Episode 10: Aging Without Limits – The Truth About Spinal Arthritis

Episode Summary: Welcome back to Ask the Chiropractor with Dr. Brant Hulsebus! In Episode 10 of our 12-part Wellness Lifecycle series, we tackle a condition many people believe is just an inevitable part of getting older: spinal arthritis.

With our Rockford clinic having taken care of up to eight generations of families since the 1940s, we have a unique perspective on aging. We see lifelong chiropractic patients in their 60s and 70s with young, healthy, strong spines. Join us as we explore why spinal degeneration isn't about the number of candles on your birthday cake, but rather how your body manages physical stress and biomechanical dysfunction over time.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• The Generational Proof: Real-world evidence from our clinic showing that degenerative disc disease and joint disease are not mandatory parts of aging.
• Defining the Problem: The surprising difference between how orthopedic surgeons define arthritis in a knee versus how the medical field vaguely defines it in the spine.
• The Degeneration Cycle: We break down the exact cascade of how a simple subluxation leads to locked muscles, dehydrated discs, lost shock absorption, and eventually, painful bone spurs (osteophytes).
• The Chiropractic Solution: How precise adjustments restore movement, pump essential nutrients back into the discs, and stop the dehydration and arthritis cycle in its tracks.

Resources Mentioned:

• Want to look into the research yourself? Visit Chiropractic.org for more information on spinal health and healthy aging.
• Missed our previous episodes? Check out Episode 9 to learn all about the powerful Gut-Spine Connection!
• Next Week: Tune in for Episode 11 where we will be tackling the truth behind some of the most common chiropractic myths and rumors.

Call to Action: Are you worried about spinal arthritis, or have you been told your back pain is "just your age"? It might be time to pop the hood and see what's really going on. If you are in the Rockford, Illinois area, come visit us at Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic for a full spinal evaluation.

If you loved this episode, please leave us a rating and review, and share it with a friend or family member who wants to age without limits!

Connect with Dr. Brant Hulsebus:

• Website: https://rockforddc.com
• Location: Rockford, IL
• Proud Team Chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs

