Chiropractic Maintenance Research

Ask the Chiropractor- New research regarding Chiropractic maintenance care and some feedback regarding it.  #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

https://chiromt.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12998-023-00502-3

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

0:11

- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor's a place I come to when somebody has a question about chiropractic, or chiropractic care, and they're looking for an answer. Now, all too often people will mistakenly ask their family physician, or another type of doctor, maybe an orthopedic doctor, about starting chiropractic care, whether or not chiropractic care can help them. And the problem, you understand, is, those doctors have no training in chiropractic, only a chiropractor understands chiropractic. Just like if you had a question about your teeth, you would ask your dentist, not another type of doctor. So people email me questions, people stop and ask me questions people actually see me at a restaurant, they'll come up and ask me a question. So this question this week has a little bit to do with the little research I just read, and a question that people have. A lot of people go to the chiropractor originally, they have an ankle complaint, something hurts, I have a headache, my neck hurts, my lower back hurts, I'm getting tingling down my arm, I have a concussion, all kinds of reasons why people originally start a care with chiropractic. And usually, once they start a care with chiropractic they start to feel a lot better, their body starts to function better, and they're getting even bonus things in their health that they weren't planning on getting under chiropractic care. An example of this, a lot of times, is maybe a woman will come in with lower back pain, we'll start adjusting her lower back, and then before she knows it her cycle becomes more normal, and she has less headaches and side effects every month. Somebody will come in with really bad neck pain, we'll adjust them, after a while, they notice their headaches are gone. All these things happen to us all the time."Hey, the area you've been working on me, has anything to do with this or anything to do with that?," we hear this all the time when someone first starts care. Bonus care, bonus results, right? So the question I was asked was about maintenance care and wellness care, people say, I want to get into some maintenance care, I want to get into some wellness care, what do you think of this? And this study just came out, it's a Norwegian study, it came out of Norway, talking about maintenance care and overall patient satisfaction with it. It was interesting to me, because the results and what they learned about this paper. Well first of all, they found out that patients really did benefit from wellness and maintenance care. People under wellness and maintenance care, it's been proven many times in many different research papers, less time at the hospital, less medical bills. Tend to check into a nursing home, or assisted living home, I should say, much later in life than others who don't. They also have less aches and pains, and overall they have a better health picture. Now, maybe it's because seeing a chiropractor every two, four, six, eight, whatever your chiropractor recommends for you, for your wellness and maintenance care, it's a good chance to bounce things off of another physician all the time. Maybe that's one reason they get some good results, right? Should I have this looked at? Is this a problem? Hey, I heard eating this is good for you, is this a good idea? By going in for maintenance care, that's a definite bonus. But overall, just having your spine, and your muscles in your spine, and your joints in your spine, and your nerves in your spine functioning and working better, it's a fantastic result. One thing we've always found, and my grandfather used to tell this to patients, if you get adjusted under maintenance, the odds of you getting arthritis in your spine go down dramatically. And it's fun for me practicing here, because we're in our 74th year of delivering chiropractic care here. I had several people who started with my grandpa in the '60s and the '70s and the '80s who are still coming in to see me today. Now, when he saw them, they were young, and he told them, if you could adjusted every month you probably won't get arthritis. And I'm happy today to be the deliver of his original message, original prophecy, that yes, he said you wouldn't get arthritis, and now that you're 70, 80, some of them in their nineties, we do not see arthritis degeneration in their spine. Now, I can't promise everywhere else, because we're only responsible for the spine, but for me it's been really exciting to be the guy that could deliver what he promised them a long time ago, even some of these patients that started with my father in the late '70s, early '80s, for me to be the one to tell them today, hey, he told you if you follow through, this would happen, it's really exciting for me to tell them that. But this study also focused a little bit on the patients who were satisfied with their maintenance care as far as how it was being delivered, and to me, this is where we're going to get to today. How do you measure maintenance care? How do you regulate maintenance care? How do you figure out what to do? How do you know that I should come every two weeks, every four weeks, every six weeks, every eight weeks, twice a year? How does a chiropractor determine that? And the study found that they found people, chiropractors who had gone to chiropractic college in America or Australia, had the best results. Now I'm very, very biased towards my chiropractic education, I'm a Palmer graduate, and Palmer College is where chiropractic started. And my grandfather went to school there, my father went there. So as a Palmer graduate, I'm really proud of this study, because it's an American college. It's the original school, founded by a Canadian, however, it's an American college. So I know there's chiropractic schools all over the world, and a lot of them, I don't know what they teach and what they do teach, I do know that only a few of them you're allowed to take US National Boards, so if you go to like a chiropractic school that the board system's never heard of before, you will not be eligible to take the National Boards. There are schools like in England, there's schools in Australia, obviously, a couple other places, I believe there's another school that's on and off again in Brazil, but the majority of chiropractic schools are in North America, and a majority of those are here in United States of America. I believe there's one, maybe two in Canada. I'm not sure, I should know, but I don't know. So it's really neat to me to see that the bulk of the people who have the most satisfaction come from the American or the Australian schools. With that being said, how do I, as a chiropractor, a Palmer graduate, how do I determine your maintenance care, what your maintenance care should be? How do we figure out what the maintenance is? Well, that's pretty easy. First of all, when you start care, we kind of just see how long you can go go, we try to like, okay, we saw you today, you did pretty good, let's go a week, see how you do, do good after a couple weeks, let's go longer and let's see how things go. So we really judge it based on the results that we're getting when you first start care. But let's say you've been a patient here, I just told you there's some people that used to see my grandpa, they still come here, they've been coming here for a long, long time. How do we determine their maintenance? How do we determine, you know what, you've been coming here since 1985, it's 2023, how do I know that you should be coming once a