Finding Relief: The Power of Chiropractic Care for Pressure Headaches

Ask the Chiropractor-

Did you know people have found relief at our clinic for over 75 years for these types of headaches?  Dr Hulsebus discusses various types of pressure headaches and why people have found success with chiropractic #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

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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, Dr. Brant Hulsebus. Thanks for joining me again this week. Well, this week I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in my part of the woods where I live in northern Illinois. A lot of patients are coming in and they're having some sinus problems. They're having sinus headaches and a lot of headache stuff. Well, I've done many podcasts over the years how chiropractors help people with headaches. That's well been documented, well been proven that if you go in to sit with a chiropractor and you have a headache, you get adjusted. Usually your headache feels better. Now, even some of the headache specialists in my area have recommended people come see us and get their neck adjusted and help with their headaches. So a lot of people have come in for headaches. A lot of people are surprised though about the sinus relief they get after a chiropractic adjustment. Matter of fact, this happens so much that in our office, when the table comes up, the first thing you see is a Kleenex box. A lot of people get up, they immediately ask us for a Kleenex. So when we designed the office, we designed the office so when the table came up, there would be a Kleenex box right there so you could grab it and blow your nose. Now, this has been one of the oldest recorded things about chiropractic since chiropractic started. If you go back in time to September 18th, 1895, this is the first ever documented recorded chiropractic adjustment. It was done by Dr. Palmer from Palmer College of Chiropractic, and he had a janitor in his building named Harvey Lillard. Harvey had a hard time hearing, and Dr. Palmer gave him a chiropractic adjustment, and Harvey's hearing was restored. Now, did Dr. Palmer find a cure for deafness? Well, there's still people out there who are deaf, so I would probably say no. He did not find a cure for deafness. So one of the many theories about when Dr. Palmer's adjustment and why it was able to help Harvey's hearing get better is because of this phenomenon. When you get adjusted and your sinuses open up, there's a really good chance that Harvey Lillard himself had really bad sinuses. And when he got the chiropractic adjustment, Harvey Lillard's sinuses could have opened, and the pressure on the Eustachian tube could have went away, and Harvey's hearing could have rapidly improved. So that's one of the things that chiropractic's been known for. When you get a chiropractic adjustment, your sinuses open and you drain. I've had many patients come in and request me to adjust their upper neck to see if I can't open up their sinuses and get them draining. So this time of year, as the different weather fronts come through and the different weather happens, comes and goes, and the quote unquote flu bug and cold bug are flying around, you want to make sure that you get your upper neck adjusted to open up your sinuses and help them drain. Now, I talked about the headaches. When your sinuses build up the pressure so much, it creates pressure inside the cranial area, and that can create massive pressure inside your skull, which would give you really bad headaches. As chiropractors we've seen the way we've been able to help headaches several different ways. And adjusting your upper neck to clear out the sinuses would relieve the pressure and therefore would relieve the headache. At the same time, I've been able to see some Dr. Longyear's work down in Jacksonville, Florida where he is adjusting the upper neck and he's actually able to, doing the upper neck adjustments, we're seeing changes in the spinal fluid and the venous return in and out of the head. Now it's interesting when you have a headache like that, it's interesting for a lot of patients to learn that your brain does not feel pain. There's no pain receptors inside the brain. The brain perceives the pain from other nerves coming from the rest of your body, going up your spinal cord to your brain and down and everything like that. So the brain, there is that part of pain. But if you were to go back in the fifties and the sixties before when they would do what they would call frontal lobotomies, they would go up through your nose or through your eye or something like that and they would literally cut your brain, front part of your brain off. And they thought they were helping you with mental health. The patient would be alive and conscious and awake for this because you would never feel a scalpel going through your brain. It would probably be a lot of pressure, probably be insane pressure, probably a lot of pressure where the scalpel or the instrument goes in, that would be a lot of really painful. But you wouldn't actually feel the knife cut through your brain. Your brain does not have pain receptors. So when you have a headache like that, we've learned it's usually from pressure, either venous pressure building up, spinal fluid pressure building up, or sinus pressure building up. And so when you get those adjustments, you'll open that up and you really help it drain, not only in the sinuses, but also the spinal fluid and also the venous flow. Many years ago when my father went to school, even when I went to school, there