Chiropractic Care & The Nervous System Explained | Ask the Chiropractor

Understanding the connection between chiropractic adjustments and your nervous system is crucial! Learn how we help regulate stress responses and overall well-being in my newest podcast episode. Check it out! 📻 #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

0:00

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. Thanks for tuning in. So today it comes from a comment or a question, I don't know how to write or say it, from a medical physician. He said that, I heard one time chiropractors said they could cure asthma. Or I've heard chiropractors said they can get rid of digestion problems. And I don't think chiropractors can do that. So I want to talk about how chiropractic and the nervous system work. And then maybe we get to the bottom of this thing. If there's anything that's caused medicine to not embrace chiropractic as well as it could, it's this topic right here. How chiropractic influences the nervous system. So I'm going to do a little deep dive here and try to explain to you when a chiropractor talks about asthma or digestive issues what they're getting at and how they're trying to say. And I'm going to put it on record right now. Chiropractic doesn't cure asthma. Chiropractic doesn't cure asthma. to get rid of digestion problems. It doesn't cure digestion problems. Chiropractic doesn't we don't even like raising the word cure as a whole. It's just part of our profession, part of our philosophy. We don't use that word that often. Chiropractic adjustments help correct and stabilize vertebral subluxations. That's what chiropractic adjustments do. And what's a vertebral subluxation? A vertebral subluxation is when one or two bones in your spine are misaligned. They're under stress. When they're under stress, they will start to behave as if they are dealing with a stress response. Pretty simple. You add stress to something and you get stress back. So two vertebrae will be misaligned. The body will recognize this as a problem and put stress there. There's chemicals that get kicked off in their stress, they're called catecholamines. So catecholamines get released at this joint. The catecholamines then will travel down that nerve and go everywhere that nerve goes until that body burned fight and flight, that body part I should say, not the whole body, just that body part. That's a typical vertebral subluxation. There is another part of this when we talk about the top bone, the neck and the tailbone, but I'm going to finish with that. I'm not going to go there yet. I'm just going to stay on this topic. So if my T1 up between my shoulder blades and they're subluxated, And the chiropractor saw that. Some of the things we might suspect is maybe some T1, T2 rib pain. We might suspect to see the dermatome, the area of skin innervated by that nerve, behaving different. And the T1, T2 nerves don't really do a lot of muscular stuff more than the rib area. But that's the kind of things that we would see. Medicine has no problem agreeing with me that if you were to, let's say, let's go up a couple levels. Let's say you're C5. Let's say your C5 has a vertebral cell fixation. Medicine has no problem agreeing with me that the nerve there, the nerve innervates the skin, might behave funny. It might have weird sensations. It might burn. It might cause pain. There might be pain coming from your neck down to your arm and to your shoulder, traveling that C5 nerve. Us in medicine agree totally on that. They call it a pinched nerve. I don't like to use that term because it's not pinched, right? If it was pinched, it wouldn't work. So we don't like to use that. Medicine and I agree that if this was a problem, it would be a reflex issue. The reflex would not behave properly. Again, we agree with that totally. We also think there might be a loss of strength along the C5 muscles. Again, medicine and I agree with that totally. Where medicine stops and chiropractic continues is that C5 also goes to the body parts. It goes to the glands in your throat. So that C5 is under chronic problems, it could also create problems with the glands in your throat. If you got the vertebral subluxation in your neck adjusted by a chiropractor, and the stress was reduced, then the catecholamines would be reduced. And for medicine, I agree that the reflex would improve. The strength would get better. The skin stuff would improve. We agree on that totally. Even the range of motion would improve. The part that medicine doesn't always grasp a hold of, is the throat glands would also improve. Same nerve, same thing. So that's the part that medicine and chiropractic struggle to see eye to eye. So if my lower back is misaligned, let's say my L4, L5. You've heard many in my podcast talking about that's a sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve is part of the L4 L5. Medicine would agree with me that the leg might have some aches and pains. Medicine would agree with me that the