Debunking Myths and Misconceptions about Chiropractic Care

🚫 Busting myths and misconceptions about chiropractic care! 🌀 Tune in to our latest episode to hear Dr. Brant Hulsebus debunk common chiropractic myths and set the record straight! #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, welcome to another podcast. So today I'm going to talk about the common myths that people think are true about chiropractic or what we do and what the actual facts are and some of them might just be opinions. Some of them might be just ideas, but I'm just going to go through my little list. I've kept this list on my desk for about three weeks and I've been trying to think of different topics we could discuss on this podcast on this topic. So I'm going to dive right in. Number one, your medical doctor or an orthopedic doctor knows more about what we're doing than we know what we're doing. Your medical doctor or orthopedic doctor, they might be great medical doctors. They might be fantastic orthopedic doctors. But I'm willing to bet they don't know nothing about what chiropractic is or what chiropractors do. So when you go to them before you come to us to ask whether or not you should see us and want their opinion, It's foolish. You wouldn't ask your podiatrist about, can I get my teeth looked at? Because your podiatrist doesn't know much about teeth. He wouldn't tell you whether you should go to the dentist or not. Everyone needs to stay in their lane. So I started this whole podcast one day because I got upset about this topic. I got upset that a patient came in that was suffering for years, received one chiropractic adjustment, and the last five years of their suffering went away. And so that upsets me. And it upsets me too when a patient's doing really good. We may be sending them to an orthopedic doctor to have their shoulder looked at, and then somebody over there tells them, don't go back there, they can hurt you. That really makes me mad. Yeah, quote Homer Simpson, grinds my gears. Okay? You have to understand that chiropractic started in 1895. And the fight with chiropractors against medical doctors claiming that medical doctors were trying to ruin us ended in 1990. Okay. So from 1895 until 1990, the American Medical Association was found guilty of trying to contain a limited diabetic. The Chester Wook case is when this all came to an end. That happened in February of 1990. So 95 years of them, over 128 years of existence, of them trying to say bad things about us. Now when you lie about something for that long, when you make up that many falsehoods about something that long, it's hard for anyone to ever know the actual truth. So if you really want to know the truth about chiropractic, you have to talk to a chiropractor. Here's another one that we're not licensed physicians. Now, I'm going to speak in Illinois. Every state's a little different. In Illinois, I am a licensed physician. My license is the exact same license that every medical doctor, no matter what field of medicine they practice in. Same licensing board, same regulatory board, same board requirements. Until recently, they gave us more. They have three national boards. We have four now. But our national boards always matched up until about 10 years ago. Like I said, if I have to go to the governing body, it's the same governing body that interviews your family doctor, same interviews the orthopedic doctors. So in Illinois, we're licensed physicians. We go to schools. We go to chiropractic colleges. I went to Palmer College. Palmer College is the oldest chiropractic college, one of the largest chiropractic colleges, if not the largest chiropractic college, and has the best pass fail rate on national boards. Yes, we take national boards, too. Our schools are accredited by the exact same agencies that accredit every other college in America. Those don't say chiropractic school isn't a real school, it's like basically saying Harvard's not a real school. Because the exact same credentialing bodies that credential our school credential every school. We have federal loans like everybody else has any other school does. So our schools are very old, very established. Palmer was established in 1897. It's a very old school, very prestigious school. So yes, we go to real colleges. Majority of us have our Bachelors of Science before we start chiropractic school. And at that, those don't, those who usually graduate get both at graduation like I did. Okay, I got my Bachelors of Science from Palmer College and my Doctrine of Chiropractic from Palmer College. Yes, we have a doctrine. When you get a doctrine, you call yourself doctor. Whether it's like our First Lady of the United States currently, Dr. Biden, who's got a doctrine in education. Whether it's a doctrine in theology, like the person that can lead Sunday services at your local place of faith. You earn a doctrine, you get the name doctor. We don't have a medical doctrine. We have a chiropractic doctrine. Why would we have a medical doctrine? We're not medical doctors. So when someone says chiropractors are not real doctors, ask them to define what a doctor is, because you'll find out there's a lot of people that you call doctor probably don't fit that definition of what that person says. I define doctrine as someone who's earned the title, the diploma of a doctrine, and therefore now has a title doctor. When you get an adjustment, Another common myth, number three. When you get an adjustment, we actually put the bone right back where it's supposed to be. No, we don't do that. That would be awfully violent. What we do when we do a chiropractic adjustment, we don't put