Beyond Back Pain: The Comprehensive Benefits of Chiropractic Care

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus dives deep into the broad spectrum of chiropractic care beyond just back pain relief. Dr. Hulsebus explains how chiropractic treatment addresses issues such as headaches, migraines, arm and leg discomfort, pregnancy-related pain, and even vertigo. He details the role of the spine in protecting the nervous system, and how misalignments, or subluxations, can disrupt bodily functions. Learn how chiropractic adjustments can enhance overall wellness, sports performance, and aging, and why it’s important to consider chiropractic solutions for a myriad of health issues.

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. thanks for tuning in again to another episode. I've asked the chiropractor, I was asked about do chiropractors treat more than just back pain? This is something a medical friend of mine asked me, said, I see a lot of reports that you guys do more than just back pain. I was surprised to hear that. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more into this topic here if you'll indulge me. So number one, a lot of people think KY does only treat back pain and they're just going in and making cracks and that's all they're doing, and that's such a small percentage of what's actually going on. There's so much more that chiropractic deals with and works with you. See, I want you to understand that the spine's job is to protect the spinal cord and the spine is full of different joints that move, bend and twists in different directions in order to keep you mobile. But the muscles around the spine are different than the muscles around the rest of the skeletal muscle. These are called balanced muscles. They behave different. They're highly innervated neurologically. And what happens is when there's stress to the vertebras, whether it's from bad posture, accidents, growth, birth, who knows, these vertebras will lock up and they'll stop moving. And as chiropractors, we call that a subluxation. And part of the subluxation includes a stress response.'cause the body's recognizing these two bones aren't no longer moving, they're fixated, and that stress response hits those nerves and they go out and they go out to wherever that nerve's going and wherever that nerve's going is now affected by this. And so as chiropractors, I don't consider myself a spine doctor. I consider myself a nerve doctor who accessed the nervous system through the spine. And so you have a nervous system called the autonomic nervous system, like right now, does anybody have any idea what your spleen's doing? Of course you don't. It just works. It just functions, and the autonom nervous system is just regulating, doing all your bodily stuff. And this got two speeds. Everything's good and fight and flight, the everything's good. The scientific name for, that's parasympathetic. The other one's called sympathetic to fight and flight sympathetic. And so either you're in stress or you're not in stress, and when the vertebraes get misaligned, typically what happens is that stress response increases that fight and flight increases, and these individual nerves go to individual body parts and it tells that body parts we're now in fight and flight, not the whole body, typically just the ones where those nerves individually go. So the one that goes to my stomachs and fight and flight, then the stomach's confused on how to do things and it wants to get things in or out as fast as they can because the stomach believes that you're in danger. And so you don't want to try to digest lunch if you were physically in danger. And so either you vomit it up or it comes out the other end really fast. And so when we adjust, T six, people report less heartburn, less indigestion. Now are we treating indigestion, heartburn? No, we're treating the subluxation. We're guessing that subluxation just to see if the nerves can get better. So what are some areas that people get like fast relief in their chiropractic care they might not think about? The number one has to be the headaches. People come in with really bad headaches and migraines, and they get their neck adjusted typically, sometimes their tailbone and they can't believe their headaches go away. The brain doesn't perceive pain. There's no pain receptors in the brain. In the old days, they'd do frontal lobotomies and they just cut right through the part of the brain and you wouldn't feel it. So what's going on? What's going on is a spinal cord itself, and there's so much tension from having bad posture in your neck or a misalignment in your neck that is literally being pulled on and tugged on, and that clogs a venous return. So blood goes into your head that's never compromised. Blood's always gonna get in, but what happens is getting out can be compromised, and so you got blood pushing their way in, but not coming out because the spinal cord itself under too much stress on the bottom of your skull with the farra and magnum is that's the hole in the bottom of your skull with the nerves come out and the venous flow cannot exit as much as coming up and pressure builds up and you get a headache. Okay. And then if you were involved in the trauma, the spinal cord come down and actually clogged the entire drain. The foramen, magnum and your spinal fluid can stop regenerating. It can get stuck in there, and the spinal fluid takes the waste out of the energy that we burn and puts in the veins and the veins take it out. But if the spinal fluid can't regenerate, it can't get it out, and that's when you get these really bad migraines. And so I have a friend down in Florida when he does chiropractic adjustments. He does 'em under a