A Historic Adjustment: September 18th and the Birth of Chiropractic

🎉 September 18th marks a historic day in chiropractic history! Join Dr. Brant Hulsebus on Ask the Chiropractor as we explore the fascinating origins of chiropractic care. #healthy815 #palmerproud #icachiropractic

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, thanks for tuning in. So the date this is going to be released is September 17th. Now, September 17th is the day before a very historic day, September 18th. So I don't know what day you're listening to this, but I'm going to talk about September 18th, and why September 18th is such a big deal to chiropractors. September 18th, 1895, is the date that we say chiropractic started. That's a date that Dr. Dede Palmer decided to give a chiropractic adjustment to Harvey Lillard. And when he did this adjustment, he had a plan. I'm gonna do this and this is what's gonna happen. So you might see things like people have been doing things to the spine since the ancient times, but this is a day Dr. Palmer went in with a Specific adjustment he was going to do, and he had thought he'd have a desired outcome after he did it. And see, Harvey Lillard was the janitor at the Ryan Building in Davenport, Iowa, and Harvey at that time was reported he couldn't hear. And Dr. Palmer at that time was a magnetic healer in the same building on the third floor. And those of you who don't know, magnetic healing back then had nothing to do with magnets. See, back then, when you got sick, you'd go to your church or your place of faith, and your religious leader would pray to get the evil sin out of you so you could heal. Much like the medicine at this time was using leeches and making people bleed to get the negative things out of your body. A magnetic healer would grab ahold of you and maybe a piece of metal and pull the evil energy out of you so you could heal. This was health care, 1895. Dr. Palmer must have felt something in Harvey's neck or saw Harvey carrying his head a certain way. And he had a theory that if he was to go in there and correct that Harvey's hearing might come back. So Harvey came in and Dr. Palmer did his first chiropractic adjustment. He did a smooth with the intent of desired outcome. And Harvey's hearing came back. Now, there's all kinds of reports on how long it took Harvey's hearing to come back. But Harvey got his hearing back. And they thought maybe they found a cure for deafness. So they went out and found another deaf person, brought him into the clinic, and Dr. Palmer felt the spot in the neck that he just had Harvey, and that spot wasn't there. But he felt a different spot that wasn't moving right. So Dr. Palmer restored the motion of that one through a chiropractic adjustment, and this person's blood pressure went down. Then he found a third person, and he said, Okay, what's going on with you? I'm deaf, and he went to find the spot that Harvey had. The spot wasn't there. So Dr. Palmer did another spot, and this guy's indigestion went away. So he just started noticing, every time I feel a spot in the spine, it's not moving right, I could do a chiropractic adjustment, I restore the motion, and all of a sudden the body part heals. So he started keeping track of every time I adjust this happens, and I adjust this happens. And chiropractic started right there in Davenport, Iowa. Now his son came along, BJ Palmer. So Dr. D. D. Palmer was the founder of chiropractic. Then the developer of chiropractic was B. J. Palmer, the son. And so B. J. took his dad's records and notes and he was able to get a hold of cadavers. Now this is early 1900s. The use of cadavers is very much frowned upon or very taboo. But he was able to get a hold of some cadavers. And he was able to then trace the nerves from where his dad said he did the adjustment to the body part. And that's when they realized that they were affecting the nervous system every time they did the chiropractic adjustments. They were able to trace the adjustment back to the body part with the desired outcome. So B. J. Palmer took this, started the college. Dr. Stevenson wrote a textbook for them. We have a textbook written in the early teens in 19, I think it was 1914, about chiropractic and how to perform chiropractic and how to adjust and where to adjust and why to adjust. And it's amazing if you read this book today. It all holds up. It's all still very accurate. Now today we've got much better diagnostic equipment than they had back then, but the core of this book, the majority of this book is still true today. And I always tease if you find a medical book from 1914, I don't think you would trust that book. So it's really interesting to see how much chiropractic When it was founded and the principles I started on, how it all still applies today and how very little has changed other than how we go about detecting and finding the spots to adjust. Now there was a time they would adjust you and they'd say, don't move now stay right where you are, you'll hold your adjustment better. Now we know to get up and make a move around. I did a podcast about six months ago about the research we told people what to do with their lower back issues. 