Arthritis and Your Spine: Why Chiropractic Care Matters

In this episode, we explore the relationship between chiropractic care and arthritis, specifically focusing on spinal arthritis. The discussion addresses common misconceptions about the rapid development of arthritis, Arthritis definitions by the American Medical Association versus chiropractic standards, and the significance of subluxations and their progression to degenerative disc disease. The chiropractor outlines how chiropractic adjustments can restore spinal health, emphasizes the importance of regular X-rays, and shares success stories of patients who avoided arthritis through consistent chiropractic care. Viewers are encouraged to consult chiropractors for accurate diagnoses and effective treatment plans to manage and prevent spinal arthritis.

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. Welcome to another episode. So I was recently asked about chiropractic care and arthritis. Somebody who had asked me who we just x-rayed less than a year ago, whether or not they can develop arthritis that fast. And the good news is, the answer is no. But let's talk about arthritis. Let's talk about what arthritis I'm talking about, and let's talk about some different definitions of arthritis. The first thing is as a chiropractor, I'm only gonna address the arthritis you get in your spine. I'm not gonna talk about your knee, your hip, your ankles, and stuff like that. That's outside the chiropractor's. Responsibility. We're responsible for making sure your spine doesn't get arthritic. We like to think the whole body too, but I'm gonna keep it within our wheelhouse and say just the spine today. And I've had a lot of patients come to me from medical doctors and they told me they have arthritis and I look at their x-rays and I don't see any. And I used to really question that. I'm like, how could you say they have arthritis when everything on the x-ray looks great? I don't understand how that could be arthritis. One of my friends educated me, one of my medical friends. I hang out with quite a few of 'em at the Ice Hogs. I'm the team chiropractor and I sit with the orthopedic doctors and it's quite amazing. The American Medical Association, the AMAs definition of arthritis in the spine. All it has to be is I woke up this morning, my back was a little stiff. I. So if that's your definition of the parameters to find somebody has arthritis we can't stop that. Nope, we can't. If I cut down a tree tomorrow, do a lot of guarding in my yard, or if I shovel a lot of snow, I guess the next day I have arthritis according to that definition. Now as chiropractors, we don't use that definition. That's not at all how we define arthritis in the spine. So when you ask a chiropractor a question, you're gonna get an answer from a chiropractor. So I'm not gonna tell you when I said earlier that we can stop arthritis or I can describe chiropractic arthritis. I am not referring to the American Medical Association, and to me it's quite comical that's their definition. It.'cause when they talk about arthritis in the shoulder or the hips, they get into the millimeter of gap between the ball and the socket that the growthy spurs can be this many millimeters. It's so precise and the angle has to be like this. And if you look at the different things of the knees it's this much gap this much of a spur this size. It's so precise. But for the spine, I woke up this morning, my back felt if arthritis. So to me that's comical. I don't understand why they just said, we're not even gonna try with the spine. We're just gonna call it arthritis from every, we want to call it arthritis. But lemme tell you how chiropractors do it. Chiropractors, we actually have a grading system, grade 1, 2, 3, 4. And we use that grading system to tell you like how long it has probably been bad and whether or not realistic expectations of full recovery or not. So let's talk about the process, how it starts and how it begins. First thing that usually happens is you get what we call a subluxation. What's a subluxation? One or two bones have become misaligned, and stress is, stress has been introduced to that joint. When the stress is introduced to that joint, it travels down the nerves wherever the nerves go, and that's the response coming out. Some people might call it a pinched nerve. I won't call it a pinched nerve.'cause if it was pinched, the nerve wouldn't work. And if you've ever had a hot lower back, you know that nerve's working, it's talking. No problem. If you have sciatica down your leg, there's no doubt that nerve's not pinched, right? Because it's screaming at you. So I don't use those words myself, but that's what a lot of chiropractors resort to. So it's not a pinched nerve, it's two bones. Auto alignment, creating stress on the nerve, coming and going. We call that a subluxation. So you get a sation. And what happens is the human body is a unique, dynamic, healing, self-regulating mechanism. And when the sation is there, the body says, this is a weak spot. This is a spot of danger. This is a spot of trouble. We are gonna lock it down. So what the body does is it stabilizes it, it makes all the muscles around lock up tight and freeze and hold in position. This is why you can't mess it up anymore. But what I learned at Palmer College is that the disc. Between the two bones. It's your shock orbit. It's your cushion. It's designed, it's thing leans to the left. It's designed to bulge to the right. If the bones lean to the right, it bulges to the left. Okay. Your disc bulge is on purpose. Of course, they bulge on purpose. That's the purpose. So in effort of someone tells you have a disc bulge, that's what they're designed to do. That's good. So you get a disc bulge going on. So the disc is like a shock over. It takes all the blow adapts to the stress as you move around. If I trim my head, looked up to the left, all my discs are now bulge into the right to make up the difference, and I come back, they all go back where they're supposed to be. So what happens is there's no direct blood going to these, so there's no direct blood going to your discs. How do they get Nutrition? Nutrition to 'em? How do they get the toxins out? When you walk and you move the muscles around your spine, they contract and as they contract, they push the nutrients in and they pull the toxins out. So I'm pushing all the good stuff in, flush all the bad stuff out. What's the problem with this? You have a subluxation. The body protect those. They're not gonna let 'em move anymore. Now they're not moving. So when you walk, if they're not moving, there's no action between these two bones, and therefore the muscles are not pushing nutrients in, pulling toxins out. And that disc starts to suffer. And as its suffer, it starts to lose its disc height. So it's becoming dehydrated. The medical term for this is degenerative disc disease, which sounds really scary. Really what it is that this, that's dehydrated. You gotta get it moving again, and what do we do? As chiropractors, we find these subluxations and we restore the motion. We