Balance and Neck Health

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus shares insights on the vital connection between neck health, proprioception, and balance. Discover why your upper cervical spine plays such a key role in stability, how chiropractors test and restore balance, and what happens when posture breaks down. Dr. Hulsebus also explains the link between chiropractic care and vertigo, concussion recovery, and fall prevention—critical topics for anyone concerned about long-term wellness. Tune in to learn how chiropractic adjustments and simple exercises can help keep you steady, safe, and healthy.

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. Hi there. We've always said that your balance is a key to your overall health, maybe a mirror to your overall health. Healthy people have really good balance and really good, what we call proprioception. Now, what's proprioception? Proprioception is knowing your place and space, meaning if I put my hand in front of my face, I know where my hand is 'cause I can see it. But if I put my hand behind my back, I still know where it is. That's proprioception. So the better your balance and the better your proprioception, the better your overall health. So as chiropractors, we've always been involved in studying your proprioception and your balance. So let's talk a little bit about the indicators of what happens if you lose your balance, the indications of what happens if you lose your proprioception, why it's so important to us, and then maybe what we can do to help it and. My father is a chiropractor. He's retired now, but he practiced for many years and when I first started practicing with him, it was amazing in his ability to predict when we would not see a patient again, meaning that patient would pass away or expire, he would notice that they would come in a very flex position. When you're in a flexed position, your body's in a state of fight and flight trying to protect itself 'cause it's in danger. But the bigger thing he would notice is their lack of proprioception. Now, if you just had a healthcare crisis, or maybe you're near the end of your life, maybe you've seen these people. Not only are they all flex, hunched over into a ball, looking down at the ground, elbows, wrists, fingers, knees, hips, everything's flexed, nothing's straight or extended, but they don't have the ability to know their proprioception. They don't know where they are in space. And you can see this because when they go to sit down, they have to look left, look right, and they take their time sitting down. When they go to stand up, they're very unsteady or unsure of themselves. And even when they walk, they'll watch their feet quite a bit because they're not sure where their feet are compared to how they're walking. This is called the a loss of proprioception, and we can see this, like I said, either after a healthcare crisis, say you have an appendix removed, or say that you know you're near the end of your life. Maybe you see these people at church or other public places where you see that their times coming to an end. But my father could always look at 'em and predict that. He could tell by the way they carried their head forward and their neck posture. So we're talking about balance as a chiropractor. We're very curious about this. We're watching you walk, we watch you, how you get on and off the table, how you get off the bench and walk to the table. These are all big clues to us. The other areas we look at is when we x-ray your spine. We'll look at the top two bones in your neck, your C one, your C two atlas, and access, they're called. These are the ones that only innervate the ears, which have a lot to do with balance, but they also directly affect the brain stem. You see your brain stems your cerebellum, and that's kinda like your switchboard. Your nerves go up your spine to your cerebellum, to your brain, to your cerebellum down your spinal cord. Now. When you have cerebellum problems, that's stress on your cerebellum, you basically fail like a DUI test. So the tests that we use to check your cerebellum are the same ones a police officer will use if you get pulled over for suspected of drinking and driving. Now I've never been pulled over, but I've seen enough TV shows and cops that know what this is all about. You'll see them try to walk a straight line. We do a cerebellar test. We try to have you walk a straight line. You'll see them tilt their head back and try to send their arm out and touch their nose with both hands and see how they do. Those are all midbrain, cerebellar tests. So this is the part that gets impaired. So you kinda have an idea. Most people have had too much to drink, aren't very good gymnastics. They're not really good on their balance. So when we do these tests to see how your cerebellum are or how you're walking, what could happen a lot of times is, I've talked about this before in like whiplash cases and other cases, your spinal cord is ligaments that go out and grab a hold of walls. They're called dentate ligaments, D-E-N-T-A-T-E, dentate, like a tooth, like a dentist. They hang out really tight and they don't budge. So your spinal cord can't slide up and down 'cause these dentate ligaments. Now if you have a whiplash or trauma where you jerk your head back and forth really quick, past the standard range of motion, there's something that has to give.'cause the spinal cord's not gonna budge, but that range of motion extends so far. You don't want your nerves to rip. So what happens a lot of times is the top bone the frame and magnum is right there and the midbrain will push down by the first two bones in your neck. Now we've got MRI machines that can prove this today, upright, MRI machines. And we even have chiropractors that are doing adjustments under motion MRI machines where we're watching'em adjust your C one and C two. And we're literally watching the midbrain pop back in and people get their balance and vertigo and headaches go away. So if you're a candidate for this the best way to tell would be an upright MRI. But these machines are far and few in between. So as a chiropractor, we would up x-ray your upper cervical to see how they're aligned and. Your posture. If you have a really good cervical curved posture looking at you from the side, you have really good looking discs. The odds of this happening to you are probably not the case. But if you have a lack of a curve, now you're already stretching it and then you've got an accident, you're only gonna take a bad thing to worse, and that's gonna give us a big clue what's going on in your upper. Another than that could happen is you could have the top two bones in your neck missing line. When we look at those the C one is like a big ring with two big masses, and they rotate posterior, anterior forward and backwards. And when you look at the x-ray, one will seem larger than the other one because it's rotated closer to the x-ray, further away from the x-ray, making it looking smaller. Just if you put your fist by a camera and you had one close, one far, one looks bigger, one looks smaller because the imaging. The C two, we can look at that one. It has a little tree stump that sticks up that's called the odontoid, and it