Chiropractic Philosophy and Subluxation Basics

In this episode, Dr. Brant Hulsebus breaks down the foundation of chiropractic care — our philosophy. What makes chiropractic different from medicine? Why do chiropractors focus on the cause, not the symptom? Dr. Hulsebus explains subluxation, the fight-or-flight nervous system response, and how adjustments help restore balance and health naturally.

You’ll learn:
✅ How chiropractic and medical care complement — not compete with — each other
✅ What a subluxation really is and how it affects your nervous system
✅ Why chronic stress keeps your body stuck in “survival mode”
✅ How adjusting your spine helps your body heal and self-regulate
✅ Why chiropractic philosophy still matters in 2025

🎙 Hosted by Dr. Brant Hulsebus, D.C., L.C.P., C.C.W.P. — team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs and third-generation Palmer graduate.

📍 Visit the clinic: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com

💬 Got a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care? Leave a comment — your question could be featured in the next episode!

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. Thanks for tuning in for another episode of Ask the Chiropractor. So last time we talked about my CCWP certification, certified chiropractic Wellness practitioner. Today I want to talk about more letters after my name, my LCP Legion of Chiropractic Philosophers, and what does chiropractic philosophy. Chiropractic philosophy highlights a difference between the medical approach to healthcare versus the chiropractic approach to healthcare. What makes us different? What stays the same? And why is chiropractic different than medicine? What's the big difference? And the biggest difference is our philosophy. Medicine is a great science and a great thing to have when it comes to treating crisises. Meaning if I should fall and break my arm. Medical doctors are great at taking my x-ray, setting the bone and putting me in a cast and helping me heal. Maybe even giving me something for the pain if I need it. Medicine's great if I have a heart attack right now. If I had a heart attack right now, I, I. Maybe when to get my neck adjusted really quick. But more importantly, I want someone to start CPR, and I want someone to zap me and get my heart going again. Medicine does a great job with keeping people alive. If I should get al by something during an accident, say I'm walking by a truck and a, a spike flies out and goes into my shoulder. I don't really want to see a chiropractor. I want to go to the hospital and have the spike removed from my shoulder. Get cleaned up and stitched it up and then go on the healing process. When I took my arm and I twisted the wrong way 10 years ago and my bicep muscle snapped, I didn't go to a chiropractor, I went to a medical doctor and they were able to do surgery on my elbow and reattach my muscle so I could continue to be a chiropractor because I wouldn't even be a chiropractor today if it wasn't for medicine to be able to put my arm back together. Most people don't want to see a one-arm chiropractor. So medicine's really good in crisis care. But when you talk about chiropractic approach versus the medical approach or what is chiropractic philosophy? In chiropractic? We're trying to really, not necessarily treat a symptom, but look at the spine and figure out what's not working in the spine properly.'cause the spine's not working properly, the nerves that come out from the spine and wherever they go won't work properly and therefore your body won't work properly. So in chiropractic philosophy, it's about trying to find the cause, the stem of things. When I was younger, chiropractic was younger. And I would go to school and people would tell me, oh, your dad's a chiropractor. I bet your dad thinks he can treat asthma. Or your dad's a chiropractor, or your grandpa's a chiropractor. I bet they think they can treat headaches. And I found out quickly that my father said, he's never treated a headache. He's never treated a sciatica. He's never treated asthma. He's never treated infertility. He's never treated anything except for adjusting subluxations. What is, what does all that mean? As a chiropractor we'll look at your spine. So if you're new to chiropractic, you go to a chiropractor clinic. In my clinic, you'd come in and we'd take your x-rays, we'd do an exam on you, and we would try to figure out where your spine's misaligned.'cause when one or two bones are misaligned and they're not moving properly, they're fixated. We call that a subluxation. And when you have a subluxation, there's stress at that joint. And that stress releases chemicals called catecholamines and those hit the nerve and wherever that nerve's going, that body part is part of that stress response. And you think you have this thing called fight and flight nervous system. You've heard of this before, and the real is called your sympathetic nerves. And through most of your spine, if