Chiropractic: America’s Healthcare Freedom

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus discusses the American origins of chiropractic care and its significance to healthcare freedom. He explains the history of chiropractic, its development in the Midwest, and the importance of patient autonomy in choosing healthcare providers. Dr. Hulsebus also delves into the typical chiropractic approach, focusing on how adjustments can help the body heal naturally by addressing subluxations and autonomic nervous system imbalances. He emphasizes the collaborative role of chiropractors with other medical professionals and how chiropractic care has surged post-COVID-19. Tune in to learn more about the freedoms and principles of chiropractic care as we celebrate Independence Day.

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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 thank you for tuning in for another episode of Ask the Chiropractor as I'm recording this. It is just about to become July 4th, and here in the States July 4th, we celebrate America's birthday in the Freedom and Chiropractic. A lot of people might not know this, but chiropractic is American made. It's made right here in Davenport, Iowa, 1895. Harvey Lillard was a janitor. Who lost his hearing, went and saw Dr. Palmer at the time, a magnetic healer, and Dr. Palmer recorded the first chiropractic adjustment and chiropractic was started. Two years later, the Palmer College of Chiropractic opened and they were off teaching other people how to repeat the same adjustment they had done previously for Harvey Lillard. So chiropractic is an American Midwest science. I listen to a lot of podcasts about people from the Midwest and it's fun to know that we are a Midwest science. So let's let's talk a little bit about why this is a big deal and how this relates to the 4th of July Independence Day. In America, you have the right to pick your own healthcare providers. We had the freedom of healthcare choice. This was a big deal that my grandfather fought long and hard for. He wanted to make sure that if you had a lower back injury, headache, or any other reason, you might want to go see a chiropractor, that you had the right to go see the chiropractor without a happen to have permission from another doctor. Now until recently, if you wanted to go to physical therapy, you had to go to your primary doctor first and get a prescription for physical therapy. Then the doctor would allow you to go to physical therapy. The physical therapist then had to come up their plan, how they want to take care of you, and send the plan back to your primary doctor, and the doctor had to sign off on that. Now as chiropractors, we never wanted that. We never wanted that for many reasons. One, back then the a MA was trying to destroy chiropractic. So I don't think we would've gotten any referrals. I don't think we would've survived, and two, the whole reason this podcast, like medical doctors and doctors of osteopath, they don't know what chiropractors do. So it'd be really hard for them to regulate when you should and shouldn't go. As a chiropractor, it's really hard for me to regulate when you should and shouldn't go to the dentist. That's up to the dentist, not to the chiropractor. So it's interesting how hard they fought back then my grandfather's generation to make sure that we remained a primary level of healthcare. Meaning that I am a primary healthcare provider. Now I'm gonna talk mostly about the state of Illinois 'cause that's where I live and that's more what I know. I don't know all 50 states laws and regulations. And I haven't had time yet. Hopefully I never do. But in Illinois, we're primary healthcare providers. We're licensed medical providers that are not allowed to prescribe or do surgeries. So for any ailment, you are allowed to come see us and then the chiropractor's allowed to come up with what we want to do. Now, what makes people want to choose the chiropractor or the medical doctor? We are a drug free approach. Chiropractic doesn't have pharmaceuticals. It doesn't have medicine, so that's not in our repertoire of things that we are going to. Start you off with care. We're gonna, knowing that we know the body heals from the inside out, that if we can get things in the body working better, functioning better, and get rid of the interference, your body can heal and take care of itself. This is why so many people choose chiropractic. We've seen a spike in chiropractic patients since COVID. Some people have gotten upset with the establishment, the medical establishment during COVID and have sought more chiropractic care. Now, when you go to a chiropractor, what's the typical approach? I. Well, your typical approach is you'd fill out a history like you would at a primary doctor's office. We get all your information. Then we would probably want to get to know your spine better. We want to take some x-rays of your spine, see what's going on. We want to do an examination to see where you're fixated. See these chiropractors, we look at the spine and we look for fixations, and we have the attitude that those are called subluxations. When one or two vertebraes are misaligned, not moving properly, and that creates a. Imbalance in the autonomic nervous system. Now, the autonomic nervous system is the one that does everything all the time. Like right now, my stomach is. Digesting my breakfast, my liver's doing this thing, my duo's doing this thing, my pancreas is doing this thing, and I'm not thinking about those things. They're happening automatically. They just do their job and those of us don't spend a lot of time during the day saying, I wonder what's my liver's doing right now? We just know our liver's doing its job and you see these organs and these blood vessels and all these things. They have two modes. They have the mode where everything is good, everything is in harmony, and it's just doing its thing. The other motives, were in danger, we're under attack. And you have to understand, genetically speaking, we're hunters and gatherers. So the moment we get chemical, physical, or emotional stress, our body goes in a fight and fight to protect us. And during these times, the autonomic nervous system can be che, what they call catabolic, meaning it'll waste itself away to survive the moment. If I was being chased by a bear, the only thing that matters is the next five minutes. Do I get away or don't get away? And it doesn't matter what else happens to me during that five minutes, except for getting away from the bear. So certain body parts turn off by design, like digestion. Who cares about digesting breakfast when you're being chased by a bear? Learning turns off. Who cares about learning calculus when the bear's chasing you? We don't need