has a spinus on the backside, and those should be nice and linear with each other, nice and lined up. If it's rotate, you'll see the spinus kicking one way. Then we know we have a problem. These areas, and again, these areas have the nerves that come out, elevate your ears. So if you have a problem with the nerves going to your ears, we can see balance issues. So now we've got innervation to your ears. So we've also got pressure on the midbrain going from this exact same areas. So these are all very important areas that we want to adjust and take care of you. So what should you expect if you go with a chiropractor and you have balance issues? One, we should do a little bit of testing to kinda see what irritates it, what triggers it. Two, is it balance, when you, when all the time, is it certain positions? We can kinda isolate some different Baal balance issues. But if you're have an overall balance issue, do we want to x-ray your neck, see your neck posture, and see your upper neck alignment to see if there's adjustments we can make. Now if your neck posture's bad, there's all kinds of fun things we can do to help you get it back. In this office, we do some tractioning where you lay on a pillow at home and try to get your neck curve back. A lot of shoulder exercises 'cause as your shoulder goes, so does the neck posture. And lastly, we do neurological retraining where you just have, you put a little laser that comes out between your nose. You follow it back and forth on a piece of painter tape in our room and then we can see it. You start to see your curve come back. Now as far as adjustments are concerned, we'll adjust you first 'cause you can do all these traction things and all these neurological retreating and all the things in the world. You want to, if your next misalign, it's gonna be really hard to have success versus if you have your neck adjusted first and get rid of some of the fixations that we call subluxations. So in your neck, subluxated free. Now it's ready to change. So you come in, you get your x-rays, we do our exam. Then you start getting your adjustments. If this is the case now, it's really important to us because we, like I said we know your overall health is, goes hand in hand with that. And we're not the only healthcare that cares about this proprioception. When you look at Pilates and yoga, it's all about proprioceptive retraining. So your chiropractor might even introduce you to a Pilates or yoga class, or introduce some as simple exercises and stretches to stimulate these cells in your neck that get stimulated every time you get an adjustment to bring back proprioception. Make your proprioceptions work better. Matter of fact, there's quite a few scientists that call the adjustment itself proprioceptive input so that we know that we're improving that. When you see little kids, they're trying to increase this nervous system. They're trying to make it grow. You'll see little kids walk through a parking lot and they'll see a parking one of those parking blocks and they'll all try to do the type rope on it. Just naturally all kids tend to do that 'cause they're trying to grow their appropriate session. They're trying to develop that and make it better. That's why these playgrounds where they climb and jump over things and, me as a kid, climbing trees and stuff like that. It was all about increasing the proprioception to make my nervous system stronger and better. Fire more. So proprioception is really big. Now, there's other types of balance issues. We could talk a couple of them. You have benign positional vertigo. That's a lot of times it has to do with crystals in your ears, and we'll find that out right away because you'll be in our table. You'll be fine. We'll bring the table down and you tell 'em you're dizzy. Then we'll bring the table up and you tell me now you're worse again. And that's a lot of times we can help with that too. There's a couple procedures we've learned that we can guide you through those in order to help you with those too. But there's lots and lots of calls for vertigo and dizziness, but chiropractic has had a lot of good luck with lots of 'em. And the long term. The biggest reason we worry about balance is because when you get older, one of the most common things that happen to older people is they fall. And when they fall and break something, then their health rapidly deteriorates. So we tend to lose 'em pretty quickly. So we don't want to see that happen. We don't wanna see you fall and hurt yourself. So we wanna be able to get you adjustments and help you out. And as a holistic CCWP, A certified Chiropractic Wellness practitioner, we have other cool tips for you too. If you're a male over the age of 40, after you do iso metric exercises where you just work real slow and steady with weights or maybe landscaping when you're outside, pulling weeds and stuff, or planting things. Raking leaves. If you have a recovery drink of an und natured whey protein, that will not only help your muscles heal and the hockey team might take care of after they're done skating playing a game, they drink whey protein. So not only does it help a recovery. Not only is whey protein wake up and stimulate your glutathione, which protects your DNA caps, and also has a great detoxer of heavy metals and toxins in your system to help your neurology heal and repair itself. But it also stimulates the. The development of fast twitch muscle fibers, and as males, when we hit the age of 40, our fast twitch muscle fibers can deteriorate. So having the under natured weight protein, after you exercise, you help regrow those fast twitch muscle fibers. In return 40 years later, it makes you less of a fall risk. So every time after I work out, I do my un natured weight protein in order to keep my fast twitch muscle fibers. Not today when I'm 50, but 30 years from now. When I'm 80, I'm more worried about. So we have all kinds of tips and tricks for you if you, having I balance issues sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better. A lot of times people come and say, I wasn't that dizzy. Now you're just to be now worse. That's not a weird thing. Not an always thing, not by any means, but that's not a weird thing to have that happen when the neurology has to reprogram and reset. And a lot of times initially right after you're adjusted now and you come up, you're a little lightheaded, dizzy. That's the coolest thing in the world because Dr. Long here, down in Jacksonville, Florida, has proven that's just your spinal fluid regenerating and you're like resetting. When your spinal fluid doesn't regenerate, that's some of the things we see with the CTE, the athletes with the concussion stuff. So if you've had a head injury and you're having vertigo issues later, it's really important to get your neck checked by a chiropractor. Chiropractors are secretly leading the field in concussion care. Maybe not diagnosis or prevention, but concussion care. We're leading the field with that. All the top athletes and vets and stuff are all going to chiropractors to get relief from that stuff. So make sure you seek us out. All right, everybody. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, make sure you ask a chiropractor. Thanks everybody.