Neck Pain in Rockford: Why Fall Brings More Visits to the Chiropractor

Is your neck pain getting worse as the weather cools down? You’re not alone — every fall, more Rockford residents visit chiropractors for stiff, sore necks.

In this episode, Dr. Brant Hulsebus from Hulsebus  Rockford Chiropractic in Rockford, IL explains why colder air and posture changes trigger neck tension, and how chiropractic care restores movement and reduces pain safely.

You’ll also hear about a new 2025 PubMed study showing how spinal adjustments improve head and neck movement control in people with chronic neck pain.

In This Episode:

• Why fall weather increases neck and shoulder tension
• What your posture says about your neck alignment
• How chiropractors evaluate and treat neck pain
• What new research reveals about spinal manipulation
• Myths vs. facts about chiropractic neck adjustments

🎯 If you’re dealing with neck pain, stiffness, or headaches in the Rockford area — this episode is for you.

👉 Visit hulsebuschiropractic.com/blog
for the full show transcript and research links.

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 thanks for joining us again. So while I'm recording this, it's currently October, so it's the fall. And what we fight a lot of times with the fall is that we get a lot more people coming in with neck pain than we do in the summer or the winter. Now, we do get a lot in the spring, but we seem to get more in the fall and it's not raking time. A lot of people just assume, as I'm talking about autumn or the fall, they were thinking about raking outside doing leaves. The trees still have leaves. But more and more people are coming in with neck pain, and I gotta be honest with you, I don't know why we see that more in the fall than we do any other time of the year. My father, he was a chiropractor and he had a theory that maybe it's because we're going outside more and the cold air is hitting our neck, and the neck causes little shimmers when the cold air hits us that maybe we're not prepared for. Because this is the time of the year when during the day you might have a t-shirt on and or shorts, but then when the sun starts to go down, it gets really chilly out. So maybe if you're at a someone's soccer game or a baseball game or a football game and you need to come fully prepared with warmer clothes, the cold air would hit you and cause you to shiver a little bit and lock up your muscles. Another thing I could remember him telling patients to do is don't drive around with your car windows open, because the cold air can do the same thing. So he was always big about trying to keep the cold air off the back of your neck. Now, that's just what I learned from him. I never read that anywhere or saw a research paper on that. But it's not the craziest thing to think that could be accurate. The cold air hitting the back of your neck causing little shimmers. I know for me, I didn't have my first car with air conditioning till I was almost 30, so having your car windows rolled down was a big thing. We used to have what we call two 80 air conditioning, two windows 80 miles per hour. But today I don't see too many cars driving around with the windows down anymore. So I don't know if that's still a factor or not. But I do know that going outside and being the cold air is a factor. So I know I tell a lot of patients who are gonna be out in the cold or watching games or softball or baseball or football games to make sure you wear something up and around your back of your neck to keep the cold air off of your neck. But what about neck pain? Does, do chiropractors tend to help people with neck pain? The answer is absolutely yes. We definitely help people with neck pain. We've been helping people with neck pain since the beginning of chiropractic matter First, the first ever chiropractic adjustment given was in the cervical spine or the neck area, so neck pain's right up our. Now there's a lot of special things we have to think about when it comes to neck pain. The biggest problem with the neck pain is whether you're standing up, laying down or sitting down or hanging upside down. You're using your neck. So a lot of people find it hard to find relief with the neck pain. Your chiropractor often has lots of tricks for that. Maybe ways of lay down or prop some pillow up around your neck and ways to help you. So what would happen if you came to the chiropractor with neck pain? What would you expect? The first thing we'd ask you about is your arm and your hands.'cause we know the nerves that come on your neck go into your shoulders, your arms and your hands. So if you have neck pain going into your shoulders, that's very common. Now it's fun for us as chiropractors because we're, when we adjust the neck area that's one of region, and we adjust the thoracic area, that's one region. The thoracic region would be where your ribs are attached, your 12 ribs. But in reality, in chiropractic speaking, it's all the same because your neck muscles come down and attach between your shoulders and as your shoulders goes, that directly affects your neck. So if you've been