Concussion Care: A Deep Dive into Chiropractic Solutions

🧠💡 Concussions affect more than just the head! Chiropractic care is vital in treating neck and spinal injuries associated with head trauma. Check out our podcast to learn more about these groundbreaking treatments! 👩‍⚕️👨‍⚕️ #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

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. Hello and welcome to another edition. Thanks for tuning in. Today I want to talk a little bit about sports. Last time we talked a lot about how we can predict an ACL vulnerability to an injury, but the chiropractors are really good at helping with hip imbalance and muscle posture to help prevent those knee injuries. But another thing that chiropractors do that doesn't get enough press or enough recognition is the work that we do with concussions. Some of the top doctors in the world that take care of concussions are chiropractors. If you go to Harvard Medical School website, you'll see that Dr. Ted Carrick is the one in charge of head traumas. He's there teaching at Harford in Boston, Massachusetts, the Harvard College. And Dr. Carrick started off at his own little institute down in Florida, then he went to Life Chiropractic School, and now he's at Harvard as people learn more and more of what he does. See, he's a chiropractor, and he's discovered that when you have a head injury, adjustments to the upper neck can help a lot. And he does a lot about how you adapt to your environment as you're in your environment. Some of the cool videos I've seen is him is he's had somebody after a brain injury that can't sit still, they're constantly bobbing and weaving. And what he'll do is he'll put on different color eyeglasses on their lenses, like a purple and maybe an orange, and they'll actually balance out as the wavelengths go into their eyes change. And while they balance out and actually sit normal for once, he does upper cervical care to them. He's also been known to take athletes and have them play their sport in a controlled area. And he'll have thousands and thousands of cameras on them. And they notice that every once in a while they get in a certain position and their eye will go. Little jerk and sporadic, their eyeball itself. So what he'll do is take their picture at that moment. Then what he'll do is get them back in that same position to re introduce that same stress to get the eye to perform the same way. And while they're there, he'll adjust their atlas. Pretty cool stuff. And they're able to walk away, get rid of their tremors, they're able to walk away, go back to the sport they loved. Or in the case of veterans, they're able to go back just to having a normal life again. We also have the work of Dr. Scott Rosa, R O S A, Rosa. Scott Rosa got a little bit of fame and publicity when he took care of Jim McMahon and the 85 Chicago Bears. They had a special on where are they now, the 85 Bears. And sad, sadly and tragically, Dave Doberson had taken his own life because of the CTE issues he suffered from. Like many of these athletes, he shot himself in the chest because he wanted people to study his brain in order to help his teammates and future football players figure out what happened. During this, they talked about Jim McMahon having really bad headaches and his pressure. And they put a picture of his MRI on the screen. Dr. Rosa took a freeze frame of this on his TV. And he looked and saw a part of Jim McMahon's midbrain, the cerebellar tonsils. Hey, it came through the base of the skull and now it's by the neck area. And Rosa's figured out when this happens, The spinal fluid does not regenerate the way it's supposed to. And we also know through MRIs and pre and post imaging that when you get your C1, your upper neck, adjusted it can actually drive the midbrain back into the foramen magnum or leaving it in the pressure. So if you go onto YouTube and type in Jim McMahon Chiropractor you'll see the video. Jim McMahon went to Scott Rosa and Dr. Rosa was able to do his upper cervical work on Jim McMahon. Afterwards, as Jim McMahon described it, it's like a toilet bowl being flushed. He can actually feel the spinal fluid regenerate. And when you look at a CTE brain, what is the ventricles. What's a ventricle? The ventricle is the spot inside the midbrain where the spinal fluid hangs out. And you see those brains, and you see those ventricles, they expand in the CTE brain. You also see the little cracks and crevices on the outside of the brain that we're all familiar with. They deepen and widen with CTE. You see what happens is, for many years, we didn't really know what spinal fluid did. It was the assumption that spinal fluid was just water that balanced the brain, flowed the brain, flowed inside. Now we know that the spinal fluid actually has a big job. It actually takes toxins, or toxins, or Stuff that your brain's used for energy. After it's done using it for energy, it takes it and brings it to the veins. And then the veins suck that up and they take it down to the liver and the