you have a subluxation, is an increased output to the sympathetic nerves or the fight and flight. Now fighting fights designed for us to survive an attack. Genetically speaking, we're all hunters and gatherers. We're supposed to be out walking the earth, picking fruits and berries, enjoying our vegetables, killing small animals and fish, but more importantly, avoiding big fish and big animals that might want to eat us. And so the moment you see a wolf or a bear or a coyote or something coming after you, your fighting flight kicks in. And you're fighting flight's designed to keep you alive for that attack. And you have to understand that bear attacks only last five minutes one way or the other. Either you get away or you don't get away, or I get away and you don't get away. But either way is over in five minutes, and when you're under attack, what we know is that your blood pressure will go up. You'll have vasoconstriction. You wanna move the blood from your core out to your arms and your legs so you can fight or flights, your cholesterol will go way up.'cause if you were to get scratched during this process, you'd want to clot and live your white blood cell count plummets. Because white blood cells are really good at treating viruses and cancers and bacteria and infections. They're not really good at taking care of a polar bear. So your white blood cell count goes way down. Your immunity plummets with it. Reproductive drive gets turned off. Nobody cares about making a baby while they're under attack. Other things get changed too, and it's all designed to keep you alive through years and years of genetic coding to keep you alive for this attack. Now, today, 2025, most of us don't really live a hunter and gather lifestyle. Most of us have a home. We have appointments, we have schedules, we have jobs, we have school, and we have all these new stresses. But you have to understand that whenever you're under stress, it's the same reactions. If you're being chased by a bear, you go on to fight and flight. And so as chiropractors, we know in the spines, misaligned, we know the type four mechanical receptors within the joint of the spine when it's not moving, start to behave different, and they go in the fight and flight mode. And wherever that nerve goes, that nerve part goes in the fight and flight. Part of being under stress is that your digestive system doesn't work properly.'cause if you're being chased by a bear, who cares what you had for lunch? So your digestive system will alter. This is why sometimes if you're under tremendous amount of stress, you might get nauseous or have irritable bowel 'cause of the prolonged stress.'cause your body doesn't wanna waste the time with digestion right then and there. By the way, this is also the same reason why you, when you're under stress, you crave quick, simple sugars instead of healthy vegetables.'cause your body wants the quick energy, it'll store the rest of that sugar for later. But right now it just needs to survive. So as a chiropractor, if I have found a subluxation at your T six vertebrae between your shoulders, those are the nerves that go to your stomach and the subluxation is there and those nerves go into your stomach don't work, right? Then what happens is your stomach goes in the fight and flight, so it tries to accelerate the digestion process and one way you can accelerate the digestion process as overproduction of stomach acids and overproduction of stomach Acids has a fancy term that we call heartburn. And so do chiropractors treat heartburn? No. Chiropractors don't treat heartburn, but people with heartburn go see a chiropractor. Do they report less heartburn afterwards? Absolutely, because we get rid of that subluxation that's going from the T six to your stomach. So the fight and flight response to your stomach goes away, and therefore your stomach goes back to the proper mode it's supposed to be in, and then your stomach behaves better. You see something that I've heard a lot of doctors come in, I've even had orthopedic surgeons. Some of the best orthopedic surgeons come in and tell me, Hey, I got a pinched nerve in my neck and my hand's going numb. I'm like, dude, it's not a pinched nerve. There's no such thing. If it was pinch, your arm wouldn't work. You have a subluxation, the base of your neck. And that subluxation is kicking out those catecholamines and they're hitting that nerve root as it leaves your spine and it's going down the nerves and your arms and your hands and your fingertips, making you have a numb or tingling feeling, maybe a burning feeling. I always think it's funny when someone tells me their nerve's being pinched or cut off. Now they have a really bad pain or burning sensation. I'm like if you're having a burning sensation or pain, it sounds like the nerve is working.'cause you have to be able to detect that sensation and you do that through your nervous system. So you have a subluxation there. And so chiropractors, I don't treat