Episode 48 – Restoring Life: Phillip’s 13-Year Journey To Health

 

Have you ever been in so much pain that you’re ready to chop off that body part? Phillip’s struggle with the pain is not the worst of what he went through. He sought out medical doctors from all over the US, in and out of the Veteran Affairs system, to find an answer to get him better. Phillip’s 13-year journey in restoring life changed after his mother’s chiropractor overheard his story and said, “I can help.” Listen to Phillip as he recalls the haunting experience and how the right therapy made a wonderful impact on his healing journey. Tune in to this episode so you won’t miss the incredible journey of Phillip in restoring his life.

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Restoring Life: Phillip’s 13-Year Journey To Health

We’ve got a guest, don’t we?

We do. This is Philip. He’s been a patient for a little bit over a year now, and we wanted to bring him on for a while because he’s got a great story. Why don’t we let it go and let you start telling your story about everything? Start at the beginning and how things got you into the office.

It was a long process to get me here to the office. It’s a long story so we kind of have to go to the beginning. I was on active duty in the Marine Corps in Southern California at Camp Pendleton. I was in a motor vehicle accident in October of 2007. We were hit from behind. We were stopping at a red light. I heard a weird noise. I was in the passenger seat and I turned to look behind us and it was the sound of someone’s brakes failing.

I was in the car seat and I had turned to the left and looked behind us and this is when we got hit with me out of position. It threw my head over my left shoulder. It wasn’t too serious of a car accident. It was two old-school steel vehicles and they hit real hard. We both drove away. My neck felt funny, but it never hurt the day of the accident. It just felt strange. I didn’t think much of it though. I went home. I had to be at work the next day. I go home and I go to sleep.

When I woke up the next day, that’s when I started the next stage in my life. I sat up in bed the next morning and immediately, I noticed that I could not feel the right side of my face. It was numb and tingly. It felt strange. As I get my feet on the ground and I’m sitting in bed, the second thing I realize is that my yawns are different. I started yawning immediately when I sat up in bed and my yawns were changed now. They were now happening in slow motion.

 

 

It took about 2 to 3 times as long for the yawn to start and finish. Also, I would not stop yawning. I woke up in the middle of a yawning fit basically about 100 times or more that morning. I could not stop. Also, and very notably, every time I would yawn, tears would pour out of my right eye and only my right eye. This is very unusual. I don’t know how you guys yawn, but this is not normal for me. It wasn’t at the time. I was 21 years old so I had 21 years of yawning experience and this was all new for me.

Anyways, also the sensation of the yawns. It felt like it was coming out of my throat. Every time I would yawn, my throat muscles would activate and flex hard and tear themselves out of my neck. There is nothing I could do to stop them. I could do jumping jacks and slap myself in the face and stop the yawns, and that was my normal for a long time after that. Also, within two weeks of the accident, I noticed that my hand wasn’t working right. I had some pain in my hand. I had muscle spasms in my forearm and in my shoulder.

After two weeks, I started walking with a limp on my right side. My right leg had felt funny after the accident, but only for a few days. I could not figure out why I was limping. Nobody could tell me why. They just started happening. In the Marine Corps, things like this are frowned upon. It ended up costing me my career and everything but I went to every doctor they had and nobody could help me. I was going to a chiropractors. They were snapping every bone in my neck. They were twisting and popping everything, and nothing seemed to help.

Every day for many years, everything got worse and worse. I could barely move. The other notable thing would be within two weeks. I had this terrible spot in my back, in the upper right quadrant of my back underneath my shoulder blade where there was this rock-hard mass of muscle about the size of a golf ball, a little bit bigger very deep next to my spine and it would never go away. I ended up basically the only way I could fall asleep for years was by laying on a baseball and pressing it as hard as I could into that spot. It was incredibly painful, but I could at least fall asleep. It would cause this release into my neck and arm so I could rest.

Through those years, did the yawning continue? I know it probably wasn’t as severe, but did it continue to be your weird yawn?

Yeah, it never stopped. I would’ve yawned fits. I’d yawn 300 to 500 times a day on average. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. It would just depend but yeah for years every day. I’d yawn pretty constantly and consistently.

I bet that started affecting your jaw too.

My jaw was super affected. I got lock jaw bad. Also, I didn’t know it, but I was clinching hard not intentionally. It was the same thing happening with my throat and my shoulder where the muscles were constricted at all times as hard as they could to the point where the muscles would tear themselves apart. I would go to sleep and they would heal and the next day, I would have to tear them apart again to move around.

That was what the baseball was for. Every morning, I could break up all the knots with the baseball so I could at least rotate my shoulder, move, stand up, and walk around. However, it was a physical thing to get to that point every day. Tearing apart all the muscles that were locked up so I could move. Also, because each one was so painful. I could feel it come on. Psychologically, it was hard to get past.

What did this do to you? Were you able to work through those fifteen years? Were you able to have relationships?

I could go on for hours about how it would affect our relationship. I’ve been with the same girl the whole time. She was my girlfriend during the accident, but she’s my wife now. My wife knew me for about six months before that car accident. She only knew the real me for about six months and ever since then, she’s been dealing with this other person who is in so much pain. They have trouble talking on the phone. I would be hurting so bad that I couldn’t hear someone talking right to my face. I’m trying to read their lips and focus. The pain is just too much with constant muscle spasms and the yawns being so painful. It was awful. Also, to know that they weren’t going to stop and they were going to keep coming all day.

 

 

What did neurologists say about this?