the bone back into place. We free the bone up. When the bone gets subluxated, subluxation is when one or two vertebral bones become misaligned. And in doing so, they create a stress, and they create a stress response. And that alters the nervous system. When a chiropractor does a chiropractic adjustment, they relieve the Subluxation, and the body starts the healing process. The good news for us is the bones were designed to go back in place. They got grooves and bumps that all interlock. Chiropractor's job is simply free the bone up, free the subluxation up, so that way the body can take care of it from there. So people come in and they're like, How long will you hold this in place for? We don't really. Push it back in. I tell most of my patients, if you took an x ray of you before the adjustment and the x ray immediately following the adjustment, you might be disappointed. You'll feel great, but you might be disappointed. Even though it feels like sometimes like we shook the room when we adjust you, where it's not really moving that much. It's just getting freed. We're freeing the bone so the body can put it back where it needs to be. Chiropractor's job is just to unlock the body's potential. Let's get in there, find something that's stuck and locked, unlock and let the body take care of itself. We have an old saying, nature needs no help, just no, no interference. On that same topic, number four, I can, yeah, I can crack my own back. I don't need to come see you. I never need to see a chiropractor. I can still get my own back. Or worse than that, when they come in and say, I just can't get this one like you do it all the time. Can you take a look at it for me? Usually by that time you've got everything so locked up and so jammed up it's going to take us a week or two to fix you. Because what happens is you're really not doing what we do at all. We find the one that's stuck through motion palpation, meaning that we use our hands, we feel your spine, we find the one that's not moving. There's ones above and below that move extra, right? We find the one that's not moving, the one that locks into place. This is why we go to school for 10 trimesters or three and one third year, on top of the four year diploma we get before we commence. So you're looking at almost seven or excuse me, eight and a half years and that's 30 hours a trimester at chiropractic school, right? My daughter's at University of Iowa. She's taking 15 hours a semester. We do 30 some hours a trimester. So we're getting 90 hours a year. And so it's three and a third year, but it's, if you did it at the real speed, it might be a lot longer. But no, you can't just lay on a couch and twist and have your hip make a noise and say, I just couldn't quite get it like you did, could you take a look at it for me? Because what happens is we find the one that's stuck through motion palpation and we free that one. But when you start grabbing chairs and twisting yourself or having to crank on your leg or, Grabbing the door frame and trying to twist the one that's stuck is only getting more stuck It's going to get more and more fixated The ones above that one and below that one finally have to give because something has to give And those ones give when they give there's a little bit of an endorphin release And so people think oh, I feel better now But they find that they go from doing that from one day to twice a day to four times a day to eight times a day To every hour Then they come see us. Man, I just can't get that one like I used to. Could you get it for me? Man, by the time you see us and you've been doing that, that one is so stuck, it's so locked up, it's so jammed. Then you look at it, it's you didn't get it very good. It's you screwed it up pretty good first before you got in here. You got to give me a break. Just because something feels good doesn't mean it's good for you. I always say take tequila. It might feel good going down, but we all know it ain't good for us. Or take a big bowl of pasta or take a thing of ice cream. Man, that feels so good when we're eating it, but we know it's not good for us. We know we're going to pay the price for that later. When you try to get your own back, you're going to pay the price for that later. Okay. It might feel good at the time, but you're really causing a bigger issue. If you're feeling that needs to get done, you need to see a chiropractor. That's a, that's an alert. So don't try to crack your own back. Go see a chiropractor and get a chiropractic adjustment. Get that fixed. Don't get that more and more stuck. All right. Oh, one last thing. The science thing. Chiropractic is unscientific. I love it when I hear that. I love it when someone says, I'd see a chiropractor, but I want to go with the medical doctor. There's more science behind that. Man, that makes me laugh. That really cracks me up. So let me tell you the medical approach, okay? First, go in with lower back pain. NSAIDs. Non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs. Can someone show me the research paper that shows that non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs are good for someone with chronic lower back pain? Because I can provide you the research paper that shows using non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs will give you chronic lower back pain. I can give you the research paper that shows giving non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs NSAIDs can give you headaches. This research is old. It's been around for a couple decades. We know for a fact it does. So the first approach you go when you get insets that we know create chronic lower