Incorrect Common Finding at the Chiropractic Clinic

What is a common thing seen in most that is actually detrimental to the patient?  When we do not see this we are actually surprised.  #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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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, thanks for joining us for another episode of "Ask the Chiropractor". Remember, if you have questions about chiropractic care, the only person qualified to answer that would be a chiropractor. just to, if I had a question about a tooth as a chiropractor, I would not answer that I would ask a dentist. So let's dive into this week's question. I was recently asked a question by somebody when I was working out over at the gym again, and the question I was asked is, what is something that we see in a chiropractic clinic that is a abnormal finding, meaning that patients should not have this, but it's become so common, it's like almost everybody we see has this problem that this problem's becoming the common and not the uncommon anymore. And but it's not right, you're not supposed to have this, and that's really easy, almost any chiropractor can answer this within seconds. It would be neck posture. Almost everyone comes in with a forward head posture, meaning that their heads way out over their shoulders. And not only that, but their shoulders are rolled forward. And you're supposed to have a nice round curve and your neck and your neck's supposed to be back here over your shoulders. Your chest is supposed to stick out real big. And that's how we're designed to walk around. But most of us walk around with our shoulders forward and the head forward. How do we get that? Well, typically it comes from sitting. The moment I sit, my shoulders roll forward and my head goes forward. And so I sit, I drive a car, I use my computer, I use my phone, I read a book, whatever I'm doing, I get in that posture. And then what happens is, when I leave that chair, when I get up to start moving around, I memorize the bad posture and I keep it with me. Now does this bad posture cause immediate problems? Well, I tell a lot of people that bad posture leaves us in a vulnerable position, right? So the bad posture's not going to hurt per se, but it leaves you in a position to set you up for more problems. So when someone comes in and they say,"Hey, I slept funny last night, and now my neck is killing me.""Hey, I turned my head real quick and now I've got this catch right here.""Hey, I did this, now I've got this pain going between my shoulder blades up my neck." I tell them, it's not that you did that, it's the fact that you did that while you had the really bad neck posture and you got to start getting better at doing your exercises and your stretches, so you don't have that neck problem anymore. So that way, if you do sleep funny, that way, if you do turn your head the wrong way, that way if you are working above your head doing stuff, you don't have to have this agonizing pain, this gnawing pain. So let's talk a little bit about this forward head posture and why it came out. Well, a lot of people today think it's because of your phones and your tablets, but I would tell you that people read books way before we had phones and tablets, and they were in the exact same position. Other people tell me,"Hey, I don't sit all day, I have a standup desk." And when you stand up at a desk, you still have your shoulders forward and you still have your neck forward, because you're still typing, you're still using the screens. Now don't get me wrong, I prefer a standup desk any day of the week over a sit down desk. But I often tease my patients, there's no healthy way to use a keyboard and sit in front of a computer all day. There's better ways, but there's no right way. Just like there's no right way to eat a candy bar. It's always going to be wrong. But I would say if you ate a candy bar on a treadmill, you're doing it better, but it's still not right. So standup desk, yeah, way prefer than over a sitting desk. So if people had this problem before with books, if people had this problem with typewriters, not just computers, and we had this forward head posture then, why is it becoming a bigger deal now? This is a conversation I have with a lot of chiropractors, you know, they'll tell me,"Oh, it's all the phones, it's all the tablets, it's the computer lifestyle, it's the work from home." And I told them, you know, people have done that for a long time, right? Long, long, long time. I mean, my grandmother had a sewing machine, she'd sit in front of that sewing machine for a long time. That's really bad forward head posture, right? So why has it gotten so bad lately? Well, here's my theory, I think it's because of the chairs. Have you ever ridden in an older 1970s car that guy inside like an old Ford pickup truck or maybe an old Chevy Camaro and sat in those chairs, they're not very comfortable, they're miserable. Or maybe you go to your, find an old office chair somewhere and you sit in that chair, that chair's awful, it's not comfortable at all. Matter of fact, whenever you go to a place now with those metal folding chairs, you sit there for a little bit and you'd start moving around right away. That's the way the chairs used to be, they used to be awful. And nobody ever wanted to sit in those chairs for more than half an hour without getting up and stretching and moving around. So it's my theory, the reason why our necks are so bad is because our chairs have gotten so good. Now we can sit long enough to develop a neck problem. Heck, I was in a F-150 Ford pickup truck the other day, and it had not only heated seats, air conditioned seats, but it even had chair massagers that go up and down your back. Plus now, the car in the interstate drives itself. So you could just sit back and just let the car go. And it's real easy just to sit there for a long, long time and it doesn't hurt your back. And again, when you're sitting with this with your neck, it doesn't hurt per se, but you're getting this more and more and more of this neck posture, where in the old days, like I said, you get a, I'd see some of these like gaming chairs