As a chiropractor with over 42 years of varied clinical experience I’d like to say that I’ve seen it all, but the truth is I’ve hardly seen any of it. Keep in mind I’ve worked in a hospital, an Urgent Care Center, Personal Injury Clinics, a ballet company, well let’s just say for a chiropractor, I’ve had the privilege to have treated a giant variety of people in many different situations.
While there are thousands of diseases listed in the Merck Manual, as a chiropractor I’m probably not allowed to treat almost all of them and I’m not treating diseases, I’m treating people. While a hair dresser can give a stranger nutritional advice, it is extremely frowned upon in my profession. If we were to dare say take an over the counter anti-inflammatory, that could be considered practicing medicine without a license.
While many patients do fall into a certain category or syndrome, it is kind of obvious by now that most patients seem to have a unique if not bizarre set of symptoms all of their own and if the world goes on another 20,000 years each and every one of them could end up in the medical books. For example, if a patient named John I.Q. Public has a left hand that when moved in the opposite direction of their right foot creates flatulence, they’ll be in that future book with what will be known as John I.Q. Public Syndrome.
While an ole fashioned chiropractor will be quick to say they don’t treat any disease, what is it that we are doing that has gotten our patients better? Keep in mind most patients go to a chiropractor as a last resort. New polls show that people trust a chiropractor more than a child molester, but less than most professions. We’re down there with used car salesman. Maybe because of this, patients come to us last, after they have failed all forms of modern medicine, including physical therapy, injections, surgery, acupuncture, psychology, psychiatry, church, etc. because they are desperate beyond any sense of rationality at that point. What a patient hates more than anything is that their doctors don’t know what is wrong with them and have not afforded them a successful treatment.
I like to joke that if you go to 80 different chiropractors in Los Angeles you’ll get 80 different treatments but it is not a joke, it is the sad truth. But what is it that we’re doing even if we’re all doing something different that works so well? While most chiropractors adhere to a few basic techniques or some very modern if not questionable what I call voodoo techniques, what is the common denominator that is getting these phenomenal results? It’s quite simple, we’re changing your nervous system. The oldest ideas in chiropractic were that we were moving a hard bone off of a soft nerve. We now know that is not the case and if you had a hard bone on a soft nerve I’d be sending you for surgery. Thankfully, most patients don’t have that extreme of a condition. But they do have nerves that are not firing optimally.
What is the best way to make a nerve fire optimally? Those 80 chiropractors mentioned above will have 80 different opinions on that subject. After graduating from the Carrick Institutes Post Graduate Neurological program and passing federally recognized national boards in neurology I’d like to think that my opinion may hold a little more weight, but I could be wrong, but I’m usually right when it comes to these things.
So let’s say you have headaches. You could find yourself very busy doing very questionable things depending upon what type of practitioner you go to. In Chiropractic we have what would be considered factions that are similar to religions. We have some people that want to whack away really hard on your neck when your ligaments have been torn in a severe whiplash automobile injury. That’s probably not such a good idea. We have patients that the thought of going to a chiropractor is so scary that they seek out the chiropractors that don’t do chiropractic.
I’d like to say that I have taken almost all of the different techniques over the years, but in the last decade alone probably a few dozen new ones have been invented. When I was younger I’d spend my weekends in hotel rooms taking technique seminars. After a while I was beginning to hear such crazy stuff that I would challenge the inventor of this technique only to discover that they basically made all that crap up. But to a young practitioner hoping to find the answer that would solve their patient’s many different problems, these fairy tales seemed fabulous. Many young doctors got married to a method that was totally fabricated, yet it worked, for some. Why?
Not to sound like the Riddler from Batman, but what is the greatest drug of the tens of thousands of drugs in the world, which is nothing at all. You guessed right, the placebo. Works better than most drugs it is tested against especially the new designer ones out today that are designed to keep you taking it for the rest of your life. When I went to school, we were interested in finding out what gets a patient better. That is very frowned upon in modern medicine. Am I daring to insult many of my colleagues and say that what they are doing is no better than a placebo which again, by definition is nothing at all. I guess I am, but doing nothing at all is really good if it gets the patient better.
