Episode 9: The Gut-Spine Connection – Can Chiropractic Improve Digestion?

Episode Summary: Welcome back to Ask the Chiropractor with Dr. Brant Hulsebus! In Episode 9 of our 12-part Wellness Lifecycle series, we dive into a surprising topic: the powerful connection between your spinal health and your digestive system. If you've been struggling with heartburn, constipation, or irritable bowel issues, your spine might be the missing link.

Join us as we explore how the gut impacts your overall immune system and why you could eat the healthiest diet in the world, but still suffer if your body isn't properly absorbing nutrients due to nerve interference.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• The T6 Vertebrae & Heartburn: Discover how the nerve exiting your spine between your shoulder blades directly controls stomach acid production, and why a subluxation here can lead to unexplained heartburn and GERD.
• Lower Back Alignment & Bowel Function: Learn how the lower thoracic spine, upper lumbars, and pelvic bones dictate the speed of your digestion, and how chiropractic adjustments can offer rapid relief for constipation and IBS.
• The Dangers of Malabsorption: We explain the domino effect of poor gut function—how failure to absorb nutrients leads to systemic, chronic inflammation that turns minor aches into major pains.
• Pediatric Gut Health: A quick callback to Episode 7 on why chiropractic care is a fantastic, safe option for babies and kids struggling with bowel issues.

Resources Mentioned:

• Want to look into the research yourself? Visit Chiropractic.org or search PubMed for studies on chiropractic care and GI health.
• Missed our previous episodes? Check out Episode 7 for more on pediatric care, and Episode 8 to learn about the physics of stress!
• Next Week: Tune in for Episode 10 where we will discuss Healthy Aging and the truth about degenerative disc disease.

Call to Action: Have you tried probiotics, diet changes, and GI specialists without success? It might be time to look under the hood. 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 who might be suffering from unexplained GI issues!

