School and Chiropractic

Ask the Chiropractor- a trip to the chiropractor should be included in your back to school list.  #healthy815 #palmerproud #icachiropractor

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor's my podcast that I do for people who have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care. All too often people make the mistake of asking their family physician or somebody else in the medical field about chiropractic care. And I say this is a mistake for the simple fact that majority of medical providers have no education or background on what chiropractic together or what chiropractors do. So, if you wanted a question about chiropractic you should ask a chiropractor, just as if I had a question about dentistry I would ask a dentist, not my family physician. So recently, I'd asked a question by a patient who's noticed that there was lots of teenagers and children in our office this last couple of days. Where we live, school's just going back into session. In our area, about half those schools are back in, the other half start next week. So, why are all these kids coming in at this time of the year? Well, there's a lot of different reasons. And let's start off first just because a lot of them are leaving for college. They're gonna take off. They're gonna go back to college, and they wanna get a quick adjustment before they go to try to make sure they're healthy and strong to move into their dorms or move back into their apartments. And then, they might be a while before they see me again. Now, often when we have students that, or patients in our office and they're gonna go back to college, we often look for chiropractors in their college towns to take care of them when they're not here. Some of them are athletes. We have a couple D1 athletes D2 athletes and stuff that, that come in here, and they really want their information so they can provide it to their medical team back at their college. Usually those schools actually have a chiropractor that you work with, and I often make sure they take my card so that chiropractor can contact me, or I often find out who their chiropractor is, and we talk before they go home. So, that's one reason they come in, because they're getting ready to go to college. Another reason is the same reason they go everywhere else this time of year. They always wanna come in and get one more check before the school year starts. We go get our eyes checked. We go get our teeth checked and stuff like that. So, often right before school, a lot of kids will come in and get one more check before the school year starts, just part of a routine. Another reason they'll come in is because we do really good scoliosis checks. What do I mean by the really good scoliosis checks? Well, a lot of physicians and the standard tests has kind of been just to have the students kinda like bend over touch their toes. And they look at their shoulder height and their belt height. And these are good clues that something in their spine could be going on, but it doesn't always mean the scoliosis. A lot of times we have people come in and say,"I just left the school physical, the sports physical and they let me know that my child has a scoliosis. What do you think about it?" Well, I'm not happy that it was misdiagnosed, but I'm happy it was misdiagnosed, because we're able to look at it a little closer, dive in a little deeper, maybe take X-rays and actually look at it. Because if we if we suspect there's a real scoliosis, we gonna take an x-ray of it and really see it and see whether or not it's really there or not. Sometimes you might just have a little curve in your back. I talked a lot before about the righting reflex. The righting reflex says no matter what, my eyes stay level. So if I get a little kink between my shoulder blades I might have a kink in my lower back trying to balance me out. doesn't mean it's a scoliosis. It just means that there's a couple kinks in the spine. So, we take an x-ray usually to see what's going on, if there's an indication to do this. After we look at the x-ray, we can clearly see whether or not it's a scoliosis, because the scoliosis has a couple of things that really jump out in an x-ray. You'll see the twist of the spine to the left and then to the right. You'll see the spinous, the little bumps you fill on someone's back, they'll shift with the curve. So, some of them will go to the left some of them will go to the right depending on which way the curve turns and twists. That's a real scoliosis. So, a lot of times people will come in, and they'll say, "I just got diagnosed with the scoliosis." I say, "Cool, can I see your x-ray?" Bacause if they're diagnosing you with this, say you have it, and you're gonna start making choices in your life because of the scoliosis, like not playing certain sports or doing this or doing that because of it. I would think an x-ray to confirm the diagnosis before we change lifestyle would be very, very very important. And I've even had one student came in here one time, they fitted him for a back brace for a scoliosis, and I took the x-ray and there was literally nothing there. So, we just got rid of that brace. That was overkill. So, if you give that diagnosis of a scoliosis, it's really good idea to go see a chiropractor to confirm that's actually what's going on. We spend family doctors, they're in charge of cold sniffles, earaches, you know, pink eye, all that stuff. Chiropractors, we're in charge of the spine. So, when it comes to diagnosing the scoliosis, go see the people who only look at the spine all the time just to confirm that diagnosis. So, no matter where you're in the country, if someone said you have a scoliosis, I would go to a chiropractor, have x-rays taken and confirm that diagnosis before I did anything else. So, there you go. We have people that come in before they go to college. To recap, we have people that come in, because they just, they're doing everything else. The hair, the, excuse me, the eyes the teeth and everything else. Let's get our spine checked. We have other people that come in, because they maybe had a sports physical and they were told they have a scoliosis. The other reason people come to a chiropractor at least come in this office is because we wanna establish a baseline. And what do I mean by a baseline? Well, concussions. Now a lot of people don't know this, but some of the top concussion doctors in the world, alive, are chiropractors. Matter of fact, if you look at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, you'll see the name Dr. Ted Carrick. And Ted Carrick's, a chiropractor, Ted Carrick's the one that worked with many, many NHL players including maybe some of the ones I've taken care of here at the Rockford Ice Hogs the Chicago Blackhawk affiliate who have had concussions. And I got to work with Dr. Ted Carrick, because of the connection with me being a sports chiropractor working with the hockey team. And I got to learn a lot about what he does. And it's amazing work that he's doing with these concussion and head injury victims. So that's been really, really cool to learn from him and to get to know him. The other one I work a lot with is the chiropractor that will help Jim McMahon the '85 Bears quarterback, go back to being Jim McMahon after all his head injuries. And that's my friend Dr. Scott Rosa. If you want to learn more about Dr. Scott Rosa, go to YouTube, type in"Jim McMahon chiropractor," and