reflex on the leg would be suffered because the sciatic nerve is being suffered. Medicine would agree with me that there might be some dermal tone, skin areas that are changed because the nerves are being pinched. Medicine agrees with me on all these things. It could even be some burning down your leg or pain. They agree with me totally with this. But the L4, L5 also innervates part of your colon. And if your colon is under stress, it's going to behave funny. And so that part of your colon might be funny too. If we gave you adjusted, it'll be curing the colon. Or are we simply adjusting the nerve that goes to the colon so the colon will be under less stress? Those catecholamines will not have the same effect. Should they be reduced after vertebral subluxations corrected by a chiropractic adjustment? So that's what happens. That's the part. So medicine and I and chiropractic agree on like 85 percent of what the nerve does. It's that last 15%. It's the autonomic nervous system we call it. The autonomic nervous system is basically has two modes. It has the mode that everything's great. Your body's doing its thing. You don't think about what your liver's doing. You don't think about digesting your breakfast. You just know your autonomic nervous system is doing it. This morning if you're like me and you got up and went to the gym, I had to breathe a little bit more at the gym. I had my heart rate changed really quick at the gym. And I didn't have to put energy into that. I didn't have to think about that. But my body automatically did it for me. The autonomic nervous system does that. And it's got two modes. Like I said, everything in homeostasis, everything's doing good. It's just doing its thing. But it also has a fight and flight response, right? You've heard of that. Your body's in danger. You have to go into a survival mode. We call this catabolic, meaning that you have to survive the moment. So when that happens, all kinds of changes occur in your body because genetically speaking, we are hunters and gatherers. We're designed to be walking the earth, picking fruits and berries and killing small animals, but most importantly, avoiding the large animals, right? You don't want to. So that's what happens is the fight and flight kicks in. We call that the sympathetic nervous system. And you go into survival mode. Now, when the vertebrae are misaligned, we've got studies out there by Oguya and other people that have shown that when the vertebral subluxation is there, there is a sympathetic response at that nerve level. Like I said, that nerve also goes to the body parts. That fight and flight kicks in. Fight and flight is catabolic, meaning that you, it doesn't matter if you don't survive the moment, because it's bad for you long term, but it's short term looking at you through the danger, but you've got to turn it back around. Like I always say, if the bear eats you, it doesn't really matter what happens an hour from now. And when there's a bear coming in the room, there's always one person doesn't make it, but everybody else does. For those of us who do make it, We switch back out of that fight and flight back into homeostasis. We call that parasympathetic. So you have sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic, I'm in danger. Parasympathetic, I'm not. We've seen chiropractic adjustments create measurable things by measuring chemicals in the mouth. We've seen chiropractic adjustments create a change from sympathetic dominant to parasympathetic dominant. Now, why is this so hard? This is a hard things to measure, right? These are hard things for us to see and qualitatively put numbers on for anybody not just chiropractors. It's just this is a hard thing to measure. But we're starting to see changes in different parts of your body that kick in when you're in fight and flight versus when you're not and so we're starting to measure those levels before and after chiropractic care. And so that's how we influence the fight and flight. Now, I told you that there was a second system, the parasympathetics. My grandfather was a chiropractor and craniosacral because it came from the top bone in your neck and your tailbone. Now the craniosacral system, that's this turn homeostasis or turn off fight and flight. Let the body know fight and flight's over. The danger's gone. It's time to go back to normal. In between your, right around your C1, your top bone in your neck, the vagus nerve comes. V A G U S, vagus nerve. And in Latin, vagus means wander, and it wanders everywhere, belly button up. And this nerve's job is to tell your body, belly button up, generically speaking, the danger has left. It is time to relax. It is time to go back to homeostasis. But if you have a vertebral subluxation, we've been able to do the, okay, this is what's going on with this person. This is the subluxation I find. I'm going to adjust them, and after I adjust them, this is the results I plan to have. This is outcome research. We have predictable