Chiropractic and helping with fall risk

Ask the Chiropractor- Recently a patient told me they witness their father falling down.  I was asked is there anything chiropractic care can do to help with the fall risk.  Dr Hulsebus discusses two areas of the spine that can play a role in fall prevention but also some exercise tips to start to today for the future. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, and welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor's" my little podcast that I do where I try to answer questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care that you might have. All too often, people go to a bad source for chiropractic information, not healthcare information, but chiropractic information. All too often people ask a family doctor or maybe a physical therapist or massage therapist whether or not they should try chiropractic care, and even though these people might have good intentions, they're ignorant on what chiropractors do and therefore they're bad people to ask because they don't know the answer. And all too often, I've had somebody come in after asking another healthcare provider whether they should try chiropractic care or not, and that other healthcare provider told the patient that,"No, you should not." And then time goes by and they finally come see us out of desperation. We see them a few times, and they get incredible results right away, but that's time in their life and longer for us to take care of them, and all that never should have happened. They should have came to see us right away. So people submit me questions all the time to see if I can answer the question for you. This week I had a really fun question, and it's really appropriate because I just got back from Palmer College Homecoming, where we took classes and learned a lot more new, exciting stuff. And the question was,"Can going to a chiropractor help with my steadiness?"Often I feel like I'm going to fall."I'm always afraid I'm going to fall and hurt myself."Can a chiropractor help us with that?" And I'm going to answer this question in two different ways. So the first way I'm going to ask is the direct way."Can a chiropractor help me with my issues of falling?" Well, a lot of times, not all the times, but a lot of times, some of the reasons are that vertigo or unsteadiness can come from your upper two bones, your neck being misaligned. See, what happens here is the brain stem is right there, and the brain stem is our coordination center. The nerves come up the spinal cord, they go to your brain stem or your cerebellum, and the cerebellum sends it to the brain. When they come down from the brain, they go to the midbrain, then they go to the body parts where they need to go. So as chiropractors, we've noticed that when we do upper cervical work, the top two bones in your neck, we can often influence this area. Now, why does this happen? Well, this happens a lot because the spinal cord itself goes right down your neck, and the spinal cord has these two ligaments that come out. They're called dentate ligaments. They look like little teeth, hence the word "dentate," and they hold onto the sidewalls very aggressively. And these are really, really powerful ligaments. These ligaments don't want to go anywhere, budge or move. So when you have a neck with bad posture, now what's happened is you're almost pulling on the spinal cord when you lose your good posture. So if you have a nice round curve, that posture's good, but when you straighten it out, there's a lot of tension coming down. And because the spinal cord itself doesn't want to move, so the spinal cord's at, let's say the fifth cervical is right there, it's anchored down, and when you move it, you increase the tension. The spinal cord is now being stretched, but it's not going to move, so the only thing that can happen is that the brain itself and the midbrain itself gets pulled in a downward direction because of the force of the neck being the wrong place. So if you lose your posture, you increase this pressure tremendously. Now, if you're involved in a motor vehicle accident or trauma where you jerk your head forward and backwards in what we call a whiplash injury, this is even more pulling and tugging, but this is done in really quick action. And we all know, it's one thing to fall slow and another thing to fall fast. So if you do this really quick back and forth, you're going to get even more pulling and yanking. So anyone that's had a head injury, because remember, I've said this 1,000 times, you cannot have a head injury without a neck injury. You can't swing your head around without hurting your neck, okay? So what happens is people get these injuries, they'll injure themselves, and what happens is part of the brain comes down. Now, when part of that brain comes down, it can definitely cause some issues. I got to actually see this with Dr. Longyear down in Jacksonville, Florida. He actually has a motion MRI machine, so he can actually watch the chiropractic care happen real time, real life. And what happens is when you do those upper cervical adjustments, you actually help push and take the pressure off the midbrain and alleviate that. That's why a lot of times when people come see us, they come in with a little bit of vertigo and dizziness, and when they leave, they're much happier, because the chiropractic care to those upper two bones can make a huge difference as far as your vertigo's concerned, and your steadiness, your unbalance. The other thing that happens there too is a lot of times we'll see a spinal fluid flush, and you've heard me talk about this in some of the head injury videos, the importance of this. So if you're feeling unstable, you're feeling a little dizzy, a little lightheaded, a lot of times a good chiropractic adjustment to your upper two bones in your neck can resolve this. Now, how do we know if this is you and if this applies to you or not? It's real easy. We take an x-ray. If those two bones are misaligned, those two bones need to be adjusted, and we adjust them, you should get better. If you come in, you have this as a symptom, as a condition, we take the x-ray and you have perfect posture and those two bones are exactly where they're supposed to be, then we're probably wasting your time. You're probably at the wrong place. But that's why we do the exams and the x-rays that we do. So a chiropractor can definitely put you through a neurological exam and take the x-rays and be able to answer, "Yes, I believe we can help you," or, "No, we can't." How often do you have to come? It depends how bad it is. I can't answer that for everybody. It all depends how bad it is. You can break your arm 14 different ways. They're all going to require different times to heal. Same difference in your neck. If it's totally misaligned, in bad posture and it's been like that for five, 10 years because someone told you not to go to a chiropractor, it's going to take extra long to heal. If you just had the accident yesterday and you ran in, and before the accident you had perfect