Dr. Blair & Asthma

 

Asthma is a horrible disease, and it’s unfortunately an extremely common one. Dr. William Blair knew the struggle all too well, and his own experiences gave birth to the ground-breaking Blair technique. In this episode, we look back on how Dr. Blair’s battle with asthma took him to a chiropractor who practically doubled his life. Learn what inspired him to always look for “the better way” when treating diseases and finally be able to breathe life. We also go through a little bit of history of the Blair technique and why it continues to change lives today. Moreover, our hosts Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley talk about some tips on staying healthy and keeping your immune system active during the holiday season.

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Dr. Blair & Asthma

Dr. Bagley, how are you doing?

I’m great. How are you?

I’m doing excellent. It has been wonderful. I had several new patients that have come in from another doc that since retired and unfortunately, passed away, Dr. Matthias. A couple that hasn’t been didn’t even know that he passed. It is very sad.

That is always heartbreaking.

They are all grateful that I’m able to take care of them now. I had one patient. She hasn’t been in since 2018. I got a new picture of her. She is going to do great.

We had some outstanding results. One lady had several years of chronic pain following a couple of car accidents. She didn’t think that she wanted to live like this anymore. It has been a few weeks of care. She says, “I have a new lease on life.” It makes it a good day to be a chiropractor.

I have an ex-Marine who has been having these ups and downs since we started the care. He was like, “This is different. Normally, I have to slouch to be comfortable. Now I can stand up straight and tall.” He and I will probably sit down and do a one-on-one interview at some point in time for the show because he is pumped. We will probably read some of his comments over the past couple of months because he is prolific and verbose when it comes to words. Afterward, we will talk about knives. That probably isn’t pertinent to what we are talking about.

It is probably not great for the show, but it may be a different show. I bet there is a knife show out there.

There are several.

You know all about it.

I don’t need to be spending money there.

What we were going to talk about was the history of the Blair technique, who Dr. Blair was, and what brought him into chiropractic in general.

What is curious about Dr. Blair’s experience with chiropractic is he didn’t think chiropractic was going to be able to help him. His family moved him all over the country because his asthma was horrible from a young age. They were all over the place. I’m going to have other Blair docs giving me grief about this because I should know this off the top of my head. I taught it enough times. He ended up having asthma so badly, even in a dry climate. He was not projected to live much past 25 at the time.

This was the 1940s, do you think, at this point?

It was 1950 or so when he got up to Palmer.

He was suffering in the 1940s.

His girlfriend, who later became his wife, says, “You are going to go see my doctor, Dr. Leon Halstead.” I can’t forget that name. He gets his first atlas adjustment. He loves it. Dr. Blair was already analytical at this point in time. He is enamored by this technique. He was like, “I have to go learn how to do this.” He and Dottie Blair, I don’t think they were married at the time. I’m not sure what the timeline is on their marriage, but both of them pack up and start driving up to Davenport, Iowa, where Dr. Halstead had learned the cervical techniques from Dr. Palmer.

He is on his way up there. Here is the funniest part of the story. He is doing great. His breathing is good. He has no problems. He visits a friend along the way. Back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, there were hundreds of chiropractic schools. They were all over the place. The early diplomas for chiropractic not only allowed you to practice it but also teach it because they wanted this young profession to proliferate quickly, which was weird because there were four schools in Davenport.

I see there are benefits there, and there are things that probably were taught not right.

As he is driving up, he is visiting a friend along the way who is also in chiropractic school. They say, “We adjust atlas as well. Why don’t you start classes here?” He starts classes at this point, and about a few weeks into the program, he goes out of adjustment. His asthma flared up significantly. He goes down to their clinic, and some of the lead docs in the office say, “This is what we did last time. Can you adjust my atlas?” They tried. At the end of it, they said, “Son, you pack your stuff up and make your way to Davenport because that is where you are going to get better, and that is where you are going to learn what you want to do.

For our readers, Davenport is the birthplace of chiropractic. This is where D.D. Palmer discovered chiropractic, and this is where his son B.J. developed the profession. At this point, B.J. is in charge of the school, and this is now Dr. Blair up to his pilgrimage to get the lifesaving care he needs.

Here is the other thing that people need to realize. We had made this joke before about the schools that you and I went to because I went to Palmer College in Davenport, Iowa. You went to Logan College in St. Louis. Both of these are on the Mississippi. I have had silly arguments about which city has worse humidity in the middle of summer. It is one of those things when you start comparing, and they are both bad that if St. Louis wins, it is by millimeters as opposed to by miles.

