Ask the Chiropractor: Quick Answers to Common Questions

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus from Rockford, Illinois, addresses common questions regarding chiropractic care. He elaborates on the best types of pillows and mattresses for spinal health, the benefits and limitations of inversion tables, and the complexities of muscle and joint pain. Dr. Hulsebus also discusses when to seek chiropractic versus physical therapy, the misconceptions surrounding 'pinched nerves' and 'disc bulges,' and emphasizes the importance of consulting a chiropractor for chiropractic concerns. Tune in for quick, informative answers designed to help you make better decisions for your spinal health.

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, and welcome to Ask the Chiropractor. Now, our typical format is somebody will have one question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, and I'll dedicate 10 to 15 minutes trying to answer that question. We get asked lots of questions, and not all the questions I can go on about for 10 to 15 minutes. Some of them are just short, quick questions. So today, I thought I would change the format and just try to answer a couple quick ones. Let me start off with one of the questions we get asked a lot. What's the right pillow to buy? Hey, I want to get a good pillow for my neck. What's the best pillow to buy? If there was a perfect pillow, we'd all have it. It'd all be selling like crazy. A friend of mine down the street from me where I live tried to develop the pillow, and the pillow idea was you could add or remove the stuffing to make it match for you. I thought this was a cool concept, because in my opinion, the perfect pillow depends on the head, the shoulder, and the mattress of who's using it. Every head, shoulder, and mattress are unique. So when you go to lay down, one pillow might be great on one mattress for one person, but horrible for the next person on the next mattress. How do you know which one you have the good pillow? I usually tease about going to buy five or six pillows all different firm shapes and size and then go home and lay on them and have somebody look at you. If your spine is a nice straight line, you found the right pillow. I also recommend taking those other pillows back and buying multiple copies of that same pillow because you'll probably never find it again. But the pillow that might be right for you might not be right for your spouse. Cause it's again, it's a different, even though it's the same mattress, it's a different head, different shoulder. So when it comes to buying the right pillow, it's going to be a different pillow for everybody and a different mattress. And if you go out and buy a new mattress, it's time to go pillow shopping again. Cause you might find out the pillow that you've loved no longer works on the new mattress. So there's just not a black and white answer on this question. You just have to experiment until you find the right pillow. On that note, what about the perfect bed? A lot of chiropractors have spent a lot of time researching the beds. And if you go to chiropractic. org, we work with a company that our chiropractors have helped design a bed. And this is the basic concepts of it. It can't be too soft and too, like a memory foam or just molds to your spine. Because you might not have a good spine. You might not have good posture. Like water beds, right? You lay down and they feel really good, but they offer very little support and they disappeared. So you want a mattress with support. But then, you don't want a mattress with like tons of coils in there that's so firm and rough you can barely sleep on it. You want something comfortable. So myself, I sleep on a hybrid. It's got memory foam in between the coils. So you have the best of both worlds. But you want something that supports you, not just something that's so comfortable. Because those beds after a while, you start to notice the lack of support they give you and it comes back. That's my philosophy on the mattresses. People ask me a lot about inversion tables. Hey, I'm going to get an inversion table. Will that be something that will help my back? Hey, I got an inversion table. I'm thinking about, I tried that before I tried chiropractic. Inversion tables are a good way to decompress and get a good stretch at the end of the night. And I don't dislike inversion tables. I often say an inversion table is something that's will keep a good spine good longer. If I have a good day, my back's feeling great, I'm moving, bending, twisting good, and I want to go home at the end of the day, and I want to do some spinal hygiene, or some spinal maintenance, to try to maximize the health of my spine the best I can on my own. An inversion table could definitely be part of that. Just like stability exercises, some stretches, yoga moves and poses, those are all great things to help do some spinal hygiene. And I actually don't mind people having aversion tables. But an aversion table and all those things I just said won't get a bad spine good. Matter of fact, it can sometimes actually create more inflammation and more swelling and make a bad spine worse. So if you go to the