posture, it's going to go away quickly. So I hope that makes sense. So that's the first area I wanted to discuss when it comes to, "Can a chiropractor help me"with my unsteadiness and balance?" The other area we can help with, a lot of us study outside of just chiropractic adjustments. We study exercise, how the body works, how the muscles work, how the neurology works. And one of the ways we learned about this was your fast-twitch muscle fibers. These are the ones that help us, prevent us from falling. When you go to fall, you lean forward and your fast-twitch muscle fibers fire, and that causes your leg to jump out and you catch yourself. Now, as we age, we lose these fibers, especially in men as we age, we lose these because these fibers and your level of testosterone go kind of hand in hand. So, as your testosterone goes down, these fibers tend to decrease in numbers, too. But good news. Both for men who are older and women, you can definitely still build these. They're real easy to build. It's a real easy exercise to do, but you have to build them and you have to feed 'em. How do we build them? What they call eccentric exercises? What's an eccentric exercise? Let's just say I grab a dumbbell and I do a curl with it, right? So I grab it in my hand. I bring it right up to my forearm, right up in the air so my hand's now pointing straight up and down. I came up really fast. That is not eccentric. What's eccentric is if I bring it down super slow. So if I grab a bench press, I press it away from my chest, super, super fast, but I bring it down, I go really, really, really, really slow with it, that's eccentric. Or if I grab the kettlebell and I did a squat, that would be the best for this, right, a squat. I do a squat down really slow. Then I spring up. That would be an eccentric exercise. So that's what you want to focus on. This causes the muscle fibers to split and helps grow new muscle and have it create more of these spindles that your nerves can fire faster and faster, hit those muscles, make those muscles fire faster and faster. So that's a great way of doing this. Now, you also want to feed these muscles. So you get done with your workout, even if you're out in the yard, we're exercising and doing some yard work, but anytime you have a good workout, a good sweat and you're trying to catch your breath, as soon as you finish, you want to finish it up with whey protein, W-H-E-Y, whey protein. I do a whey protein shake, and I like to do undenatured whey. What's undenatured whey? Whey that comes from a health food store, not a muscle store. So I get my whey, my undenatured whey from the health food store here in Rockford. And this is also what the IceHogs drink after the hockey game because this also helps recovery. And some of you have heard me talked about whey protein before because it elevates glutathione levels. Glutathione does a really good job of pulling heavy metals out of your system. So if I go out for sushi, I'll do an undenatured whey the next day to pull some of the heavy metals out of my system from the fish that I just ate. So undenatured whey is a huge, all kinds of benefits. And we studied Donald Trump after he had COVID, and one of the things they gave him was whey protein, and whey protein increased Donald Trump's glutathione. And I can't legally say it, but it was amazing how when Donald Trump increases glutathione, on how fast he beat COVID. I'm just saying. I'm not saying it's a solution of cure to COVID if any legal bodies are listening or paying attention, but I've been saying that if I have COVID, I'm doing my whey protein right away to try to stop the cytokine storm, all right? That's the legal mambo jambo we have to go through to talk about COVID still, unfortunately. We don't have to pay attention to the science. We have to watch what we say. All right, so back on topic, falling. So yeah, so I will exercise, I'll do eccentric exercises in order to build the fast-twitch muscle fibers back up. And when I finish exercising, I will take the whey protein. Now, mind you, most of the time you stabilize yourself with your legs. My legs jump out, my legs shoot out in order to get them to go. So I also get my lower back checked, in order to get my lower back checked to make sure my hips are level. Because if I have a subluxation in my lower back, that's going to affect the nerves going down my legs. We call that sciatica. Can chiropractors help with sciatica? Absolutely. I've done thousands of videos on that and thousands and thousands of research on that. But if my lower back's not behaving the way it's supposed to be and I go to stop on my leg real fast and I have a subluxation in my lower back, then my reflexes are going to be slower, they're going to be diminished. That's one of the ways we prove that your back's out. We check your reflexes, so that's decreased, too. So if I really want to prevent falling, especially as I age, I want to make sure my upper neck's clear, I'm going to make sure that I'm building my fast-twitch muscle fibers, and last but not least, I'm going to make sure my lower back's cleared so that way I don't have any hesitation of the nerves going down my legs or my lower back so my reflexes going to the fast-twitch muscle fibers continue to work. So, can chiropractors help with falls? Well, if you look at the big picture and you do everything overall, we should definitely have a decreased fall risk. I hope that answers your questions. It's not an overnight solution. Some of it is. Some of it, you get you upper neck adjusted, you could feel better the next day. Get that lower back adjusted, get those reflexes working better, you could feel better the next day. But long-term solution is to keep doing those eccentric exercises and having that whey protein. I'm in my late 40s and I do that three times a week, and that's how I maintain what I have. So I hope that answered the question,"Can chiropractors help with falls and fall risk?" That's kind of how we go about doing things. Now remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I'm going to urge you to ask a chiropractor, the only people that actually know about it. You can go to my website at Rockford DC, that's R-O-C, excuse me, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, and submit a questionnaire, or I'd recommend you go to palmer.edu and check out the Palmer College website, or go to chiropractic.org, the International Chiropractic Association. If you don't want to believe me, go to the what I consider to be the best chiropractic school, the largest, most successful, oldest and most successful chiropractic school. Or you can go to the International Chiropractic Association. They have tons of information and research there, too. And if you want to search internet yourself, go back to one of my previous podcasts. I talked about how to search the internet by using the word "PubMed" to actually find the real science. Alright everybody, thanks for listening. Come back next week, and maybe next week I'll be answering your question. Talk to you then. Bye-bye.