Chiropractic care for knee and ankle pain

Chiropractic care can help relieve knee and ankle pain by adjusting the bones and muscles to their proper positions, promoting natural healing. This hands-on treatment can reduce pain and improve mobility without the need for medication. #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 and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Today in Ask the Chiropractor, I was asked about knee pain and ankle pain. If I have ongoing knee and ankle pain, should I go to the chiropractor? And the answer to this is sometimes yes, sometimes no. What do I mean by that? If you've really hurt your knee, like you've got a torn ligament or something in your ankle, then probably not the chiropractor. You probably need to actually go see a orthopedic doctor. But here's the good news is your chiropractor is trained to look at your knee and ankle and to know whether or not you should take it to the next level or not. But let's say that's not the case. Let's say you didn't just fall off a ladder and tweak your knee really bad. Let's just say you hurt your knee or your knee's been hurting for a while or your ankle's been hurting for a while. Can you go see the chiropractor for relief for that? The answer is yes. A lot of people have great success getting rid of their ankle pain and their knee pain after going to a chiropractor. A lot of times your chronic knee and ankle pain came because you weren't going to a chiropractor. Chiropractor. Now let me explain that first. If you've never been to a chiropractor before, you've never been going, and you've had some type of lower back or hip injury. previously and your spine healed misaligned, we call that having a subluxation with two bones are misaligned, hitting a nerve, interfering with the nerve impulse, changing the nerve impulse. What we see then is that your gait is different, the way you walk is different because you had to compensate for your lower back going out. If my lower back should twist and go out, there's muscles that go down and attach to my pelvis and my legs. So if I twist my lower back, those muscles are now. Not going to be the same as they were before. Now some of them are being stretched, some of them are more loose. And when I go to take my steps and I start walking, I'm going to walk a little bit different. Now am I going to feel that the first day? Probably not. If I smoke a cigarette one day, will I get lung cancer? Probably not. But if, the more I do it, the longer I do it, the more continuously I keep up on it, I'm going to create irregular wear and tear. Think about your tires. If your car tires are misaligned. You drive from your house to the shop to get it realigned. You're probably okay, but if you're driving on it for months and months, you're gonna have to buy new tires. The good news is you don't have to buy new knees and new ankles when you're misaligned. We just have to get rid of the misalignment. We get rid of the misalignment. A lot of times if you've had chronic knee or ankle pain, this could actually take it longer for us to get you better because the chronic knee and ankle pain is going to cause you to have to relearn not only how you move your back, but how you move your ankles and your knees too. The really good news is we're putting it back the way it's designed to be so it goes back quicker. So biomechanically, if you've had a lower back injury, you're going to change the muscles in the way you walk and your gait, and that could put some irregular wear on your ankles and your knees. So that's how we affect it biomechanically. Now let's talk about neurologically. The muscles, excuse me, the nerves in our lower back, the nerves come out and they go down our legs, form what they call the sciatic nerve and the femoral nerve, and those innervate our knees and ankles. And so if you have a subluxation, not only is it biomechanically wrong, interfering with the way that we walk and carry ourselves, but now that the neurological component as well. And if you hurt yourself and the nerve impulse going there is not in a good state, it's in a fight and flight because it's under stress. Fight and flight doesn't allow you to heal and repair. Fight and flight is actually catabolic, meaning that you waste away to survive the moment. So as a chiropractor, we can adjust those areas and stop the nausea reception or the fight and flight of the stress response going down that nerve that's limiting your healing potential because that nerves interfere with. So if you've had a chronic issue in your knees and your ankles and that nerve has been chronically misaligned for a long time or subluxated, then what happens is it's really hard for that to heal because The impulse it needs to regenerate and heal and let the body know this is a damaged area isn't working the way it's supposed to. So when we adjust your spine, not only do we help the biomechanics of your spine that's a big help, but we also help the neurological innervation of your spine and your coordination and your balance and everything else. So if I've had a chronic knee and ankle problem, not only is there biomechanic issues that we can be aware of, but the chiropractor is also concerned with neurological issues that's delaying your healing. Maybe you've gone to a physical therapist or orthopedic doctor and you did some exercises and stretches but you really didn't get better. Maybe surgery isn't the next best choice. Maybe going to the chiropractor would be the next best choice if it wasn't the first choice. So going to the chiropractor and having that looked at first. Now what about actually like adjusting the knees and the ankles? Y'all gonna tell me that you watch videos online where they see these crazy chiropractors do some weird stuff to knees and ankles. Part of that is chiropractic, part of that is just clickbait to get you to watch stupid stuff. But yeah, we do some adjustments on the ankles, we do some adjustments on the knees. But if we're adjusting your ankle, that means you're already misaligned. If we're adjusting your knee, that means something else already occurred. So that's the result of upper places being off, right? Because, my father always said, did you take just that one knee somewhere? How come that one knee is wearing out? The other knee is not wearing out. Is that a new knee? Is that knee goes somewhere? Other knee doesn't go? Of course it doesn't. Your knees go together everywhere you go, just like your ankles. But what happens if one's got a