back pain and headache. If that doesn't work, which I'm not going to bet it does work, but if that doesn't work, don't worry. We can probably do a physical therapy. Now, you've heard me on many of these podcasts, and if you haven't, go back and listen. We now know that the muscles around the spine are called stabilization muscles. These muscles are very different than skeletal muscles if you look at them under a microscope. If you look at them in my dissection lab, they look the exact same as skeletal muscle. If you look at them under a microscope, they look totally different. They have no goggly tendon organs, which helps you move your muscles around. These muscles only move by neurological reflex. So they have so many more neurological spindles together. And if you're not going to a state of the art physical therapist that keeps up on their research, that keeps up on their science, and you go get PT on this, and they're going to totally miss that mark about the stabilization muscles. If they're using a book that's more than 10 years old to do your lower back exercises, to do your lower back PT, good luck. Probably not going to work. Again, we look at the science, we look at the fact that stabilization muscles are the key. But don't worry. If PT doesn't work, we'll give you a cortisone shot. We'll go in there and give that shot in your lower back, help that lower back pain. Can someone show me the research paper that shows it's okay to give a cortisone shot to the lower back? I know the FDA doesn't approve it. I know the manufacturer of the shot doesn't recommend anywhere near the spine. So why would you give someone a shot that the FDA doesn't approve that's near the spine that the manufacturer said not to and then call the chiropractor on scientific. You can have your science, but you got to follow. You can't just have it. You have to actually follow the science, right? If we know NSAIDs aren't the right thing to do, we know most of the physical therapy fails, and we know the cortisone shots are the wrong thing to do, and now you're going to let the same person seeing this whole time now operate on your back? Did this give you three things in a row that don't work? Now, is there a science that shows that chiropractic is the best? Of course there is. Of course there is. And it's been proven over and over again. Science just keeps coming out every week. There's nothing more proven for lower back pain than chiropractic. They call it spinal manipulative therapy. They call it motion exercises. Whatever they want to call it in the research paper, it's fine. But it's chiropractic. The North America Spinal Society said they recommend spinal manipulation therapy over anything else. And there's not even a chiropractor on the North America Spinal Society. There's not one chiropractor on it. And they're telling you that's the best thing you can do. So these are just myths that just drive me nuts. Now, I'll try to put as many of these links that I just quoted as I can. A lot of links. And if you go back to my old podcast and do a search, you can find them all. I've broken each one of those things down, one by one, those research papers I just quoted real quick. So there you have it. Those are some of the most common things I hear about chiropractic. That's just not true. That's just not factual. And again, as a chiropractor, we all get tired of listening to it. We get tired of hearing it. Number one, your medical doctor should tell you whether they should come to us or not. They know more about what we do than we do. Myth. Number two, we're not really educated. We don't really have a license. Myth. Not true. We're not real doctors. Not true. We have a doctrine. Number three, when you give you an adjustment, I actually put the bone, physically move the bone back into place. No, we just give it a chiropractic adjustment, free up the, get rid of the adhesions, make the vertebrae move again, and let the nervous system go back to doing what it's supposed to do. You can crack your own back, Myth number four. Can I crack my own back? No, you cannot. You can make it make noises, you can make it more fixed, but you can't do what I do to yourself. I wish you could. I wish you could, because when I travel, I wish I could take care of myself. Unfortunately, I can't take care of myself on the road, but luckily I have two great doctors here to take care of, find care of me. And lastly, there's no scientific research behind what we do. And that's crazy. That's just crazy. There's all kinds of it. Go to Palmer College. Palmer. edu, they have research there. Go to chiropractic. org, they got tons of research there. And remember, if you do research, look at my old research podcast. Make sure you always type in PubMed to find the real research. We even got research today to show us how many adjustments it takes in order to start to make a change in your spine. It takes 12, by the way. 12 adjustments to start to make a change. So you have to give chiropractic adjustments at least 12 tries. All right, everybody. So there you go. Common myths and misconceptions about chiropractic care. settled by a licensed chiropractor. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you next week. And remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, only one person is qualified to answer that, and that would be a chiropractor. So if you have a question, wherever you're listening to this or hearing this or listening, seeing together, reading about this, leave a comment below. Maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. And like always, please make sure you like and subscribe. Thanks everybody.