Every career has interesting beginnings, and looking back on them can reveal valuable lessons. Beth Bagley puts Dr. Frederick Schurger into the spotlight as she asks him how he transitioned from engineering to chiropractic treatment. They discuss how this non-surgical method delivers a neuro-structural shift to the body and how to find the right chiropractor to address your specific needs. Dr. Frederick also opens up about the time he suffered from trigeminal neuralgia and the proper way to treat this life-threatening situation.
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How Dr. Frederick Schurger Found Chiropractic Treatment
We are on episode 3 of the show. In the last episode, we went over your testimonial, and then you ran around Kansas City. How was that?
It was amazing seeing these young athletes performing at their national tournament. My two girls, who are thirteen-year-old twins, got fourth place overall and second place in their division. That was great to see. It was exciting and fun to watch.
I went to a conference.
I saw pictures of you.
Oddly enough, I’m running into somebody else. I’m like, “I recognize this guy from somewhere.”
Was it Greg Gersten?
Yes. I ran into Greg and a couple of others who I got to hang out with and chat with. I got to hear some good stuff. I got to hear Liam Schubel speak and a couple of others.
What conference was this?
It was the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic.
That is why I didn’t go because I’m not in Illinois.
That’s where I was. I ran around afterward and hopefully got all the equipment I needed for a good hunting experience. We shall see.
I’m looking forward to getting some deer sausage or something.
If there is a backstrap, I will bring a backstrap.
In this episode, one of the things I want to start off by asking you is, what is your chiropractic story? How did you decide to become a chiropractor? What led you here?
This was a circular path because I had a little bit of chiropractic care growing up. It’s not quite as close as you did. I had a local guy who I wish I had had a chance to talk with him, but we never did. We never connected. We were talking about connecting, and that never happened. My first experience was when I was in an engineering school. I went to Rose-Hulman in Terre Haute, Indiana. I was planning to be an electrical engineer in all sorts of fun stuff. Somewhere in my sophomore year, I have the worst back pain ever. I’m miserable. I’m like, “The chiropractor helped me in the past. I’m going to find a chiropractor.”
How old were you during this?
Probably 19 or 20 or somewhere at that point. We are looking around and we find someone. I don’t even know a thing about insurance at this point in time. Apparently, I have health insurance through my dad. I connect with this guy down the road. I’m used to going in, finding the problem, and working it as many chiropractors do. If you are better, you are on the road. Maybe you need a couple of follow-up visits in short order.
This guy, before he would do anything else, he wanted to do an exam. I understand that an exam is important. At the time, I’m like, “Doc, it hurts back here. Get that fixed.” We do the exam. He figures out what he finds. He wants to do all this electrotherapy, tens, and heat. He can’t adjust me if my back hasn’t gone through this and relaxed. My brain is thinking, “You got newer stuff. That sounds great.” It didn’t help.
Your first introduction to chiropractic is what we would call more of a conventional chiropractor.
I would even say that my first introduction to a chiropractor was a conventional Palmer chiropractor because he was a Palmer doc who focused on adjusting the spine. Whereas my first adult introduction, in this case here was to a doc that wanted to do every therapy under the sun before he would even adjust me, which I have never responded well to.
I had another guy years later, which we may touch on, who was like, “We got to massage you before you are relaxed enough.” This is a full-spine conventional chiropractor. They are going to focus on everything from your atlas down to your sacrum. We will talk about why that is not accurate later. I go about 2 or 3 weeks, and I’m not feeling better.
What I did was I took my wallet from my back pocket where it had been because that is where young men put their pockets in Billfolds because it looks cool. I moved it to my front pocket. I did some stretching. I chatted with my uncle who understood this stuff a little bit better than I did, and I was better. I was also completely like, “I wasn’t ever going back to a chiropractor ever again.”
They didn’t know what they were talking about.