I’ve seen probably 35 different PhDs over the last years. I’ve seen 35 to 40 chiropractors. Some of them are legendary chiropractors. One of them worked for the New York Knicks courtside for years. I saw the top neurologist in Texas. He doesn’t have a clinic. He works in a laboratory with test tubes and stuff. He’s going for a Nobel Prize. He was furious when I pulled enough favors to get in front of him. They all said the same things. They all said, “Your neck looks fine in an MRI, so your neck is fine. We don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

Initially, when I was at Camp Pendleton seeing military doctors and I was still enlisted, TBI was the new hot thing in the military. This is from the IEDs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and stuff. IEDs and all the injuries related to it like spinal compression from the vehicle being lifted and then also any kind of weird TBI concussion protocol type things and then nerve damage. Eventually, when I kept pressing, they slapped me with fibromyalgia and told me to stop coming around.

For our readers, TBI means Traumatic Brain Injury just because we all know what that is, but someone out there might not know. Also, fibromyalgia I’ve found, at least in my office, is sometimes a shut-up diagnosis as, “That’s what you got. That’s what it is.”

That was what they did and they even put me on to a psychologist and psychiatrist. They told me it was all in my head. They wanted to put me on everything from Seroquel to whatever else. As I said, they were throwing stuff at the wall hoping it would stick at that point.

At some point, did you ever think, “Maybe it is in my head?” The gaslighting in the medical community can get to that point where you almost believe it. Did you ever believe it or did you know for sure that something was wrong?

After a few doctors told me that that’s what they thought it was, and very politely they told me but in a roundabout way, that’s what they were saying. No, absolutely. It started to get to me. I started to wonder if I was making it all up. Being in the military was traumatic and I was with a bad unit that treated us badly. I thought maybe I was going crazy.

It didn’t make sense that I couldn’t control my muscles anymore but they were telling me my neck was fine. I’ve had so many MRIs and CT scans over the years because you got to understand every single month, every single week for years, I stood in front of a doctor and I pointed at my neck. I said, “There’s something wrong with my neck.”

I was in a minor car accident. The only part of my body that was affected was my neck. It was very obvious. Everything that I was feeling revolved around the tightness at the base of my skull and how messed up my neck was. It felt broken. My neck felt broken. The morning of the car accident, that’s when the sounds of my neck started changing. It pops. Also, the grinding, cracking, and squishing noises. It’s weird, strange noises and all these strange sensations and pain associated with it. I don’t know. It went on forever and it never stopped. I didn’t know what to think anymore.

This is a lot of the reason that we’ve done some of the deeper research that we’ve done in the upper cervical looking at the small ligaments in the upper neck that will get completely missed on an MRI. They’re not even doing the right testing that they would do let’s say for a ligament in the knee that we need to do for the upper neck to find those ligaments to even know, “You’ve got a grade 2 tear, you’ve got a grade 3 tear, your alars are shot.” It could be any one of these things, and certainly, we’ve talked about that since we’ve got started getting your head on straight.

How did you end up finding Dr. Schurger’s office?

This went on for fifteen years and after so many years you just accept that this is your life now. It started affecting my job right away. I couldn’t run anymore in the military. I ended up getting separated from them. I went home and I tried to heal. I thought being out of the military with no one forced me to run and do things that I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I am on light duty anyway. It’s one of the reasons it got so much worse. When I got out of the military, I went home. I tried to rest for a year and a half, and every day it would get worse. I started working again. At first, it was full-time for a few years, but then it got to the point where I couldn’t work full-time anymore.

It was 20 or 30 hours a week. As of about four years ago, I was only doing about twenty hours a week at a grocery store doing online shopping for people. At that point, my arm stopped working. It no longer would listen to commands. It would hang at my side. I was doing my work one-handed like pulling heavy carts, grocery shopping, and bagging groceries all in one-handed.

You’re right-handed, to begin with.

I’m ambidextrous, but I am right hand-dominant. That was my primary hand arm up until that point. It is no longer.

You can be ambidextrous when you must be.

 

 

Things kept deteriorating at the grocery store to the point where my arm wasn’t working anymore. I couldn’t hold my head up very often. I would’ve to sneak into the bathroom and lay on the floor for fifteen minutes to finish my shift. Eventually, I had to stop doing that and I got a job at a friend’s restaurant just because they would take it really easy on me and give me all the easy stuff. They’re very accommodating. Even then, I had to quit.

It’s been probably a year and a half, two years now since I’ve worked. It had gotten so bad that I wasn’t working anymore and I was laying in bed all day in pain. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t play video games anymore. My hand was too bad. It was too painful to sit up and look at the TV. I couldn’t read much anymore. I couldn’t do anything.

Playing guitar and going on walks was ancient history. I hadn’t been able to do that in years but it had gotten so bad that I had even sent out a couple of emails asking about medically assisted suicide in Europe. What is the process for that? How to do it without getting flagged by the VA for being suicidal or whatnot because it was a medical thing? I had already asked them to cut off my arm because I was in so much pain. If I literally can’t see because I’m in so much pain, my arm is no longer doing me good. I wanted it gone. I wanted to be able to move on with my life.

It was about this time that my mother was in South Carolina at a chiropractor’s office. She was talking about me to a patient next to her and the chiropractor overheard her. He came over and he said, “Repeat that. Tell me everything that you just told her.” She did. He reaches into his wallet. He takes out $500 and he tries to give it to my mom. He says, “Fly your son to me. I know what’s wrong with him and I can fix him.”

