Did you know that some chiropractors do more than adjust patients during their visits? Sometimes chiropractors don’t even need to adjust you during your visit! That’s an excellent sign of healing, and that’s great news because that means you can go longer and longer between visits! On top of that, it might help with your allergies! In this episode, Drs. Frederick Schurger and Beth Bagley share the value of their profession and the importance of holding your adjustment. So tune in to this engaging episode with Frederick Schurger and Beth Bagley.
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Allergies, Crying & Holding Your Adjustments
Dr. Bagley, how are you?
I’m great. How are you doing, Dr. Schurger?
I’m doing excellent. Welcome, everyone to The Blonde & The Bald.
I’m the blonde.
We are glad to have you here for another great episode. We’ve got some good stories. This is going to be a fun one. This one will not be as spicy as the last episode.
That is a great way to say it. We were a little spicy last episode. We’re going to be heading into allergy season soon. In the Midwest, especially where we’re at, St. Louis and Springfield, we get some pretty bad ones.
I joke about it. Ever since I moved into this area, I call them the Illinois allergies. I’ve lived in the Midwest most of my life. I know you have, too, but I’ve been in rural areas most of the time.
You have, more than me. I’ve always been a big city girl, as in the suburbs. I’ve never lived in the country.
I have lived next door to a field and we’ve had the fields plowed. Around here, when the fields start getting plowed, there are all sorts of dust and chemicals breaking up into the air. I call them the Illinois allergies, which are spring and fall. We’re coming into that. A Cochrane study came out that says, “Masks don’t work for respiratory viruses especially.” We knew this. This is not a surprise.
What is taking place that helps us to not have all these allergens is this wonderful thing in the middle of our face. Mine’s pretty big. Yours looks much better than mine. We have these amazing noses. I remember growing up with a buddy of mine. We would go running track. His sister ran track, so he was going to run track. I was hanging out with him until show choir practice because we were both on that.
You were in show choir?
I played trombone. I never sing and dance.
I was in show choir.
That’s why we get along. I was the guy in the background playing the horns, and then playing the bass. I would hang out with him until practice and we were going for a run. We would be going for a run in the middle of spring, and my sinuses were dripping the entire time. We joked, “It might be easier to cut the whole thing off.” I entertained that thought for several years. Thankfully, I got my head on straight and that took care of it. These noses are designed to filter out a bunch of junk.
That is why we have little hairs in there that everyone wants to get rid of. Keep some of them in there.
Not only do you have hairs, but you have mucus and these three little bones that create air currents that do two things. It mixes the oxygen, CO2, and nitrogen that is coming in and out. It warms the air coming into your lungs. Especially on cold days, it’s so important to breathe through your nose. If you breathe through your mouth, all the filtration that is happening up here goes away.
In the show, Stranger Things, it was the first time I’ve ever heard somebody make fun of a mouth breather. The kids called each other, “That guy’s a mouth breather.” I realized it’s because when you’re breathing through your mouth, you don’t look smart either.
You can see how my face comes down and my chin is pretty even with my face, maybe a little bit of a jutting out into the jaw, which is what we want. When you breathe through your mouth more, the jaw retracts and you have a harder time breathing through your mouth. It causes bite problems and TMJ problems. We had a wonderful dental radiologist speaking at our last event.
She was great.
She was fantastic. I remember she commented on somebody else’s cone beam CT recently about a cavity that was going on. She was savage about it. It was so great because it was Dr. Steinberg’s patient and she said, “Send that over to the dentist. Have them pull that tooth immediately. There’s no saving that.” It was savage, but she’s great.
She was telling everyone that if you breathe through your mouth, it is going to destroy your mouth and jaw. You’re not filtering all the stuff that is supposed to be coming through, it’s going to destroy your health and your immunity’s going to get dropped. This is why there’s a great book by James Nestor called Breath where he goes into detail about this.
Breathing through your mouth will destroy your mouth and jaw, your health, and your immunity will drop because you're not filtering all the stuff that is supposed to be coming through. Click To TweetPeople talk about this book all the time. I have not read it.
You need to read it. It’s a fun read. It is a very technical book, but James brings you along through the story so easily. I recommend it to everybody. There are two books. There’s another one called Oxygen Advantage that came out maybe a couple of months before James’ book came out. I got through about five chapters, and I put it down. I saw it and I haven’t picked it back up. I read James’s book in a weekend.