outcome research. We can't do a double blind random control study on this because the parameters are impossible to create. I cannot create two people with the exact same vertebral subluxation at C1 having the exact same health problems at the exact same time. Double blind random control study does not work. Double blind random control studies are meant for medicine, taking a medicine pill, period. They are not meant for surgery. Have you ever heard anybody have a double blind random control heart replacement? If these people get real hearts, you get a fake heart. Let's see who survives. They don't do this for parachute research. They don't put a real parachute on one person and a fake parachute in the other and to see who survives. So anyone that asks for a double blind random patrol study on chiropractic is doing that to try to sound intelligent, but actually don't have the first clue. of how to measure real research. So we've had people come in, they've had high blood pressure, they've had their C1 vertebral bone subluxated, they've received a chiropractic adjustment, and their blood pressure's gone down. This was on CBS Good Morning America about 20 years ago. I remember when I was just getting done with school, it was all over the media. Something we've seen all the time. So as chiropractors, we can adjust that C1 in your tailbone in order to help with that. Now, what would the C1 adjustment look like? This is the person who can't relax. This is the person who can't sleep. This is the person whose blood pressure is going all over the place, uncontrolled, randomly. This is the person that, like I said, in order to get out of fight and flight, you can't sleep when you're in fight and flight. So if you get your upper neck adjusted, you get out of fight and flight, you turn on that nerve that says, Hey, let's turn off fight and flight. And then we're able to sleep again. This is the person that would, You know, a lot of times after I adjust someone for the first time and they see one, I see them the next time and I say, tell me about how many dreams you have. How did you know I was dreaming all night? I knew that first bone was misaligned. And I know that person had to get good quality sleep in a long time. So when we do that adjustment, that's what we see. Now the tailbone is going to do everything belly button down. So this is what my grandmother had adjusted when she was unable to have children. She got her lower back and tailbone adjusted and she was able to become pregnant. Does chiropractic adjustments help with infertility? Chiropractic adjustments remove the vertebral subluxation, which changes the autonomic nervous system, which then in return can help with fertility issues. Chiropractic adjustments do not correct fertility. Chiropractic adjustments correct vertebral subluxations. If you know somebody with fertility problems or fertility issues, referring them to a chiropractor is an excellent choice of actions to help. So there you have it. That's how chiropractors work in the nervous system. And by working in the nervous system, especially the autonomic nervous system, we can influence the way the body goes into fight and flight and out of fight and flight. And that's what chiropractic adjustments do as a whole. Is there such a thing as a pinch nerve? No. It's a generic term that doctors will tell you just because they think you understand what that means. Yes. But it's really not a pinch nerve. It's really a nerve that's under stress. It's really a nerve that's not performing on an economic system on its term. off or not behaving the right way and it's in the wrong mode. We adjust that, we get it back in the happy mode or the mode it's supposed to be in, the current, with the current environment that you're in and the human body takes care of the rest. So there you have it everybody, chiropractic and the nervous system. I hope that makes sense. And if you have a more in depth question about some of these different topics I talked about or, hey, have you seen chiropractic adjustments that help with A, B, or C, go ahead and ask below. I understand that you understand that we're not trying to cure something, but we've had a lot of people get a lot of improvement after getting adjusted because we've been able to help regulate the autonomic nervous system better. In a nutshell, chiropractic adjustments help regulate the autonomic nervous system to get the correct response to the stress they're currently under. All right, everybody. A lot of big words today. Thanks for finishing with me. Thanks for going all the way with me and listening to this. Remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one person qualified to answer that question, and that would be a chiropractor. If you don't believe me, ask your medical doctor how chiropractic adjustments change your autonomic tone and see what they have to say. It's Chiropractic 101 for those chiropractors. All right, everybody. Thank you. Talk to you again next time.