They didn’t explain it well. Quite honestly, I felt like they wanted to build the insurance. At a certain point in time, I’m like, “I’m not getting better. Why am I still coming in?”
A lot of people will have that experience. Unfortunately, that might be their only experience with chiropractic. Why would they go back? The truth is if you have a bad dental experience, it is not like you are never going to see a dentist again. You got to find a different one. Going back to that question of why would something in your back pocket cause your back to hurt?
Aside from the fact that I am sitting in class for eight hours a day, I’m going back to the fraternity house and sitting at my desk doing another eight hours of homework. It was Engineering and Rose-Hulman had a very aggressive schedule. I’m sitting all the time and running around. Sure enough, that got my entire hip off balance. I’m never quite sitting level. I took that thing out of my back pocket. Almost immediately within about a day, it was better.
What that brings up in my mind is some of our patients who might have a broken foot and are wearing a boot. The same thing could happen. If the boot is this big and the shoe is this big, they are walking unbalanced over and over. Do you know what starts hurting? It is their back. As chiropractors, we have answers for that. A lot of times, they were like, “Take some ibuprofen. It will get better.” It can cause long-term damage. I’m glad you figured that out before it caused long-term damage. Fast forward, how did you decide to go to chiropractic school?
I graduated from Rose. I start doing my Engineering stuff. I’m all over the country. They got me as an installation engineer. For what I was doing, we call it fancy robot jockey. I’m traveling all over the country and doing good. I’m trying to get in shape, trying to lose some weight, and focus on my health at the very least. I dropped from about 240 pounds down to probably the 190s over the next couple of years, trying to get in shape.
I’m looking and frustrated with work. I’m like, “I want to get out of this line of engineering and go to another line of engineering project management type thing.” I’m practicing kung fu at this point in time. I am having a ball doing that. It is what my mind, body, and soul need for different experiences or a break. I have a fall on the mats as I would multiple nights a week.
The next morning, I woke up and all of a sudden, I couldn’t get out of bed. I’m lucky that I’ve got a medical doctor three houses down the main street where I was living. I walk on down there. I’m like, “I re-dislocated a shoulder that I dislocated in high school. Let’s get a new x-ray on it and see what’s going on.” It feels like I have dislocated my shoulder. It hurts everywhere, and there’s nothing. It is still a grade-one dislocation. It hasn’t gotten any worse. It is stable. She gives me some meds. At that point in time, I make an appointment with a friend’s chiropractor, who has been trying to get me in. They said, “If you ever need me, I’m here.” I said, “This is one of those times. This is a structural problem. If anybody is dealing with structural problems, it is a chiropractor.”
I see him. I think we are still dealing with the entire spine. This is another Palmer graduate. He is focusing on correcting this vertebral subluxation, certainly from the Palmer School. It is a full spine. I got some shoulder stuff, upper back stuff, and lower back stuff, which is my main complaints. I go in there. He does a workup and takes X-rays. The guy in Terre Haute didn’t take any X-rays. He said, “We are going to put you on all this stuff.” He finds the problems and gets them fixed. I’m like, “I feel brand new.”
I realized that this chiropractic stuff was allowing me to do my kung fu more, which I loved. I’m like, “I keep on knocking myself out of adjustment doing the kung fu. I better learn how to do this stuff. I got a friend who I can reciprocate with and who can work on me so I can keep on doing all the stuff that I’m going to do.” I can remember almost as clearly as we are talking now, I had on my desk right here, this would be my workspace, I have my computer up here. This was at the engineering cubicle I was at. To my left, I have an application for an MBA that was half-filled out for at least 6 or 8 months that I immediately pitched because I realized, as I was taking some classes, that this chiropractic thing was something I wanted to do.
Fast forward, I got to Palmer College in 2002. At this point in time, I am finding someone to take care of me. I’m still having all these problems. My lower back still hurts. I need to get adjusted at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. I get into the student clinic, and they are working on me. They are taking care of me. Sometimes they can get that lower back to clear out. Sometimes they can’t. This went on for a year. During this time, I ended up taking an outside class that was not part of the normal college curriculum. That is one of these techniques that has a lot of other things going on with it.
