Arthritis in the Spine

Ask the Chiropractor- 
A few weeks ago Dr Hulsebus read a research paper on how arthritis is diagnosis.  Dr Hulsebus describes the greater detail that chiropractors use for arthritis. #healhty815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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- Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor" is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic and I'm happy to be the team Chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus and welcome to my podcast. So today, I'm gonna talk about arthritis. A lot of times we have patients that call us up and say, "My doctor tells me I have arthritis, Would I make a good candidate for chiropractic care? Could I still come because I have arthritis?" And my advice is, you better come in and get checked again for arthritis, because chiropractors diagnose arthritis totally different than the medical field or the orthopedic doctors that define it. If you listen to me, a couple weeks ago, I discovered a research paper where they talked about arthritis in the spine and how chiropractors can help. But they enlightened me about how the medical field defines arthritis. Let me give you an example. When you have shoulder arthritis, what they do is they take X-rays, they get out precise measuring tools and they measure the gap between the ball and the socket down to the millimeter. And if this millimeter is this much or this much, then you have arthritis. If it's less than this or more than that, then you don't have arthritis. And they measure the spurring. If you have a spur, this bigger, or not that big, then that's arthritis. Very, very detailed, very, very precise definition of let's say, arthritis in the shoulder. And the same is true in the hand, the wrist, the elbows, the knees, the hips, but what's not is the spine. So the minimum, you have to say to be diagnosed arthritis in your spine, the bare minimum in the medical field is when I woke up this morning, I was tight and sore. Boom, arthritis. Now, I've gone outside and done with all of yard work and the next morning I woke up and I'm a little tight and sore, does that mean I have arthritis? Well, according to the the textbook that they use... I'm not saying all medical doctors do this, I'm just telling you the definition according to the textbook, says absolutely, you can tell them, they have arthritis. Now in chiropractic, we have a whole different way of diagnosing arthritis in the spine. See what we've learned that the spine itself has disc between each bones. And when you move around and you do your everyday activity, especially when you walk, the muscles around this move and contract and they do things. Now, when you have what we call a subluxation, when two bones are under stress or misaligned, the motion stops, they freeze, they get stuck, they are fixated. That's what we do when we feel your spine, we call palpation. We go up and down your spine, we're trying to find the vertebrae that aren't moving and then we try to restore the motion through a safe, effective chiropractic adjustment. And so that's what we do all day. Why do we do that? Well, because when they're not moving, the disc are suffering. Let me explain. There's no direct blood supply going to your disc or from your disc. So your disc only gets nutrients through osmosis, and osmosis is when the muscles around there squeeze, and contract, and they push the water in and pull the water out, and that's the only way they flush and regenerate the disc. So if you have a misalignment in your spine or a subluxation, then what happens is those two solidify so you can't hurt it more. Now temporarily, I understand why this happens, but long term this is bad, this is why we have the chiropractic profession. We find them when we correct them, we make a move again, because if we don't make a move again, what happens is that disc over time will start to flatten and dehydrate and get smaller and smaller and smaller, and that becomes more and more unstable. So the body's intelligent and it has what we call innate intelligence in it, and it's job is to say,"Okay, we got something here that's weak, it's vulnerable, it's dehydrating over time. How do we get rid of that? How do we make that more stable?" And you start growing what we call osteophytes, O-S-T-E-O-P-H-Y-T-E-S, osteophytes, otherwise known as spurring. And so the bones start to grow, they're spurring, they start to widen the bones. If you've got something narrow and unstable, how do you make it more stable? You widen it. So they start growing these osteophytes, these spurs all around there. And then the spurs slowly start coming together from above and below until you actually get so much arthritis, the bone is fused. Now, when that bone is fused, a lot of times it's hard for a chiropractor to make an adjustment on that because the calcium has gone in there and it's wholly fused together, and it doesn't want to move anymore without breaking that. So when someone says, "I have arthritis in the spine and you always help me." The answer is, "Well, we can always help." Because we can adjust the ones above and below it, because what happens is this arthritis as this gets fixated, the ones above and below with that fixation in between them, they start getting fixated too. The next thing you know, it went from this vertebrae, to this vertebrae, to this vertebrae, to this vertebrae. So yes, we can always help because we can adjust the rest of them. We can't always adjust that spot because then that's totally fused and that's what happened, you should have came to see us a long time ago. So, when we look at X-rays and we define arthritis, we have various phases of arthritis we say you're in, whether you're in phase one, two, three, some of us use a four scale, some use a three-scale phase, we use a four-scale phase here. Phase one there's stress, the vertebrae are misaligned, you're in phase one, we needed to address this. Phase two is now we're getting discs starting to shrink. Phase three is we're seeing the growth of the new advanced spurring occurring, the new osteophytes forming and then phase four is when we started to see them fuse together. We have a cool study in chiropractic because there was a really, really stubborn old fart that didn't want to get adjusted. He came with his wife every year and the chiropractor would take a look at the wife and we always say, "Can I just take an X-ray of you?" The chiropractor was always hoping eventually this guy would figure it out. Unluckily for him he never did, but luckily for us he never did, because