You know it’s something.
Same thickness. Same content.
I’ve heard patients talk about this book. People who are not even in health fields like this book, so that’s incredible.
It’s a real easy read. If you still don’t want to read the book, go find the Joe Rogan podcast with James. It’s a great listen. James is a prolific writer and storyteller. He’s great. One of the things that he tells people to do is put tape over their mouths. Just a little bit of pore tape. If you have children, I’m telling you, put it on their mouths before they go to sleep.
You don’t have children. You cannot put a piece of tape on your kids. I get that you’re just putting it there because I’ve used mouth tape before, but no.
You have to train them into good habits at an early age. If that doesn’t work for sleeping, you can do it after dinner time. You put a big old piece of duct tape across their mouth, and then they’ll be quiet.
He’s joking. I don’t recommend putting tape on the kid’s mouth because they’re going to have a complex. You can recommend what you want.
I know many people who have done it for their kids.
I do think keeping your mouth closed when you’re sleeping is important. If you can’t do it, a lot of times that’s because you have some apnea or some airway constriction that’s happening.
This is why taping helps. Again, I know several people who do this. Another podcaster and YouTube notoriety, Mike Mutzel, he did that with his child. Honestly, within about a week, they didn’t have to do tape anymore because kids learn faster than adults.
Watch for your kids and see, and then talk to your doctor about that. Don’t just up and do it.
They’ll be fine.
Going back to allergies, there are a couple of things I like to tell patients that I do personally during allergy season. I still get allergies. I never got allergies until I was in late high school. I didn’t have any lick of any problems at all. I never had a sniffle until I got a little older because allergies can develop over time. You don’t have to be born with them.
The development of allergies probably had a lot to do with me not being in alignment. I’ll be honest because my alignment was getting worse through high school. It was terrible. There are a couple of things I currently do because I still get some allergies. They’re not as bad as since I started upper cervical care and Blair care. One thing I do to stop allergies from being as bad in the spring is I start taking a supplement called D-Hist from Ortho Molecular Products.
That brand, but not this product.
I started taking that in early March. I will start about a month before allergy season hits. I have two bottles at my house ahead of time, but my kids take them, too.
You’re living on the west side of St. Louis, where if you think about how the winds blow, they tend to blow east to west. As the farms and fields are getting plowed out west of you, all of that dust is coming across. That’s how you’re getting some of that as early as late March.
The tree pollen is what gets me and the kids the most, and I live right next to the woods.
You guys would have a lot of that.
The second thing I do is when tree pollen or grass pollen starts, you can see where you got that thick yellow on your car when you come out of your car and it’s gross. That’s when I start using the neti pot once a day. I like the neti pot because it helps me clean up my sinuses. I only use filtered water. I won’t use tap water because you do not want to put tap water up your nose and its saline additive to it.
Not everybody likes it. I can go through how I do it sometime because there is a special way to do it because a lot of people feel like they’re going to choke and die when they do it. There’s a way, and I had my kids doing it when they were 3 or 4 years old. If they can do it, anybody can do it. Have you ever used a neti pot?
From all of my years of swimming, I had never enjoyed any water going up my nose, so I’ve had a severe reaction, not quite an allergy, but very close to using one. I much prefer one of these nasal spray bottles. I have this one filled with 1% iodine solution in filtered water. With iodine, you mix it down from the 10% liquid to the 5% liquid. Just a couple of squirts up the nose. I do that in the morning generally to clean stuff.
That can help with viruses, too, I’ve heard.
That’s what they were saying. There was some back and forth. I’ve seen some research studies that were more inconclusive, but quite honestly, anything that rinses out the nasal passages. Sometimes if you’re in a situation where you’re like, “I’m not sure what’s going on,” once a day might not be enough. Maybe twice a day is what you need.
Now that you said, I use a nasal spray called Xlear, and it’s a xylitol solution.
I like xylitol generally, though you have to be careful around dogs. That’s my only worry about xylitol.
It can kill dogs.
Dogs do not like xylitol.
Watch out for xylitol gum because that at least has a flavor to it, so the dog might be more attracted to it. Watch out for xylitol in your house if you have dogs.