month, once every three weeks, how do we do that? Well, one thing we do a lot here is that we will update your x-rays every few years unless you give us a reason to do it before. Like, you know, I come in, I'm bent over, I had a trauma or something, we'll update your x-rays before. But if you're just a maintenance patient, you're coming in, everything's feeling good, every couple years or so we'll talk about wanting to update a film or two, probably your primary area, and we want to compare that to the last film that we took. And when we use these films, we can see, okay, you know what, you're subluxations are looking great, the misalignments are looking good, your posture's looking good, we're not having any changes here, I think what we're doing is going great, let's not change it. Or, we might take a look at 'em and say, well you've made tremendous success here, you know, you've becoming every two weeks, I bet we could go every four weeks. Then maybe a couple years later we take some more films and be going, oh, your posture's not as good, let's get back to seeing you maybe every three weeks now somewhere in the middle. So those are one of the tools that we use, we use the way your films change come and go over time. If I x-ray you at one point, you get a great cervical posture, then a couple years later we x-ray and your cervical posture's not there, then we have to look more at like, hey, are you doing these stretches? Are you doing these exercises? What's your lifestyle like? What are you getting into? What are the factors causing your neck not to hold this posture? So it's good for us to take films every couple of years, but films are not the most practical, we can't do like a film every time you come in, that would be too much, that would be excessive care. What we look at more is maybe how you line up. What do I mean by that? When you come in, we measure your feet, you always feel the chiropractor playing with your shoes, we're looking to see the distance between your feet, how you level up. We're also looking at your shoulder height, which shoulder's up, which shoulder's down, is there one higher, one lower when you're laying face down? And then we flip on your back, we look to see is your left ear closer to your left shoulder? Are you starting to develop like a little bit of concavity to your neck, where you're trying to lean away from a joint that keeps getting swollen all the time, that your posture is trying to change, to adapt to it. So these are all little clues that we make to ourselves about the patient when we see them. You always wonder what we're typing, what we're writing, well that's what we're looking at, we're looking to see how you line up. And if we're seeing that every time you come in, again, whether it's two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, every time you come in, you're lining up the same way, you tell us you've had no health concerns between visits, and we give you that adjustment afterwards, you're lined up nice and square, and we say, okay well I'll see you again in five weeks, and we lay you down we measure again in five weeks, you look the same as you looked before, but you've been doing good, everything's moving good, you're having any health issues or any concerns, it just looks like about every five weeks we have to hit control + alt+ delete and reset your spine. This is what we most commonly do, so this is how we determine what kind of a maintenance schedule you need, what kind of a support you need. Now, I tell all my patients that this goes good unless we deal with the stressors, chemical, physical and emotional stress,"eat right, move right, think right" that Dr. Chestnut would always say, and then Dr. Palmer always called it the "three T's", thoughts, traumas and toxins. If you're overloaded with those, let's say you decide to see how much junk food you could eat, maybe let's say the holidays are coming up and you know you're going to take in a whole bunch of more sweets, because you know, like in our office, a lot of our patients bring us brownies and cookies, and we have all this extra stuff around the holiday time. Or maybe Halloween, you know, maybe you steal candy from your kids' cookie jar or whatever, the little Halloween bucket, you're stealing the little candy bars, and you know you're going to be a little more toxic than normal. Or maybe let's say that you decide to quit exercising, just quit going for your 30-minute walk every day. Or let's just say you just have a bad emotional thing going on, so you're under some heavy emotional stress. Well, those things is when I'd come in a little sooner, and I tell all my patients that when you have these things you might have to come in a little earlier, see us a little sooner. But then I also flip it around, right? Let's say you buy an organic garden and you're going to eat all your own vegetables like I'm doing right now, all this stuff from my garden, cucumber, two or three cucumbers a day I'm picking. Or let's say you start an exercise program, you're going to exercise more, I'm going to get out, do more. Your new job requires you to walk outside all day, fantastic. Or let's say, emotional stress, let's say you won the lottery, or you found a whole bunch of money, or you know, you met the love of your life or something like that, or this and that, and all of a sudden now you have less emotional stress, then you could probably go a little bit longer. So we have a lot of patients that will alter their schedule during the year based on their stress levels, and that's what we work with you on when we determine your maintenance care. You know, hey Bobby, every time this time of year it's like you're a little worse according to my notes, we see a couple extra times, this must be a stressful time of the year for you, during this month let's see maybe one extra visit this month because we know it's always a little more stressful on you. And maybe we'll say, Hey Bobby, you know, when you come in this time of the year, it's like you're doing awesome, you're barely even crooked, I don't even know why you're here today, maybe that time can go a little bit longer. So that's kind of the feedback and the science and research you need from your chiropractor when you do a maintenance schedule to kind of come up with the ideas. So why we do a maintenance schedule? I think everyone knows that. Those research papers have been out there for decades and decades, how people do better when they're in their maintenance care, they see the chiropractor actually less than that they don't. And then the biggest thing is, what kind of a feedback, how does the chiropractor know what your maintenance schedule should be? How is that all determined? Well, I hope I answered that today with this little bit of knowledge. I'm going to put a link to the research paper in the description below, hopefully wherever you're seeing or reading this you can find it. I'll have it on the YouTube channel, have it in the Facebook page, and I'll have it on the, wherever you download this to the podcast, I'll put a link there too. I want you to take a look at the paper yourself, See where I'm coming from. I try to back up what I say with real science. All right everybody, well that's all I have for you today, maintenance care and the importance of it, why we do it, and the rationale behind it, as far as the logic behind how we determine how often you're coming. All right, everybody, stay healthy, stay strong. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, ask a chiropractor, nobody else, nobody else knows. And if you want more information from me, go to my website, rockforddc.com, that's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, and I'd be happy to share more information with you there. All right everybody, stay healthy, stay strong, see you next week.