Ask the Chiropractor-
Recently I was asked about the most common finding we see at the Chiropractic clinic. As a Chiropractor I would say it is the C1 or first vertebra. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor-
Recently I was asked about the most common finding we see at the Chiropractic clinic. As a Chiropractor I would say it is the C1 or first vertebra. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
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 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, thanks for tuning in for another episode of "Ask the Chiropractor." Today, I was asked a question about what is the most common finding that you see in somebody who presents asymptomatic? Let's dive into this a little bit. Why would somebody go to the chiropractor if they were asymptomatic? Lots of people do. Well, you see, when your spine has what we call a subluxation, when one or two vertebraes are under stress and they're misaligned, what happens, is over time, they develop more and more symptoms of being misaligned. When it initially happens, a lot of the time you have no idea. So a lot of people elect to come to the chiropractor periodically for maintenance or wellness visits, or just like we say, just to be checked, and they're being checked because if we can take care of those before the patient realizes they're there or has symptomology with them there, then they go away really, really fast, and why suffer, why have neurological stuff and other things going on, biomechanic alterations, if you don't need to? So lots and lots of people come in and they say, "Hey, I'm feeling great.
I'm just here to get checked.:And then what the chiropractor has, typically, I'll have older X-rays of you. You come in that day and say everything's feeling great. I say, "Well, great. Let's take some X-rays." That's not going to happen, you probably originally came in with a back pain, neck pain, or headache, and on that visit, there was X-rays and exams done. And what we do is we compare how you present today based on those previous exams and X-rays that we have of you. So if you came in today and said, "Hey, I'm feeling great," I'm going to lay you down, I'm going to do different checks with your legs and your shoulders and have you turn your head left and right. And I'm going to compare that to how you were when you were acute or when you were having problems or issues. And so based on how you measure up and how you line up based on how your previous findings, that's how we know how to take care of you. So we'll lay you down, we'll kind of motion your spine with our hands, we call that motion palpation. We're going to go up and down your spine, see how it's moving. We'll look at your hips and see how they line up or measure your feet, we have you turn your head. We'll feel the spots in your neck and we'll be able to detect it as a misalignment, and so I always hope that I can find it before you know about it, right? So if you can come in and we get that adjustment made and then your spine's clear, then you don't even know that you had an issue, that you had a problem, and therefore, everything's better and you stay healthier. That's the idea of the wellness based care. So let's talk about that. What is the most common finding that we would see on somebody who comes in with asymptomatic? Well, almost everyone that comes in, whether they have a symptom or asymptomatic, whether it's wellness care, whether it's I need help, I'm in pain, or I'm not feeling well today, or something going on, the absolute most common finding, the most common vertebrae that we find misaligned is always almost the C-1. We call that the Atlas. The C-1, that's right in the base of your skull, and so if you remember Greek mythology, Atlas carried the globe around, so it has the name Atlas. It's a very unique vertebrae because most vertebraes have a body with an arch that comes back and forms a spinous. Well, this one does not have that. There is no spinous in the back. It's simply what it is. It's a giant ring with two big masses on the side instead, and so a lot of times when we X-ray you, we have you open your mouth really big so we can see behind your teeth, and I always show you what I call the bow tie in the X-ray. And when we look at the bow tie, what we do is we look to see if it's level, we look to see if one side's bigger or smaller than the other, because the bigger or smaller would show us the way it rotates, and that's the most common misalignment we find in the entire spine, and matter of fact, this one bone has an entire branch of chiropractic where all they do is only adjust that bone. They call it upper cervical care, or NUCCA, stuff like that. There's all kinds of names for it, AO, there's all kinds of different chiropractors that had decided to take their entire practice, their entire career and focus it on just correcting this vertebrae. Why is this one vertebrae so important? Why is this one vertebrae the most commonly misaligned? Well, one, that's the most mobile one, because the one underneath it we call axis, it has a little tree stump that sticks up and the C-1 wraps around that tree stump, and that's how you turn your head and tell people no. And so this is the most mobile one. This can shift left, shift right, and remember, I've talked about this many, many times. There's a thing called the righting reflex that says your eyes always stay level. So if you had a kink in your lower back, your eye, your neck and stuff, you kind of twist to keep your eyes level with the horizon. Otherwise, your whole everything goes AWOL in your nervous system, so your eyes always stay level. So the C-1's one that can easily move and counter rotate for other problems too. Well, Dr. Palmer started this whole upper cervical thing from Palmer College of Chiropractic. Now, Palmer again, Palmer College is where I went to school, it's where chiropractic originated. Dr. Palmer was the first chiropractor. It's the oldest, largest chiropractic school out there, and I tend to think it's the best. I could be biased, but I tend to think it's one of the best. So Dr. Palmer started this whole, and matter of fact, there was a time when you went to Palmer College, you were only allowed to adjust the top bone in the neck. Anything else, he said you weren't doing real chiropractic. So this upper cervical has been a huge focus on what chiropractors are doing, and today I'm really excited to see that some of the most coolest research and some of the coolest neurological things that are happening are happening with their upper cervical practitioners. I actually like going to their classes and their seminars to see what they're up to. So that's the most common one that we find misaligned, and the issue with that is there's a nerve that comes out from that area called the vagus nerve. It's your 10th cranial nerve. Yeah, it starts in the cranium of your head, but it exits in that area. Now the vagus nerve, I always say generically, does everything belly button up, and what does it do everything belly button up? It's the one that tells our autonomic nervous system that the danger's gone. Autonomic nervous system, there's a big word for you, right? Well, you've probably heard of this before. It's called fight and flight. So your autonomic nervous system has two speeds. It has, everything's going great, everything's fine, everything's working the way it's supposed to. I'm digesting my food the way I'm supposed to, breathing the way I'm supposed to, all my organs are doing all their functions the way they're supposed to, and then we have fight and flight. So when fight and flight kicks on, our body thinks we're under attack, whether it's chemical, physical, or emotional stress.