chiropractor and he, you get your adjustments and your back starts moving better, the chiropractor says great, now it's time for a maintenance or a wellness plan. This is a great time to introduce those things to your chiropractor. Make sure you discuss it with the chiropractor first. But a lot of those things can definitely help you keep a good spine. Keep a good thing going, right? That's all we want to do. Because we just want to keep maintaining. What can I do? I never want to feel like that again. What can I do to keep myself in a good place? These are all things that complement what we do. I would never say replace what we do. I don't care how good your water pick is and your electric toothbrush. You still need to go get your teeth cleaned, right? More of that you do, the better your teeth cleaning is, the better it goes. These are adjunct things that can help with spinal hygiene. Am I against them? No. But should you buy one in order to fix your back? Probably not going to happen. Now I want to talk about a couple of things, the terms that we hear a lot. A lot of times people come in, I think it's I don't know if it's my back or just a muscle. I don't know if it's the joint in my back or maybe just a ligament. I don't know if it's the bone or maybe not the muscle. Chiropractors always chuckle about this because it's always all the above, right? So if you have a joint misaligned, it's going to make a muscle mad. It just has to because the joint has moved the bone, the bones move this position, the muscle is now being stretched, the muscle is going to be mad. So you couldn't tell us like, hey, I don't think it's the joint, I think it's just the muscle. It would never just be the muscle. It would always be the muscle, the joint, and the bone. Because you can't have one without the other. So a lot of times you come tell me, I don't know if I'm in the right place because this muscle is really tight. I think it just might be a muscle issue. It is a muscle issue. But there's a reason it's a muscle issue. There's a cause behind the muscle issue. And there's usually inflammation in the joint that causes the vertebrae to move and change their normal alignment. And the chiropractor can unlock that and get you adjusted. Right? Remove the subluxation, get you adjusted, and then the muscle should be able to heal and go back to itself. This goes on to another topic of mine, should I try physical therapy first or chiropractic first? If you had that misalignment and that muscles under stress is overstretched and the muscles inflamed because it's overstretched and irritated, how much can the PT do to get that muscle to calm down if the cause of that muscle being stretched still exists? So let's say two vertebraes rotate and the transverse, the thing that sticks out the side, like the wing of the vertebrae, they separate and they open up and they go wider. And there's a muscle that goes between those two. How much PT can you do to get that muscle to relax if the pulling still exists? It doesn't work. You have to get the alignment fixed first so it stops pulling. And then, yeah, go do physical therapy. So if you get a prescription for physical therapy from your physician, I think physical therapy is good. I think you're going to learn some benefits of moving and exercising. But I think you need to get adjusted first. So what I tell patients to do is, let's put pause on physical therapy. Let's make some spinal corrections, right? Let's get some adjustments going. Usually when you go to the chiropractor, you have three phases of care. You have the, I'm acute, I'm suffering, I'm having issues. This is where you're probably coming in two or three, four times a week getting adjusted and then it slows down like once a week what we call corrective care. So once you go into corrective care, this is where we introduce exercises and stretches. This would be like, okay, now let's use your physical therapy prescription and let's talk to the physical therapist and let me tell the physical therapist what I found, what's going on and the involvement that I discovered either on your example and or your x rays and so that we can work as a team to get you better. And a lot of places like in my state of Illinois, I can write you a prescription for physical therapy too and we work directly with the physical therapy people. And that's going to be a little different state to state, but in Illinois, for sure, the chiropractor can write you a prescription for physical therapy. If you've had really bad sciatica for a really long time, because when you got your sciatica, you didn't ask the chiropractor if you should go, you asked somebody else. And that physical therapist, I thought a trainer, the medical doctor, the nurse practitioner said, oh no, don't go to the chiropractor. And you didn't go. And that nerve was subluxated for so long that you've got atrophy down your leg, meaning you've lost muscle tone, because you took bad advice and didn't ask a chiropractor about chiropractic care. The adjustments are eventually going to get that lower back doing better, and eventually that nerve's going to start firing better, and eventually that muscle's going to come