motion MRI machine, and we literally watch that part of the brain pop back up the midbrain, get back where it's supposed to be, and people get headache relief. So I think it's really cool when someone comes and tells me they've had lower back pain than after about three or four visits, they're like, you know what? My headaches are gone. I think that's really cool. And I talked about the nerves. When there's a subluxation, let's talk about their topic. The nerves, when there's a subluxation, go to body parts and affect it. Well, a lot of people have arm or numb arm pain or numbness and tingling in their arm or maybe their leg or sciatica, and they start getting adjusted. And that stuff goes away too, because the nerves were being subluxated up here. And it affects the musculature and the sensation on your extremities. So a lot of people report that They get really relief from extremity. Issues after starting chiropractic care. Another fun one that we see a lot of is pregnancy.'cause when you're pregnant you don't want to do a lot of drugs and you can't do a lot of other things that you might be would do if you weren't pregnant because you're trying to protect that new baby coming. So a lot of people are forced to go to the chiropractor 'cause they don't have any other choice. And when we find out with chiropractic care, you're pregnant. It's so cool because we've had a whole branch of chiropractic dedicated to this. I did a year's worth of courses on taking care of pregnant women, and I've become certified in the Webster technique. Webster like the dictionary and the Webster technique is just all about making sure the baby doesn't end up breached. We do a couple of mom tailbone adjustments. We do a couple of trigger points on some ligaments and we just get mom's lower back and tip tailbone adjusted and the womb physically gets larger and the baby can now move and move around. And all of a sudden now we have a happy baby, normal birth. But not only that, but when mom gets adjusted, when she's pregnant. There's papers out there that show the delivery goes easier, smoother, less complications. There's papers out there that show mom has less pain and discomfort. Mom's able to function better, and it's really cool that like the moment you find out you're pregnant to start care right then and there because we can establish more of a baseline and do more. By the time you're like seven months pregnant and this ligaments are on, there's so much stress now. It's screaming at you. We can still help, but it's not as awesome if you start right when you first find out you're pregnant. So we've helped so many women have normal, healthy pregnancies. I know that I've had 21 women come to me and tell me they were breached and I was able to do the Webster technique and then the breach baby went away. But we're not even worried about that anymore now because we don't wait till you're breached to start the technique. We start the technique the day you tell us you're pregnant.'cause why let the baby get breached? Why? Chiropractors, we always. Talk about prevention. Prevention. So why wait till the baby's breach and then start doing the Websters? We do the Webster. The moment you tell us you're pregnant and we start making sure that you don't end up with this. And plus we know so many cool biomechanic tricks, like keeping your knees below your hips when you sit helps with pregnancy pain. Working in the. Ligament, the uterus muscle on the front. Doing a little misogyny every day, helps keep staff from spasming. We've helped so many women that are pregnant, so that's really fun. And you know what happens after a pregnancy ends? You get a baby. And there's a whole part about chiropractic. We take care of kids and babies. That was another part of those courses I took, was taking care of newborn babies and stuff. We've helped so many kids. People come in, little babies and they have a colic ear infections. They're not sleeping good. I. Maybe when they start walking and crawling, they're a little bit out of balance. Some kids even have to wear the little prosthetic on their head to help shape their head better. We're able to help prevent the torticollis. What's torticollis? I have a helmet on my head, not a helmet of prosthetic, and it's not weighted equally 'cause it's trying to do something. So it's got more weight on one side than the other. And now my head's always turned. I'm trying to develop neck muscles right now in my posture, but I have a weight on my head that's making me lean in one direction. As chiropractors, we can reset that after every adjustment to help the neck not get bad. The typical protocol is you wear the pro, you wear the headpiece, you get the bad neck, and you go to physical therapy. And the chiropractor's like, why get the bad neck? Let's start taking care of you right away while you have that on and not get the bad neck to have to fix bigger problems down the line. Yeah. Afterwards, if you wanna do some physical therapy, great. We'll talk to your physical therapist and we'll tell 'em what we've been doing, what're working as a team and get the little guy, little girl right back where they need to be as fast as we can. Another big one that people see as far is vertigo balance issues. Remember I talked about the muscles around the spine? They're highly innervated. Their job is to keep you stable and centered. If you got twist up and down your spine, those things are working overtime. Trying to just keep you upright. If we can alleviate some of that pressure and some of that interference, I. Then your balance starts working better, you start functioning better, and we have lots of cool tricks and tips and little exercises to do to work on that