Both are great for clearing out the nasal passageway and keeping the moist. As we’ve been inside in the heat all winter long, we don’t have the moisture until the moisture starts coming back in and you can have normal Midwest humidity. Welcome to the Midwest.
I prefer that because every time I touch a patient right now, I am shocking them. I touch them and I shock them. They take their puffy coats off, walk, and sit down, and then I shock them. I was like, “That’s part of your treatment and therapy.”
That is also why I tended to take my shoes off in the office so that I’m not shocking everybody as well.
I’m shocking people and nobody wants to be around my feet. I want to talk real quick about the neti pot. If somebody out there wants to try it, you can get them at Walgreens and it’s relatively cheap. You take this little pot of water. It looks like a little tea kettle. You put lukewarm filtered water or distilled water in it. I will reiterate, please use filtered water. You do not want to grow stuff up in your nose. If you’re at Walgreens, buy a bottle of distilled water at the same time.
You put mixed little saline in it. Little packets come with it. On one side of your nose, you lean forward over the sink. You’re going to open your mouth. Mouth breathe like you said not to, but we’re going to mouth breathe during this. As you’re mouth breathing, almost like a pant, you put it up your nose. You’re leaning forward. It goes up into your sinuses, comes out your other nose, and drips down into the sink. The minute you close your mouth or try to swallow during that, the saline solution will run down the back of your throat and gag you.
You can do this. You can learn to do it. If it does go down your throat, you’re not dying. It’s just salt water. It will clean out your nasal passages. I always do it. For half the thing, I go one way, and then I blow my nose. I take it the other side and I go the other way, and then I blow my nose. If you have a cold or upset sinuses, it is soothing for them. I do believe that it helps clear out the days’ worth of pollen that your filter system has filtered out for you. If it’s sitting in there and you have an allergy to it, it could increase the inflammation. Getting that away, I like to do it before bed.
You made another good point there that the saline can be swallowed. The 1% iodine solution, anything that gets back into your throat, you want to spit out because you do not want to swallow the iodine. Saline is not a problem. We’re mostly salt anyways.
You don’t want to drink all saline all the time, but it won’t hurt you out a little bit.
That will clean you out in another way. You’ll be like, “Thanks. I didn’t want that.”
You had a couple of things more about allergies.
Two things quick on allergies. 1) My allergies have gone to almost zero with the exception of when I am in the middle of a field that is fresh pollen, or I’m cutting grass, or they are plowing the field. My allergies under Blair care, right to zero. 2) I had an assistant here in the office. She had horrible allergies and migraines forever. In fact, her allergies would trigger a migraine, but she’s under chiropractic care. Her migraines have gone away almost to zero.
We fly down to Atlanta, Georgia in April for one of our upper cervical evolutions. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated pollen the way that I saw it for the first time. I’ve flown all over the country, but I’ve never necessarily seen a full-on pollen storm, like what they get down in the South. Like you said, that green or yellow stuff over everything.
I had no problems with allergies. She had no problems with allergies. The only time she had a migraine is she was studying for something and she fell out of adjustment, and I had to adjust her. In about a couple of hours, she was better. It’s amazing what getting your head on straight will do to get you everything else. These other things are quite honestly just extras.
You got to have your head on straight first, but these other things help me. I used to have to be medicated during the allergy season back in high school because I was miserable. I don’t anymore. I haven’t taken allergy medicine in 15 to 20 years.
When I took it, I couldn’t function.
There are lots of different ones, but there are some that knocked me out.
That is why I would rather have a runny nose. When I was doing engineering, I would rather have a runny nose and be blowing my nose all day long because I’m like, “It’s allergies. Don’t worry about me.” Two or three hankies deep, I could work. If you’d give me an allergy medication, I’d be out for the day. It was no good.
Anything else about allergies? I’ve got a couple of things to talk about.
That wraps it up and you told me there’s something about you crying. Why have you been crying?
As a female doctor, I cry a lot. I’ve cried three times. Not anything about me. It’s that when people tell me things, happy or not happy, I cry. If they cry, I cry. I can’t stop. That’s just part of who I am. I cry at commercials. I used to be embarrassed about it, but I’m not anymore because it means like I’m an awesome human being.