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. Thank you for joining us. We're now in episode 10 of a 12 episode series. I'm taking this time to break down how chiropractic works and some of the most common things that people come see us for. And today we're gonna talk about episode 10, about healthy Age. My grandfather was a chiropractor. He started practice either in 1948 or 1949. The records are a little questionable back then because of various laws and regulations. I personally think he started in 48. My father personally thinks he started in 49. He doesn't matter. But we've had, I have patience because I'm in the same practice. You see my grandfather practice and then my dad joined the practice and they opened this bigger clinic here in Rockford. And now I'm here and some of the people have been getting adjusted by my grandfather and my dad and now me. We got one family. We've taken care of eight generations of their family. But we've got people that started my grandpa when they were young. I got one. He was a baby when he was, saw my grandpa and now he's probably about 10 years older than me. So he is in his early sixties. It's been adjusted his entire life by one of us, by myself, my dad, or my grandfather. So I got these patients that have been patients in our office for a long time and then being adjusted once a month, and now they're on Medicare and Medicare kind of requests x-rays once a year. And when we x-ray them every year, it's neat to see because they don't have arthritis, they don't have degenerative disc disease, degenerative joint disease. Their spines are young, healthy, and strong looking. Now, I can't speak for their hips and their knees and their ankles. That's outside of my jurisdiction. But when we look at their spines, we have a whole healthy population here in Rockford, Illinois, of people who have been adjusted for decades, and they're not aging. Their spines aren't degenerating. So arthritis isn't a thing that you have to get because of your age. Arthritis is a thing that happens. So let's dive into that a little deeper. Let me explain to you a little bit about. Who gets arthritis, who doesn't and why? First thing is I want to clarify the definition of arthritis. When I talk about arthritis, I'm gonna talk about bones that are degenerating, disc that are dehydrating disc gaps that are gone spurs that are growing on the spine. That's the chiropractic definition. I find it interesting when I learned about the medical definition of what's arthritis in the spine is. I'm friends with quite a few orthopedic surgeons because I take care of a hockey team, the Rockford IceHogs, and so do they. And we sit together during the games. Matter of fact, when they get hurt, we go in the locker room together and we help each other. We're a team. But I asked them, what's the definition of a show? Arthritis in the shoulder, arthritis in the hip or the knee. And they get exact millimeter measurements they do on the spurs and the gaps. It's very precise. They get all kinds of, in the old days, I'm older, they get all kinds of rulers out encompasses, and they draw down things and they measure down the millimeter. Today the computers do it, and they get very, very precise. It has to have this much of a change or this much of a difference to this side versus that side. It's amazingly precise. It's very, very calculated, but the definition of arthritis in the spine is the minimum. Hey, I woke up this morning. My back was sore, stiff and sore., When I played hockey, I'd wake up in the morning, my back would be stiff and sore. Does that mean I have arthritis on my spine? I have arthritis on my spine according to the medical definition, but the chiropractic definition would say absolutely not. I woke up with a stiff sore back when I was in my twenties after doing physical labor. So according to that definition, I have arthritis. So let's not talk about their definition. Let's talk about the chiropractic definition and chiropractic. In my office we have different phases. Phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four, phase one. You could bounce back from phase two, you can get pretty good. Phase three is manageable, phase four as you should have came and seen us a long time ago. So let's talk about how somebody gets arthritis because it's not age. because I see people's spies and they get arthritis in their lower lumbars. But not their middle thoracics. I mean they're all the same age. They've all been the same place. They've all gone everywhere together. So it can't be age, it has to be stress. So what happens is one or two vertebras in your spine will misalign when they misalign. We call that a subluxation, and the body recognizes the biomechanical features of the spine now has been altered. because the spine's no longer the way it's designed to be. That increases your stress, load of your stress, your how you bend and twist, how you carry your weight. So the spine will lock up these areas with the musculature around to protect it from further damage and to cope with it the best it can with the stress that it's under. Now when you walk and you move around the muscles around your spine contract, and when they do that, they push nutrients into the joint spaces and pull the toxins out. A lot of those joints of the spine do not have a direct blood supply. It your knees, get that through blood supply, your ankles, get that through blood supply. Your spine does not get that through blood supply. It gets it through movement and motion. But if you have a subluxation and one or two of these bones are misaligned, those muscles are locked down, they're not moving, and therefore there's no nutrients in toxins out. It just sits there. And over time, with a signal like that contracted all the time, the disc don't get what they need and they start to dehydrate. This is called degenerative disc disease. They're degenerating, they're losing their height, they're dehydrating. As they start to shrink, the gap between the vertebraes goes away. As this goes away, becomes more and more unstable. because now the shock absorber is gone. If you have a old pickup truck and your struts are worn out. You know when the struts are going good, you're driving on a bumpy road here in