What You Might Be Missing: The Chiropractic Perspective

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus discusses the growing trend of patients seeking second opinions from chiropractors after receiving a medical diagnosis. He explains the differences between the medical and chiropractic approaches to treating pain and restoring function. He shares insights into how chiropractors analyze posture, movement, and spinal function to address underlying issues, rather than merely treating symptoms. Dr. Hulsebus urges listeners to consider chiropractic care as a first-option or second opinion and emphasizes the importance of consulting a chiropractor for chiropractic-related questions. He also encourages viewers to leave their questions for future episodes.

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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 of Ask the Chiropractor. When you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care. The only qualified person to answer these questions are a chiropractor. Now this is part four of four of a thing we did this month. Tried to do a whole month on one topic. The basic topic is why are more people seeking second opinions from chiropractors? More and more people are coming into us after getting a medical diagnosis and wanting to talk to us about what they just learned and want to know whether or not chiropractic could help them. I guess in theory, my message about if you don't know who to ask a chiropractor is actually starting to work out a little bit. So what's the difference? Basically when you go to a medical doctor, it does a protocol, and the protocol usually, let's treat your pain. They usually start off with NSAIDs, non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs. Now, the research is very clear on these. The more these you use, they develop chronic headaches and lower back pain. The majority of reason why people seek medical advice. So taking these chronically leads. We know for a fact the chronic use of it, meaning that you've been using 'em for a long time. The side effect of that is lower back pain and headaches. That doesn't work. They might give you a steroid burst and a muscle relaxer. Now, my personal philosophy on muscle relaxers, your muscles are in spasm to keep you from slabbing, the inflamed joint more and more together. So when you take a muscle relaxer and the muscles relax, you're allowed to slab that joint together more and more. And in my opinion, that could be not beneficial, but more harmful. Now, the steroid burst is meant to get rid of the inflammation. I have no quarrels about that. If that doesn't work, then they send you to physical therapy. Now, in previous podcasts, you can go back and listen. We've talked about the fact that the recent literature has stated there are four types of muscles. When I went through school, we learned three. We learned skeletal, smooth in your butt vessels and cardiac muscle in your heart. Today they're saying there's a fourth time called stabilization muscles. These are the muscles around your spine. The muscles around your spine look like skeletal muscle when you do a gross dissection lab. However, under a microscope, they look very different. They have tremendously higher number of neurological EVAs significantly more, 200 plus more per square millimeter than other muscles in your body because these muscles job is to keep your eyes level at all times. If you listen to my podcast, I'll often talk about the righting reflex, R-I-G-H-T writing reflex, and that says your lie. I stay level at the horizon at all costs. So when people come to see me, they have a kink in their lower back. They usually have a kink in their neck to balance themselves off and order to correct a righting reflex. If you watch an athlete move at high speed, you'll see their high state level up the whole time. This is all the stabilization muscles. If you're doing physical therapy and your physical therapist is not up to date on the research and treating you stabilization muscles, but using old fashioned physical therapy instead, then they're missing the point in the physical therapy does not work very well. So if you've already tried NSAIDs, muscle relaxers and old school physical therapy will say, and that doesn't work. The good news is the next thing they have is injections. You know the shots they give in your spine. Now, what's interesting to me is to my knowledge, these are not FDA approved. Nor FDA recommended for the spinal area. Why? Because the reason I just said the musculature is different. The manufacturer doesn't recommend them around the spine. Why? Because like I just previously said, we've realized this is a different type of muscle. They respond different. Do cortisone shots work wonders in the shoulder, the hips, the and the toes and the knees? Yeah. I've had some. They do pretty good relief. They relieve the pain. They make the joint go back to where it was. I can't say they don't. I've had 'em done myself. However, the spine is different. And lastly, if all this fails, they have surgery. Now, I have a pretty biased opinion on surgeries because I don't see the good ones. I only see the bad ones. But we have a lot of patients with spinal surgery. The problem with spinal surgery is the ones above and below the surgery move extra more, and they get worn out faster now 'cause the motion's been taken away from the ones that were surgically fused. So that's their system. Our system's different. Our system is gonna look at the structure of the spine, how the spine moves biomechanically, how it behaves with your nervous system, your posture, and the right refl. So chiropractic takes a different approach to your spine. We don't always want to treat the pain right away. We want to restore the function. If we can restore the function of the pain should go away. Pain is simply telling us that there's something not right that needs to be fixed. We will look to make the correction. And what we do, there's all kinds of great benefits on the nervous system. It. So we look at things with a different lens. We look at things with a different approach. We're not the let's get rid of the pain. We are more, let's restore the function. That's why our approach is different. Now, what does a chiropractic a second opinion look like? You went to the doctor, you have an issue with a chiropractic. A second opinion is that we wanna see your posture. We wanna see how you move. We want to have you probably lay face down. Turn your head this way. Turn your head this way. Lift this leg, lift that leg. We want to see how it worked. The whole S spine moves at once together. To get an idea of where the fixations are and where the fixations are, where are you locked up? What is causing all this problem? We want you to bring your x-rays with you. If you had X-rays, done some somewhere else, bring 'em with you. We can look at those x-rays. Your medical physician, the radiologist there looks at 'em for fractures and tumors and bad things, and that's awesome. Everybody should we do. We look at 'em for those things, but then we go a step further. We go a step beyond what the radiologist does. We look at it chiropractically. We look to see how you look in a weight bearing position. What do the joints look like? Where's the compensation? If this is rotated here, how does this affect this down here? A really good example of this is the top bone in your neck, this C one, C two, the top two. The C two