balance. If you're getting older and you feel like you're losing your balance, don't worry. You can get it back. You just haven't been practicing enough. Go get your spine unlocked, get your chiropractic adjustment, and then talk to the chiropractor about improving that. And then let's talk about digestion, sleep, and stress. I talked about that nervous system being locked in and stress and fight and flight. The other half of that was that parasympathetic. I said that everything's normal. If you got a ation in the top of your neck or your tailbone, that affects the nervous system, that tells your body that danger's gone. It's time to relax. If you get a really good C one or Atlas adjustment, one of the number one side effects we hear all the time is they come back and they're like, I just feel more at ease and I slept so good and I woke up and I felt so much better. Or, you know what? My digestion so much improved. And there's studies out there chiropractor in Japan showing that when you get your atlas adjusted, that your body actually goes out of fight and flight faster, better than if you don't get it done by looking at lavatory enzymes. It's awesome research. So the chiropractic philosophy is catching up with the chiropractic research now. I love it. It. Another area that we take a lot of is sports, right? A lot of people come to us, they might have lower back pain. We start adjusting 'em. Now they notice that when they play their sports afterwards, they feel better. They're having less injury. That chronic thing has gone away that they've been dealing with for a long time, even when they've worked with other healthcare providers. Here, my clinic, we actually work with a. Place down the street called Movement Fitness, where they work on return to play. And if they start seeing a kid with really bad pelvic rotation or an athlete with a high shoulder and low shoulder, they send 'em over to us. And then we meet every week and we go over all these athletes about what we're doing and what they're doing. So the athlete gets the best thing. And like I work for the Pro Hockey Chiropractic Society, taking care of the Rockford Ice Hogs, the A HL team, the Chicago Black Hawks. But like every NFL football team has a chiropractor. Now, almost every hockey team from AA college all the way up to the pros has a chiropractor. Same with baseball. In the Olympics I know the Olympic chiropractor, the guy that goes to the Olympics, takes care of him. I did a podcast previously on a different epi episode, different show with the chiropractor that hope hoped the entire country.'cause they didn't have chiropractic in his country, so they brought him in to do it for them. Really cool stuff, man. So yeah, we're all there. And then the number one thing is just staying well. I have a lot of people that come to work for me and they're always surprised how happy our patients are when they come here.'cause they're not coming in because they're broken. They're coming in because they feel good, they know they stay better under chiropractic care. They know they have less time off of work, less sick days. There's a research that shows people that get under wellness care are able to live on their own longer, later in life, need less assisted living as they age. And this, they live healthier. They have less doctor visits, less prescription drugs as they age. Chiropractic patients just age better and senior years are so much more enjoyable when you're not sitting around. A lot of, my dad's a chiropractor and my grandfather was too, and man, my dad hates it when he sits down and everybody his age starts talking about all the pills and medications that Ron and all the doctor visits they go do. He just shakes his head's you guys aren't living. This deal. That's not good. None of this is progress. This is all bad stuff.'cause my father being adjusted his entire life, 'cause his dad was a chiropractor and now I adjust him, right? And so he doesn't have those lists. They don't have that stuff. They don't, they're not good. They don't have tons of medications and this and that. He's just living healthy, having a great life boating, golfing, and enjoying themselves. So it's fun to see that. And hopefully that's my future too, right? Doing the same thing. So yeah. The sky predict about back pain. Yeah. A little bit of it. The sky pica about so many bigger, better things. Absolutely. So if your health has been bad, if you just feel like you're rut health wise, or you've gone to four or five doctors, or you're not getting the relief you need, ask a chiropractor. Don't ask that doctor.'cause they don't know what we know about what we know. What I mean by that? Never ask your dentist about an in grown toenail. Never ask optometrist about a wisdom teeth. You ask the dentist about wisdom teeth. Ask the doctor that does what you do. So go see a chiropractor. What should a chiropractic visit look like? Your first one. But you expect a chiropractic history. You would expect a chiropractic examination and you'd also expect some imaging to look at your spine to make sure it's safe to take care of you. Unless you're pregnant, we want an x-ray if you're pregnant. The pregnancy techniques that we use for patients we don't know, very low force very safe. And x-ray is always preferred, but not at the risk of the baby. So there you have it. So if you have a question about anything I just said or about chiropractic care as a whole, feel free to leave a comment below. We'll get back to you and we'll dive more into it. But I hope I answered though, is chiropractic more than just back pain? And I could keep going for two more hours if you asked me to, but we're gonna quit it here. Alright, thanks everybody.