I’m honored to cry with my patients. I’m honored that they would share things with me, happy or sad, that are so emotional. I’m sure there are other great doctors out there, but I can’t imagine going to my medical doctor and saying, “This amazing thing happened.” Them being like, “That’s right.” I’m very honored that I get to be a Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractor and have these emotional connections with people. It’s not a job. It’s the best profession in the world. You and I could make money in a lot of different ways.
We’ve had the offers over the years to make stupid money even.
Stupid money, because we got brains and we’re smart science-y people.
We’d been in some engineering field.
I’d be in molecular technology.
Stressed out to our nth degree.
Maybe. I might get to take better vacations.
That is a fact. We would take better vacations.
I would not have fulfillment and I didn’t back when I worked in biotech and stuff. I should have had this on my phone already. One night, I got an email that had this review from a patient whom we’ve been working with for 8 or 9 months. Do you mind if I read it?
Go ahead. Read it.
It’s a Google review. Usually, they’re two sentences like, “I like this doctor. She’s great.” This one’s long and I love it though. It’s so heartfelt. Honestly, this is how a person who is not a chiropractor explains upper cervical chiropractic to someone. I was like, “Yes.” What’s so cool is these are things that I say to my patients and some of them listen, which is incredible.
“In April of 2022, I developed a bad ear infection, which lasts for two weeks. Afterward, I continued to have feelings of pressure and sharp nerve pain in my inner ear, often spreading down into my jaw. I saw an ear specialist who suggested it might be Ménière’s disease, an incurable and disabling degenerative condition of the inner ear, which can eventually lead to severe vertigo attacks.”
“He advised a low-sodium diet and told me to call him if it got worse. I started low-key panicking when persistent tinnitus, another Ménière’s symptom, joined the inner ear pain. I decided to see what I could figure out on my own. A Google search on Ménière’s disease led me to an article on the Blair Chiropractic website. It stated that many supposed cases of Ménière’s type symptoms are caused by an upper cervical misalignment, not inner ear dysfunction.”
“I had nothing to lose. The low-sodium diet certainly wasn’t helping. I made an appointment with Dr. Bagley. X-rays showed my top three vertebrae. The very top vertebra C1 right next to the inner ears was indeed badly out of alignment, and my head was slightly tilting to one. It’s the side that was cradling a phone against my shoulder for the previous two years at my job.”
“The very first adjustment left no doubt that it was what I was needing. It felt like some pressure or constriction that I wasn’t even aware of had been released, and more oxygen was flowing into my brain. I felt euphoric. Subsequent adjustments didn’t have the same euphoria as the first, but as the weeks passed, my symptoms consistently became less.”
“Now, I would say that the issue is essentially resolved. I’m at the point where additional adjustments are preventative maintenance rather than addressing symptoms. I started the adjustments in June 2022. Now, it’s February 1st, 2023. It took about 6 to 7 months starting with biweekly sessions, then gradually reducing frequency to weekly, bimonthly, and then monthly.”
“I don’t have words sufficient to express my gratitude for Dr. Bagley. I found myself with a very painful and debilitating condition, and she gave me my life back. As far as I’m concerned, she’s an angel of healing straight from heaven. If I hadn’t serendipitously come across that Blair Chiropractic webpage, I don’t know what kind of shape I’d be in now, but it wouldn’t be good. Upper Cervical Chiropractic is legit. There’s no way some placebo Jedi mind trick could have resolved my symptoms. Now, I tell everyone who will listen about it. Erin and Dr. Shiloh have been thoroughly great and supportive as well. If I could give 500 stars, I would. Thank you, GK.”
That is awesome.
Isn’t that the best review? This person did not identify themselves on the review, so I won’t either, but I’m going to give a big old to this person when I see them.
That’s fantastic. That’s one of the many different conditions that respond well like that. I talked about a couple. They happen to be in and she’s still doing better. They started in ’18, and it’s now ’23, so it’s been 5 years, but she’s functional. She’s got problems.
This does not solve everything. Upper cervical is not the only reason people have problems, but it solves a lot.