developing neck pain and you look at yourself in the mirror and you notice you got one shoulder up higher than the other shoulder, that's a huge clue that you got some big stuff going on that's probably not gonna go away with a simple, Tylenol, aspirin or leave. It probably needs some serious correction. The other thing, if you notice that your head's tilted in one direction, that means you've got a really bad, swollen and joint in there. Probably, again, not gonna go away with simple over the counter stuff. So you come with a chiropractor and you say, I've got neck pain. What happens next? In my office we would do a chiropractic exam on you. We'd push pull, watch how far you can turn or not turn your head. And then typically we would take x-rays of your neck area. Now this neck X-ray's always funny'cause people laugh at us when we ask'em to open their mouth real wide. You see the very top bone of your neck. One is right underneath your, where your ear. Ears are, and right behind your jaw I can feel a little bump right there. That's your first bone in your neck and your teeth are really dense. So trying to shoot this on an x-ray and see it with the teeth in the way is really hard. So we have you tilt your head a little bit and open your mouth really big to try to get your teeth outta the way so we can see how that one lies. You see the first one's really important and the second one is too, the second one on your neck, they're called Atlas and Accesss. And the access, the second one on your neck, if you go right to the bottom of your hairline, you're gonna feel a bump right there. And that bump is really important. I like to teach the kids the bigger the bump on the. Bone, the more important it is'cause more muscles go there and that's a great big bump. It's right in the back of your head and the muscles can go up to the base of your skull and then down to your shoulder blades. And so as that one goes left or right, it's gonna pull on your skull and your shoulder blades. And that's where we were talking before about having that high shoulder or low shoulder or head tilts. The C two also has direct ations to your special census, like your hearing, your eyesight and balance and things like that. So these are other areas that you're experiencing. You might want to go see a chiropractor, but the x-rays would determine that for us, what's going on. Very exact ones to adjust and which ones to look at and exactly how do we adjust them. The second thing is we would take an x-ray from the side. We wanna evaluate your posture. We wanna see what's going on with your neck curve. What should we expect to see? We like to see a nice round curve when we have a straight neck. That's a lot of downward force on one vertebrae, but when we have what we call forward head posture and your head actually protrudes forward, that's a lot of stress everywhere. So when you have that, we know that your muscles are all working overtime all the time, and that's gonna make you very vulnerable to an injury. Very easy to get injured. So that's a definitely area that we look at. Now. We're not gonna fix that with one or two chiropractic adjustments, your posture. We're gonna unlock that for you and teach you how to neurologically and musculo skeletally to reeducate your neck posture. We're finding out more and more with the neck posture. It's not just a simple stretch.'cause we've been teaching people simple stretches for decades and we're not really getting it back. We've also had all kinds of different traction units and harnesses that people will lay on and use gravity to try to force their curve back. And these have been. Mildly successful, but maybe not as repetitive as we'd like to see them be successful. So recently we've dive into more neurologically retraining also because your neck muscles are so highly innovative with neurons for reflexes that maybe we need to retrain it that way too. And we've been finding having some success with that, especially with the concussion victims. So the neurological retreating is very important. So after we do all that, we give you a chiropractic adjustment. And recently a paper just got published. You know me, I like those PubMed papers. I think PubMed's the best place to get research. It's really hard to argue with. So I'm going to read this one to you. It's called The Effects of Spinal Manipulation on the Eye and Head Movement. Performance and Participants with Chronic Neck Pain Found After Spinal manipulation of the cervical spine produced measurable changes in head. Movement control and people with chronic pain. So what does that mean? So that means there's a lot of people that have had neck pain on and on for a long time, and they went to see a chiropractor. And when the chiropractor adjusted their neck, they were amazed at how much faster, how much more they could trend their head immediately following. It wasn't so much they could move their eyes more. They can move everything better and move it all better. And again, I just talked to about the neurological retraining. There's a lot of neurology that happens when you turn your