back better. But if you were to introduce physical therapy after the corrections have been made to complement the chiropractic care, you might speed up the whole recovery time. You actually might have better results with the recovery with working with the chiropractor and the physical therapist. But it's chiropractic, then physical therapy. Now a massage therapist, that's going to be different. I always tease that if you see the massage therapist first, it makes the chiropractor job easier. If you see the chiropractor first, see the massage therapist first. This is going to totally differentiate case by case. So just ask your chiropractor, hey with my situation in my spine, should I do physical therapy, should I do, excuse me, should I do massage first or chiropractic first? And your chiropractor will tell you what to do on that. Again, it's going to keep, that's just too many variables, there's too much stuff going on to give a black and white answer. I hope that I answered that question. Then let's talk about things that a lot of times you come to the chiropractor and you'll be like, Oh no, I've got a disc bulge. Or oh no, I've got a pinched nerve. This doesn't really tell us anything. I always tease, if I lean as far as I can to the right, I got a whole bunch of left disc bulges going on right now, because I'm leaning away, leaning into the right side, causing my disc, which is like my soccer absorber, to adapt to the forces on the right side of my spine, and that disc will slightly bulge to the left to compensate for it. If I go the other way, now the disc bulges is gone on the left, and now they appeared on the right. The disc bulge when you're laying down an MRI is only so much good information. Now, if there's a whole bunch of your disc bulging out and it's gross, you've lost your disc height and stuff like that's a different story. But this could have been to say, I've got a disc bulge. Yeah, we all do. It's just whether or not it's hitting a nerve, whether, how far it's sticking out. So those are cases where you should really bring your MRI report. How do I know you have an MRI? Because that's the only way to see a disc. So if you haven't had an MRI, there's no way you can def, for sure say you have a disc bulge. Other than me assuming you all have disc bulges. And just like a pinched nerve, I have a couple of patients that are orthopedic surgeons that came in and said, I got a pinched nerve in my neck going down my, into my hand. The nerve's never pinched. If it was pinched, your hand wouldn't work. It would be cut off. You pinch a blood vessel, you lose blood to that area. You pinch a nerve, that nerve stops working. What's going on is the vertebral subluxation has occurred. Two of the vertebrae are misaligned, and when they're misaligned, that creates a fight or flight response at that level. And that fight and flight response hits that nerve, wherever that nerve's going, whatever that nerve does, whatever that nerve's function is, whether it's muscular, skeletal, whether it's sensation up and down your skin, or maybe it's the nerves that go to your thyroid. Either way, that nerve now is switched modes from everything's good, everything's fine, into fight and flight. I always like it when someone says I have a pinched nerve and they're having burning sciatica down their leg. I'm like, I don't think that nerve stop talking. I think that nerve's talking really loud. So a pinched nerve is another thing. When you come and tell us you have a pinched nerve, it's like whatever. That's not a real thing. So that's some of the things that we see as chiropractor. So these are, like I said, usually when you can listen to my podcast, we go over a topic in depth, but these are little questions I get asked all the time. So this would be fun to do with one with just short, quick answers. You heard me talking about the sciatica and not asking a chiropractor about chiropractic care. If you really have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I just can't stress enough how important it is to ask a chiropractor. Anybody else you ask, you're just going to get a bad answer. We have a patient that came in here and said that the chiropractor, just as your neck, is going to paralyze you. We looked at her MRIs, we looked at her x rays, we did an exam on her, and she's doing amazing. She's doing wonderful. Her recovery is going great. Again, why did a practitioner tell her this? There's no education or background in chiropractic that's beyond me. But to think that she might have suffered for too long with this, had she not come in and asked us whether or not we could do it, had she believed the person who told her that chiropractic would paralyze her, come on she would never begin the recovery she's getting. And, actually the doctor there wanted to prescribe her an opiate. And we all know how bad those can be. Thank goodness she's heard of my podcast and said I should go ask a chiropractor. So, always ask a chiropractor about whether or not you should see a chiropractor. Alright, if you have a question, leave it below, wherever you're listening or watching this. And maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Thank you.