the pain down the arm. We adjust the neck when those nerves come out and go down your arm. See, this is chiropractic philosophy. Our philosophy is if you give the body everything it needs to do its job and just get outta the way the body can maintain itself, not heal from an impulse spike in your shoulder, right? You gotta get that taken out and the wound cleaned. But I think I want to get that part of my body that goes in my shoulder adjusted afterwards to make sure there's nothing limiting the healing potential that could arise from having a subluxation at that time. So as chiropractors, we're not really back pain doctors. We are more neurological inhibitors. So we're, we are stimulators we want to give you nervous system a jumpstart wherever it's going. That's chiropractic philosophy. That's the way Dr. Palmer invented chiropractic. That's how the principles and the founding of chiropractic exists, and that's the biggest thing that chiropractic offers that other healthcare providers don't offer. So you might see some chiropractors that don't talk about this at all. You might just see 'em. They might just treat your aches and pains, and they're probably pretty good at it. They're gonna follow the medical model. But then every once in a while you'll find a chiropractor like us that still holds on the original chiropractic philosophy and the original way of taking care of patients. So if you came in and you got acute sciatica, would I take you as a patient? Yeah, absolutely. But I, in my mind, I'm not really treating the sciatica. I'm treating that lower back subluxation. If I get that lower back subluxation to let go and relax and get those chemicals that come out, those nerve endings to calm down, then the sciatic nerve should heal and you should go back to normal. So when people ask me what can you tell me about my leg? I'm really more looking about your back and your spine, trying to figure out how long it's been there, how to correct that. If we can correct that, then the leg should heal. Now if you've had it too long, let's say you've had sciatica on your leg for a long time.'cause somebody in their infinite wisdom told you not to go to a chiropractor and you had it for a long time. You've lost muscle mass in your leg. It's important I adjust you then. It's important I send you down the road to our friends. You know here in Rockford we have our friends at Movement Fitness and they'll start an exercise program for you to regain the muscle tone you lost while you were subluxated. So besides that, there's another area that we also talk a lot about, and that has a lot to do with the fact that maybe you're parasympathetics, the ones that help you relax, aren't working properly. So if you have a nervous system that kicks on for fight and fight, you also have a nervous system that kicks on, that tells you fight and fight's over. And this area all comes from your neck and your tailbone. The very top two bones in your neck and your very bottom of your tailbone, your C one, your C two, and in your sacrum. These are called your parasympathetics, and when my grandfather graduated school, all they were to do is adjust to C one. See, there's a nerve here called the vagus nerve, V-A-G-U-S and Latin. That means a wanderer and it goes everywhere, belly button up and tells the body that danger's gone. It's time to go back to homeostasis, turn off the fight and flight response. When we adjust this area we give a massive of parasympathetic stimulation, inhibiting the fight and fight throughout the body. So this is another very important area in chiropractic that we'll address and take care of. This is the one, maybe you've heard of somebody having high blood pressure, getting adjusted in their blood pressure going down. Like I said in the beginning of the video, if you're under fight and flight, you have high blood pressure. So if you can adjust, you hit the off switch to your fight and flight, the natural. Thing would be to have your blood pressure go down. A lot of times after I adjust someone C one, the biggest thing they'll tell me is they had a great night's sleep. They were finally able to relax. So I hope these little differences explain the difference between medicine and chiropractic and the approach. They're both great. They both save lots of lives. They're just two different things. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I hope you learned something a little bit more about chiropractic versus medicine. And what that LCP means and how my thought process works when you come in the clinic and like always, if you have question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one qualified person to answer those questions, and that would be a chiropractor. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care you'd like me to answer, feel free to leave a comment below or a message wherever you're listening or hearing this. And maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Thanks for tuning in.