The Harvey Lillard Story: A Glimpse into Chiropractic's Impact on Hearing

Ask the Chiropractor-

Hearing Loss? In 1895, Harvey Lillard's historic encounter with D.D. Palmer marked the dawn of chiropractic care and hinted at its potential to impact hearing. Today, his story remains a compelling testament to the link between spinal health and auditory function. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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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. Hi, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here. Thanks for tuning in. So today I was asked a question about chiropractic for hearing loss. Someone said they have hearing loss. Has there ever been a case where chiropractics help somebody with hearing loss? And every time a chiropractor hears this, it really hits us because there is a very famous case of chiropractic care helping somebody with hearing loss. Back September 18th, 1895, in Davenport, Iowa on Brady Streets, at 3rd and Brady in the Ryan Building, there was a janitor. That janitor's name was Harvey Lillard. Harvey Lillard was a janitor there and he had lost his hearing and he worked in this building and took care of all the clients there and there was a client there by the name of D. D. Palmer. D. D. Palmer at that time was a magnetic healer. What I always find interesting about magnetic healing in 1895 was it had absolutely nothing to do with magnets. Back in 1895, when most people had health care problems or sicknesses, what they would do is they would go to their church or their religious place. Once you arrived there, your pastor, your religious leader, whatever the title is, would grab a hold of you and they would pray with you to pull all the evil sin out of you. which was making you sick. Some people thought this was not quite very scientific. So they would go to a magnetic healer and what the magnetic healer would do that was different is they would grab ahold of you and they would pull all the negative energy out of you in order to help you get better. So Dr. Palmer, this time he was a magnetic healer and he was trying to help people get well. And he has studied a lot of different things with wellness and getting well. At one time he had owned two giant aquariums or fish tanks. and he was selling fish to people, the goldfish, and he noticed that when one of the tanks was having problems like with the filter or trying to keep the water clean in there, all the fish in that fish tank would have problems, but the other fish tank would be fine. When he would move the fish from the problem environment to the healthy environments, the other fish would get well. And so he had this notion back then that, germs sought people out or people were prone to disease or illnesses. He started questioning, is it really the people that were prone to disease or illnesses or was it maybe the environment they were in? So by changing the environment, how they adapted to their environments, the fish got well. So he started calculating all these different ideas and healthcare wellness. He even was known to grow in his own raspberry bushes, which is his hybrid raspberries and how he would put them together. So he's just studying all these different things, random things about wellness and healthcare, how things work. So he's a magnetic healer. in this Ryan building in downtown Davenport, Iowa. And this janitor comes in and the janitor can't hear nothing and Dr. Palmer at this time had a, was working on a, an idea, a a hypothesis, have you, where he was looking at the spine and how the spine moved and what happened if the spine wasn't moving and why people weren't adapting to having issues. Harvey came in and Dr. Palmer felt a spot in the spine that wasn't moving. Dr. Palmer went in there and restored the motion, which was named the first ever chiropractic adjustment. It was the first ever chiropractic adjustment because it was the first time someone went in and tried to move the spine, free the spine with the intent of having a desired outcome. There was bone setters forever. There was people that would move and crack things, this and that's not chiropractic. Chiropractic, we don't crack the spine. That's not what we do. You crack eggs, my dad always said, you don't crack spines. As chiropractors, our job was to move this bone for this desired outcome because of these positive findings. That's what chiropractic is. So you see people showing things that happened way before 1895, those were manipulations, those were gross manipulations, that wasn't chiropracticus. Just like if I took a knife and cut you and pulled out an organ, that wasn't early surgery, that was early torture. There was no outcome there, desire to get you better. So Dr. Palmer went in, adjusted Harvey. When he did that, Harvey reported, some reports say two weeks, some reports say two hours, it was 1895. Record keeping wasn't what it is today. Harvey can now hear the hooves of the horses outside the cobblestone road which he hadn't heard in a long, long time and Harvey's hearing had been restored. So when somebody asked me can chiropractic help with hearing loss we always think of Harvey Lillard. Now the next patient came in who was also deaf and had, was hoping to find an answer with Dr. Palmer. Dr. Palmer felt his spine move something different and got a different result. This person stayed deaf but their blood pressure went down. And then Dr. Palmer, another one came in, felt the nervous spine, the spine that was moving. Dr. Palmer figured this is not good. Went in and moved it, hoping his hearing would restore, but his heartburn went away instead. So that's when he started realizing, if I adjust this bone, the nerves that come out of there must go to this part of your body. When I adjust this part, these nerves here go to this part of your body. And the reason why this wasn't like common knowledge is because you have to remember in 1895, the idea of having a cadaver, and studying a cadaver, was against so many religious taboos that there was no way you're going to have that. And there was no x rays yet, right? 