go and we make a for chiropractic adjustment based on your x-rays and our exam findings, and we help restore the motion, get those moving again, get rid of that fixation, help reduce that subluxation, and then what happens is the muscles around there contract it, push nutrients back in, and the disc gets its nutrients and it rebounds. So we've had patients come in, I said, boy, you get a thin disc here, a thin disc there, and then we re x-ray them. Six months, a year, two, two years whatever. Whatever we decide as chiropractors, we need to do, we re x-ray them and we see the disc have returned, the disc have come back. Medicare often requires either an exam or an annual x-ray. And what we like to do is when we look at these annual x-rays, we like to compare the disc at year to make sure our people on Medicare, their disc are maintaining their height. In my opinion, as a chiropractor, if you're disc are maintaining your height, then you're doing great. If your disc are losing height, then we gotta change something. So the disc could come back. It can regenerate its height, no problem. But let's say it doesn't. Let's say you never meet a chiropractor, or let's say somebody tells you, oh dear, I don't think a chiropractor can help you. Or worse, you go to a physician, you say, chiropractors can't do nothing about this, and you don't go to a chiropractor'cause you didn't ask a chiropractor. You don't go what happens to that desk over time? After years. It goes away. It gets all the way flushed, and then the bones rub against the bones and they form bony calluses. Osteophytes. I. These are bony spurs. These are the arthritic changes that we see on the x-ray. So when you come to see us, if you have a really thin disc in bony spurs, we call that a next level of degeneration. Subluxation, degeneration. Phase one is you're out of alignment. You got stress on there. Phase two is we're losing the disc kite. Phase three, we're trying to get some big spurs, and the disc is almost gone phase four. You should have came to see us a long time ago. The discs are gone, the bones are fus, and that's now one bone. Now the problem with these bony spurs is when they grow, they can grow anywhere. They can grow on the front side, which isn't that big of a deal to the side. If they start growing back to the back, one third of the body of the spine, the vertebrae, that's a problem because that's where your nerves are. And if these spurs go in the wrong place, they can grow and hit the nerve leaving and create constant irritation on that nerve. And then if what happens is, if that's the case, one, as a chiropractor, I'm gonna try to restore the disc kite and see if I bring the disc kite back, things will move and that'll go away. But if it doesn't, then I have to introduce you to my friend, the surgeon. He can go in there and clean that joint up. That's what they talked to about the laser, the minimal abrasive back surgery. They go in there and they clean that joint up and try to get rid of those spurs and the stuff that's hitting that nerve. But if it's too far gone, then they try to fuse you together and then those vertebraes never move again and there's no motion there ever again. They remove the disc and they fuse you together. And as a chiropractor, I have learned the ones above and below that surgery tend to deal with a lot more issues because of that surgery. So it's important to come get your spine check? Absolutely. If somebody tells you have arthritis in your spine. If it's a medical physician, we learned that definition's pretty generic. It just means you woke up with a stiff back that day, which could happen to any of us. But you want to get your x-rays evaluated by a chiropractor. Now, can we evaluate your degeneration and the overall health of your spine, your disc kit and stuff without an x-ray? Nope. You can't. What about if you had an MRI? A little bit. With the chiropractors, we take our x-rays and you're standing up so we can see what the disc looked like with gravity on 'em. And an MRI you're laying down. So we can see the spurring, but we can't really tell the disc height'cause you're in a different position. Gravity no longer affects those discs. So standing upright X-rays are the best. Now, if you've had x-rays taken from a different healthcare provider and you were standing up, your chiropractor absolutely can use those. Matter of fact, if you got really old ones, those are even better because that could take new ones that could compare'em to your old ones and look at your disc height and see how much has changed. An example of this is your L five, your very bottom disc. A lot of us, this disc never grows, right? You see when you're little, you sacrum six different bones. You go through puberty. They fuse in the one. A lot of times that L five tries to join that party and they get a rudimentary disc there for life. But I take an x-ray of you and I see that rudimentary disc. Is it a rudimentary disc or is it the way you grew? I. Is or is. Or do you really have arthritis? So if I have an x-ray of you from five years ago, I can compare it. If it looks the exact same, then I think that's your normal. If it's drastically different, then I know we're dealing with disorder of arthritis. So old X-rays are huge. So if you have old ones, hang onto 'em. Your chiropractor would love to see 'em. So if you came to saw us see a chiropractor, you should ask him, Hey, what phase of arthritis degeneration am I in? What kind of subluxation degeneration? How do my disc look? What are the stressors that are affecting my disc? Losing your posture is a major stressor on some of your discs. So getting your posture back, take a lot of pressure off those discs and obviously getting your chiropractic adjustment helps a lot. I'm excited because I have patients in my office that started with my grandpa, saw my dad now see me, and now they're in their eighties and their nineties and they don't have any arthritis in their spine.'cause grandpa told them and dad told them, if you keep getting adjusted, you won't get arthritis. Now I've taken care of 'em for 23 years and they don't have any arthritis in their spine. It's awesome. But again, when they go to the medical doctor, they'll. They'll tell 'em you have arthritis in your spine, and I just pull the x-rays up and say, is that invisible arthritis? So if you have a question about arthritis in your back and you wanna know whether or not your spine is really arthritic, chiropractors have much better definitions of arthritis in the spine than the American Medical Association. And we get those x-rays and we'll tell you exactly what's going on, whether or not we can help, what your best plans are, and best way to stop it if it's already going, and whether or not those discs are recyclable. Alright, thanks for tuning in. Remember next week if you have a question, you wanna leave it wherever you're watching or listen to this and maybe you'll be the question of the week. Thanks everybody. And remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only person qualified, the answer is a chiropractor.