But how did the patient get better? Again, the common denominator is their nervous system changed from a state of being below the threshold from where nerves fire optimally to be over that threshold level where we get those miracle stories we hear about everyday. So, what is the best way to get over that threshold level?
Nerves are very particular so lets just say you need to be very well nourished for them to work. So with all things being equal and you truly are well nourished what is the method that works best to get a nerve to fire above threshold? Hint, look back up at the title of this paper.
Indeed, a fast stretch cavitation of a Zygapophyseal joint is the most powerful and safest way known to modern medicine to change the central integrative state of your nervous system and that is where the miraculous results arrive from. What exactly is that? Yup you guessed it, it is a chiropractor cracking your neck, which is very popular on Instagram these days. Sure I could tell you a story, or you could hear a sermon in a religious gathering, go to a psychologist and all these wonderful things will change your nervous system, but it is not going to do it as fast as a good ole back cracking.
I have colleagues that will examine a shoe you donated to them and fix you over the phone by playing with your shoe and they have gotten people better. But that takes a lot of faith on your part. I have colleagues that would have a heart attack if they watched me adjust someone’s spinal joints because they incorrectly believe that the human nervous system can’t absorb that kind of digital information. Even my advanced training in neurology by the most legendary brilliant chiropractor in the world, who teacher’s medical doctors at Harvard feels that it could be overloading people and he is right, some people can’t handle all that digital information going into the brain so rapidly and they might get dizzy, nauseous, or just not better, maybe even worse. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that is extremely very rare situation, but they can arise. Some graduates of that course absorbed something very different than I did and all they are going to do is place a barber’s old fashioned massager on a well thought out toe and that will be your treatment. Depending upon the state of your nervous system and belief system, that may do it for you.
But what has worked best over the decades is an ole fashioned chiropractic adjustment. That is why I returned back from my voodoo days and started practicing the most powerful and safest method to stimulating the nervous system, cracking your back. I relearned that from taking that Harvard Professor’s very intense neurology program. But why you may ask? Why do I have to do that to you? Well because you are paying me to get you better and that is going to work best in 99.9% of the situations. At least that is what I found and have a big issue being intellectually dishonest with myself. The cognitive dissonance I developed from listening to so many chiropractors teach their specific technique that may or not be real took a toll on me for awhile. So after taking just about every seminar you could imagine I found that what works best is cracking your back, more specifically your neck but why?
The nerves in your spinal joints are the fastest, largest, most powerful nerves in your body. There are 250 times more of them in your upper neck joints than below in your lower back joints. That means I have a 250 times better probability of success if I crack your neck no matter how much a patient might beg, bargain, plead, for me not to do that as if they were being sent to the executioner.
By the way, what gave me the idea to write this is a patient called me off of Google the other day and the search term was chiropractor that will crack your back. Apparently, she had been going to that other brand of chiropractors that did something other than chiropractic, you know those practitioners that advertise gentle. I take great offense with that word because of course what I do is gentle.
I can adjust your neck without you thinking that you’re going to have to rush off to the emergency room like I did after going to one of my less skilled colleagues. This leads me to saying that there are many in my profession who can’t perform it, so they do these other things that are not as effective. You could go to one of these so called scientific Applied Kinesiology chiropractors that will test your muscles in your hand until you are exhausted and after an hour of that they, if you’re lucky, will have ended up cracking you anyway. Or they may not. You could go to a guy that will roll an egg off your head after carefully x raying you and while they are a specialist in that technique, I think you would have a better experience going to someone that is actually doing chiropractic.
Some people love getting clicked with an activator gun because they are not getting cracked. The thought of getting cracked sends them into convulsions. I often get patients that specifically ask if I do the activator -non cracking technique and I ask why they are asking and they say because I want my back cracked. Different strokes for different folks they say, but I say if you are going to go to a chiropractor you should want to receive chiropractic care. I have no problem with all these other methods, glad people have choices, I just wished that they called it something other than chiropractic. Chiropractic got to where we are today because we adjusted people with our hands, moved their spinal joints and they got tremendous results.