kidneys and you excrete it. We also know that the spinal fluid itself goes up and down. It goes all the way down your spinal cord and back up again. And this motion also helps flush and clean the spine and the brain itself. And so when you got the clogged damn. When you got the base of the skull applied, when the midbrain is coming down, Scott Rosa's work has shown that with the pre and post x rays and the pre and post imaging, that getting this adjusted and making a change here will actually change the way the spinal fluid can flow. And last time we're talking about somebody else, Dr. Longyear down in Jacksonville, Florida. Dr. Longyear saw a lot of Scott Rose's work and was pretty intrigued by it. Dr. Longyear had studied under Dr. Ted Carrick for many years and Dr. Longyear now teaches Dr. Carrick's class at Life Chiropractic College that Dr. Carrick once taught before going to Harvard. Dr. Longyear has a motion MRI machine. And so now there's most MRI machine, we can actually watch the upper cervical adjustments on patients with CTE and we can literally see what's happening as it happens. It's really exciting. So Dr. Rose, Dr., excuse me, Dr. Longyear puts the stylus into the MRI and it's a mechanical adjustment, this one is, so it's not like I do with my hands. This is a very specific very exact adjustment to the C1 vertebrae. And what he does is he puts it in there and he does the adjustment. When he does the adjustment, we literally see the spinal fluid, like Dr. Rosa had hypothesized, drain out and come back up. So he literally flushes out and regenerates the new spinal fluid. We watch the venous flow outtake increase tremendously. So once, like Dr. Rosa had hypothesized, the veins are able to come out more. Have you ever had one of those headaches where it just pulsates? My father is a chiropractor also, and so is my grandfather. And they always assumed that when you got adjusted in your upper neck and you were a little light headed afterwards, it's because you were getting a blood rush into your inner ears and you had to balance yourself out. That's why it only lasted about 10 seconds. Dr. Longyear has actually proven that thought wrong. It's actually so much cooler than that. See, the pulsation you get, because the blood's always going to get to your head. If the blood doesn't get to your head, we call that a stroke. So the blood's always going to your brain. That's not an issue. The issue is getting it out of your brain. Out of your cranial cavity. And when the foramen magnum, the hole in the base of your skull is clogged with your midbrain, the venous flow suffers. So what you get is the smooth muscles of the blood vessels, the arteries, pumping blood into the brain, more going in than coming out. Which is why you get the pulsation because it's backflow. It's hitting it and it's down enough to go. And the spinal flow is not draining, right? You get really bad headaches, really bad pressure. And if you have severe case of this from, let's say, football, hockey, or sports injury, or like our veterans, you're near an explosion and you're serving our country and the explosion happens and it throws you across the room and you get the head injury and now you can't do it either. So Dr. Long here has a clinic down in Jacksonville where he's putting people in this motion MRI machine doing this upper cervical work and we're literally watching the venous flow empty the head and the spinal fluid regenerate. Now I don't know how anyone could say that's not what's happening when we're literally watching it on a motion MRI machine as it's happening. And I think it's so cool. I think all the stuff I've heard my father talk about and my grandfather reading the old chiropractic textbooks, if they would have had the ability to watch an adjustment live, under the motion MRI machine, that just really, really, really, really got them excited and pumped up because I know it did for me. So after long years doing this. Now, how do I know all these things so well? I've had dinner or lunch with all three of these gentlemen. I got to meet Dr. Ted Carrick, working with the Rockford Icehogs, the hockey team here, because we had a player who had a concussion. You might have heard of Ted Carrick before, he's the one that helped Sidney Crosby and Jonathan Tays, he was in Sports Illustrated. So I'm not bringing any HIPAA secrets that weren't already long broken. But because the Icehogs had players with the same agents and same talents and same friends with the players. I went to a conference, Dr. Carrick was speaking, and I was asked by the team, by the Blackhawks, and at that time he was at Life University. At that time, the president of Life University was a family friend. So Dr. Carrick and I got to talk about the players that I take care of, and he got to teach me how to do what he does. here at my level and know when to refer him up. I got to meet Scott Rosa again because, after he helped Jim McMahon, he was looking for other famous athletes and there was a famous Chicago Blackhawk player who