Rockford with all the potholes, it's not so bad, but as it starts to go, now the struts are bad. Now you're hitting those potholes. Now the whole thing's bouncing around. Before you know it, you need an alignment job. Your steering stuff's broken. You need new parts. But when the struts were good, you were good. So your disc or your struts, then you're losing your struts. So the body starts putting extra calcium around this space. And we call that osteophytes, P-H-Y-T-E-S, osteophytes. This is the start of degenerative changes. These are boney changes. These are changes that are almost irreversible and they grow wherever they want to grow around that spot. And they'll actually grow where the hole and the nerve comes out. And when they do that, that hits that nerve. It becomes a constant pressure. It's very hard to adjust that away. Now the other part is the back behind the joint behind the spinal cord. You have two more joints. They're called facets, F-A-C-E-T. They're taking more of a load. Now they're getting rubbed and grinded on harder. Their gap went with the disc gap, so it's the disc gap went the way everything collided. They start to rub. Now you've got the end of joint disease because these are starting to rub and you rub and they grow. Bony callouses are spurring, and now they start to spur and they get really hard to move. These spurs are also hyper inflammatory, meaning when your back has these things and you go out and push it, you're taking muscles that are locked up already, working super hard to keep stay locked up, and now you're asking them to do extra work because they're locked up and you got the degenerative disc disease, that degenerative joint disease, those spurs head things, creating inflammation. Just a bad recipe. So a lot of times people will come see me and they'll have all this going on in their spine. They'll be in their sixties or seventies and they'll tell me, I've never had a back problem. I'm like, yeah, you have. It's quite obvious because you have all the spurs in the degeneration. There's no doubt you've had back problems. You gotta be crazy to think you've never had a back problem. You don't have to lie to me. I can see it. And so as a chiropractor, when you come see us. Before this happens, let's say the day you slipped and fell, the day you had stress in your life, chemical, physical, or emotional, those vertebraes locked up. Now they're not moving. What do I do as a chiropractor? If you come to my office in Rockford, we're gonna do is we're gonna take you, we're gonna do a chiropractic exam. We're gonna see how you bend and twist and move around the different vertebraes. We're gonna feel those vertebraes feel, how they're moving, which ones are fixated, which ones are not. Then we'll do an X-ray exam on you to look at your actual bone, see how they're line up. As I say, pop the hood and see what's underneath the hood and see what we can do to help those. Then what we'll do is we'll do an adjustment on those, and we'll get them moving again. We'll restore the movement. Then what happens is the bones start moving again. The muscles start moving, and then you don't lose all that dehydration. And so by people who started with my grandpa in the 1950s, the 1960s, and have come to see us once a month, once every six weeks, once every two to three weeks. They never keep those fixations very long. They never had that dehydration. So they never take step two, which is when they start losing the disc height. Step three, they start growing osteophytes. Step four, they become hyper inflammatory. Step five, it all starts to fuse together. We never have a step two, we never have a step three. So you come to see us, ask the chiropractor, and you look at your x-rays. What phase of the degeneration am I in? Where am I at? How much is this reversible? How much is this forever? How much is gonna need constant maintenance? How much it's gonna be I can get stronger, get better, doing different things that you prescribed to me. So again, when I started this podcast, I said there's two definitions of arthritis, the one chiropractors use and the one medical doctors use. So if you go to the medical doctor and you ask them about spinal arthritis, they can't answer you the way a chiropractor does because they don't even define the word the same way we define it. Get it. Like we talk about different phases. We define the spine, the way they define the knees, hips, shoulders, ankles, yada, yada, yada. Their definition of arthritis in the spine is very generic and very unscientific and unspecific, unlike every other joint. I don't know why this is, I'm not a medical doctor. Don't ask me. Ask me about chiropractic, but a chiropractic, we break it down. We give you the scale, we show you what's going on. So if you were worried about this, I go to the chiropractor and say, how does my spine look? What do I need to avoid arthritis? What does my spine look like? How do I reverse the changes that I've already started? What does my spine look like? You have arthritis. Okay, what can I do to prevent it from getting worse and try to, what kind of improvements are realistic? Sometimes the only realistic improvement could be is a little bit bigger gap, a little bit less stress. If it's already fused together, there isn't anything anyone can do for you other than surgery. That's when we refer you out. So remember, if you have a question about arthritis and how chiropractic works, only one person's qualified to answer that, and that's a chiropractor. Ask a chiropractor. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, you wanna ask me, leave a message or a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this. It's very exciting to see, what chiropractors can do to help change this. And there's a lot of rumors about what chiropractors do and don't do, and rumors and myths about us. I'm gonna ask you to come back next week, and I wanna talk about the truth behind some of these chiropractic myths. I'm gonna break them down, tell you where they came from, tell you why they're not true and what the truth is, and try to answer it as scientifically and as honest as possible. Come back next week for 11, week 11, episode 11, the some of the truths about chiropractic care. Thank you.