The one thing I will say that I don’t regret about not being there is that we don’t get as much snow.

This is true. You don’t have snow, which goes to my point. There is more humidity in Davenport. Either way, humidity is horrible for an asthmatic. It is not a good situation. Dr. Blair is going through chiropractic school, probably living in one of the dorms on the third floor of the one-student building. That was an old building when he got there. It was at least 100 years old at that point in time. This is a great building. It has been renovated. I’m not going to say it has a smell.

I bet it did back then.

Old buildings have smells.

There could be mold and all things that could affect somebody with asthma.

He gets through the program. It is a two-year program at the time. He graduates top of his class with honors. He heads back to Lubbock, Texas, almost immediately. That is where he set up his small little practice. Within a year, he had to draw up a new facility, which was up until the Blair Chiropractic Clinic that Dr. Gordon Elder now has taken over and moved to a more modern location.

They ended up in not a great part of town.

It wasn’t a great part of town. It was an old building and had problems.

I’m thankful that Dr. Elder took over that. He is a great chiropractor. If anybody is reading in the Lubbock, Texas area, that is your doctor there.

When we say Lubbock, Texas area, we are talking about the 300 miles because oftentimes, that is how far people would go to see Dr. Blair. Dr. Blair saw all of the oil tycoons down there. Patients came and flocked to him because of how precise he was with his analysis. This was before he developed the technique that we now practice. He was always looking for, “How can I do this a little bit better?” He understands how bad his life was when he had asthma. The adjustment that got him better was life-altering.

 

 

The argument about the old toggle recoil that you and I have both practiced at one point in time that got Dr. Blair thinking about it was there are occasions where you will do the analysis 100% right. Something is innately different, and you couldn’t see it on the X-rays the way they were taken. You had to adjust them from the other side. There wasn’t a good explanation as to why at the time. Sometimes you find this out along the way, but, in this case, it was Dr. Blair’s mother-in-law who needed to get adjusted from the other side. He was trying to figure out how he could make sure he didn’t have that situation twice.

What was incredible about Dr. Blair is that he didn’t say, “What is good enough?” Nothing was good enough for this man. This man wanted perfection. He wanted to figure out systematically why things worked the way they did and how to adjust somebody in the most precise way, which is incredible. All of us, Blair chiropractors, owe so much to Dr. Blair. It is interesting that he figured this out through interaction with his mother-in-law. You don’t want to piss off your mother-in-law.

 

 

He liked his mother-in-law, apparently, but he ended up looking at things from a different lens. This is where he found eventually finds his particular views that we call Protractor Views. With the CBCT, Cone Beam CT, I have turned it, and I’m like, “There it is.” I can see how the listing sits differently. The patient I hadn’t seen since 2018 was in now, and the course had changed. I’m like, “There it is.” It was clear as a day when I started dialing in, and it changed.

When we are talking about articular views, articular means the joint. When we are looking at the joint on someone, we are looking at right down the line where the joint lines up. If something lines up, we can see it. If it is not, it is doing that. On this one, it is overlapping. When he’s talking about articular surfaces, we are looking at how joints interact with each other and what makes them misalign.

For those people who are reading this and don’t have time to get to the video, I understand. The way to think about X-rays when we’ve traditionally taken them, there were a couple of things going on. As they would take a picture, you would take a picture from the front and from the side to get as best an idea of what 3D is.

New technology allows us to get a volumetric picture that effectively gets something out of the Ironman movies that we have seen where he is doing all the modeling around his arm. We had to turn the angle so we could look straight down the joint because almost none of the joints are square. As we look forward, a few joints are square going forward. As we look at the sides, a few joints are square to the sides. You have to look at that joint in order to see the proper and the true misalignment.

That is what Dr. Blair had figured out. He eventually developed an adjusting technique that addresses those more exactly than the old auto toggle technique addressed. It is neat because once you understand that most bones are moving forward and backward instead of left and right, you have to reevaluate how you can adjust a person and how you get them back to health and healing. This is why we see such great results because sometimes it is a matter of putting the phone back into place in the right direction. That is what it took to get somebody well.

Dr. Blair’s life was extended three times what they expected him to live because of upper cervical work, especially the work that he eventually developed. I talked about this last episode. There are many people, myself included, where my sinusitis goes away when I’m in adjustment. It comes back sometimes with a vengeance when I’m out of adjustment. I see many people who have had asthma, allergies, and respiratory issues, in general, get better once we get their heads on straight.