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. Welcome to another episode. Welcome to episode nine. Of 12. So if you've been watching this along, you've heard different me talk about different areas of chiropractic can affect your health overall. Can I have a general overview of chiropractic trying to break it down to a bunch of different episodes. This is episode nine and this episode I promised talk a little bit about gut health, GI health. You know what's going on with your digestive system in chiropractic. Why is it when people have digestive problems? They come to my clinic here in Rockford, Illinois and get a chiropractic adjustment. I briefly hit this talking about newborn babies and maybe a little bit. Last week we talked about stress and how stress works. You see your gut. We are learning more and more has so much more to do than just digesting lunch During COVID, a lot of us learned about the role of the gut and the immune system. Turns out the gut and the immune system are so closely related, and as we look at things like autism and other areas of. F nervous system functions. We look at permeability issues where toxins are allowed to sneak through, and we know if you have a healthy gut, it's a good defense to toxins. But if you don't have a healthy gut, what they call leaky gut syndrome, you can more permeable or suspect to toxins getting into your system and wreaking havoc on you creating autoimmune issues. So today I wanna talk about the gut health and what chiropractors have to do with it. I am gonna focus on a couple areas of your spine. I'm gonna start off talking about T6. This is the one that my father used to discuss every Monday night. Every Monday night, my dad did a healthcare class here to teach people about chiropractic. He didn't have social media. We could do videos or podcast. So he had a classroom built in our office and every Monday night he would give a class with these giant. Posters he would put up and talk about things. I know when I first got here, I'm like, dad, let's do a PowerPoint instead. It's a little more up to date. And I he really knew those posters pretty good. But he did. He did do a PowerPoint. He actually worked with Palmer College to take his slides that he did the paper slides and turned into an actual presentation. So he had switched over to that, but he did this Monday night forever. Today we use channels like this to do the exact same thing my father always did, and he always talked about heartburn, indigestion, seeing between your shoulders. You have vertebrae called you a six thoracic vertebrae. T6 and T6 has nerves that come out, most of us that go directly to our stomach. And when we eat something, our stomach knows exactly how much acid to make because it's, we've had it before and our brain learns what we're eating and knows how to digest it. It. So it goes into your mouth, the nerve and your mouth sense what you're eating. Tells your brain, Hey, we're having a ham and cheese sandwich. And the brain says, oh, we've had that before. And it sends a signal down to your spine. A T 6 and T 6 goes to your stomach and controls how much stomach acid you make. This is why the first time you eat something, you might get an upset stomach. because your body doesn't really know what to do with it yet. But the more times you eat it, the easier it is to digest. So the signal goes from our mouth to our brain. Our brain, and our spinal cord. Spinal cord to the stomach., If you have a subluxation at T6, meaning that the T6 vertebrae is under stress or misaligned, and it's telling the body something's wrong here, so it locks it up to protect it. And there's chemicals that get released until those muscles will lock up and keep it protected so it doesn't get any more messed up. And those chemicals hit the muscles around there, lock it up, make it tight. That's where you get that. Pain between your shoulder blades, but those chemicals also go down the nerve root into the stomach until the stomach we're under stress. Now, a stomach under stress has to respond one way and only one way. Maybe two ways. One, it can either expel everything in your stomach and you vomit. You ever been really stressed out and felt nauseous, you know what I'm talking about. Then the other thing it'll do is it'll overproduce stomach acid. If it doesn't know how much to make, it'll make too much. If you were living in the wild and you didn't make enough stomach acid, the food always come back up and eventually you'd starve to death. So as a failproof mechanism, it's better to make too much and not make enough. You overproduce a stomach acid and that results a heartburn, indigestion. Now there's heartburn you get because your health is bad and there's heartburn you get because you eat bad. This isn't affect the one that I eat bad. If I just had a, I saw these cheeseburgers with donuts for the bun with bacon and all kinds of sloppy stuff on them. If you eat that's heartburn you earned. Your body says, what are you eating? And it gets really mad at you. But if you're getting heartburn and other things like GERD and stuff like that, you don't really know why. because you're eating good. It could be because of a T6 subluxation. Now again, we don't have an adjustment for heartburn. We have an adjustment that fixes your T6, which helps the nerve flow to your stomach, which makes your stomach healthier. In return, the heartburn and indigestion should go away if that was the cause. Now, another area where people come to us a lot now is bowel issues, constipation, irritable bowel. They come to see us all the time for this. And if you watched the previous episode, I believe it was episode seven when I talked about pediatrics, to take care of kids. A lot of kids come to see us little babies, and the mom will tell us they haven't had a bowel in a couple days. And I always say, Hey, if you're in Rockford, Illinois and your pediatrician tells you something you don't like and you want another opinion, come see the chiropractor. So moms will bring the little babies in and they'll tell us, the baby has had a bowel in two or three days, and I'll adjust the baby's hips. And the baby instantly has a bowel. So let's talk about that. What's going on there? Even to have a bowel, it takes nerves. Nerves have to speed it up or slow it down. If you have a subluxation in your, where your thoracic spine, your lower ribs and your upper lumbars come together, those directly innervate the small intestines in the colon. If we adjust you really good there. Sometimes I'll even tell you, Hey, I don't know what your plans are, but the area I just adjusted, you can create you to have a bowel movement so you can plan ahead. Very common, very common, right after we adjust someone, they have that situation. So if you have constipation or irritable bowel, sometimes a trip to the chiropractor can make a big difference. So we adjust the other area. The other area of course, is your pelvic bones. If those areas are misaligned, same thing can happen. A lot of times we put people on their sides, we adjust them and we see them do a two step, but they want to get out of the room with us because we know what's going on. So we graciously let them leave because we know it's about to happen. So we usually get some pretty fast results with that. Sometimes faster than some people like, but nevertheless, we tend to get good results with that. Now, why is this so important? We talked about it. It doesn't matter how good a food you eat, how good your diet is, if you can't absorb it and take the nutrition in. What's the point? So as chiropractors, were able to give you those adjustments to help your GI system work properly and functional so that way you can absorb the food you eat and the nutrition you get. Think about that. Think about if you're not getting nutrition you want to get, because even though you eat good, but your GI system's off. And it's going through you too quick or too slow. You can't absorb the things you need to absorb. And so what happens? You become internally inflamed and internally inflame somebody is hyper inflammatory, meaning all the little aches and pains become big aches and pains. And so if your diet's off, your whole system's off, and if you can't absorb your diet, even if you're eating it right, then you can't get the good stuff outta your diet, then you become chronically inflamed. And every little ache and pain becomes a big ache and pain. Every little pinch here, little lower back problem here becomes bigger issues. And so when you get the chiropractic adjustment and we restore the nervous system going into your GI system, all of a sudden we have this huge change and your body starts to heal. To heal and get better. So if you've been having these GI problems, if you know someone that does have massive GI problems, usually what we'll do, I know if you come to my clinic here in Rockford, we'll do an exam. We'll see how that T6 feels. We'll feel how that lower back pelvis combination works. We'll have you lift a leg, twist this leg, bend and twist this way, bend and twist. That way we'll take some x-rays of your spine. It's always good to look under the hood and see what's going on. So we'll take some x-rays of your spine to see what's under the hood. We'll see what the misalignments are, and if we see these misalignments and we see these problems, a lot of times we could point them out to you. We can help you. Again, we don't treat these things. We treat the subluxation by getting rid of the subluxation. And improving the subluxation. We improve the nerve nervous system function and the turn the body starts to function better. And over time you heal and correct and you get healthier. Also, if you didn't hear me talk about kids with the constipation, go back and listen to episode seven. I, I haven deeper, but if you have a little kid with bowel issues, please get them to come see us. It's so important to these kids because their nervous system's still developing and it growing and maturing. And for them to be hyper inflamed during this process, it could be really, really detrimental. So please get those kids in right away. We can take big, big adjustments. So if you tried your probiotics, you tried your prebiotics, you've tried your postbiotics, you've tried eating better, you tried changing your diet, you've tried doing different things, different GI specialists, you continue to struggle. Come see a chiropractor, what do you got to lose again? The chiropractor should be able to show you through examinations and X-ray evaluations, whether or not you'd be a candidate. So if these are issues you're having, go see a chiropractor. Now, remember, you can ask a GI specialist. You can ask your family doctor if you should go see a chiropractor for these things. But they're not educated on what chiropractors do or how a chiropractor could help. So asking them, you could probably gonna get a, don't go there, or, I wouldn't do that if I was you, because they just don't know. So only person qualified to answer to that question is a chiropractor. If you don't wanna take my word for it, go to chiropractic.org. That's our national association. From there, you can find all kinds of research papers and data. Go to PubMed, P-U-B-M-E-D, Google search it. You'll find all kinds of articles about chiropractic and how it's helped people. So don't suffer, don't be sick, and don't allow your GI problems to become immune system problems, inflammatory problems, and everything else. Go see a chiropractor, see if the chiropractor can help you. I hope that helps us. I talked about kids. It's important when you age too. People under chiropractic care tend to age better, tend to do better overall. So if you're worried about how you're gonna feel when you're older, what's gonna happen to my body as I age? I come back next week in episode 10. We're gonna talk about how the health, how to age healthy at a chiropractic clinic. We got some fun things to talk about in that episode, especially if you don't anyone with degenerative joint disease or degenerative disc disease. I'm gonna tell you how it's not really a disease. I'll talk to you next week. Thank you.