I ended up paying my own money outside of college. The college takes care of you and gives you free care as a student. That is a nice bonus, but I ended up paying out of pocket for somebody off campus sometimes twice a week for most of the summer going into the end of my first year. At this time, we are also introducing the first upper cervical class, the Toggle recoil that you talked about in the previous episode. I’m like, “This is great stuff. I’m going to learn everything that I can. I’m going to experience all of these techniques because all of them work.”
This is the problem with the guy from Terre Haute. I don’t know if he knew any other techniques other than physiotherapy. He practiced what he knew. This is the good and bad about chiropractic. There is a different chiropractor for every person. Some patients fit our mold, and some patients fit somebody else’s mold. That is quite all right.
There is a different chiropractor for every person. Some patients fit arm mold, and others fit somebody else’s mold. Share on XI always say, “I’m a good chiropractor, but I’m not everybody’s chiropractor.”
One of my classmates is Dr. Justin Brown, who is down in the South Florida Miami area. He was starting his clinic and I said, “Let’s get me some X-rays for the Toggle recoil.” He takes the pictures and gets me adjusted. I feel great. It is the beginning of August. I joke about this being my chiropractic birthday because it is close to my actual birthday. I get adjusted, and my lower back pain is better. I’m like, “This is neat stuff.” That is the beginning of August. By the end of August, I had stopped going to the other doctor because I wasn’t getting any value out of that anymore. In early September, I realized, “My lower back doesn’t hurt. There is something to this upper cervical work.”
I’m going to interrupt you to bring it back to a patient story. I had patients tell me at first, “Can I go to my regular or conventional chiropractor even though I’m seeing you?” I will tell them, “Sure. I’m going to be adjusting your neck. Have them not adjust your neck.” Many times, they don’t need to see that other chiropractor anymore. That is what you saw too, which is cool. I’m not saying that works for everyone, but it works for me. I get it for you too.
The other thing I immediately noticed was I was getting checked at least once a week or sometimes twice a week because my lower back hurt that much. It took me a while to realize it, but I didn’t need an adjustment for over a month because of that first atlas adjustment that I got on my chiropractic birthday as I like to put it.
With an atlas adjustment like a Toggle or the Blair technique, remembering back to your first adjustment or subsequent ones, was it painful to get that adjustment? Did it hurt?
That adjustment did not. Justin also practices a technique called NUCCA, which is another one of the upper cervical techniques. We will include Toggle as the sixth one, but they are five that are popular that we tend to refer to people. His technique is gentle. If you feel it, they are doing something wrong. With him, I didn’t. At a later class, one of my reciprocating docs that we were working back and forth as we were learning some of the advanced Toggle work, he was a little deep on his adjustment
We could say, “With time comes more precision.” You will find that a doctor that has been doing it for more years will have a gentler adjustment and not such a deep one. An upper-circle adjustment shouldn’t hurt. Sometimes, it is tender when someone pokes at you, but the actual adjustment should be gentle and precise. It shouldn’t hurt.
The upper circle adjustment in chiropractic treatment should not hurt. It should be gentle and precise. Share on XThe times that I find it as we are setting up and getting on there, that is usually when it is most tender for patients and people. In any case, 3 to 6 months later is when we started getting into the Blair work on campus.
I wish that would have been on my campus.
Brent Owens was part of our first Blair class on campus. That is when I met him.
His wife went to school with me.
It is funny how small the world is and how connected we have become because of all of these people. If you could find the class to be offered, sometimes you could take it even if it took you a five-hour drive and three weekends to do it. It is what we were doing at the time. One of the interesting things about the Blair work that was different for me, my lower back pain was gone from my atlas, but I was still having that chronic sinusitis that I would have on a regular basis. I was sneezing, hacking, and coughing. It was bad. When we got me under the Blair work, all of a sudden, that goes away. It was still bad because I had a hard time holding my adjustment. I have a couple of concussions. I liked beating myself up.
