Ask the Chiropractor-
Dr Hulsebus discusses the basics behind chiropractic care. It is more exciting as more and more research is coming out proving what chiropractors have always known. #healthy815 #palmerpoud #icachiropractor
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor-
Dr Hulsebus discusses the basics behind chiropractic care. It is more exciting as more and more research is coming out proving what chiropractors have always known. #healthy815 #palmerpoud #icachiropractor
www.rockforddc.com
- 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 chiropractor 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, and welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor." So again, if you have a question about chiropractic care, you should always ask a chiropractor. Now, for those of you who listened to last week, you know that I had my good friend coach Justin Kegley on about his new book, and I promised to put links on my website directly how to buy his book and they're up. So if you go to rockforddc.com, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D dc.com, you'll see wellness library, underneath there you'll see reading materials, and you'll see a link to Amazon to purchase his new book. Now, the good news is his new book in a digital copy like on a Kindle or on your app, it's only 99 cents. And I kinda like the digital copy personally because if you're taking those plans with you, how to, if you didn't catch last week's episode, it was about nutrition for athletes. And so if you have a digital copy, you take it with you, you can actually see the plans with you as you're traveling and stuff like that. So, take a look at that. But let's talk about this week. Somebody was asking me about,"Hey, can you just tell me like the basics of how chiropractic works? I know a lot of people come in for neck pain and lower back pain, but people tell me they experience things other than neck and back pain. Can you kinda just give like a basic chiropractic?" So I'm gonna do a chiropractic 101 today. A little bit, just the basic of what we do here. And what it comes down to is the fact that as chiropractors we're always more nerve doctors, and we access your nerve through your spine, than we are like spine doctors. I'm much more neurology and much more on how the autonomic nervous system works. The autonomic nervous system for all of us, it should be on cruise control, it should be doing its everyday functions. When I talk about the autonomic nerve control, I ask people, do you have any idea right now what your liver's doing? Do you have any idea right now what your duodenum's doing? Given most people don't even know they have a duodenum, but the basic fact is that you can digest lunch without having to think about lunch, it just happens. That's your autonomic nervous system. Now, the autonomic nervous system has two modes. It has that everything's good. Like right now, everything quiet, peaceful, no problems. And it also has a thing called fight and flight. When you're under stress, your sympathetic nerves take over. And your sympathetic nerves and your fight and flight nervous system is awesome. But genetically speaking, we are all hunters and gatherers and that's what we've evolved from. So our fight and flight nervous system is only designed to keep us, it's designed to keep us alive in case of an attack like a bear or a wolf or you know, hyena, whatever it would be. That's what it's designed for and it's really awesome the way it does things and it does some really cool stuff if you are under attack. One of the things it does is it raises your cholesterol really high, right? Because if you are under attack, you want to have high cholesterol because if you were to get scratched or cut, you want to clot and live. Well, everyone knows if you watch TV or see a commercial, they advertise high cholesterol is bad. High cholesterol is bad when you're not in a fight and flight, but when you're in fight and flight it's really good. We also know like when you're in fight and flight, everything changes. It's designed to survive in the next five minutes. Because if you're being attacked, if you and a group of people are being attacked by a lion, it's gonna be over in five minutes one way or the other. Usually if you go in with a group of eight and there's a lion shows up, you leave with a group of seven, right? But either way it's over. So the fight and flight's designed for short term and this is what they call catabolic, meaning that you will waste away today, it'd be detrimental to your long-term health because if you don't survive, there is no long-term health, so who cares? So that's the idea of the autonomic nervous system. It helps maintain our bodily functions and it switches to crisis mode during fight or flight. Well as chiropractors, we've noticed that some people have come in with health problems and a lot of their health problems can be traced back to a fight and flight response. Say, indigestion. If your body doesn't know how much stomach acid to make, it'll always make too much. because if you don't make enough, then what happens is the food you're trying to eat, you can't digest, it'll come back up. So survival, it always makes too much. So if it's under fight and flight, it'll always overproduce stomach acid just to shove it through. You can get really bad heartburn. But what if there was a way to adjust the spine to influence the autonomic nervous system, therefore taking the stomach from an inappropriate fight and flight response back to where it's supposed to be. That's what chiropractic has been working towards, our research on showing how when we do an adjustment, this happens. A lot of people say, well, can you prove that? And I can't wait to prove it, like I really, really can't wait to prove it. But unfortunately the technology to test these things is just in its infamous, it's just starting. Ogura is a scientist out of Life West University and Japanese, and Dr. Ogura has been able to do all kinds of cool studies measuring different chemicals that undergo stress. So, the Ogura research has been able to show that when you go into see the chiropractor, if you have certain salivary amylase, like stuff in your mouth, that is very active when you're under stress, they're able to show that it's there, you get your chiropractic care, then they're able to show it goes away. There's also been a lot of cool research on heart rate variability, showing that when you're under stress, your heart's gonna go a little faster because it wants to get the blood to your arms and your legs, so you can either fight or flight, run away. And it's been able to show the difference in your heart rate variable monitors before and after chiropractic care. So the limited things we can test, so far so good. We're batting a thousand, right? Every time we test one of these things, that's exactly what happens. It's exactly what we thought would happen. Exactly what our philosophy tells us would happen. So as chiropractors, that's really what we do. So