bad nerve and one's got a good nerve? One's gonna heal, one's not. And the biomechanics of the misalignment also is gonna put irregular stress on one side, maybe not the same irregular stress on the other side. Therefore, you get one wearing out faster than the other side. Yeah, so if I'm adjusting your knee, if I'm adjusting your ankle, I'm definitely adjusting your lower back and your hips to see what else is going on. This is a huge component. Now, if you listen to my podcast regularly, the last two weeks we talked about other components in this area of your spine. We talked a lot about GI issues, constipation and stuff like that at this area of your back that's misaligned. So if you have knee issues or ankle issues and you're also dealing with some GI issues, the good news is this all might be one issue, one chiropractic issue that we can help you with. And also we talked a lot about female health problems and female fertility and stuff like that. And again, this is the same area of the back that innervates the reproductive organs for females and prostate for the men, all part of the same lower back area that we adjust. So when you're misaligned in this area, it can definitely cause problems beyond just knee and ankle. pain, stuff like that. A lot of times people come in and tell me they have an SI situation. The SI is just where the sacrum and the tailbone come together, excuse me, the sacrum and the hip come together. And that just means you got a misalignment above it and everything's jamming right there and that's turning your leg, altering your biomechanics again, causing knee and ankle problems on one side. A trip to the chiropractor if you're having knee and ankle issues is not a bad idea. Now if you came in here and told me you were having a, right knee or left ankle problems, what will we do? What could you expect when you go to the chiropractor? In my office, we would take x rays of that area to see if there's a misalignment. We would also do what they call a deer field check, where we lay on the table, and we bend your knees and we see what happens. Not only that, but we'd also look at your feet. If your hips misaligned and your biomechanics are off, When your feet hang down when you're laying down, you might see one foot going straight up and down and the other foot flared. That already tells me that there's muscles in there pulling and twisting that ankle and that knee that I have to be aware of. So we would do the leg check, we'd see how you do, we'd give you an adjustment, then after the adjustment was over, then we would recheck you. So between the x rays and our exam, we'd be able to create a picture of what's going on and whether or not you're at the right place and you're a candidate. That's how we would handle it here. Now, do you have to come in how many times? What we would do is we know that when you're bad, these are your positive findings. We would adjust you and every time you came in, we would do that before and after the adjustment, see if we cleared you out. And if we cleared you out and you're moving good, then we'd send you on your way, have you come back. And we'd probably keep that cycle going until we see you actually come in where you actually held your adjustment. Then what you want to do is give you some stability exercises to put the glue on that adjustment to make sure you hold on to that. That's how we handle that. Now as far as adjusting a knee or an ankle, what we do is we go through the range of motion and we would just test it to see if it needed it or not. Now you might need a couple when you first start because you've been bad for a long time, but hopefully after a while we stop doing that. become part of the routine. If it's because part of the routine, then we talk about instability ligaments. If you're talking about instability ligaments, either we would give you some stability exercises in your ankle or your knee, or we refer you to a physical therapist that we work with, that understands what we're talking about and would implement the same type of care for you. So that's what it would look like if you came to my office. Now, chiropractic is. practice many different ways. I can only talk to you about the one I'm the expert of, and that's myself. So that's how we handle here in this clinic. How many visits to expect? How many times you have to come? Let me see your x rays. As your degenerative changes in your bones, that's going to take longer. How misaligned are you? Is it a big curve and spinous rotation, or is it just some spinous rotation, or we just have a little hip rotation? Basically the more you have out of alignment the more it takes to get better. I mean it's fairly self explanatory. The more that's damaged the more time it takes to fix. So that's how you do it. And also maybe the length of it going on. Remember I talked about that knee starting to already have some degenerative changes because you've been walking on it for 10 years wrong and you never thought about going to a chiropractor. It's going to take a lot more time. Also is your knee getting inflamed and swollen making you limp because when you limp you twist your hips and after you lower it back out. So all that comes into effect, so your chiropractor should be able, after a few visits, to be able to give you an idea of what they think it's going to take to get you better. For me, I usually, after the third visit, I can give you a pretty good idea of what it's going to take to get you better. So there you have it. Knee and ankle problems. You might want to think about a chiropractor, if you haven't already. Hopefully you haven't waited too long and have too much changes. Are you ever going to get referred to a chiropractor by an orthopedic doctor or a family physician for your knee and ankle? Typically the answer is no, because they don't know what chiropractors do. That's why I started this podcast. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, you ask a chiropractor. Now, if you have a question for me on the knees and ankles, lower back, or anything else that a chiropractor should answer, go ahead and leave a comment or wherever you're listening to this podcast or wherever you're watching this podcast and I'll get those and maybe next week you'll be the question and ask the chiropractor. All right, thanks for tuning in and joining us and again, if you have a question about chiropractic, the only person qualified to answer that question is a chiropractor, so feel free to ask away. Thanks, everybody.