She didn’t take the money, but she was getting a kidney out soon and she needed someone to be with her for a week. I flew out and while I was there, she insisted that I go see this chiropractor whose chiropractor number 41 to me. I didn’t care, but it was going to make her happy. I went and he’s an upper cervical trained chiropractor, but like an all-around chiropractor. He is not Blair, but I do think he knew about every cervical.

He tells me what’s wrong. I believe him, but I don’t. He adjusts my neck with an impact gun. I forget what it’s called. I didn’t feel anything. I don’t think he was very good at it but he kind of knew what was wrong. I didn’t feel anything from the neck but he did pop my rib because he said that the forward-facing S-curve in my spine is what was compressing these nerves that were going to my arm. That’s what was causing my hand to not work and my arm to not work.

I didn’t believe him but when he popped my rib, I immediately was totally healed. My hand was 100% normal again. It was gone. My strength was back. Before, I couldn’t open a Gatorade bottle. I had to ask my wife to help. It was this miraculous thing to sit up and have my arm working after it. I hadn’t been able to use it in three years. You have to understand. It was totally worthless for three years and in one second, it was normal again.

I sat up and I said to myself, “Maybe there’s something to this.” He told me the kind of chiropractor to look for. I flew back to Springfield at the end of that week and started looking for upper cervical chiropractors. Wouldn’t you know? We have one right here in the town that I live in by real chance because there are not very many. I went to see him and that was kind of how I ended up in his office. That’s how it went down.

That’s quite a remarkable story about the adjustment that helped your arm.

It wasn’t everything to me though at the time. Sure, the hanging arm is great but still, there is pain. I can’t function.

I noticed talking to you right now, I’ve not seen you yawn once. What kind of changes have you seen with the Blair care?

It was wild. I ended up seeing Dr. Schurger here. Not all of the things happened in one adjustment. It was the first 3 or 4 adjustments that made changes to my day-to-day. The first one was an attention-getter. I come in. I asked him to assess me. He assesses me. He decides that my C1 and C2 are not in the right place. He lays me down on the table and he does the neck adjustment on my C1. He then sits me back in his chair to rest.

When the weight comes off in my head, when I lean back in his chair, immediately tears start pouring out of my right eye for no reason. When I say pouring, I do mean pouring like a half liter an hour. It is like a faucet that’s been left on. It’s dripping. It formed a puddle on the leather seat underneath my shoulder and it soaked the shoulder on my T-shirt. This was in about 300 seconds. There was that much water that had come out of my eye. I know because I was counting. It’s because when I laid back and tears started pouring on my right eye, I was like, “After years of yawning and every yawn with water coming out of my right eye. He pops my neck and this is happening. We poked the bear. We’re messing with it. We found what was going on.”

As I’m counting and I get to about 300 seconds, I realized, “This wacko might have just broken my neck and this is permanent.” As I realized that, I’m overcoming this fear. I’m like, “Okay,” because the whole time I’ve been frozen. I’m like, “This is crazy.” However, I was like, “I’m going to go ahead and move. Let’s see what happens. I turn my head left and I hear all these crazy pops and snaps that I don’t normally hear. I go over my right and when I do that, there’s all these other crazy sounds.

When I get to a certain point, there’s this crazy snap like a nerve got plucked like a guitar string. I can’t explain it, but it was like a pang all through my body. Immediately after that, when I went back, I turned back to the front. Immediately when I did that, the tears instantly stopped right away and I could tell that they had stopped. As that was happening, out of my throat came the first normal yawn I’ve had in years. It was a normal length. My throat didn’t turn itself inside out as I was yawning. It wasn’t painful. It was short. It was a normal casual yawn that lasted about a second like the way they used to.

Ever since then, my yawns have mostly been normal. I will still get a few short attacks of 3 to 10 yawns in a row in a quick succession but now both my eyes are watering and only a little bit. The right eye waters a little bit more but I’m still seeing changes week to week and month to month with chiropractic and with prolotherapy now. That first visit was when I realized that this was what was wrong with me. This is what I need. That’s what started to make a difference.

He has such a good recall of the mechanism of impact and how his body was turned. Do you feel like there’s a relationship between his misalignment and the way?

If you are getting rear-ended, anytime that you are not square going forward, it is going to have an impact on some of the check ligaments in the upper neck in any which way. The last time I was in a bad car accident, I was looking down into the right when Gal backed into me and then knocked me for a loop for the better part of a week.

It’s the same thing. If you’re turning to one direction or another, you’re going to have the ligaments at their full extension and any other force that’s coming in that’s not supposed to come in is going to screw with that stuff. What he’s going through, there is a level of torn and messed up ligaments, which we’ll talk about here in a little bit because his experience with Dr. Hauser is pretty profound but the neurological stuff is so weird.

All of these vasovagal-type situations where the vagus nerve is somehow being impinged but the question is where with him and then the other part is why is it causing the eyes to tear just on the right? Why were the yawns so weird? Why were all of these what we would not consider vagal-related and parasympathetic-related muscles to have an effect along the way? There are lots of questions. We’re happy that we’re finding some answers to get him back to normal life because what was curious, I think when you first came in, there was some reason why we couldn’t adjust you from the right.

As I said, we could go on for a considerable amount of time on the strange symptoms that I started getting shortly after the car accident and in the years following and I mean it. We don’t even have time in the day to talk about them all and I probably wouldn’t even be able to remember them all clearly because it gets so overwhelming and you accept that you’re not normal anymore so you don’t even like to pay attention. You’re just glad that you can walk around that day and you don’t worry too much about your actual experience because you’re fighting through the muck.