It does. It’s a foundation that you can build everything else on. Nutrition’s great, food is good, but if your body is not working the way it’s supposed to. I always like using the analogy, you can have the best toaster and the best bread in the world. If you can’t plug that toaster into the outlet to get electricity, it ain’t going to work. You will never have toast. By putting that head back on straight or putting that atlas back to where it’s supposed to be, you got electricity. You got things connected and working the way they’re supposed to, but everyone heals at different paces.
That’s great that in six months their life is back together. They are not afraid of living. Like other people, the one that was in it is living her life. It’s little things. She’ll hold the remote, and then all of a sudden, it goes flying out of her hand. Her husband says it’s very comical. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t have cameras around the living room to catch it. Everything starts at a certain pace. Sometimes you got to get checked more frequently at the beginning to figure out what is going on.
I love that they brought that up. The frequency of care between conventional chiropractors and Blair Chiropractors, there are some big differences. The first thing I always think of is what holding means. Getting in a Blair Upper Cervical Adjustment is precise. It’s made for you. It’s made for your particular bone structure and the misalignment that has occurred on top of that bone structure. What holding means is when we put the bone where it was supposed to be, and now all the signals are telling us the link checks, the nerve scan, and palpation. They are telling us now it’s where it needs to be and when it’s where it needs to be, I don’t have any business touching it. Hands off.
I had a patient in. After she got adjusted on Monday, she hadn’t been in for a while. She was having all sorts of weird stuff going on from visiting with another doctor. She’s like, “What is happening here?” I took a look and I’m like, “We got to get this.” He needs to come to my seminar, which is another story altogether.
We got her C2 adjusted, which was stuck and locked out of place. Sure enough, she’s like, “That feels better.” All of a sudden, she starts getting these tingling sensations going through her body that she hasn’t experienced. It’s like this wave of energy that’s turning back on. Like your patient said, the euphoria after the first adjustment, what level of health did that person come from? How low were they after the adjustment? How high did that first adjustment get them to?
What we do by checking people on a regular basis early on is to keep you up at that higher level so that you don’t fall back into that horrible pit of despair. You’re slowly bringing yourself out as your body heals. It’s a cyclical cycle that takes time. Right off the bat, you need to get checked a little bit more frequently to make sure something weird isn’t going to happen.
Some upper cervical chiropractors have used this. I don’t know where the basis is, and maybe you can tell me. For every year you’ve been out of alignment, it takes a month of healing. I don’t know what proof there is on that. I do feel like it’s somewhat true.
For every year you've been out of alignment, it takes a month of healing. Click To TweetThat’s one of those anecdotal things where there’s no way to define it. It holds true based on years of clinical experience. Dr. Brooks was the one who told me that the first time. He had been in practice for 40 years at that point in time. God bless him.
Rest in peace. What a great man.
He was. That’s what his experience was. People need to understand that sometimes you can hold for months at a time and sometimes you can hold for minutes at a time.
It depends on what’s happening in your body at that moment.
I remember grabbing a cup of coffee, looking out the window, and all of a sudden, seeing a complete accident happen in front of your office on Dowdy Ferry.
That is a notorious place for accidents there.
You could just pull out of a parking lot. I’m not even saying you have a car accident. I’m just saying, the stress of driving through traffic might be enough to set you off, or you decide to go ice skating in the parking lot, which I don’t recommend. I just had a soon-to-be patient. I found out that she used to go see Dr. Mathias beforehand. She made a comment, “If I go to a new chiropractor, they’re going to want me to start three times a week for the rest of my life.” I’m like, “We don’t even do that. It’s two times a week.”
Sometimes if they have been under upper cervical care at even another type of upper cervical doctor, we might see them two times a week to establish what their pattern is. Once we see that you’re holding well, we’ll decrease it. Typically, in my patients, it’s about six weeks of twice a week. There might be some holes in there, but I see more of a pattern of holding where I can say, “Let’s do once a week.” I typically do that for about 8 to 10 weeks after that, of once a week.
It varies on the individual. I have some people that within four weeks after their first adjustment, haven’t needed another correction. Everything is staying where it’s supposed to be.
That is some people.
I usually recommend a package of visits. I’m like, “We don’t need these couple of visits. Let’s extend this out.” Maybe what’s going to happen is instead of needing 6 weeks of once a week, they need those 8 weeks or 10 weeks of once a week. Just because that’s where their cycle is before we can move them to 2 weeks, 3 weeks, or 4 weeks.