Going through a school, you probably were over-adjusted.
We stopped doing anything but upper cervical at that time for my neck. It was obvious when I was out of adjustment, and we got it back in. The worst part was it would be 4 to 8 hours before the sinus drainage would taper off. I get adjusted, and I have to go take a nap for 2 to 4 hours just for that immediate symptom to go away. Now, 15 or 20 years later, it is not nearly as bad when I need to get adjusted. It is there. I might need a couple of hours before it dissipates. It is less problematic now. It is a road that takes a while for things to heal because it is not an overnight treatment as it were.
In the past, I had a headache, I could take an Advil and 30 minutes later, the headache was gone. Is the headache gone or just the symptoms of the headache? As chiropractic, we are not treating symptoms. What we are treating is a specific misalignment. If we get the specific misalignment, all that does is unlock the body’s ability to start healing, which is super cool.
It is one of those things I wish people could see. That is what I’m hoping for with this show. It’s so people can see why we are excited about this stuff. It’s that we have had personal experience. Most chiropractors, especially upper cervical chiropractors, didn’t wake up one day and say, “I want to be an upper cervical specific chiropractor.” Most of us have stories about how we discovered this for ourselves. It is exciting to see our patients come in. Some of them even become chiropractors. The thing that warms our little chiropractic hearts the most is when they decide to change the lives of others around them with chiropractic care.
That was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. Chiropractic school tends to have about 10 trimesters or 11 quarters. I can’t remember. Maybe it is 12 quarters. It takes about three and a half years to condense a five-year program together. At the end of the second trimester, I remember a couple of my classmates are both practicing upper cervical elsewhere. They come back from visiting another college saying, “We got to do this upper cervical. It is all atlas access.” My engineering brain says, “There are 24 movable segments between here and the pelvis. How can two take care of the rest?”
This is why I much prefer using the phrase neuro structural shift to describing what we are addressing with these misalignments because there is such a profound neurological impact on the body that is driving all of this. I had a patient come in now in her 50s, and she got adjusted on Monday. I asked, “How are you doing?” She was like, “My neck still hurts, doc, but my lower back feels awesome. How did this work on that?” I told her.
It is a global shift. This one thing is the foundation of a house. If the foundation shifts, the house will start to get cracks. The doors don’t open and close if that foundation shifts. In a house, if we fix the foundation, those cracks still have to be fixed, but they won’t keep getting worse. The foundation of our body is right here. When that shifts a little back, it will cause lower back pain to people.
My big joke is if you have ever watched Jimmy Neutron, there was an episode where they are off on some planet battling two other races. One of the race’s brains is in a fishbowl with a spine hanging off it. The brains are floating around because they are able to do that. It is the funniest thing. I think about that and I’m like, “We can’t have our brains and our head float around and gravity. We need this body to get us around and move us around in gravity.” The principle still stands. We got to keep this level, and that is what our body’s trying to do. If that upper neck or that foundation is out of place, we are done. We got problems.
If you had to do it all over again, would you have changed your path at all, or do you think you learned through your path?
I learned through my path. Let’s be honest. I would do business things differently. There are a lot of business things I would do very differently.
We make mistakes there.
Sometimes you don’t get taught these things, and sometimes you’re already bullheaded enough that you were like, “I think that is what I’m going to do. That is going to be fine. No one is going to tell me otherwise.” The few things I might do differently are getting the cone beam sooner and getting the advanced technology faster, if only because of the stuff that we are seeing now on a day-to-day basis.
I had a patient who had Meniere’s. He came in to see me back in sixteen and hasn’t been back since early seventeen. That was the last time she was in. She was seeing another chiropractor, and she had been doing fine up until about a while ago. All of a sudden, her vertigo and Meniere’s is coming back now. To put it into perspective, she doesn’t have a right eardrum. I don’t think there is anything there. There might be something deep in there. She has an ear but no eardrum.