After that car accident, I could no longer lay on my left side physically. I could only sleep on my right side. Laying on my back is okay, but it’s not great. If I lay on my left side, I feel a strange pinch low down in my neck and it’s painful, but not too sharp. It feels funny and strange. Within 30 seconds, my vision will go a little dark. The room looks darker than it is and I’ll start getting a pounding headache in this special spot on the right side of my brain. I’ll get this feeling of, I cannot explain it, but it feels like I’m dying.

I can’t specifically tell you why. It just feels bad like something is wrong. With the pain and discomfort alone, I can only lay on my left side for about 30 seconds. Also, this incredible pain in my neck, and I’ll hear movement and I’ll hear stuff moving around. I can feel just terrible things in my upper cervical spine. I can only do that for a few seconds and to recover, I have to lay on my right side. When I lay on my right side, it feels incredible. It feels euphoric.

I would absolutely compare it to sex. It feels amazing. Also, the harder I press my head into the pillow on my right side, the better I feel to the point where my eyes roll back in my head and I will drool on myself because I feel so good. It’s like a drug. I don’t know what heroin is like, but it’s probably pretty similar to this feeling. It sounds so strange. I want to go ahead and mention right now that I’m not crazy. The harder I press into my right side, the better I feel until it feels incredible. It’ll go on for hours. I could do it for three hours.

Especially with the amount of pain that you were having, switching from a pain situation to a euphoric anything was going to be huge.

It’s so much more than that though because it wasn’t just the sensation of pain. Everything feels better. My muscles aren’t as tight on my right side. If I press nice and hard, my chest opens up. I can breathe easier and deeper. My eye will stop twitching. It’ll help my yawns. If I’m in the middle of a yawn attack, it’ll put a stop to it eventually after a few minutes but the relief that it brings to my shoulder, my throat, and my chest. All these muscles are always tightening and bearing down.

The relief is not natural. It’s a very unnatural level of relief from laying on my right side and getting the pillow right because it has to be very a specific spot, but it’s a wild thing. For years, I could not lay on my left side. I’m doing better now. I can do it now for probably a long time, but I don’t do it because it still puts a lot of stress on my neck and it puts stress on these ligaments that aren’t doing so well. Hopefully, in the near future, I’ll be able to do it again.

You can try it. Try only laying on your right side for the next three days. You won’t sleep for three days, I guarantee you because you don’t realize how uncomfortable you get being stuck in one position. I would lay on my left side even though it would hurt me and it would ruin my next day. It’s because if I lay on my left side for longer than 30 seconds, the next day I’m wrecked. I’m in way more pain than normal. I would do it anyway to get a little relief, to stretch out my body, and feel better even temporarily. Psychologically it messes with you.

One of the curious things, and I’m rushing way ahead from where we started with care. What was interesting is we adjusted his atlas from the left only. I believe the axis is left too but the way he’s out of adjustment, we can adjust from the left or the right, Just about a year into care, things are like, “Why don’t we try adjusting you from the right?” All of a sudden, there is a new level of release.

It definitely did something different. That was when I started seeing results of my shoulder and with that muscle spot in my back, that permanent knot. That was when that started to loosen up. From that point on, I don’t think I’ve laid on a baseball since then. I don’t think I’ve had to. I do mean it. If I wanted to get out of bed, I’d have to spend about 45 minutes on that baseball to get up every day, and to fall asleep at night, I would have to be on it.

 

 

The question I have in the back of my mind and kicking myself is, “Why didn’t I do it sooner?” Why didn’t I say, “Let’s do it,” but the other question back there is also, “Could we have started it sooner?”

I think we played it right because we were being cautious. My neck had gotten sheared off because of where I was in the car accident, and the way I was positioned. I knew which direction it sheared my neck. We were worried about that. We were worried about me laying on the left side because of the way it made me feel.

I think we almost needed that year, not only for you to feel comfortable to do it, but for your body to be ready for that adjustment.

Sure, and it’s not like we weren’t seeing incredible results from that side. By working it from a different angle, we loosened something in a different way or it released a nerve that it had been pinching. I’m not sure, but the results have been astounding.

The other thing I want you to share with Dr. Bagley and everybody else is we go back and forth for you between the atlas and C2. What do you notice differently?

I can only describe things so well. My language is pretty limited. I’m from Texas. I barely speak English but it’s amazing how I can very clearly tell. I’ve done a lot of awareness training, meditation, and stuff. I used to be way into martial arts and everything. I’m pretty good at the sensations, knowing where things are, how they feel, and why. I can tell when my C2 or C1 goes out of place. I’ll be sitting there watching TV and I can hear the bone move quite clearly. It makes a very distinct noise when it moves over. I can feel it moving. I can hear it moving. I can’t even describe the sound, but it’s a very strange sound.

The second the bone moves and gets to its endpoint, that’s the instant that I feel the symptoms from it. When my C1 slides out of place, I hear it and I feel it. When it does slide out, immediately my face goes numb. I’ll start to yawn, my eyes will start to water, my right eye will start to twitch, and my throat will start to spasm. It’ll start to tighten up and spasm. It’s instant. You cannot mistake it for anything. You can’t miss it. It’s so obvious.

When I get adjusted and he works on my C1, it immediately goes away. My face goes back to normal and my throat calms down. My eyes calm down. It’s the strangest thing. When the C2 goes out, that’s the bad one. It took me a little longer to realize what was happening, but now I can feel it as clearly as the C1. When the C2 goes out again, I can hear it and feel it as it moves. When it reaches its endpoint, immediately it’s like some demon is digging its claws in my shoulder and my shoulder tightens up to the point where the muscles are tearing apart. My hand will immediately go numb.