Dr. Palmer called them the three Ts:thoughts; traumas; and toxins. The moment we hit one of those stresses, our sympathetic, our fight and flight takes over and the vagus nerve then kind of takes a back seat to the fight and flights. Well, ideally, eventually, the danger's gone, right? Okay, genetically speaking we're hunters and gatherers. Our only stress should really be a wolf or a pack, a bear or something like that, but the news is once that animal's gone, the danger's gone. We go back from fight and flight, back to the what they call parasympathetic, or everything being normal again, and that's the vagus nerve's job. The vagus nerve now fires and says, okay, it's time to go back to normal, danger's gone. Let's bring the heart rate down. Let's take the blood vessels, have them relax a little bit. Let's stop pushing the blood to the arms and the legs to fight or flight, and let's get it back to the important vital parts. And then when you're under attack, digestion turns off. So the vagus nerve's job is, after the danger's gone, tell the digestive system go back to normal. I mean, maybe you've seen somebody so stressed out, they vomited, right? That's because you don't want to be processing your breakfast or your lunch when you're being chased by a bear, so you just get rid of it so you have more energy to fight or flight, okay? So the vagus nerve's job is to go down and tell the rest of the body danger's gone. What we found through some of the cool research coming out that when you adjust that C-1, you would directly affect that vagus nerve and its function. You kind of wake it back up when you adjust it. So a lot of people come in and they get that adjustment, and all of a sudden they just feel more like tension's gone, like more at ease after their adjustment. And again, this is so powerful an that entire branch of chiropractic, upper cervical focuses only on adjusting this one vertebrae for the most part. There's some stuff they're doing with this one vertebrae is they've also discovered that Dr. Longyear down in Jacksonville, Florida has a motion MRI machine, where we're actually watching him use this instrument, go in, and adjust that top bone in the neck, and what we're seeing is that the midbrain that comes down from your regular, you have your big brain on top, midbrain in the back, spinal cord coming down, nerves going up. We're finding that midbrain can actually start to be pulled out of the skull into where the spinal cord is, and what happens then is when you have a whiplash, your neck goes back and forth really quick, it pulls and yanks on the spinal cord and the midbrain, and concussion stuff. That's what some of the areas we're looking at. So somebody gets severely concussed, we're always concerned about the midbrain and the overall integrity there, because you can not have a brain injury, you can not have a concussion without a neck injury. You can't just hit your head and your neck doesn't move. Your neck's always involved in it. So the neck is part of the injury with the concussion. This is something chiropractors I've talking about now for the last several years. Well, Dr. Longyear actually has a motion MRI machine and we're watching him when he goes in and adjusts that top bone in the neck, we're actually watching the spinal fluid from inside the cranium get flushed. There's a video on YouTube about Jim McMahon and the chiropractor. Jim describes it like a toilet bowl flushing. Your spinal fluid actually gets, if the mid brain's coming down, the spinal fluid can't get out, it's getting clogged. We help the midbrain go back to where it's supposed to be, then the spinal fluid regenerates. It was also theorized, a lot of times, when you have one of those pulsating headaches that maybe the blood flow going through your head isn't very good and that's why you have the headache. That's wrong too now. What it is is the venous flow can't get out of the skull. The blood can get in no problem. I mean, if you weren't getting blood to your brain, we call that a stroke. But the blood can always get in and sometimes the blood can't get out, and that's where the toxins and stuff build up. So when you get this adjustment up here, the venous flow opens up. So the pulsation, you feel those headaches, that's the blood coming up and hitting the backflow and getting jammed up, more going in than coming out, and that's why you get the pressure and the pulsating when you get the adjustment. A lot of times after this, a lot of people feel dizzy for about 10 seconds, and that's just their body leveling off. So what's the most common misalignment that we see, whether you're good or bad, whether what's going on is the C-1. Matter of fact, my father always came out and talked about everyone's listing on their Atlas, how he never found a patient without an Atlas listing. So there you have it. What's the most common in vertebrae that we have to adjust? It's the C-1, the Atlas vertebrae. Now, if you have a question for me about chiropractic or chiropractic care, remember the only person qualified to answer questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care is a chiropractor. Physical therapist, your family doctor, they just don't study chiropractic, and they definitely don't study as much as a chiropractor studies it. No more than you should ask a chiropractor about your teeth. You should ask a dentist about your teeth. All right, everybody, if you have a question for me, go to my website, Rockforddc.com. That's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. You can hit contact us. Leave me a message there. Anywhere you're listening or watching this podcast, go ahead and leave a comment there too. I probably will see it there also. Thanks, everybody.