Chiropractic science states that the body is self healing if the nervous system is working properly. Since 20% of our central nervous system aka the brain for most people, is located in your spine, I feel my nervous system should be working very well because I get a lot of chiropractic adjustments. Yet I have some health challenges. Many patients have much worse challenges. The original chiropractic premise also stated that we needed more than just getting our spines adjusted. We needed to have good nutrition, a good positive mental attitude, exercise, and rest. Living in today’s world we’re probably having a tough time getting all of those things and that may be why more people require more adjusting and even still, things are not always going optimally.
Sure it could have something to do with our toxic environment with sensitivities to just plain common foods. Heavy metals and toxic chemicals are everywhere in our environment and in us. Just old scars can affect chronic pain syndromes since our Fascia connects our entire body, from head to toe, with no start or ending point. It is loaded with nerves and it can produce problems in areas you would not associate with old injuries. Coincidentally, I always use two tools to warm up patients by stimulating the nervous system. Ironically, they are called myofascial release tools. My first 3 semesters in school taught us that none of that stuff was necessary, just get in there and adjust and that is still my greatest tool, but addressing tight fascia is now a must in my routine.
I saw a startling statistic yesterday. 16 – 34 million Americans continue to experience symptoms of Long Covid. 80% of long Covid patients continue to experience fatigue. 85% of patients with long Covid symptoms two months after their initial infection continued to have symptoms a year later.
What is the connection of those statistics to the first two paragraphs? If there is something making an organ sick, it becomes a source of nerve misfiring and can create muscle spasms. The complexity of our nervous system can be simplified by knowing that everything is connected to everything. That is quite different than the reductionist theory of medicine, which was, we need to separate the organ systems to understand them better. Medicine the way it is practiced now has a high failure rate because it cannot see the forest from the trees, they are focused on temporarily getting rid of a symptom in the specialty area that they are focused on. They are not concerned with going up stream to discover what caused the failure in a supposedly self healing system.
All this to say, I used to think I fixed people because they felt better after an adjustment. But they don’t last as long as they used to in this toxic world we live in. If you are a part of this world you could probably benefit from a chiropractic adjustment. You might also want to consider more exercise, rest, better choice of food, preferably real food, not the processed stuff that we know is making all of us the consistently the sickest industrialized nation on earth for at least the last 50 years. Being number one is not always all they crack it up to be. It’s hard to keep a good mental attitude knowing things like this, but we have to try anyway.
If you found this useful you can thank a certain very high powered CFO that refused treatment the other day. After what I thought was a brilliant explanation for the benefits of chiropractic delivered at his huge mansion, he replied, I’m not getting my back cracked and walked out so fast, leaving me in the dust with his personal assistant, who by the way, thought I did a great job. After 43 years of treating patients that mostly came to me when all medical treatments failed them, I thought I was doing rather well with cracking backs. (For a great understanding of why a fast stretch cavitation of a zygapophyseal joint, aka cracking backs works so well, on my website next to the social media buttons is an image of a brain with the words, Things You Should Know, written inside of the brain. It will take you to 5 different articles, the first one is titled, The Chiropractic Adjustment and why you want them. If you read it you will have a better understanding of how your body works. Sadly a better understanding than most medical doctors I speak with.)
I spent an additional 6 years in a post graduate neurology program resulting in me knowing better why such miracles were occurring. Sadly, the CFO didn’t think I was as smart as I do. I always feel bad when I’m unable to help someone for one reason or another. Often I found the simpler I keep it the more patients enjoy my visit. But when someone acts like that I know they have fallen victim to some very vicious marketing initiated by the AMA in the 1950’s and even though in 1987 they lost the world’s largest anti-trust suit in history, the damage they’ve done to humanity prevails.
Since just about every other commercial on T.V. is telling you to ask your drug salesman, AKA doctor for a pill they control the news outlets and quite often the news outlets will paint chiropractic in a very bad light and most of it is based on a re-analysis of a study performed in the 1950’s which has been proven to be totally false, but whenever a lazy graduate student has to do a thesis they are often pointed to an easy one and bring up that old story that always makes it to the news. One reason why Spanish patients don’t hesitate to go to a chiropractor is because the AMA never bothered to do their bad mouthing in any language other than English.
43 years ago when I started practicing, I had a beautiful office in my home town, and often personally drew blood on my patients to help analyze their entire health and corrected issues through a system of what is called today, functional medicine. Let me tell you, it was very stressful. I do a lot of emergency work now, which seems a contradiction to the chiropractic concept of trying to avoid emergencies and to fix it before it breaks. Let’s face it, I find that kind of work less stressful and the patients more grateful. At my age, I’m focusing more on my health and that includes decreasing my stress, so I do emergency chiropractic because getting someone truly well takes a lot of work, work that patients are not always willing to take on. That would include me when I see a delicious looking desert.
I still recommend to every patient that they should follow up with a good chiropractor in their neighborhood for regular care to receive the bigger benefits of what chiropractic truly has to offer, which is better health, not just making your boo boo feel better. But lately, I’m a boo boo specialist and when someone has developed such acute severe back pain that they can’t walk, you’ll appreciate my way of doing things.
Neck Pain and headaches seem to be the 2nd biggest reason people call me. I know many of my colleagues are not comfortable and not willing to treat cases like this as aggressively as I do, but I do it that way because that is what is going to get patients back to their regular selves the quickest. Honestly, I don’t feel like driving to your house 20 or 30 times.
The now thousands of Chiropractic management services available all agree on one thing. A chiropractor should be seeing patient at least 60 times. It’s called a PVA, a patient visit average. In N.Y. mine was around 65 and my manager thought I was doing a very poor job. Now my PVA is about 1 and I’m happier. Often my patients are too because they want to get back to being able to do the things they would normally be doing as quickly as possible. Again, I still do my diligence and explain to them that they should seek follow up care. Sometimes they prefer me, but if they live far away, I prefer they go to their local chiropractor. I always let them decide.