These two fingers will be in crazy pain. It feels like someone’s stabbing me in my hand. Immediately also, especially with the C2, I can feel the spine beneath the C2 start to adjust as it slips back into that forward-facing S-curve. I can feel them starting to adjust and move and now I can’t turn and move so well. Also, that spot in my back where that permanent knot was starts to come back. It’s a wild thing to feel again. It’s an instant thing. It happens immediately once that bone moves. I can absolutely tell it’s C1 or C2 and every time, I’ve been right. I’ve been right three times in a row now. I’ll come in and I’ll be like, “It’s my C2 or it’s my C1.”

I have some patients who can tell that too. There are some of my patients and one named Philip also. It must be a thing that hears it happen. He’ll always say, “It snapped out, doc.” He’ll say, “It’s this one and this one.” He’ll tell me which one.

All those sounds, no one around me can hear them, but I can hear them very well. They’re loud and they’re very distinct. Each different problem makes a different sound. It’s wild. It’s a strange thing to experience for sure.

Do we want to go through anything else over the past couple of years of care? I think we want to go to Hauser next though, don’t we?

I said we could keep going over things forever. I’m disorganized because it’s a big blur for me. We didn’t even touch on the psychological stuff. It’s not like it wasn’t messing with my head. I was having memory problems. I no longer knew what day it was. It’s not that I cared. I was in so much pain, but I was struggling. I was struggling to keep track of even holidays. It would be Christmas and I didn’t even know it was happening this week. It was bad. The brain fog was very pronounced and the hearing too. It messed up my hearing a lot.

I’ve passed all the hearing tests I’ve ever taken, but then when I go to work and I pick up the phone to try and answer it, I can’t hear or someone will be talking to me and I can’t make out what they were saying. Either I couldn’t hear them or something else was happening or I just couldn’t understand them. It’s hard to explain, but I wasn’t myself anymore.

I was gifted and smart when I was young and I was a quick reader and now, I couldn’t read so fast. It was just little things like that where I knew something was wrong with me, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on it. It would go on and on. There are so many strange things. The sensations and feelings. It was overwhelming but chiropractic turned that around and then Dr. Hauser is making an impact.

I think I know, but just so everybody knows who Dr. Hauser is.

What happened was once all these crazy things started happening to me with this chiropractor and I had Dr. Schurger let me know, “You have a C1-C2 problem.” I started learning about it. Early on, one of the first people that you run into on the internet if you look into strange neck problems, which is what I was mostly interested in. I was trying to find other people like me. Since no doctor could tell me what was going on, if I could figure it out, I needed to find somebody with the same symptoms as me. That’s where I stumbled on Dr. Hauser.

I found a couple of interviews he had done on YouTube with some patients with the same kind of issues. For years, just on one side of their body. The one that stood out to me was a dentist that he had helped who was 55 years old and was in a car wreck. He wakes up the next day and his tongue can’t taste anything anymore. His right eye was twitching and his right arm didn’t work anymore. He couldn’t be a dentist anymore.

He had some other really strange symptoms but the main thing to me was hiccups. He hiccupped for three years straight. He walked his oldest daughter down the aisle hiccupping the whole time. He didn’t sleep for the first three weeks, he said. He went crazy. He had to go do some inpatient mental stuff. I totally understand. It gets in your head when you can’t stop yawning or stop hiccupping to the point where you cannot sleep, conversate, or work.

You then have doctors tell you it’s in your head. That’s where he was. He had gone crazy. He was pursuing medically-assisted suicide in Switzerland or someplace over there but that’s when he found Dr. Hauser. Dr. Hauser is a doctor in Florida. He used to be here in Illinois for about many years or something like that but he moved his practice to South Florida. He’s considered one of the best neck doctors in the world for weird neck stuff.

If you have any weird neck stuff going on, if you were born without a C1 fully developed, he does all kinds of congenital defects and genetic defects where your ligaments don’t work properly. Any kind of weird stuff with the head and neck, he’s the guy to talk to. I went and I did an evaluation. His evaluation was incredible. He does things that other people don’t do. He’s got gear and tests to do on you that other people will never bother to do.

One of the tests that they did was what is now being called DMX, but it’s motion X-ray or fluoroscopy. It’s an advanced form of fluoroscopy but what it allows is it’s a video picture X-ray of your neck going through motions. It’s not just forward and backward, but side to side and rotation to see what is loose and what is not moving the way it’s supposed to. Dr. Hauser is one of the premier experts in the country in evaluating that stuff.

He is. He is the only person I’ve found and all the doctors I’ve talked to can’t even read it or are confident to look at it. That was the first time we got a photo of my neck bones in a place where they weren’t supposed to be because, for years, I was unable to get that photo. Every MRI, every X-ray, they said that my neck looked normal even though I knew it wasn’t. If they have no evidence, they’re not going to help you. They’re not going to do anything to you.

He was the first one to take a picture of it and say, “Your bone is over here and it’s not supposed to be.” The ultrasound tests are incredible. You can listen to one of the arteries on my neck on ultrasound and that’s going and I can turn my head over my right shoulder and the sound is gone because that artery is 100% obstructed. When I lay on my left side, that artery is 100% obstructed. That was the tip-off as to why the yawns were happening and what was going on. When the brain starts losing oxygen, it’s going to keep asking for air. If it doesn’t get any, it’s going to ask again and again because that’s all it can do. It’s drowning.