I have some patients whom I’ll see every 6 to 8 weeks, depending on how well they’re doing. I’ve got one who is certainly in her late 80s, if not early 90s, who has been holding since September. We had the hardest time getting her to hold. All of a sudden, it’s been doing good. Thankfully, she hasn’t gone face planning anywhere. She had a couple of those in the past year, but not recently. The other nice thing is, especially with the cone beam, it is so much easier. If you have an injury or accident, or something changed, we might take you.
We just pop in there and figure it out.
Now, if someone’s not holding as well as they are, we can take a new cone beam and figure out where things are. This is important because again, the goal is not to see us for the rest of our lives. I joke with patients, “There are some great ways to lift weights that will buy a boat for your orthopedic surgeon. You’re not going to buy boats for us. We don’t like boats. We’re not boat people.”
I’m not a boat person either. Boats are expensive.
More importantly, we want to get people well and happy. We want those kinds of testimonials because we know that person.
I honestly want to make my money seeing more referrals that we get from people that we’ve helped. I’d rather do that than anything. It’s not about the money. It’s about the more people that we see. I don’t need to see you twice a week for the rest of your life. Honestly, I would get tired of some people.
There are some people that I’m like, “Mary, I love you, but I don’t need to see you for another month. I know you’ve been in here every week for the past six. I know you love talking, but I can’t have that conversation with you. I’m sorry. I’m just going to schedule you out for a month, especially when you haven’t needed to be adjusted in two.”
Honestly, people know. The first time you go to an upper cervical chiropractor or Blair chiropractor like us, you are going to be skeptical because it’s different than a conventional chiropractor. A lot of times, conventional chiropractor adjust you the first time they see you. That’s them. That’s fine. I’m not dissing them at all. A lot of times, we’re not taking X-rays. It’s cookie-cutter. It’s like, “I feel tight here and tight there.” Pop. That does help a certain percentage of people. I know it does.
It got me into care.
I started off as a chiropractic patient getting that care. I was never taught. I never understood the idea of not just feeling better but functioning better and staying that way. Now that I realize that it’s about function and the body working in a balanced way so that I can be healthy for a lifetime, I get checked regularly. Prior to that, I just waited until I hurt. That’s what a lot of people do with conventional chiropractors and a lot of conventional chiropractors are okay with it. That’s their practice.
They’ll say, “Come back when it gets super bad.” I’m like, “I don’t want to wait until it gets bad. That’s silly.” We don’t have to do that. The idea of preventative care, protection care, or maintenance care, all of them mean the same thing, is we want to preemptively strike. We want to get on top of this before we get into trouble. Anyone can do that.
It’s just a matter of deciding that it’s important and valuable to you. Most people don’t walk into my office thinking, “I can’t wait to be a chiropractic patient for the rest of my life.” They want to get it fixed and never see me again. I totally get it. Once they realize, “It is incredible having my head on straight and my body functioning the way it is,” most of them decide, “I agree. I might want to stick with this maybe once a month or quarterly,” or whatever their body allows them to hold forever. I love that because they’re making a decision to be well for a lifetime rather than wait for something to come and get them whether it’s a herniated disc or digestive troubles. There’s so much prevention that happens, especially with Blair Upper Cervical Care.
Getting back to that one month of holding equals a year of healing, it addresses some things. Let’s identify, at the very least, most of our patients coming in to get this kind of care. Especially, this is upper cervical care that we’re talking about. This is the Blair care that we’re talking about. We’re not talking about regular chiropractic care for holding is healing. Quite honestly, as much as I love some of the other chiropractors in our profession, you go in and you get adjusted every time.
Never did I ever go into a chiropractic office prior to upper cervical and not get adjusted.
They’re like, “More adjustments are better.” Whereas we’re on the opposite end of the spectrum, less is better and the longer you can hold, the better. Everything works. At the very least, we’re seeing people in certainly late 20s to 40s or 50s. I remember John Hilpisch telling me there are two big numbers. This is the bonus for everyone who’s reached this point in the show. This is the secret sauce that nobody wants to hear but is reality. This kind of chiropractic care is not a sprint. It is a marathon. If you figure out that one month for a year, if you’ve been on the planet longer than 36 years, that’s 3 years. It takes three years to heal past that.