I don’t know how many times I adjust someone, and I’m getting them off the table. They were like, “I can breathe through my nose again. I have never been able to breathe through one side of my nose.” After they have rested, they can again. They call us magical. I’m like, “It is not magic. It is how the body was designed to work. It is designed to work correctly. We needed to remove that interference.”

Chiropractic is not magic. It just looks at how the body is designed to work and it simply removes any interference. Share on X

I don’t know how bad it is around St. Louis, but around here, we got fields everywhere. It is surrounding everything. It has been such a dry fall that as they are coming out of the fields, all this dust, all this particulate, everything is in the air, and people are being exposed to this. A couple of my minor cases are like, “Doc, I’m not sure if I’m in or out. My sinuses feel bad, but I live out in the middle of a cornfield or a wheat field.”

They put their heads back on straight. It is not going to be an immediate thing in those cases. It might calm things down. The other problem is the allergen there, and the thing is constantly there. Some people were like, “Now I can deal with X, Y, and Z because the hyperreactivity is not present anymore.”

That gets into where we talk about allergies. When we are talking about allergies from mold or pollen, we all think about sneezing, coughing, and asthma reaction. Allergies could also be things that you eat. There can be people with allergies to this hyperreactivity that their body is sensitive to it, but maybe because they are out of alignment. Their body is hypersensitive. That is why they go full anaphylactic. It is not that we, as chiropractors, fix allergies. That is not what we do. What we do is fix the reason their body could have some hyperreactivity, and that starts with the central nervous system.

We move from allergies into cold and flu season, where everyone is already having problems. We will talk about the immune study another time.

Cold and flu season is one that gets me because I hate that we call it a season. The season is fall and winter. There is no cold or flu season. There are three things that we do wrong during cold and flu season. Number one is we don’t get enough light. Dr. Schurger and I are not going to get enough vitamin D no matter what we do.

Everything north of Atlanta is the pearl.

In the past September, you could get enough vitamin D from the sun. You have to supplement if you want to keep your vitamin D levels high.

I got something there. I had a patient pick up a bottle.

I’m glad I said it because I need to take my dose. I didn’t take it yet. I’m not going to go overdosing. You need to talk to your doctor about what you can take personally. I take a lot in the winter. Number 1) The vitamin D levels tank. Number 2) In the holiday of Halloween, we start eating way too much sugar. You got the holidays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. It’s sugar overload. People are decimating themselves with sugar.

It is nice if you have a little bit of sugar at the Christmas party. The problem is you have seventeen Christmas parties between Thanksgiving right through Christmas. You have your family Christmas stuff, which might be the dad’s side of the family, the mom’s side of the family, and the other grandparents. There are 3 or 4 Christmas parties right into New Year’s, but we skipped Thanksgiving. We completely skipped Thanksgiving because you can’t have Thanksgiving without a wall covered in pies. You might have this bitty little Turkey and side dishes, but you got to have walls of pies, and they are gone.

We got big turkeys in my house.

I know you have two turkeys.

The third thing is, as you talked about the seventeen parties, we got stress too. Stress is known to decrease the immune response. Sugar is known to reduce the immune response. Our immune response is not great if we have low vitamin D levels. It is the trifecta that becomes cold and flu season, where it is all self-induced. We can fix that.

Stress, sugar, and low vitamin D levels decrease the immune response. This is the trifecta that becomes cold and flu. Share on X

They don’t even have to come to see us to fix that.

They don’t have to do that for us.

People can simply say, “I’m not going to eat all the sugar. I don’t need to do the candy tax on the kids. I’m going to be good.” You pick the days when you are going to eat your sugars and say, “That is where that is.” We are recording this before the time change. I don’t know if this is the last time change. There is some talk, back and forth, that they are going to stop doing that. Not only that. It is hard for many people. Most car accidents and heart attacks are right around the time change. As we fall back, car accidents increase.

It is because it is pitch black when people are driving home from work.

They are not used to it. They are not paying attention. In the spring, when you spring forward and when you lose that hour, it is directly out of The Princess Bride when he sucks minutes and hours of your life away. They suck one hour of your life away and increase heart attacks for the next two weeks. It’s no joke.

There is no reason for it anymore. This is silly.

