Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:20 I was getting gas yesterday and uh, I had to get home to let Henry out before I had to come back for the afternoon session. Stopped at a gas station, put the card in and it says declined. So I'm like, okay, well no, I got plenty of money there. So I tried again, Keep putting it in. Eventually it says, see cashier, I, I'll just drive to another gas station before I can go in to see the gasier. I'd rather run outta gas on the side of the road than go in to see the cashier when it says that. So I just drove to another gas station.
Speaker 2 00:00:52 Yeah, there's no more communication anymore. You've gone in before and you know, you get the same thing. Iru the shoulders. I don't know. Try another pump.
Speaker 1 00:00:59 Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:01:00 I've already tried two
Speaker 1 00:01:01 Puffs. Yeah, I'll try another gas station. Yeah, I'll roll the dice.
Speaker 2 00:01:04 Yep.
Speaker 1 00:01:05 We got a listener question.
Speaker 2 00:01:07 All right, excellent.
Speaker 1 00:01:09 It says, I've never been to a chiropractor before. I'm intrigued because I've watched YouTube videos and I want to try, but I'm a little nervous. Our chiropractor's really dangerous.
Speaker 2 00:01:22 I mean, when people ask about is it dangerous, you'd have to look at, um, the annual premium for a chiropractor malpractice, you know, which is sort of what you'd base the safety of a particular item on, whether it's a profession or let's put it the risk factor. What's the risk factor there? And if you think about globally for chiropractor around the world, it averages somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 a year. I don't know of anything that is safer than that. If you look at the premium wise for the insurance.
Speaker 1 00:02:00 So for instance, can medical doctor, how much might they pay per year?
Speaker 2 00:02:03 Well, you know, I can't give you that number. I know they're kind of blown away when I mentioned that. That's for a year.
Speaker 1 00:02:09 It's in the multiple thousands. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:02:12 Now that may be a little secret we don't want everybody to know. Right? I would guess a good question to compare that as well would be massage therapists. We know that that falls very low on the scale of possible injuries associated with massage. And I'm gonna guess that there's probably gonna be at least half what ours is, which I, it would be extremely good. Everything's got its possibilities in this kind of dangers. Uh, we are well schooled and, uh, probably better than any other profession. If you think about it, Chase, if you remember we went through student board, uh, the state boards and, and then you go through the national board aspect of that. We're actually have to probably learn more than any other profession on what does not fall within the category of chiropractic. So we learn about a lot of other professions, specialties. Let's just take prostate out of the hat. We don't treat the prostate, but we have to know that if a patient comes in and the condition is not related to something that we do spinal, that we have to have at least enough knowledge to be able to refer to the proper physician.
Speaker 1 00:03:25 Right. So to your point, I've got some numbers for us pulled up here for a 1 million to 3 million policy like we have for an ob gyn average 74,000 bucks
Speaker 2 00:03:38 You year.
Speaker 1 00:03:39 Yep, yep. The annual cost for malpractice insurance across all medical professions, the average 7,500. But there are many types of professionals doing healthcare work that have higher risks, such as surgeons typically pay between 30,000 and 50,000, but it could go higher for riskier forms of surgery. Yeah. OB GYNs may pay in excess of 200,000 it says here.
Speaker 2 00:04:06 Yes. So if you put the risk associated with chiropractic into that, it's gonna be extremely low.
Speaker 1 00:04:12 Yeah. So we're paying $1,200 a year. So if you think about that, an insurance company believes that it's gonna have to pay out a lot of money because people are getting hurt going to chiropractors. They're gonna be charging a lot more money than just $1,200 a year because their number one priority is their bottom line. Right? Of course, they're gonna charge a riskier procedure such as a surgery where there's higher incidents of negative outcome. They're gonna have to cover their bottom line. So they're gonna charge a lot more. So I think that does speak volumes about the safety of what we do and what a lot of, uh, medical doctors learn in school is that chiropractors call strokes. When somebody has a stroke, a lot of times they'll go to the emergency room and sometimes the first question they're asked is have, have you been seeing a chiropractor?
Speaker 1 00:05:00 And that is absolute myth because what the studies actually show is that a chiropractic adjustment, aka spinal manipulation, cannot cause a stroke that wasn't already going to happen in the first place. People have strokes from turning their head too fast to look over their shoulder, driving in traffic. They have strokes from going to get their hair washed at the salon and leaning their hair back, leaning their head back over the sink and it just moves something the wrong way and it dislodges something that was already gonna be dislodged. So now something that a chiropractor could do to minimize risk X-rays, making sure not to adjust patients who have a higher risk, such as someone who's smoking and taking birth control at the same time, maybe someone who has a history of chronic drug abuse or maybe someone with a high amount of degeneration and arthritis in the neck, those would be red flags for me and that's what they teach us in school. So those are patients who I typically will not do a spinal manipulation on someone who has those risk factors. Now, maybe some chiropractors in the past have done that, but I think it's something that is, uh, taken into consideration anytime we're taking care of a patient.
Speaker 2 00:06:08 Yes, those numbers are extremely rare and the possibility of you have complications from taking aspirin are actually greater than having your neck adjusted. Um, in the research I found that if, I think the number is, if you take 20, no, you take 40 chiropractors and you look at them over a 25 years within the profession, you're going to have somewhere around one out of those, those 40 chiropractors over that one year time who will actually have a patient who winds up having a complication associated with a cerebral vascular related issue, which most people know as a stroke.