yeah, you come in with a stiff neck, we're gonna adjust you, that neck's gonna get better. But all too often people are like, you know what? My throat feels better now. Or hey, I could hear better now that you've been adjusted my neck, how did that work? And so that's when we talk more about the nervous system and how the nervous system can be influenced in and out of this. It's really exciting work to me. It's the more and more the research comes out. Heidi Haavik of New Zealand, she's doing a ton of this kind of research just to be able to prove it. Unfortunately, majority of our research goes to neck pain, headaches and lower back pain because that's what your insurance companies want to know about in order for the chiropractor to get reimbursed for helping that lower back pain, it's nice to have that research and stuff to show for it. So those are valuable studies, however, maybe it's time to start looking in more diverse directions of our research. I think we've pretty much guaranteed that we can help the lower back pain and neck pain, just like we know a cast, if you break your arm, can help your arm heal. There's no need to continue to research whether or not having your arm in a cast would help a broken arm. I think we've established that's definitely a thing. So, chiropractic 101, you come in to the chiropractor, the chiropractor will usually take some x-rays of you and at least do a chiropractic exam. There, we can kind of see where you're misaligned. When we know you're misaligned, we know where these fight and flight nerves come out of your spine and we know what body parts they go to. So, if we see an area of stress in your spine where it's not moving right, we call that a subluxation. It's not moving right, we go in, we restore that motion, we help break those adhesions keeping it locked up, because when it's locked up, it's giving out that fight and flight signal, which is hitting that nerve and traveling to whatever body part is involved in that and inappropriately telling that body part it's time for fight and flights. All too often you hear a doctor say, oh you have a pinched nerve. If you had a pinched nerve, that body part wouldn't work. It would be paralysis. It'd be like, you know people, when they pinch a nerve, it stops working altogether, so therefore wherever that nerve goes, that body part would no longer do its job at all. So it's never a pinched nerve, it's the fact that joints are under stress and when that stress is in that joint, those signals are coming off of pain. That's one of the signals that's how you find us. But it's more bigger than that because that signal's also going under that nerve, that body part. That's why you might hear somebody that said, you know, I used to, many times, my grandfather had a lot of patients that claimed their allergies got better after getting adjusted. Their asthma got better after getting adjusted. Heartburn goes away when they get adjusted. Vetigo goes away when they get chiropractic care. These are all things that we trace back, not to the biomechanics of how the spine moves, but the neurology of the spine coming out and where it happens to it, and how it's influenced by the biomechanics of the spine, if that makes sense. So, if we take the pressure off the two vertebraes that are under stress and the stress coming out of those two goes away and the body part goes back to what we call homeostasis. Or simpler terms, no longer in fight and flight. That's kind of chiropractic 101. So your chiropractor will do the adjustment for you. You can just, not all the time it immediately goes away, because unfortunately sometimes you develop muscle memory, like if this one spot's been misaligned for five years, your body's adapted to that and actually create a secondary spot to balance you off. And it takes a long time for the body to relearn how to be wrong, but to make it the best they can while it's wrong. And so as a chiropractor we might see you a lot at first so we can retrain it to go away. The good news is as we retrain it, we are retraining it to go back to the way it's designed to be, not the way it had to learn to be. So it's always a much faster process to take it back to where it's supposed to be versus how it got to be that way. What am I saying? If it took five years to get like this, it will not take five years to go back. It'll take much less time than that. But there will always be a little bit of scar tissue there. There'll always be an area of vulnerability there and that's why people choose to come back to the chiropractor over and over again to get checked and rechecked. Not only that, but let's say it's like your neck and shoulder area that's bothering you, and you have a job where you sit all day, you go to the chiropractor, they adjust you and that goes away. You feel better, everything's feeling better. My sinuses are open, my headaches are better. I can move my neck better than I could before. Then I go right back to doing the exact same thing I was doing prior to the chiropractic care. I mean, should we not expect the pain to come back and return? Because you go back to doing the exact same thing as you were doing before? And that's why some people like to come in for the chiropractor, either A, a lot of people come in, they say, hey, it's starting to hurt again. Let's get it adjusted again. Do two or three adjustments, get it back to normal. Or some people went to do what they call wellness selective care, where you just come in and you just get adjusted and you do it before it happens. And it's up to your chiropractor to know how often they should see you based on that. That should be based on your exam findings and more than that, your x-ray findings. And so the chiropractor, that's their job is to determine, that's part of the doctoring of chiropractic, to figure it out what you need. There's no black and white schedule or simple thing, if you're this age and you have this then you need to come in this much. It's up to the chiropractor to look at your posture, look at the alignments, to look at the stress you put on yourself and to take it from there. So there's kind of chiropractic basic 101. What do chiropractors do? Chiropractors adjust the spine to help the nervous system work better so the body can heal and take care of itself better. This is why, you know, maybe during a pandemic, chiropractic clinics got busier because we weren't trying to put a bunch of stuff in you. We were simply trying to make you work better, your body function better, your own immune system, your own nervous system, digestive system, whatever it is, our job is to take what you got and make it better. All right everybody, chiropractic 101, I hope I answered your question. Well, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, feel free to leave me a comment. Go to my website, rockforddc.com or leave me a message wherever you're watching or listening to this. If you're watching this, you can also listen to these wherever you most commonly listen to podcasts. Thanks everybody.