Less adjustment is better. The longer you can hold, the better. Everything works. Click To TweetA lot of people are at the 3-year mark, the 5-year mark, and the 10-year mark, and those are where some of the biggest health gains happen. Who wouldn’t like to have a little bit of the clock rolling back physiologically? We’re still going to make a rotation around the planet every 365 days. If we can roll back the physiological age, which is a lot of what’s going on, holding is a big part of that. That’s going to make things better.
An interesting thing is when a patient has head pain. Not headache, head pain. He wants to get adjusted to get rid of the head pain. I was like, “We don’t treat symptoms, but it could be related to a nerve that’s going into your head. If we adjust your spine, it could get better. I can’t promise anything, but this is a very big possibility that they could be related. You have an upper cervical misalignment.”
We get him adjusted one night. He comes in and goes, “My head pain’s not getting better.” I was like, “I know. It’s going to take time.” He goes, “My hip pain’s gone.” Your body will prioritize things. I can’t predict what it’s going to heal and win. He had chronic hip pain and it went away with one adjustment, but it’s not what he came in for.
It’s funny because one night, I’m walking around at home getting dinner and everything. I sit down and I’m like, “That’s not feeling right in my hip.” The next morning, I wake up, planning on doing my kettlebell workout. End of week six. I’m onto week seven now. I go to pick up the kettlebell because my right hip is feeling amiss. I go to bend over and I don’t want to. It’s so funny, and I’m like, “Which one of the Vano brothers can I get into?” Sure enough, I got my atlas and C4 put back into place and the hip got better. The neck wasn’t bothering me. The sinus wasn’t bothering me.
It’s hard to explain to people and it’s hard to believe at first that it’s not just neck pain. Just because you have a misalignment in your neck, we might be able to find a tender spot when we poke on it. A lot of people are like, “I didn’t even know that hurt until you touched it.” It’s not about pain. It’s not necessarily about neck pain. It’s about how your body’s functioning. Are you in a pattern of dysfunction? If that is happening and it’s related to this misalignment subluxation, it doesn’t have to be pain related. It could be function related.
It's not about pain. It's not necessarily about neck pain. It's about how your body's functioning. Click To TweetChildren will come in and get checked. They might not have any symptoms, but their parents know it’s time to get checked. I teach a lot of my parents to do leg-length checks on their kids. I’m like, “Every so often when they’re laying down, check their leg lengths. If you see it pulling up, it’s time to come back in because that’s not secret or impossible for them to check.”
Honestly, if you’re tuning in to this right now and you have kids, make them lay down. I do it face-up because it’s easier for kids to do that. You could do face up or face down. Make sure their feet are lined up. I like to have their shoes on. It’s easier to see with shoes. Push up evenly on both of their feet. If their heels line up, great. If they don’t, do it again. If it’s still lining up with the left leg short, they need to get checked.
Funny story while we’re thinking about the kids, especially for kids that don’t have symptoms. This young boy was doing all sorts of weird stuff. He was doing something weird with his hand and his eyes.
Like Tourette?
It’s more of a seizure thing because his uncle has a seizure. He’s having similar responses. Grandma said, “That’s the same thing your Uncle Kevin had when he was young before the seizures started.” Uncle Kevin is not good about keeping his appointment. He knows that, but we’ll see him in a couple of weeks. That was the joke I made with him and the boys. “Do you guys know where your Uncle Kevin is?” They’re like, “No.” I said, “Neither do I. I just know he’s not in town.” He travels a lot.
This is the best part, honestly. I don’t think mom or dad told me about this. The youngest boy was 5 or 6 because his twin brothers look to be about 8 or 9. They all have the same problem, but they’ve only had the youngest one in so far. You hear about kids wetting the bed. Not only was this kid wetting the bed. He was wetting himself throughout the day. He is staying dry now since we’ve got him under care.
His eyes are starting to line up better. Mom hasn’t seen the twitching that he was doing with his hand in a couple of weeks. I seem to recall. Dad was the one who was out of that crew this past time around. I’m so excited, then mom tells me, “We got to get the other two boys in. They’ve got problems, too.” For someone who had bed-wetting problems, I wish my folks knew that this would help.