When I was a student at the New York College, we were very well trained medical doctors. Other chiropractic schools made fun of us because we were so medically trained and oriented. But we also were taught at the time what were the 5 or 6 major accepted chiropractic methods from those other colleges. Our teachers were old time chiropractors sharing their decades of clinical wisdom with us eager students. But because we thought we were scientists because that was most of our 5 year curriculum, the hard medical sciences, we gravitated to the younger teachers with their pseudoscience techniques. We made fun of the old geezers. But the old timers would yell at us to stay away from that new nonsense, they knew what worked best. Now I’m the old geezer saying the same thing. After many years of trying a lot of the “voodoo techniques”, I know that the original techniques of manually adjusting a spine work best for most patients. For the few patients that don’t respond well to the cracking techniques I’m grateful that I have so many colleagues that offer something very different. As I stated above, they too get good results. Now, there could be a thousand more wild if not more bizarre techniques out there. I don’t know, but it seems like there is a new one every few weeks. Makes it hard to refer a patient because you have no idea from their office description exactly what they are doing.
Sadly, the only college that I’m aware of that is doing a good job in the ole fashioned back cracking department is Life Chiropractic College and their graduates I find are the ones that I’d go to. My alma matter, New York Chiropractic College, has gotten rid of the name Chiropractic in their title. The Los Angeles school of Chiropractic no longer exists either. They have some kind of unified health sciences title now. In the future, it is going to become very difficult to find a chiropractor that knows how to adjust your spine, AKA cracking your back.
Sure, I may seem a little arrogant, but on the other hand, most of my patients have been rejects from medical doctors and chiropractors. Often for my entertainment value, I ask what they received and after rolling my eyes to the point that the patients are concerned for my health, these patients do much better with what I call nothing fancy, just basic chiropractic. Of course that is a two way street. Every doctor has patients that they cannot help and that is why they should refer out. Many chiropractors would rather chew their limbs off than refer their patient to another chiropractor. Because I now only do house calls, there are a lot of chiropractors in Los Angeles that are wondering if I’ve had some kind of psychotic break because I recommend to all my patients that they receive regular care and if I know a good chiropractor or two in their neighborhood, I will give the patient their phone numbers.
Lastly, if you think I’ve been a little hard on my fellow chiropractors, you should review the case notes when I asked what treatments they received from their M.D. or emergency room. So many of them are blatant malpractice. Sometimes they get lucky and receive the correct diagnosis. Now comes their typically ineffective treatment plan. Worse, some of these treatments are incredibly torturous.
I really don’t understand why people would prefer some of these methods, some which are truly agonizingly painful over going to the safest most effective treatment known to medical science, which is getting your back cracked, just in case you haven’t been paying attention. And we don’t need anesthesia to perform it, although for some of my patients, I wish we could use it when they get hysterical over a treatment that has been performed billions of times with great results. Of course keep in mind, if you have a medical condition like a heart attack or stroke, you don’t want to be going to a chiropractor. But most people have chronic pain syndromes that can be effectively treated with very safe chiropractic adjusting. How safe? Well the malpractice insurance companies know who is hurting who and my premiums are about one hundredth of my counterparts. Who are people afraid of? Chiropractors.
Who do they call after being told on a commercial that what they are going to ask for can kill them? Well it’s not me that they’ve been told to call. Ask your doctor if an untimely death is right for you. Said another way, the 3rd leading cause of death in America, according to medical doctors is a visit to your medical doctor. It is called Iatrogenic disease. While the news likes to point out that one out of a billion case that died attributed to a chiropractor it is usually debunked although that part doesn’t make the news. This disinformation is like listing that a patient died from Covid even though they were shot in the head. If they tested positive for Covid,that was how the cause of death was reported.
There is a famous case in Canada that was used to outlaw chiropractic in one of the provinces. The women died a month after going to a chiropractor. They said she had a stroke. If we were to tear your vertebral arteries you are not walking out of the office because you would be dead instantly and that doesn’t happen. What the news neglected to inform people of was that this woman was obese, a smoker, on birth control pills, and was diabetic. All very well known stroke risk factors. So the point of all this is, you’ve been indoctrinated to think bad things are going to happen to you if you go to a chiropractor and the opposite is what is true.
The old joke, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated means in this case, that the news frightening the public away from chiropractic so that they will choose their sponsor’s drugs, may be what is preventing them from actually getting better.