If the brain starts with oxygen, it will keep asking for air. If it doesn't get any, it will ask again. Click To Tweet

You’re drowning, but your brain doesn’t know what else to do other than force you to yawn and hope it gets some air. That’s the theory on what’s been going on there. All these other tests were eye-opening. It was nice to have all the feelings that I’ve been feeling for years finally validated with data which to me was invaluable. That was the first time I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew that the whole time but after a year of them telling you, “It’s all in your head,” you start to believe them.

Since you’ve been seeing Dr. Hauser for the prolotherapy, what’s changed?

What was cool was seeing Dr. Schurger for a year and getting to know what the chiropractic side felt like and the effects it had on my body. The healing was incredible but every time it was temporary. Dr. Schurger puts my neck back in place for three days, maybe three weeks at the most, and then I slide back out of position. I need to go see him again.

Every day that I’m out of position, the symptoms are getting worse and everything is compounding. My spine is starting to curve again. These problems were never going to go away. It was my new life now. Every time I feel bad, I go see the chiropractor and I feel better. This is what I’ll be doing. Dr. Hauser is all about prolotherapy. That’s his thing. That’s something that he kind of helped invent along with another doctor a long time ago. He’s all about it.

He was very confident that he could help me with that. He thought that I would see positive results. I went ahead and started prolotherapy and it’s been astounding the difference that it’s made. It works. It’s a real thing. It’s tightening up my ligaments. I can feel it. I can talk for quite some time about all the ways I can feel it, but it wouldn’t make much sense to anybody. It’s something you have to experience yourself but my neck isn’t making as much noise because the bones aren’t moving very much. I can feel that it’s tighter. My neck is stronger.

Prolotherapy has been astounding. It made a difference. It works, and it's a real thing. Click To Tweet

I could only hold my head up for about 1 to 3 hours and then I had to lay down for an hour and rest. Now, I can go much longer. All the symptoms are going away. The head tilt was one of the big crazy things that I noticed. When Dr. Schurger adjusted me, for years, my head tilt was at about 25 to 30 degrees. It was permanent. This was normal for me. This was my every day. When he adjusts my neck, it definitely goes back to normal, but not for very long.

The head tilt would come back after even just a few days. Even with me mostly still in position, my head tilt would come back. After the second prolotherapy treatment was a big difference where I could tell. After that second injection, my head tilt was pretty much gone and it stayed gone for a month. It’s so hard to explain to a normal person, but seeing the world with your head tilted where everything is tilted, you get used to it.

When all of a sudden your head is straight again, it’s strange. Everything is normal but it’s not supposed to be. It’s still strange to me to wake up in the morning and sit up and my head is on straight. It is permanent. It seems to be permanent. It’s not something that comes and goes. Even if I’m out of position, I’ll be out of position and I’ll need to come see Dr. Schurger, the head tilt is way better.

Are you noticing you’re holding your adjustments longer then too?

I didn’t get to talk to Dr. Schurger about this yet, but this is the craziest thing. You’re not even going to believe me, I don’t think but I mean it. I had slipped out of position. I could tell that it didn’t slip very far out of position but it did slip. It was my C1. I could tell it wasn’t bad. It was bad enough that I was going to go see Dr. Schurger, but it was night so I was going to wake up the morning and call him. I wake up in the morning and as I’m adjusting my head on the pillow getting some extra rest and stretching, I feel it go back.

I felt it slipped back into place on its own very clearly. I could even tell the direction it was heading. It is in the opposite direction that it normally does because I really can’t hear and feel it when it falls out. I heard it and felt it go back in. It felt great. Immediately, I felt the same effects that I would feel as if he adjusted me. That’s not supposed to happen.

It’s incredible. It is exactly what’s supposed to happen. That is somebody who’s been under care for a time. We tell them, “Wait a little bit because if your body’s doing what it’s supposed to do, your body will pull this back into place because it knows the right place. It’s so great.

 

 

It’s because these tendons are tightening up. It’s pulling it back where it needs to be. I could feel it pulling. I could feel the natural tension of the ligaments funneling the bones into where they’re supposed to be, which is what they’re supposed to do but I could tell. That’s the strangest thing but after a year of only falling out of position to fall into position was remarkable. It was wild.

Honestly, I’m to the point where I might not even get adjusted many more times. I don’t feel I need it. I want to see if the prolotherapy can do what the chiropractor can do just naturally tightening up the ligaments. It’s been remarkable. The prolotherapy has been incredible. I’d honestly say I’m probably 25% heeled from the prolotherapy alone from three injections out of the 10 or 12 that he wants to do. It made the difference in day-to-day, just the neck noise.

The fact that I barely heard my neck is wild because for fifteen years, it sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies in my head. It was constant snaps, crackles, pops, grinding, and pieces of sand in between my bones. That’s the way it sounds. It’s almost dead quiet now. I got no discomfort. I could not roll my shoulders. My wife would have to take a lacrosse ball put all of her body weight on it and dig it into my shoulder here just so I could move my shoulder a bit. She can tell the difference. She can feel with her hands and be like, “You’re getting better. It’s wild.”

I think a lot of where we want to go as far as what your care is going to be looking like in the future with the prolo, keeping everything clean, and getting the ligaments healed. As long as you’re not doing anything that’s going to knock you out of place, you won’t need to come in as frequently as you had been. Certainly, we’re seeing you not having the crisis moments where you need to be in sooner.

It would be so bad. When I would fall out of place four months ago, it was detrimental to my day. My headache would be so bad. I can’t see out my right eye. I can’t even open my eyes. It was so bad. It’s wild stuff but to see all that go away. It’s definitely prolotherapy that has made a big difference where I’m like, “I’m starting to feel normal again,” which is crazy. In the first few years, I would have dreams sometimes whereas in my dream it was before the accident. I was normal, happy, and feeling good in my dream and then I would wake up and I would think that I attacked my wife a couple of times because I thought someone was in the bed stabbing me with a knife in my back.