look at some of Dr. Rosa's work. I got to spend a couple weekends with Dr. Rosa, and he's actually sought me out to meet some of my hockey players to see if he could help them. And I was giving his card to them to see if they could work with him. So, Dr. Rosa's taught me some really cool stuff too. So, what we do with the students here that are playing contact sports that are worried about concussions is we'll take a bunch of x-rays first as a baseline. Because I tell all the students,"Having concussions a bad thing, but you should be able to heal from your concussion. The times you don't heal from concussion is when you have a concussion, and then you get a second concussion or you're not fully healed from the first one and then you have a second one." Those are much, much worse concussions to have by far. And so, how do we know you're safe to go back? Well, having that x-ray of your neck prior to the season starting gives us a baseline to compare it to. So, if you came in my office, we'd x-rayed your neck before the season started, and then the concussion happens, we'll immediately take another x-ray, and we'll notice what's changed. What's the difference between the two x-rays? And then, we'll start our care. Now here in my community, I work with the local orthopedic place, and they do all the testing, and I do all the care. So, they'll do your testing that say when it's safe to go back to school and it's safe to go back to sports. But, we really want to establish that, so we work jointly. We work as a team. They do the testing, I do the care. I tell them what's going on with your records, and then they retest you. But, you see what we'll do is we'll take the x-ray after the injury, we'll see what was different compared to the baseline, and then we'll give you care. Then, when we think you're ready to go back, we might take one more x-ray to make sure it looks more like the original x-ray. That gives everybody good reassurance that you're most likely you're back to your normal. It's not a perfect science. We just don't have the tools invented yet or capable yet of being able to determine what's going on with the concussion. We just use the best tools we have. And the one thing we know about a head injury is you cannot have a head injury without a neck injury. You cannot hurt your head without hurting your neck. And I'll give you a second to think about that. Yeah, so if I hit my head, it's gonna jerk back and forth, and I'm gonna whip my neck around. And I've talked about this on several videos, but I think it's worth bringing it up again. The spinal cord itself has these ligaments that come off in the side, and they're called dentate ligaments D-E-N-A-T-E. And it's like dentist, dentate, because they almost like a tooth. And these are like super strong ligaments, and they hang on the side of the spinal canal really, really tight. And so, what happens is these ligaments aren't going anywhere. So, when you whip your head forward and backwards, whether there's a concussion, whether it's a whiplash or anything like that, or you know, we do a lot with our veterans too. They have things blown up around them. They get knocked around. So, what we see is that these ligaments are hanging on super tight, and then the spinal cord goes forward and backwards real hard and violently. And what happens is the neck moves up and down really violently too, and the spinal cord gets yanked and pulled on. But, because it can't move up and down because of these ligaments, the only thing they give is pulling the brain in a downward direction. And in the bottom of your skull you have a thing called the foramen magnum as a hole where your spinal cord comes through. But, this whipping around in some cases we actually see the midbrain gets pulled down. This is what Scott Rosa's work taught us. And what we were able to do is where that interrupts the spinal fluid flow, and that's why the headaches and everything else get really bad. So, we're able to do some chiropractic care in my office where we're able to help alleviate some of that pressure from the midbrain. Now, if you're a severe case, then we would send you up to an upper cervical specialist. They're called AIO specialists. There're not many of them in the country, but we do know where some are. We have a couple of really good ones here in Chicago that we could refer you up to. Dr. Marshall. Dickholtz is the one I typically use. So, if that was your case, that's who I would send you to. He's amazing with the work that he does up there, but that's all he does. He doesn't like just your lower back and upper back. He's focused on that. So, we know those people, specialists we can send you to to help get you the care you need. And of course, like I said, I'm friends with Dr. Rosa, and I've gotten to know Dr. Carrick. I might be able to pull a couple strings and get you that far if you had to be. But we've never had one that bad. We've been able to help everyone that we've seen so far. So, it's getting that baseline x-ray. So, there you go. That's why you see so many kids in my office right now. And I want to remind people, usually when they hear the word concussion, they're immediately thinking hockey or football like a really aggressive contact sports. And where those sports, those are usually the worst concussions, because those are the most violent sports, but the sport with the most frequency of concussions always surprises people. So, when it comes down to the bad ones and the ones that really, people really get their bell rung, we're thinking football and hockey. But, the one that they are most likely to have concussion, because of the frequency concussions is girls' soccer, actually. Yeah, girls' soccer has a lot of concussions. So, don't think just because they're not wearing pads, they don't have to worry about concussions. Concussions happen every time, every sport, everywhere. So, if you got a young high school athlete or middle school athlete that's really, really competitive I'd recommend you go to your chiropractor and ask for some baseline cervical x-rays, so you could have them in case of concussion. And you know what, I've always found that the more you plan for something the less you needed to plan. The more you're prepared, the less you have to worry about it. So, get those baseline x-rays. It is a huge, huge tool in case those things happen,'cause we want to keep these kids having fun playing sports, hopefully getting scholarships and getting free college and stuff like that. But, we gotta be out there playing in order for any of those things to happen. And if, you know, like I said, hopefully it never happens, but if it does, we want to do the best job we can to get them back to normal prior to going back to everyday life and jeopardizing their second concussion before the first concussion's fully healed. Well, if you have any questions about what I said, go to my website, Rockforddc.com, That's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, and you'll find out more information there. Also, if you have a question for me that you'll like to see me answer sometime, leave a message them the websites or otherwise go to our Facebook page or YouTube page wherever you might be listening or watching this video, and we can go into more depth from there. All right, everybody, thanks for listening. Hope you have fun, stay healthy. And for those of you going back to school good luck this semester. Thank you.