20 years ago compared to today and how that's changed. So yeah, we know some more stuff, we've tweaked a little bit. But you gotta remember too that when chiropractic started, it had absolutely nothing to do with lower back pain and neck pain. It had everything to do with improving neurology, through chiropractic adjustments, to improve bodily functions. And even though the testing, that stuff is still, Pretty new, able to test how we affect what they call the autonomic nervous system. That's the nervous system that runs your body without you thinking about it. And it's got two modes. Autonomic nervous system is either in fight or flight or sympathetic. Or not in fight or flight and that's called parasympathetic. When we adjust you, we see the changes in your parasympathetic and your sympathetic nervous system. Again, it's hard to measure these things and it's hard to I know everybody talks about they want a double blind random control study, that's just not how chiropractic research is done, because you can't give a real adjustment and a fake adjustment. It's no different than heart transplants, people weren't given real heart transplants and fake heart transplants to see which one was real or not. It was, this is what we're going to do, this is what our plan is, and this is what we think is going to happen when we're done. And if these things continuously happen over and over again, then we've proven this must work. That's how real chiropractic research should be performed. Just like research on parachutes. Nobody was given a fake parachute and a real parachute, and let's see which one does better. No, it was, this is what's going to happen when you open your parachute, this is what we think is going to slow down your acceleration, this is why you live afterwards. And that's exactly how chiropractic works. If we adjust this one, we know the nerves go to this body part, we know when the nerves are inflamed, they're in sympathetic mode, this is what happens. We give the adjustment, the sympathetic tone turns down, the paracetamol turns on, and therefore the body part goes back to homeostasis, and you should feel better. Now, does chiropractic offer cures for everything up and down the body? Absolutely not. Chiropractic just is here to help the nervous system do what the nervous system is supposed to do. We always say without interference, that's what chiropractic does. We don't treat asthma, we don't treat indigestion, we don't treat deafness. We find the vertebral subluxation and we correct it with a chiropractic adjustment. And if the body is ready to express itself in a certain way that's been hindered by this subluxation, by correcting the subluxation the body now will express itself better. homeostasis, the way it's supposed to, and the person now is able to heal on their own. Remember, medicine doesn't really cure things. Medicine retards things or alters things so the body can overcome them. If you have a bacterial infection, the antibiotic binds to the bacterial infection, slows it down, hinders its growth, so your white blood cells can do the job. The antibiotic does not actually. so does not remove it but help the body take care of it We have The Invention of Chiropractic, September 18th, 1895, by Dr. D. D. Palmer. And then after D. D. Palmer came his son, B. J. Palmer, and B. J. became the developer of chiropractic, started writing textbooks, he got the school up and running, he got the education going, he started training chiropractors. And then the last Dr. Palmer, Dr. David Palmer, he was called the educator. Because even though Dr. B. J. Palmer started a school, What he didn't do is he didn't do it the traditional ways, because nothing the Palmers do is traditional. In order to get credentialed and licensed and viewed as a real college and put into mainstream healthcare like that was their goal, they had to go through all kinds of accreditation. And this is something that my grandfather, see my grandmother got adjusted by B. J. Palmer, the second Palmer, but my grandpa and David Palmer knew each other very well. And my grandfather worked with David Palmer. He was at the table to get the schools accredited to make them part of the same education system as everybody else's. And this was done to not only put us in the same playing field as other universities, but also for the student loan program. So grandpa fought really hard to get us involved in student loans because a lot of people in my grandpa's day would say you didn't even go to a real college. Chiropractic schools aren't real. So my grandfather knew that if he could get the schools accredited by the same agencies that are credit every other school in the country, it's hard to say we're not real because now we're on the same playing field as everybody else. So if you ever say chiropractic college is not a real college, we're the same. governing bodies that govern and accredit our schools as in the credit every other school. That's like saying University of Iowa isn't real or University of Illinois isn't real. Of course it's real. It's part of the education system that we got put into. My grandfather also got Medicare to cover chiropractic. Because again, he couldn't say that the science of chiropractic isn't real. The federal government recognizes it and watches us like they do medicine and osteopaths and dentistry. So he knew by getting us into the same arenas with those that we would become an even playing field. And that's exactly what happened back in the 70s. Chiropractic has been around since 1895. I'm a third generation chiropractor. It's really common to see multiple generation chiropractors in our field. And it all started right down from where I am, Rockford, just south of us. If you jump on the Rock River and head down to Mississippi, you'll meet it right there in Davenport, Iowa. That's where it all started, but after D. D. Palmer. Help me celebrate Founders Day by telling the story of how chiropractic started and a little of the history of chiropractic and the origins of chiropractic. Thanks for tuning in. If you know a deaf person. Maybe chiropractor can help them. Obviously, there's still a lot of deaf people out there. So like I said, we didn't find a cure for deafness. We found a subluxation in Harvey Lillard's neck. When we adjusted Harvey Lillard, his neck got better and his hearing came back. We did not get adjusted for hearing loss, but it was nice to see Harvey get his hearing back. All right, everybody, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care or the origins of chiropractic or chiropractic history, feel free to leave a message or a comment below, and maybe next week you'll be the topic of the week. Thank you.