We fought a couple of times because I thought someone was hurting me or someone was choking me. I wasn’t used to it yet in those first few years. Now, when you don’t know anything else, you barely remember what being happy is like and to wake up and feel normal. It’s astounding. That’s the other big difference the prolotherapy has made is that normally when I wake up, before prolotherapy, I don’t feel great. The longer I have my head up, the more that I sit up and stand up, the worse I feel hour by hour until the afternoon or evening.

When you don't know anything else and barely remember what being happy is like, to wake up and feel normal is astounding. That's the other big difference the prolotherapy has made. Click To Tweet

I cannot stand up anymore. I have to lay down for at least 2 or 3 hours. Normally, when I’m in that much pain and discomfort, the second I lay down, I lose consciousness. I pass out on my right side and it goes into this healing mode. It’s not like that anymore. I feel good even in the afternoons and evenings, which is not normal. Even Dr. Schurger could not do that for me. That to me was wild and all the other feelings where it feels so much stronger. Also, I can just tell that things are getting better. We still have a long way to go especially to 100% where I’ll never need a chiropractor again. I can see why that might take 10 to 15 injections to get all the way there but I’d be happy at 50%. If I couldn’t get any more prolotherapy, I would still be incredibly happy.

A good way to look at it is where you are going to be with prolotherapy where a typical patient of ours that doesn’t have ligamentous damages is they still might need an adjustment here or there. It might be even quarterly that they need to get checked but it’s not an emergency every three days because that’s not how it’s supposed to be. That’s not normal. You were injured. Your ligaments were destroyed. I cannot wait for this to get published so people can hear your story. That was such a good story.

The other thing that I do think is remarkable is that for a while I could only hold position for maybe three days or maybe a week at most. That is me not working, not doing laundry, or washing dishes. This is me on bed rest basically and sitting in one special chair because it’s the only chair I can sit in and it doesn’t cause me great pain. I was doing that for months. I was doing absolutely no work. Even taking a gallon jug of milk out if the refrigerator would throw me out.

I’m not even doing that. I’m literally doing nothing all day every day and I could still only hold my position for three days or maybe a week. Now, I’m helping out around the house and I’m holding a position. That wouldn’t be possible without prolotherapy. I’m confident in saying that. I’m not trying to absolutely discredit or discount what happened.

We don’t feel bad at all. We’re good. We can help the body be aligned, but we don’t do prolotherapy.

There’s only so much that the ligaments can do naturally. Proper ligament healing can take years. The prolo takes those years and turns them into hours and that’s the exciting thing about the difference.

Especially now that I have the process down, I do predict. I’m the least hopeful person in the world. This journey I’ve been on beat that into me but I know in my heart that in two months I’m going to be very different because I’ve gotten the process down. There’s a way of intermittent fasting and then making sure you sleep at the right times and get lots of sleep after the injection. Also, you eat the right food. You eat good food. Now that I’ve got that down, I do expect some radical stuff in the next few months and it’s going to be awesome. I can already feel it getting better. I know that I’m getting better.

If you talk to any patient there at Dr. Hauser’s place, that’s the happiest place on earth. It’s the happiest place I’ve ever been to other than Chuck E. Cheese in the ’90s when everybody was happy to be at. It’s because you see these people. They’re getting wheeled out in wheelchairs. They’ve got 20 ounces of fluid pumped into the back of their neck. They’re in incredible pain and they’re glowing. They’re so happy because they know that when they wake up tomorrow, they’re going to feel better.

It’s the craziest thing to see with your eyes. He’s healing people who have genetic defects that are incurable. You can look it up in a medical dictionary and it says incurable degenerative disease with an average lifespan of 30 years old. He’s got people that are walking around that aren’t supposed to be walking. Medical science says they can and they can’t get better. These are congenital defects where their ligaments are underdeveloped or non-existent. They’re wheeling them into Dr. Hauser’s office and they are walking. It’s crazy. It’s not supposed to be happening. I can promise you. I looked at medical textbooks again and none of this is in there, but it’s real. It’s helping people.

This is where it is cutting-edge science.

That’s where we’re at. Upper cervical chiropractor and prolotherapy, where they’re at is the cutting-edge of modern medicine in America. It is something that’s not fully understood, especially by any normal doctor that you’ll find in an emergency room, in a hospital, or even a specialist. No one has the level of knowledge that Dr. Schurger has or that Dr. Hauser has. Nobody understands the neck like these people do and you’re not going to get help until you find them.

Thinking of a reader right now who’s doing the same Google searches you were doing of medical assisted suicide because they’re in such a desperate state. What would you say to help them know that there’s another way?

It’s important to note that it’s not like that. For years, I was taking the doctor’s word for it. I googled my fingers off for years. At no point did I ever find anything like this even when I was researching specific stuff about the neck and weird things like yawning fits and stuff like that. I still couldn’t find anything about the upper cervical. The phrase upper cervical never came up for years of googling.

If you’re in a place where you have weird stuff going on and no one has been able to help you, if you haven’t been evaluated for upper cervical even if you weren’t in a car accident, or even if you’re not sure, you would assume it would have nothing to do with your neck. You have to go get it checked out because you haven’t done it all. These neck problems can bring about anything. They can give you ADHD and tummy aches.