Is that surgically removed or just not there?
This was how she was born. There were a couple of other odds and ends in that area, but her atlas was out the same way. Generally speaking, we updated the angles, and she has been feeling great since she got adjusted. It is amazing the stuff we see. Let me tell you why we got the cone beam. I have shared this one with you, but not here on the show because this is new. I pulled the trigger for the cone beam because I had what is described as trigeminal neuralgia and had a small tree. It was about 40 feet tall. It decides to fall on my head.
I don’t know if I have heard this story.
In fairness, I was chainsawing the base, trying to knock it down, and it went the wrong way on my head. Here is the crazy part. That was Memorial Day weekend. I got checked Thursday of the following week, and everything was fine. I am not out of adjustment. Something switched because it was still under the control of the body but not out of adjustment.
The functional changes haven’t happened yet.
I don’t know what happened, but something switched. On Friday, I was up in the middle of the night trying to deal with the worst sinus facial pain that I had ever had. It is all the sinus stuff that happens when I’m out of adjustment. That came in such a severe fashion. It is funny because I can feel it right now talking about it. It is right through here. It felt like a knife in my face.
In hindsight, I realized it was trigeminal neuralgia. I went to get adjusted on Saturday morning. Let’s put this in perspective. If the second coming happens while I am sleeping, I’m screwed because I will not wake up. If it is in the middle of the night, between roughly about 10:00 and 6:00 AM, it is not happening. My wife Jean tried to wake me up, and it was not happening. I’m dead to the world. This had woken me up. If I had gotten more than three hours of sleep total in the night, I would be sitting in the shower with hot water coming down on my head, trying to deal with some of this pain. I emptied the tank.
For the audience, this thing called trigeminal neuralgia is also called the suicide disease because people that live in this amount of pain sometimes see no other way out, which is awful. We come to find out, we have an answer to this.
I get adjusted Saturday morning. I drive down to my doc’s office and he works on me. I go out to the car. He doesn’t have resting rooms in his office. I take a nap for probably about 45 minutes. I come back in and have him check me one more time. I think he did something else. I’m still having problems. I’m not nearly as severe. We come down from a 10 to maybe an 8 on Saturday. The rest of Saturday and Sunday, I was still miserable.
I see some patients Monday mornings. I hit the road to run down to Dr. Bono’s office in Glen Carbon, where he got one of these machines. He runs a new scan on me. Sure enough, something is out differently. I believe it was my second cervical, what we call access or C2. We get that put back into place. I can feel that intensity drop from maybe that 8 to a 3 or 4. That was the direction I needed to go in. I realized I needed this machine to be able to make the determination. If you are having that problem, we need to take that picture.
I don’t wish trigeminal neuralgia to be my worst enemy. I will adjust them after, but they should experience real pain. Suffering from trigeminal neuralgia shouldn’t. This is why I mentioned that I could feel the pain coming on talking about this. James Tomasi had trigeminal neuralgia, and he was about to kill himself. His book is What Time Tuesday?
He was talking about all of this. He had written the note and had purchased the gun. He knew what time everyone would be out of the house so that he could take his life. James was a Christian preacher and Born Again. He knew suicide wasn’t real. After he got his first adjustment, nothing happened. He got adjusted. His wife paid for the X-rays and for the whole thing.
He gets adjusted. They got a follow-up appointment the following week. She tickles behind his ear, and nothing happens. He goes back up to his pain cave, curls back up, shuts all the curtains, and he is sitting there on his bed, when all of a sudden, he has a moment of clarity. Maybe the twenty minutes that the pain diminished is enough for him to realize, “Something happened. I don’t know what it was.”