to be wasting time on that. Your blood vessels constrict. They move all the blood from your core out to your legs and your arms so you can fight or flight, right? Nothing that happens that some people have always said is bad for you is your cholesterol goes way up. And how many commercials do we see about it? Do you have high cholesterol? High cholesterol is awesome if you're being chased by a bear.'cause if you were to get scratched or cut, you'd want to clot and live right? Reproductive drive turns off. We don't need that when we're being chased by a bear. So you have high blood pressure, vasoconstriction, high cholesterol, no reproductive drive, upset stomach. Do I sound like a commercial for pharmaceuticals? That's what we see as chiropractors and we see these spots in your spine. We do the adjustments and we tell that part of the spine that's fixated with the subluxation is that, Hey, we're not in fight and flight right now. Let's go back to normal. And so chiropractors help the body get out of fight and flight and back to normal through chiropractic adjustments. Now, there are two exceptions to this. That's the very top bone, the very bottom bone. Those control what we call your parasympathetics, and I jokingly call those your chill out nerves. If those two are misaligned, your body doesn't understand that you're not in fight and flight. It won't turn it off. So if something gets you a little revved up, it normally the body just shuts it down. Those two nerves do. But if those two nerves aren't subluxated, they're under stress that they don't know how to tell you to do that. Now, how do you know if this is your problem? The x-rays are huge. The chiropractic exam is enormous way for us to tell. There's something going on here, but this is the person who doesn't walk around angry. But as they get more angry, they get more and more. This is the person that's unable to get a good quality of sleep because they can't turn, fight and fight off. So they might go to bed and sleep, but they wake up tired. This is the person who doesn't have dreams'cause you can't get the deep sleep. This is the person whose blood pressure's may be normal at the beginning of the day, and as the day goes on, it goes up and up and up and up, and then they crash and it resets the next day. These are people that we usually look at for doing the upper cervical and the tailbone adjustments, the SA adjustments to try to get them back into harmony. This is also an issue that my family got in the chiropractic with. My grandmother was unable to have children and Dr. Palmer was able to adjust her sacrum because if you're and stuck in fight and flight, you don't reproduce. I. Right, because you don't have, you can't take time to reproduce if you're being chased by a bear. And so Dr. Palmer was able to adjust my grandmother and she was able then to get normal cycles again. And then she was able to become pregnant with my uncle Roger. And here we are. So this is things, and so as chiropractors, we've always fought for the right for you to come see us too. That's why we celebrate the 4th of July. We celebrate the freedom of healthcare and a lot of other countries. Getting to see a chiropractor is still a challenge. There's challenges in Canada. They don't want chiropractors doing the x-rays, and chiropractors don't feel they can do a quality job without having x-rays. And there's other obstacles in many other countries where they constantly try to. Interfere with how we do things just like they did here in America when we first started forming too. So it's interesting to watch. It's really cool to have the freedom to, to seek healthcare where you think you need healthcare. And don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. If you come to the chiropractor, we are uniquely trained to not only. Look at you Chiropractically to see whether or not we can help you chiropractically. But we're also trained and we have national boards and we're tested on when we need to send you off for more help. When? When maybe what you're dealing with is limitations of matter and you need medical intervention. I. When I had my bicep snap on my arm and I had to have it reconstructed I got adjusted, but I didn't think the adjustment was gonna fix it. I went and got the surgery on my arms, I had my arm back so I can do more chiropractic adjustments. So we understand the limits too. We know when to send you out and when to get help. We know when the inflammation is too much and we can't keep up with it, and we need to get more help and more. Teammates and colleagues working with us here. We work with orthopedic doctors. We work with family doctors, we work with physical therapists. We work with nutritionists. We work with everybody. That's one of the benefits we have for being the team chiropractor for the Rockford Ice Hogs. We've been able to make lots of relationships and friendships with other healthcare providers. That makes it really easy for us to refer you out. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Never see a medical doctor that tells you not to go to a chiropractor and never see a chiropractor that tells you there's no place for medicine. They each have their distinct roles and the distinct functions, and it's not for us to decide. It's for the medical to decide if you need medicine, and it's not for the medical doctor to decide if you need chiropractic. It's up to the chiropractor to decide if you need chiropractic. And in the perfect world, we would communicate and talk to each other, and that continues to improve year by year by year. So there you have it. Chiropractor's rights, right? Be able to see a patient's rights. More importantly for you to be able to pick a chiropractor. Like I said, I know during COVID we had a lot of people coming to see us ask what we could do to make them healthier and stronger when COVID was going on, so perhaps they could have an advantage. So those are fun times. I'm glad they're over. So as we celebrate July 4th and we celebrate our freedoms, remember that we live in a country where you have the freedom to pick your doctor to. We live in a country where we have the freedom of healthcare choice, and that's a pretty awesome freedom that a lot of people in the world don't get to experience. Remember, if you have a question about whether you should go into a chiropractor or whether or not chiropractic care can help you, only one person's qualified to answer that and that would be a chiropractor. Have it safe and fun July 4th. And if you like this podcast, please like, share or subscribe. And if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care you'd like me to answer, leave a comment or a post below and maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Thank you for tuning in.