1895. So Dr. Palmer was doing these adjustments. Dr. D. D. Palmer was doing these chiropractic adjustments and saying, okay, I adjust this and this happens. And I adjust this, this happens. And he started writing down that, okay, T1 does this. L4 does this. When I adjust this one, this happens. And so he kept really good records of this, and then his son came along, Dr. B. J. Palmer. And Dr. B. J. Palmer was the first person to bring an x ray machine across the Mississippi. He actually got the, finally accessed the cadavers. And he went back and he verified that his dad wasn't just doing random things that, Hey, when I adjusted this, this happened. This, and Dr. B. J. Palmer then said, this is why it happened. And then they started writing textbooks, chiropractic textbooks, and chiropractic philosophy came from the first Dr. Palmer's work. My philosophy is if I do this, this happens. And then B. J. came along, the son, and he started proving his dad's philosophy. Through science to show it actually holds up and he started developing the art of adjusting different bones, different angles, different lines of corrections. And before you know it, we have an art science and philosophy of chiropractic. And that's really when BJ Palmer showed up. That's really when chiropractic took off and launched. That's really the beginning of chiropractic. D.D. Did a great thing by setting the stage and they called D.D. The developer and they called BJ the developer. D. D. was the founder. B. J. was the developer. B. J. took it and ran with it, created it. And it's a well known fact in chiropractic families. The son's usually a little smarter since I'm a third generation son. Wink, wink. But no, Dr. B. J. Palmer was the one that really took it there with the chiropractic textbook in 1910. And what I, what I love about this textbook is I love reading it still today because When you read it, everything still holds up, right? The things they were talking about back then, the adjustments they were doing back then, the results they were getting back then. It's 2024. It's still the same. We're adjusting. Now we know so much more about it than they knew. I have a friend in Florida with a motion MRI machine. We're actually watching the adjustments happen inside the body. Now I can only imagine that Dr. Palmer had access to stuff like that, but we know so much more about it. But all we're doing in chiropractic research and chiropractic works today with all the new imaging, the new equipment is all we're doing is we just continue to prove that 1910 textbook correct. We're not finding errors or flaws. We're not saying, oh, look it, this whole chapter is crazy. We can't do this. We're finding out that everything they wrote back then, the laws and philosophies that Dr. D. D. Palmer started, that Dr. B. J. Palmer recorded and started to prove and verify, they're all true today. So chiropractic hasn't changed very much since 1910. But the way we detect things, the way we can document things, the way we can measure things, the way we can see the outcome, the predictability of it has grown tremendously. But the meat and potatoes of it's the same. And for fun, I always tease my friends that are, let's say, a family physician. I said, hey, you have a medical book from 1910. I wonder how much of that still holds up. I wonder how much of drilling holes in the head, using leeches, and giving little kids cocaine and prescribing cigarettes, I wonder how much of that still holds up today compared to chiropractic. We have, I like to tease them about that, how our stuff is, time tested and true. It's always fun when somebody asks me about hearing loss. Now, can chiropractic help people that are deaf get their hearing back? I think really what happened with Dr. Palmer back in 1895, as I believe Harvey Lillard probably had so backed up congestion wise with the sinuses and everything. When he got that adjustment, the congestion went away. It opened up and it drained. And probably the station tubes got all the pressure off of him and his hearing was restored. Now, we don't know. It's 1895. We don't have videos or anything to record it. But we do know Harvey couldn't hear. We do know Harvey got his hearing back. Was Harvey completely deaf? Nobody knows, right? Have we been able to get multiple people come in that are deaf to get adjusted and get their hearing back? Not really. But we've been able to get a lot of people come in that are really congested and have their station tubes blocked up, get adjusted, and train, and get their hearing better. Matter of fact, in my office, when the tables come up, The Kleenex box is right there because so many people, after their adjustment, their nose starts to run. We want it to be the moment you come up, you're like, oh my nose is running, the Kleenexes are right there to grab. You don't have to ask, you just, they're right there, perfectly positioned. So there you have it. Can chiropractic help people with hearing loss? That's a long answer, but it's a great, great question and any chiropractor loves to be asked about that because we get to talk about all those papers we wrote when we were starting chiropractic school philosophy and history classes about Harvey Lillard and the first chiropractic adjustment. So there you have it, a lot of chiropractic history, a little chiropractic background. And as a fun side note, Dr. B. J. Palmer, the guy that wrote the textbooks, the guy that got chiropractic up and launching, He was Ruth Hulsebus's chiropractor, my grandmother. He's the first one to introduce the Hulsebus family to chiropractic. So super excited to know that my grandmother got adjusted by the guy that really took his dad's ideas and created this whole profession. I'm blessed to say that he adjusted her. First time I went to adjust my grandmother, my father was like, you better get our listings, right? Cause you're going to go by what BJ Palmer said if you go against them. So I didn't dare argue because, You know the best chiropractor ever took care of my grandmother. So there you have it everybody. Thanks for tuning in come back next week We'll have some more fun stuff to talk about Remember if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, it's only one person qualified to answer and that's a chiropractor So always ask a chiropractor medical training that's not talking about chiropractic at all So asking them questions about whether they should go to a chiropractor or not is the same thing as asking a shoe salesman. They have just as much knowledge. Alright everyone, go to my website rockforddc. com, that's r o c k f o r d d c dot com. Leave me a message there if you have a question or wherever you're watching or listening to this, leave a comment there and I'll get an alert and we'll get you on the question next week. Last week I promised we'd talk about concussions, we'll do that next week. This question was too exciting, I couldn't pass it up. Thanks everybody.