head with your eyes. Your ears have to go with that to keep you balanced. Your eyes have to go with that to keep you balanced equilibrium. So all those things have to work together whenever you turn your head left or right. So it's very important that this whole area stays highly adjusted and highly neurologically involved. We will try to put a link to that paper in this. It's podcast wherever you're watching or listening to it. This is a 2025 study by G-E-L-L-E-Y. And I think this comes from the Journal of Manipulative Therapy, JMPT. So we'll put a link to that. And again, pub meds, like wherever I go to research stuff, I always, a lot of times at the, I saw games where the hockey doctors are, we all sit around. And we discussed different research papers. At least he, a lot of us, and we always, we kinda hold this PubMed as the standard of a trustable, reliable source. So P-U-B-M-E-D, PubMed huge fan of what they do on PubMed, the stuff that they publish and share. It now we've been talking a lot about chiropractic care for the neck. We've got research papers that show that your range of emotion will improve. The chiropractor can help you at home to get comfortable as you heal. The chiropractor knows how to do a detailed chiropractic exam and a x-ray exam in order to figure out what's best for you. Chiropractor can give you relief today, and the chiropractor could come up with a long-term plan to help fix your posture and get rid of the stresses evolving This. All that being said, there's always someone that says, oh, I would never let a chiropractor touch my neck. And this is, goes back to an a slanderous thing that a MA tried to do for almost a whole hundred years. It if you look it up, if you look up Chester Wilke versus the a MA, the for many years, this court case resolved in the nineties, but for a long time there was an antitrust lawsuit against the a MA for chiropractors, basically saying there was ly at about. Practic and disparaging things that weren't true to try to discourage people from going to the chiropractor back then by the American Medical Association. And if you looked that up, you'll see that the chiropractor was one the case That was all true. The American Medical Association published a retraction article saying that, you know what they were saying, wast true. If you go to pub me and type in this chiropractic safe, they, you're gonna find out the answer is yes. Anyone that tries to discourage you from going to chiropractor. Concerned about the neck is quoting, so it doesn't quite exist. So if your chiropractor takes the time to do all the exams and the x-rays, there's no reason why you shouldn't be a hundred percent 1000% safe. Again. As a reminder, chiropractors pay some of the lowest male practice rates of anybody. I laughed here 'cause our new doctor, Dr. Sam, when you first graduate school, your male practice rates are the lowest. Because they figure you're fresh from school, and so she pays less than a year than an orthopedic spinal surgeon pays in a day here in the state of Illinois. So her rates are astronomically low compared to a neurologist surgeon here in Illinois that would operate on your neck compared to a chiropractor that would operate on your neck. It's just totally two different Totally. The safety thing is not even a question if the insurance companies find it safe. So should you. But if you have questions about the safety, you have questions about why people say that you should ask your chiropractor. Don't ask The people that maybe aren't, are, have been taught by people who were taught the lies, right? We always talk a lot here about maybe your doctor isn't. Anti chiropractic, but maybe your doctorate was taught by somebody who was taught by somebody that back then when the norm was anti chiropractic. Today we all tend to get along again in the Isol locker room. I work with a family physician and ER physician, an orthopedic surgeon in a dentist at every game. And we all rotate. There's different ones. So we do get along better than ever today. But if you have questions about the safety of it, if your chiropractors doing all the necessary steps, if your chiropractors are being very specific about where they adjust, you. IE not just grabbing on something and pulling and jerking on you like you see in some of these crazy short videos. I would never let anybody put something around my neck and gank on me. That's crazy. That's torture, that's punishment. My chiropractic care always must be very exact on the further breath. They're looking for never just a gross area of manipulation. So chiropractic and neck pain. I hope I answered your questions. And anything you might have know about chiropractic or neck pain go like always. If you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only qualified person in the world to answer that would be a chiropractor. Make sure you always check with a chiropractor, and if you wanna leave a message or a note below, wherever you're listening to this or watching this, I would be more than happy to answer your question in the future. Thanks everybody. Thanks for tuning in.