has a great big spine process. Great big bump right in the bottom of your hairline. From there, the muscles go up and attach to the base of your skull on the backside, but they also go down to your shoulder blades so that C two should go left or right and it's gonna pull pulling in the back of your head on one side. But it's gonna pull on the opposite shoulder too, causing problems. Now that can make your head posture go bad. Then when your head posture goes bad, the median scaling muscle that goes from the angle of your jaw down to your counter bone, that muscle gets mad. When that muscle gets mad, it gets inflamed. When it gets inflamed, it gets sticky. When it gets sticky, the nerves that come out of there, go down your arm, get imp pinched, and that causes numbness or tingling or weakness in your hand or pain down your arm. That's what we look at when we look at your x-rays. So we're looking at so much more. Another example of my why patients see the chiropractic care differently. We look at your lower back, maybe your L one L twos rotated. These nerves come out, they intubate your small intestines. Maybe you've had a lot of bowel issues. They also control the muscles that go down. Attached to your pelvis can rotate your pelvis to the left. Rotate your pelvis to the right, pull on a muscle called the pure forus, get that all flamed. And in that case, the sciatic nerve comes out and hits that muscle and can mimic sciatica. Or maybe your lower back's out and you have sciatica. So we look at different ways to determine the same thing.'cause people could have sciatic pains from the L one being out, pulling the pelvis in the piriformis muscle, or they could actually have classic SCIA or L four, L five and S one or a problem. Just like up in your neck. I talked about before the C two can move cause a cascade of problems or maybe just your C five, C six CT one, or a misalign causing a nerve on your hand. The symptoms don't tell us that the imaging does the chiropractic exam does, and only chiropractors are trained to look for these things. Now, reason why people don't come to the chiropractor first, that's the thing we hear a lot. I should have came here first. I wish would've came here first. Why? Some people think they have to be referred to us. They have to have permission to come see us. You don't, in Illinois, we're primary healthcare providers. You can just walk in my door any day of the week and we can start care. That's a unique thing about chiropractic compared to some other areas. Now, physical therapy has become primary where you don't need to note anymore. For a long time, you had to have a known from your doctor to go see a physical therapy. Now, in Illinois, you don't, so you can come in. You don't need permission to get a second opinion. You just come on and talk to us. So we'll take a look at it. So if you're waiting for a medical doctor to refer you. They really don't.'cause we're, I know where I live, we're not part of the healthcare system. Meaning that the doctors in healthcare system X refer to only doctors in healthcare system X doctors, healthcare system Y only refer to Y and Z only refers to Z. And we're a W over here, right? We're totally on our own. We're not part of that system. So you're not gonna get that referral to us. So it's up to you to come in and get a second opinion. And again, you can ask the doctor if you should see a chiropractor, but you have to remember, they don't know what we do. They never were educated on what we do. A lot of people just assumed the medical doctor was educated on everything. I can tell you, working with the team, with the hockey team here for many seasons, they don't know what I do. Often, sometimes I try to say, I know what I do, and I ask 'em four or five questions and they don't know what I do no more than I know how to do surgery on your shoulder. Do they know how to adjust the upper cervical spine or why we adjust the upper cervical spine or what we're looking for before we determine the upper cervical spine needs an adjustment? These are things that don't, that they can't answer, so to ask them whether or not they need care doesn't really make a lot of sense. But we've had a lot of patients come in that were getting ready for surgery and mean we've been here since 1949, so we've had a lot of patients that come in and learn. They were told learn to live with it, and we were able to get in there and start making chiropractic care and we were able to help them from needing that. Now that doesn't happen every time. Sometimes your spine's too far gone. Sometimes if you waited way too long to come see us and the spines agendas got big, nasty spurs and we tried. But come see the chiropractor. See whether or not, before you dive into things, talk to other chiropractic patients, see what their experiences were. So let's talk about it. You've been to the doctor, you've been told you have a situation. It could evolve your spine, it could evolve your nervous system. They want to go in a certain direction. Maybe you don't want to dive into all the drugs and surgeries and shots and injections and physical therapy before you talk to a chiropractor. All you gotta do is walk into the chiropractic office, tell 'em what's going on in Illinois, we can get your records from wherever you were. You don't have to bring 'em with you. Sometimes we can even log in and just see 'em. Sometimes our systems are connected. You can ask for a copy of your imaging while you're there. You don't have to even say who it's for to say you'd like to keep a copy of all your own records. They'll give it to you and bring it in here. Let us look at it. Let us give it our 2 cents. Then we'd be brought into here. We have a free consultation. When we meet with you, we go over your own records. Now, we might still take some more x-rays, we might still do some more exams before we can get a definitive answer that's gonna be in a one-to-one basis. Every case is unique, every case is different. So you want to come in and see us. So the biggest thing you have to remember when you go see a chiropractor, just remember. It is all about taking a different perspective. We're not trying to see how to mask the pain, how to cover the pain up. We're trying to treat the pain. We're trying to look at what caused the pain what created this? Why is your body behaving this way? And we're really concerned about how you feel today, but we're also more concerned about what it's gonna be like life in 10 years from now, 20 years from now, if you ignore this. So bring your records in, get a second opinion from a chiropractor. You can even start with a chiropractor. There's no rules against that. You can come see us first. We'll give you a copy of our x-rays to take with you. You can take it to your next healthcare provider if you want a second opinion from a medical doctor. But come on in, meet with us, talk to us, and remember if you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only person qualified to answer such a question as a chiropractor. Go ahead and leave a comment below a question below. If you have one that you'd like me to answer. Next month, we're gonna go into a different topic altogether. We just want to try something fun this month. So go ahead, leave your question below and we'll get to you. We'll get back to you wherever you're listening or watching this. And again, thank you. And remember, only a chiropractor knows whether or not chiropractic care can help you.