You should get checked out if you haven't been evaluated for upper cervical, even if you weren't in a car accident. Click To Tweet

After the accident, I got psoriasis and a stomach ulcer within a month of this car accident. For the first 21 years of my life, I was fine. These types of things can cause almost any kind of malady, any kind of problem to the human body. It could absolutely be your upper cervical. Until you’re evaluated by someone who knows what they’re doing, you won’t get help but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there. It means that you have to take that next step. You have to get it checked out. It’s a must especially if you have something impacting your life, your work, and your family.

You owe it to yourself and everyone else to pursue things as far as you can and to not give up. That was the main thing. There were years I did nothing. I didn’t go see a doctor but eventually because of my wife and because of all I had to fight for and her encouragement and stuff, I’d start googling again. I start making appointments again.

What does she think about the old you coming back?

She doesn’t even know how to feel because this was our life together. She’s a nurse and she has a broken husband so she takes care of him. I do my best and the most that we can hope for is maybe a moment or two in the day where we can smile and sit next to each other because I can’t go on walks with her anymore like I used to. I can’t even hold her hand.

That was the reality for the longest time. I don’t even think she understands how much better I am. I don’t think that she understands how much better I’m going to be yet. She doesn’t get it. She’ll get it when I start going on walks with her again. When things start going back to normal they start feeling like they used to be. I think that’s when it’ll start. I’m still taking it very easy.

You’re still healing.

For every penny that you pump into your neck, you want to take it nice and easy and get the most healing out of it as you can. That’s what I’m doing. I’m taking it easy but in a few months, I’ll be putting out resumes. I’ll be playing guitar again. That’s one thing that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I was in a band at the time. We were making $1,000 to $3,000 bucks a night playing in Southern California and I had to step away from all that. It’ll be so cool to be able to do that again. I could do it right now. My hands are working and all that, but I’m waiting until I’m a lot better. Holding a position like this is hard for me.

To maximize every penny you pump into your neck, you want to take it nice and easy and get the most healing out of it. Click To Tweet

You got it. Still take it easy but it sounds like you’re making strides and I’m so glad to hear this story.

No, it’s radical. I would call it, um, miraculous. I would call it this game-changing thing. I can’t tell you the right words for it, but it is miraculous. The level of healing is miraculous. There’s no other way to explain it.

Thank you so much for sharing this. I know it’s sometimes uncomfortable to be in front of random people, and you did such a good job sharing your story. I know there’s going to be someone who’s reading right now that is going to have their life changed because you stepped out of a comfort zone and talked about what was happening with you. Thank you so much.

You’re welcome. Honestly, it’s all that I care about anymore. I’m in this weird position where I’m starting my life over again and where I have to figure out a career and meaning to all this like a purpose. I can’t see any other purpose other than to help you guys and be a part of whatever you call this upper cervical revolution that’s happening. More needs to be done. More people need help. More people need to know about this.

The fact that I’m not a single one of the 30 PhDs that I’ve talked to in the past few years even knew what upper cervical was. They’d never heard of a Blair chiropractor. They’d never heard of prolotherapy. They had never even heard of a DMX. You have to understand that for years, every PhD I’ve spoken to had never even heard of the term DMX, fluoroscopy, or whatever. That’s how big the gap is. People are nowhere near the help that they need. The only way that they’re going to get it is by talking to someone like you.

The sad thing about those MD PhDs who haven’t come across video fluoroscopy has been around forever.

All of this has been around for a long time. It’s not like this is just coming out. I’m still studying and trying to understand why, but it has to do with the medical system. It has to do with capitalism. It’s the way the economy runs in this country. There are so many factors that play into it, but we’re many years behind places like South Korea and Europe where they know about this and their insurance covers cervical stuff and chiropractors like you. We’re behind and you can’t wait. If you’re hurting, you can’t wait for one of your normal doctors to be like, “I heard about this thing. You should go check it out.” You can’t wait for this. Take your life back.

 

 

The two big questions are, it’s not even the money. It’s the fact that you’re losing the years. You can’t get those back at all.

I still talking to therapists and trying to work through all this. I lost my 20s and 30s to this, all of it and my military career. I was going to make Sergeant in four years. That’s almost impossible in the Marine Corps. I was literally having the best career you can possibly have. I lost a lot to this, but I’m happy to finally be on the right track. If I can in any way help anyone on the planet get help with this in any similar way, even half the amount of help that I’ve gotten, it would change their lives. People talk about the money. That’s silly. You spend money on yourself so that you can get a job again and make money again. I can’t get the time back.

You can make the most of this time that you have.

I can make the most of what I have. Sometimes that’s all you can do, but you have to be the one pushing it. You have to be your own advocate. No doctor in a hospital is going to be the one to push you in the right direction. If you’re stuck in this spot where you know something’s wrong, but no one can help you you have to go find the right person who can help you. They’re out there. You just haven’t talked to them yet. You haven’t sat in front of them yet but things can get better and there are answers out there.

Things can get better, and there are answers out there. But you have to find the right person who can help you. Click To Tweet

That is perfect. I know where they can find somebody in Springfield. Tell them where they can find you, Dr. Schurger.

We’re at KeystoneChiroSPI.com. It’s Keystone Chiropractic here in Springfield. Find us on all the socials.

I am in the West County part of St. Louis, Missouri. You can find me at PrecisionChiroSTL.com. Thank you so much, Philip. It was a pleasure to talk to you, meet you, and hear your story.

It’s an honor to be here with you all. I can’t thank you guys enough for all that you have been and what you are doing for everyone else. It’s incredible. You’re healing the world in a big way one person at a time. I can’t thank you all enough.

Our pleasure. Thank you so much, everybody. We’ll see you next time.

 

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