was a theory that after you get your chiropractic adjustment, if you were slightly lightheaded or a little vertigo immediately following that there was maybe a blood rush going to your inner ears. Now we've been able to disprove that. Luckily, it's even better than that. It's usually your spinal fluid regenerating. So it's that initial rush of new fluid coming in and old fluid coming out. If you want to see a cool video on this, look up Jim McMahon from the '85 Bears. Jim McMahon, the chiropractor, Dr. Scott Rosa does a really cool, breaking all this down how this all works. And you hear Jim McMahon himself describe it like a toilet bowl flushing getting his brain flushed out. So those are some of the areas we help with headaches when the spinal fluid, so piles of spinal fluid get backed up. Well, your spinal cord itself has these ligaments that come out called dentate ligaments, and they go straight off from the spinal cord and they hang on the side of the walls. And these are very, very strong ligaments. And so if you have bad neck posture and the spinal cord can't slide up or down because these ligaments and your head's sticking out forward, we call forward head posture. I talked about this a couple weeks ago. That's going to, the spinal cord has to pull on something, and because the spinal cord itself will not move, the only thing left to happen is to pull the brain down. In the base of your skull, you have a little hole called the foramen magnum. What we see is the midbrain itself starts getting pulled down. A lot of times your cerebellar tonsils will get pulled into this area and that'll clog the spinous fluid return. So the spinal fluid is in there and the nutrients are getting into your brain. Your brain's using the spinal fluid to get those nutrients. And then the brain gets rid of, doesn't want that byproduct afterwards that normally would go into your spinal fluid, into your veins. So either go down your spinal cord and get flushed out or into your veins inside your head and get flushed out. But because the the hole is clogged, literally clogged with the midbrain, these return mechanisms do not work and they just continue to accumulate. So when you look at a veteran or maybe a former athlete that played a high impact sport, they have what they call CTE where you see the holes inside the brain where the spinal fluid is expand. And when they're expanding in there is because there's no place else to put that stuff. And it just sits there. When they give the upper cervical adjustments, the C1 C2 adjustment we talk about all the time, that will actually help move the midbrain, help the midbrain pop back into the cranium and the spinal fluid returns. And I say this with confidence because I've actually watched the videos that Dr. Longyear is doing under a motion MRI machine, where we literally witnessed this happen several times. So he's got some cool research and some cool papers coming out about this. He had a little sneak preview last year at our big annual conference. So big, big fan of Dr. Longyear and his work. I think it's really, really cool. And again, same thing. A lot of times you get those pulsating headaches, and a lot of people thought the blood flow coming up was having a hard time because blood vessels pulse, arteries pulse, veins really don't. But blood vessels have smooth muscles and they pulse. What's happening is the blood's getting into the cranium fine. Because you always have to have blood flow into your brain. Otherwise you'd have what they call a stroke, right? So the blood gets up there fine. The problem is it can't get out at the same rate it's going up. And so it gets back flowed, and that's where you get the thumping pressure from the new blood coming in, but the old blood's not coming out. So you get this thump, thump, thump. You get that pressure buildup again. So pressure headaches are very much related to this upper neck being misaligned, whether it's your sinuses, whether it's your spinal fluid, or whether it's your vein flow or whether it's all the above. Well, there you go, pressure headaches, sinus headaches. How do we get them? Why do people go with a chiropractor? I hope I answered that question. Well, remember, if you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one person qualified to answer this, and that would be a chiropractor. You might ask your physical therapist, you might ask your medical doctor, but they didn't go to chiropractic school, they never studied chiropractic. So they're not really good experts by any means to ask these questions to. So you should always, always ask a chiropractor. If you want to find more information on chiropractic, you can always go to the International Chiropractic Association, and that website is chiropractic.org, O-R-G. You go there and learn all about chiropractic. That's the national association that I'm a proud member of. I'm also on their sports council and I'm also the Illinois representative of this association. So that's definitely the one I endorse and the one I support. Other than that, you know me, I'm the team chiropractor for the Rockford Icehogs, proud graduate of Palmer College, and I operate a 75-year-old practice here in Rockford, Illinois. So next time you have a question, leave it for me. You can go to my website, rockforddc, that's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. Leave me a message there, or you can go ahead and leave a message or a comment wherever you're listening or watching this podcast. Other than that, stay healthy, stay strong. Remember, ask the chiropractor when you have a question. Thank you.