It’s so embarrassing for kids. They want to spend the night at a friend’s house, but they can’t.
There were no spending nights at a friend’s house. In fact, the rule was because I had problems, no one in the family was allowed to go have sleepovers at all. In the first sleepover that I ever did, we didn’t sleep because we were certainly in junior high school. We played D&D all night long and drank Mountain Dew.
My kids just played D&D with their friends.
It was a grand old time.
Don’t drink that. That’s bad.
I don’t touch that stuff anymore.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Back in the day, you could get gallon buckets.
It makes me upset in my stomach thinking about actual soda. If you are drinking soda, by the way, you can drink water. I know you’re like, “It doesn’t taste good.” It will taste good in two weeks. You have to stop the soda because it’s gross.
Go buy some Zevia or any of these flavored waters.
Honestly, you should do cold turkey. When you say flavored water, not sweetened flavored water like a LaCroix or something like that. Right.
Zevia would be okay because stevia-sweetened. If you need something sweet but you’ve had the sugar, stevia doesn’t do it right. It’s wrong.
Just to get off the soda. I used to drink soda like water. That’s how I lived. I thought that that was okay, diet caffeine-free coke. It was probably even worse.
I’d rather have the high-octane stuff all the time.
Honestly, I’d rather people drink the high-octane stuff.
Did I tell you what I used to get off Coca-Cola?
Cocaine?
Close. I drank literally a gallon a day of Tropicana. It was grapefruit juice. It was the ruby red grapefruit juice back in the day. Later, I find out some of the stuff they do to color that. I’m like, “There are some allergens in there.” I was drinking a gallon of that a day. Imagine, I was losing weight because I wasn’t drinking coke, but I wasn’t losing weight that fast.
It was a lot of sugar.
That got me off my Coca-Cola and it got me off caffeine, too.
That’s true. The caffeine. I’m not anti-caffeine. You’re not anti-caffeine either.
No. I’m pro-coffee in my belly all day long.
You’re very pro-coffee. I’m a tea girl. I’m not anti-caffeine. A lot of people think we’re anti-caffeine because we do have a rule in our office. One of the scans we do is affected by caffeine, so we just try to get people not to drink caffeine for about four hours before coming in. That doesn’t always work out. There are a lot of people who just at least tell us.
I’d rather be consistent that you are drinking because there are some people that need a cup of coffee for them to work properly.
That’s a good point if they are consistent. The problem is, a lot of times, they’re not consistent and that’s the bigger issue.
That is also why it’s important that we schedule your appointments and follow-ups about the same time that your habits. The habits that we are creating by checking you at the same time give us a consistent pattern, so we know whether or not you are in or out of adjustment. More importantly, when you’re coming in and aching and the graph looks good and the legs look good, we can convict it in telling you, “Everything is all right. You are going through something else.”
It almost always is.
Oftentimes, it’s just a stress response that is overwhelming other things. It might either be causing you problems or causing the system to tell us something different.
Is there anything else you want to go over in this wonderful show?
That’s a good place to wrap it up and we will go from there. Everyone go find us on YouTube. Like and subscribe. Make sure you give us a five-star review on Apple Podcast or whatever your favorite podcast app is. That makes sure other people find us because I don’t know what the algorithm is, but I know there’s an algorithm.
It’s not going to be like, “Let’s promote Blair Chiropractic with people.”
In fact, we are going to be at the bottom of the barrel because they would rather us not. You want to be strong and healthy?
They don’t want us to talk, but you can help us get people to listen if you think we’re awesome because we are. Share it. Tell people about us. Even word of mouth. You could open your mouth and talk, but even better, share it on socials. Let us know and give us some reviews, please.
Five-star reviews. Those are the ones that help. If you’re looking for me in Springfield, Illinois, or the Central Illinois area, I’m at KeystoneChiroSPI.com.
I’m at PrecisionChiroSTL.com. Have a great week.
You, too. We will be back.
Important Links
- Breath
- Oxygen Advantage
- James Nestor – podcast episode
- D-Hist
- KeystoneChiroSPI.com
- PrecisionChiroSTL.com
- http://BlairChiropractic.com/
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