we actually have his X-rays through time and we can actually see the degenerate go through this phase. It's a cool study because, you know, most people when you show them, you know, "Hey dude, look how much worse you are this year compared to last year, you need to do something." Most people would do something, but luckily this old fart refused to do it. So, we have this really cool study showing his degeneration down the chart. So, when you talk to us about arthritis, we call that spinal degeneration. A lot of you may have heard other scary words for this like degenerative disc disease, degenerative disc disease is a big scary title. I have patients come all the time,"I have caught degenerative disc disease." Well, degenerative disc disease isn't something you catch. I talked earlier about the disc dehydrating, that's all that is. So if you get the motion back in there, you should make a full recovery from that disease. I don't know why they call it disease, that's crazy name. But yeah, we just go in there and start making those adjustments. And what's cool is in this office, you know, most chiropractic clinics, they all have this. Like, somebody came in, they had really bad misalignments, they got adjusted, the alignment got better, the posture got better. And you can actually measure those disc heights going from really small to really big again. And now, we know that when those discs are there, the ideas of the osteophytes, this spurring won't occur anymore. Because step one, you lose a disc. Step two, the osteophytes grow. So, almost every chiropractor can show you an example of someone's X-rays where they had disc (indistinct), then the disc came back and now the person's living happy. But my office is cool because we started in 1949 and as I'm making this video, we're 74 and a half years old. I have kids at home that half year is important. So we're 74 and a half years old. And the cool thing about this, I have patients that my grandfather started when they were young and they'd be coming in for wellness care, whether it be every two weeks or every four weeks their entire life. So, they saw grandpa for a couple decades. They saw my dad for a couple decades. Now, I've seen them for a couple decades and now when I'm seeing them, they're on Medicare, right? They're in their 80s and when we X-ray them, you know, it's so exciting because there's no arthritis in their spine. Zero, because they've got that adjustment done periodically their entire lives. Now, they've got, you know, bad hands. They got, you know, maybe a knee that could look a little better from, you know, old injuries and stuff like that. But when we look at their spine, the part I always tease, that's the only part I'm responsible for, right? The spine, the nerves that come out of it. They've been doing fantastic. And what I like, what I love about these patients, because I've had some other 90s and older, is that they're self-sufficient. They don't need scooters, they don't need walkers, they don't need that stuff. They're walking, doing their own thing. We have a couple that come in here, they're both 95 years old. He gave up driving, he got a little dizzy one day and she never drove as far as I know. But he gave up driving one day because he felt a little dizzy. And so I have a chiropractic table at their house. So when they can't come here, I go see them. It's not because they can't come, it's their health, they can't come because they can't find a ride. So you go see them and I'm gonna X-ray them every year. It's so cool because we don't see any generation arthritis in their spine. To us, it's really exciting. And they're 95, they're still gardening, they're still doing stuff. I mean, not like they did 20 years ago, but they're 95 living on their own, doing their own thing. And you know, that's we all strive for. So that's what makes this office fun is that we've got to take people that started when they're young and gone through a couple generations of hustle buses and they've been able to keep their spines healthy and strong. So, we've actually have the proof that this actually occurs. So if you've been told you have arthritis in your spine from a medical provider, remember that's a really, really generic diagnosis. I'm not saying the shoulder one, they tell you the arthritis generation in your shoulder. You probably do according to their measurements. But in the spine, they don't really have any kind of measurements they do. Go see a chiropractor. Let the chiropractor tell you where you are in your generation. If you've got X-rays from your medical doctor that diagnose you with arthritis, take those X-rays with you, bring them to the chiropractor. Let the chiropractor look at them. Let the chiropractor give you a better definition, example of what arthritis is and what arthritis is, and ask them where you are. Say, "Am I in phase one, phase two, phase three." What the chiropractor explain it to you and show you where you are in your care and what your realistic goals can be. Because limitations that matter is... Limitations that matter is one of our Core 33 Principles of Chiropractic philosophy. There is a limitation how much we can do depending on how much damage is done. So your realistic outcomes, your realistic things that you can get from under chiropractic care, you can definitely be better under chiropractic care. Getting the adjustments. Like I said, it travels from one, to one, to one. So even if you've got one that's phase four, we can still just the ones above and below and prevent any more phase fours. So there you have it. So if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, always ask a chiropractor, because like I just said, we know so much more about arthritis, then their definitions. I'm not saying the doctors don't get it, I'm just telling you their definitions are lame in how they explain it. So chiropractor can give you a much better detailed, much better image. And we can use, like I said, we can use their images. We don't have to take new X-rays. If you have them, bring them with you. But if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, ask a chiropractor. If you wanna ask me a question or have me address an issue here for you, just go to my website, rockforddc.com. It's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. You can find a place where to leave me a message. You can also find the blogs of all of our previous talks. And we're available wherever you listen to the podcast, YouTube, Facebook, everywhere. You know, I post stuff everywhere. So everybody, stay happy, stay strong, and we'll see you next week.