took a lot of hits to the head and he started having neurological problems, actually forced him to retire. But he was an ice hog before and ice hog after his Blackhawk career and Dr. Rosa realized I would know that player and he wanted to meet that player. So he reached out to me and him and I had dinner in Kansas City at Cleveland Chiropractic College where we were able to talk about this player and get Dr. Rosa's information to the player through me. And lastly, Dr. Longyear is the keynote speaker at the, our National Associations Conference. And I'm the Illinois Rep. I'm on the Sports and Fitness Council Board. I'm on all kinds of boards there and committees. And Every night, Dr. Longyear and I went out to dinner together. I didn't even know who he was. I just thought he was another chiropractor there at our seminar. I had no idea he was the featured speaker. So him and I were able to become friends before I even knew that he was who he is. So that's exciting to have those kind of connections and friends. And if you listen to me at all this point, I want to end this with a couple of two quick points to think about. You cannot have a head injury without a neck injury. You cannot hurt your head. You cannot have a concussion without a neck injury. And the spinal cord goes down the neck and it goes out to the sides, has these ligaments called dentate ligaments, and these are strong, tight ligaments. So when you whip your neck back and forth, causing the head injury, you're also pulling and stretching your spinal cord in your neck. You're causing your neck to flare up and irritate. And like I said, and I talked about these doctors, part of the midbrain gets pulled down because of these dentate ligaments. You cannot fix the head. You cannot fix the concussion while the neck is still pulling on the midbrain. All these corrections were made after a chiropractic adjustments. So if you know someone's had a concussion, it's very, very important to get them to the chiropractor. Now here locally, I work with the orthopedic doctors. They're allowed to do the testing. In the state of Illinois, I am not allowed by law to do concussion testing. Then medical doctors have to do it. So I have a friend with a medical doctor that's learned how to do concussion testing. And what happens here, what we do, is I give the care, he gives the test. He puts you back in, I just give the care. And together we've created amazing things. However, I have to tell you, even though we've co cared several patients together, even 20 years. I have still never gotten a referral from a patient with a concussion from any healthcare provider that I know of. So if you are waiting, or you're going to ask your family doctor, or you're asking an orthopedic doctor if you should see a chiropractor with a concussion, you will not get the right answer, or an answer. But the answer is absolutely. There's no way to have a head injury without a neck injury. And you want to call the chiropractor and ask them if they have familiarity taking care of people with concussions. This is not something all chiropractors do. This is something I do. This is something I work with, but not all chiropractors have studied this area. So make sure that you check with the chiropractor to make sure you're going to the correct chiropractor to get the correct care for this injury. So if you've had a concussion, if you know someone with a concussion, make sure you seek out chiropractic care from a qualified chiropractor that understands how to treat and work with concussions. Not only that, but also ask them if they know when to refer the concussion out. Like I said, Dr. Carrick and them have taught me some of the basic 101 concussion protocols that helps majority of people. But with a severe concussion, I have a whole protocol where I refer to the more upper cervical specialist and I have a whole list of those chiropractors ready to go who to send you to, including Dr. Rosa and Dr. Long here. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. Like I just said, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, what a chiropractor can and cannot do, the only person qualified to answer that's a chiropractor. That's why we have this podcast. But if you have a question, you'd like me to answer it, go ahead and leave a comment or a message below wherever you're listening to this or watching this and we'll make sure maybe next time you'll be the question of the week. Thanks everybody. Thanks for tuning in. And like I said, we do so many great things with concussions and so many people suffer today because of them. And that kind of burns a fire in me to get more people under chiropractic care. So again, if you know someone has a concussion, make sure they see a chiropractor. Number one sport for concussions, the frequency, girls soccer. It doesn't always have to be the big football players. Those girls out there running playing soccer can definitely have concussions too. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk again next time. Bye bye.