We have light and all these other things. We can go on about blue light for being stressed, the days getting shorter, and everything else. There are ways to solve it. On that note, my teachers tell me that when they start under care, they don’t get all the bugs and problems they have because they are under care, even if they are not changing their diet and not dealing with their stress. They are dealing with their stress because their head is on straight, and their body is better able to deal with the stress.

You can say no and decrease the parties you are going to, but you can’t decrease the amount of stress you have. I use this way to speak to patients about it. It is like, “If you think you got a dam and water behind the dam, the water during stressful times overflows the dam. It is creating all of these symptoms.” Chiropractic can’t decrease your water, but we can increase the height of your dam. If we increase the height of your dam, you can deal with all the stress. It doesn’t reduce it. You can handle it better.

That is what we want to do to get everybody working better so that they are more resilient. They are able to deal with their day-to-day lives. The kids are screaming, and you are like, “They are kids. That is why they are screaming.” You can deal with them a little bit longer in your day. That covers most of what we wanted to talk about.

It is a good little episode on how to stay healthy through the holidays. Also, what an amazing person Dr. Blair was that came up with this technique that has changed the lives of millions of people at this point.

I had a couple of thoughts. I’m going to throw them out here before we wrap up. I had thought that we should talk about migraines. We could probably do a deep dive on migraines. We have been teasing about the immune study for too long it didn’t read. Go get your head on straight. That will help boost your immune system. We will talk about the details of that at another time. We will figure it out when we get to it.

Make sure everyone likes and subscribes. Please leave a five-star review because that helps more people find this. Half the reason we are doing this is for more people can find, not just myself and Dr. Bagley but other upper cervical docs and Blair docs who can help people get out of the stress and pain they have been suffering with because they were like, “How come other doctors don’t know about this?” We don’t know, either.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Before we wrap, I got to tell you about this one young lady that finally got adjusted. We will get a picture of her X-ray. She will join us on the show at some point. She was worried. She was like, “I don’t want anyone touching my neck.”

I don’t want anyone touching my neck, either. I want only particular people touching it.

I pulled up her picture and the radiologist’s report. I’m like, “Let’s go over some of the weird stuff going on in your neck right off the bat.” Her atlas should connect in the back and be a perfect ring. Her atlas was not. There is also something called the dens or the odontoid. Your first bone neck is the atlas. The second bone in your neck is the axis. Your head and your atlas pivot around your axis around a little finger that comes up through the atlas, which is called the dens or the odontoid. Hers floats above.

She got these two things going on. Plus, a while ago, she was in a car accident that she still has pain and suffering from. I’m telling her because her friend, who has been under care for about a few months, is saying, “He is gentle. He will be easy with you. It is nothing to worry about.” I’m like, “First off, the amount of force we are going to use is going to be less than I would normally use on any other individual. Second, I love chiropractic, and chiropractors do great work.” In the case of her neck, it is something precise that anyone else might cause bigger problems and cause her to have a significant problem. She would require a lot of surgery if this became completely unstable.

We did the adjustment. She gets up. She was like, “I feel like it is flushing down the back of my neck.” After she got up, I had her wrist for 30 minutes. I got her up, and she was like, “That doesn’t hurt anymore.” I’m like, “I know.” She was like, “I was nervous.” I wasn’t sure about this, which is why it has been a month since she has been in from when we took the pictures initially that she was like, “We are going to do this.” They have been like, “What are we going to do? There is some money involved.” It is going to get them better.

I love cases like this. I’m excited. I was talking with Chris Thornberg about your cone beam and how we are scheduling stuff because he is going to upgrade mine for something else around the same time. He is coming up to do yours. I’m excited for you to start seeing some of these. You were like, “We are going to do things a little bit differently for you.”

It is going to be awesome. I also already have a list of patients I want to get cone beam CTs on.

Everyone is coming in, and we are going to do everybody. You are going to have your cone beam set up right before Thanksgiving. You are going to be like, “Do I want to go get turkey, or do I want to take another 7 or 8 pictures before lunch?”

I’m excited. It is going to be awesome. Doc, it was good talking to you. It was a great episode. Remember everybody, like, subscribe, and find us online. If you have questions, write some questions in the comments. We will be looking out.

Watch out for The Blonde and The Bald on YouTube. We got that all set up. That will be there as well as on all the apps. We will talk later.

 

Important Links

• https://KeystoneChiroSPI.com/
• https://PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com/
• https://www.BlairChiropractic.com/Dr-William-Blair/