you're making now for the kids that like to play the video games hours at end. These gaming chairs, you ever sit one of those things, it's like a giant cushion just wrapped around you, it's really comfortable. But now you got that person playing the video games the whole time, and their spies is going to get more and more in that forward head posture. Worse and worse and worse. Where before if the chair was uncomfortable, they would get up and move around, they'd have to because their lower back hurt too much. When I go back and look at my grandpa's records, you know I'm the third generation chiropractor. Grandpa started 75 years ago. He saw tons of people for lower back issues. And I didn't see that many neck issues. It was definitely more lower back than neck issues. And you know, we just recently, we had all these paper X-rays. We go back and look at normal, the abnormal neck curves. And I was looking at some of the old charts that even my father saw people in the seventies and the eighties and the nineties, and the forward head posture was not written on every chart. Now today, like I said, what's an abnormal finding that's become normal. We actually, we don't write down, they lost their neck curve. Now we actually make a note in their chart when they actually have their neck curve. Like, holy cow, you have good neck posture! We make a note of that because it's so infrequent, we just don't see it no more. So the biggest problem with the forward head posture is not only that your shoulders are forward, and your head sticking out, but every inch forward your head goes, gravity pulls down equivalent 10 extra pounds on your neck for every inch forward. So what you do is you see these elderly people like at church or the grocery store, and they had their head way out like this. And they get that great big hump between their shoulders that are hunching over really big. And that's, some people would call it osteoporosis, some people will call that scoliosis. And what it is, is the human headway's the same as a bowling ball, and all that extra 10 pounds adds up over time. And you start to see the spine just take the abuse of it. And a lot of times too, you can actually see a thing they call compression fractures where the vertebrates are nice, rectangular bricks will start to get compressed on the front side and they'll start to look more like a wedge than a brick anymore. And we try to see the vertebraes lose their integrity over time. And that gets to be really painful as those start to deteriorate and break down. And they have us, I mean they have a medical procedure they do for that. But I'll tell you, I haven't had anybody have that done and be grateful about it because they just inject you with plaster and trying to save the height. But it's the best we got, but it's not very good. So it's very important to maintain your neck posture, very important to maintain that. Keep your forward head posture away. And so what do I tell people to do? I tell people to set a timer for every 20 minutes to a half an hour. Stand up, bring your chin back. If you don't know how to bring your chin back, go up against the wall, put your back up to the wall, put your heels, hips, shoulder blades against the wall. Then without looking up or down, just bring your head straight back till it hits the wall. Now you've got great posture. Now I tell you to take a little step forward. Don't touch the wall anymore. Put the whole body forward, try not to lose that posture. And then you want to try to stick your chest out really big and squeeze your shoulder blades together and count to 10. And that starts to pull yourself backwards, so you start to forget that forward head posture. And the crazy thing is, when we have this bothering us and it's really, really like I feel that tension here, for some reason instinctually, we all do the opposite stretch. We pull our arm across our chest and we try to pull it the other way, try to loosen it up. And we're actually feeding it more. We're actually making it worse by doing that. I have no idea why instinctually we all do that. But you want to do these exact opposite, you want to squeeze it together while your chin's in. A lot of people do this pulling the shoulder blades and they stick your head out way far. You're still in the forward head posture. You got to get out of that posture to do the stretch in order to forget the posture. You can't keep stretching in the posture again, forget it. And anybody that told you to stick your chin down like this, they get a good stretch. Stick your chin to your chest to stretch. I have not met a patient yet who needs to do that stretch. I have not met one patient in two years, 23 years that needs to do that stretch. Everyone's neck curve is so bad. I am not worried about forward head reflection, I'm not worried about you being able to look down. I'm worried about you being able to look up. I'm worried about you being able to look left and right. I'm worried about bringing your left ear to your left shoulder, your right ear to your right shoulder. I am not worried about you looking down. So that stretch is just useless because you're actually helping the forward head posture more. So there you have it. What's an uncommon finding that's become so common we expect to see it now? Foreword head posture. All right, well if you have a question for the chiropractor, make sure you go to my website, rockforddc.com. That's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. Hit the contact us, submit me your question. Otherwise, wherever you're listening or watching this, you can go ahead and leave a comment below, and I'll make sure to get back to you. If you like these, you know, make sure you check out others, share these, hit the like button wherever you listen to this. And also on my website, if you go to the block page, you can see all 200 of thhem. Ask the chiropractor questions. Remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care only person trained, qualified to answer that, would be a chiropractor. So go ahead and ask the chiropractor your chiropractor questions. All right everybody, stay healthy, stay safe. And remember, "Ask the Chiropractor." Thank you.