He realized it wasn’t God telling him he should commit suicide. It was the devil. That is how he tells the story. He ended up sending thousands of patients, but only trigeminal neuralgia patients, to this one doctor over in the Nebraska area. This is the beautiful thing about the upper cervical work that we do. It is not condition-specific. It is what is wrong with your body not functioning the way it is supposed to.
I love when I get questions like, “Can you help with and fill in the blank.” It is rare that I say no. I can relate everything to the nervous system. I don’t tell them that it is for sure going to help because we don’t know. If you have stomach aches and I find out that you eat Doritos three times a day, it’s probably not because of an upper cervical misalignment. There are some things that we can do to harm ourselves. If you have a health issue going on, this is something that should be checked. Even if you don’t have a health issue going on, get it checked.
That is why we love checking kids here. We check kids in this office not because they have something wrong. Sometimes they do, but it is because parents are getting amazing care. They want to make sure their kids don’t grow up and have issues in the future. Maybe 1 or 2 out of 6 or 10 kid patients will come in, and I will not even need to adjust them. There are many of them that will not need adjustments. As they get older and they are playing sports or they have been in a car accident, we are going to find something. Correcting it before they have symptoms is amazing.
I had this argument with my folks in the past, but it was a money thing. They didn’t understand that there was a health benefit for all of us little kids getting better. I’m a family of six and the oldest of six. When mom went to the chiropractor, one of us would get a go in too. What I didn’t realize that was probably a problem that I was having growing up was I had bedwetting problems growing up. All of a sudden, I found out later if I had gotten adjusted, maybe that problem would have gone away and I would not have been dealing with that for many years.
What makes sense with bedwetting is that the brain isn’t talking to the bladder, and the bladder isn’t talking to the brain. If those two systems aren’t talking to each other or not 100% talking to each other, the kids don’t know this is happening. Many parents get frustrated and mad.
If the brain and the bladder are not talking to each other properly, a person cannot discover the negative effects caused by misalignment. Share on XThey blame the kid. It is not the kid’s fault.
They’re like, “Why are you lazy?” There is a connection issue. All of a sudden, our connection ended if we said, “Why did you do that?” It wasn’t you or me. It was the connection.
Most people don’t realize the bladder has two places that shut down what they call sphincters. One that you can control and the other one that you can’t. There is a little area between those two where if even a little bit of drop of moisture gets between them, they both open like the floodgates of a dam, and you can’t control it, especially when you are young. It is not the kids’ fault. They need to get their head on straight. We can help those folks out.
As hard as being a business owner and a doctor is, it is rewarding and amazing. I hope by us doing a show like this, someone out there hears these stories and hears that there is hope. We are available in the Midwest. Dr. Schurger is in Springfield, Illinois. I’m in St. Louis, Missouri. There are chiropractors across the country who do this work. What is the Blair website where they can find a doctor?
It is BlairChiropractic.com. It is the first place they can go to. That will help them find at least a Blair chiropractor. If they need to reach out, we can certainly find somebody else who may be close to them.
Reach directly at us. A lot of times, it isn’t a Blair doctor in your area. There is probably an upper to say that we are the best. We still love our colleagues, and they are great.
Anything else we want to touch on?
No. I thought that was great. I loved hearing your story. I heard a lot of it, but I hadn’t heard all of it. Maybe you did tell me, but I didn’t remember about the trigeminal symptoms that you had. I do think everything that we go through as doctors lead us to be better doctors for our patients because we can use that as our fuel to why we want to help the next person.
We will be back and people will enjoy it more. We got some other ideas about stuff we should be talking about.
I was hoping we could talk about some science and things that might be coming out in the news that we can chat about.
Next episode, we will also talk a little bit about Dr. Blair.
He got such a good story.
We will touch on that next episode.
It was good to talk with you.
We will talk to you all soon.
Important Links
- What Time Tuesday?
- BlairChiropractic.com
- https://KeystoneChiroSpi.com/
- https://PrecisionChiropracticStl.com/
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