Speaker 1 00:06:50 And each of those chiropractors are performing hundreds of thousands, if not more adjustments over the course of their entire career. So if just one of those chiropractors is statistically going to have an incident, those odds are pretty good.
Speaker 2 00:07:04 It's less than one, I think in 3 million. So it's a very extremely low number. But you know how bad news is, it travels very quickly. And so when something like that does happen, then it tends to hit the airway quickly and everybody likes sturdy laundry.
Speaker 1 00:07:22 So I want this patient to understand that you have a much higher risk of being injured driving to the chiropractor than you do when you actually get there. Statistically, yeah, far greater risk of having an incident in traffic or maybe even you probably have a higher risk of getting attacked by a shark than you do getting injured at the chiropractor. So I hope this person realizes that there are myths out there and it, I've seen RAM movies too. It looks similar, but that is not based in reality.
Speaker 2 00:07:52 Well, or the Bruce Lee stuff, but you're correct there because of the fact that there is a mild slight possibility, it's still there. We realize that we are educated probably better than any other profession on what to look for as possible early signs of these cerebral vascular disorders before we treat day. The story that happened to me yesterday in the gym. So I get this professional bodybuilder, so he's a large guy and he was, uh, over squatting some enormous 500 plus pounds in the gym yesterday. And he walked up to me after he had finished training and he was explained to me about this pain that he was having in his right shoulder area up around the clavicle. And um, what I thought might possibly be the cause of this and the area that it was in was around the clavicle. So very common it had that been on the opposite side.
Speaker 2 00:08:55 First thing most people would think would be some heart related issue, since he didn't have a trauma that he could remember associated with, given the history when we were talking about, he's a very large guy now. Um, we were talking a couple weeks ago about the side, the side sleeper, and this kid is a ton of muscle. We narrowed it down to that was him sleeping on the side with a pillow that was not adequate because he was crushing down all that pick muscle on that side, impinging that nerve and that artery flowing through that shoulder. And then we talked about, you know, the dos and don'ts when you're, you know, training to keep from aggravating that I explained to 'em upright roads, which is where you're taking that weight in front of you and you're bringing it up towards your chin. And he says, Oh no, I don't do those anymore.
Speaker 2 00:09:40 Well, he's a smart guy because he realizes that can create that same symptom with the impingement central. But I asked him, I said, Were you able to get underneath that, that bar, uh, with your arms, uh, due the fact that that shoulder was bothering you so bad on the right side? He said, I could barely grip the bar the way the shoulder had displaced his self interior forward. He trying to get that bar behind him was very difficult question in the gym. And there's your diagnosis pretty much before you've even he's even got to the clinic.
Speaker 1 00:10:08 Yeah, that guy knees a pillow about as thick as a bean bag as big as his shoulders probably are. That's
Speaker 2 00:10:13 What I'm telling some people. They don't realize they're six to eight inches there between the bed and the head. That's how thick that pillow's gotta be for some people.
Speaker 1 00:10:20 Yeah. Probably just need two at the end of the day, if you're that big. Well
Speaker 2 00:10:23 Yeah, or shop around and find something like you just said, you might just need to get the, uh, the cushion off the couch, <laugh> sleep on it. Hey, if you choose to be that large, you're gonna have to, uh, you know, adapt and modify. But even the 110 pound female, I mean, she's gonna have an issue if that pillow's not four inches thick.
Speaker 1 00:10:44 I'll tell you this, this body pillow that I got has absolutely been a game changer for me. I mentioned it on a previous podcast, but it's huge shaped like a candy cane. It's thick so it doesn't compress under your weight. Right. And I like it so much that I went and got a practitioner account with the company, so now I, I can sell 'em outta here. I got a wholesale account, but they, they work so well and they're humongous. When I first got it, Katie felt like it was pushing her outta the bed, but then she went and got one too. So she could, But it helps tremendously.
Speaker 2 00:11:15 Yeah, it does take up another body space in there, but however, with that one pillow, you're probably getting the effect that you would need with three because that pillow also fits between the knees when you're on your side. So that's exactly, that's sort of a, that's a, a good thing to consider myself. I move, I used to move three pillows, now I only move really two because I've got one permanently underneath my knees now. And then of course when I roll on my side I just put one leg underneath it and then I have my down pillow that I lay flat on my back with and then my thicker pillow for when I roll on the side, I put that on the headboard. And so when I flip, all I to do is roll one down and now I only have to move one other pillow where I used to have to find that knee pillow and position
Speaker 1 00:11:58 It. Talking about your bodybuilder friend in the gym made me think about when I'm in the gym in between sets I cannot help but just watch people lift, especially squat and I'll just watch their form. And what I see is that it doesn't matter how advanced you might be in the gym muscle wise, you can be humongous, you can have tons of muscle. That doesn't necessarily mean that you have good form biomechanically and that's putting you at a higher risk for injury. And I have a friend who's a physical therapist and we were talking about it the other day and she was saying that sometimes high level athletes have worse form on the squat than someone who is a typical outta shape. You know, and I've been using this app for a long time, it's called posture screen. So on a first visit when a patient comes in, I wanna make sure that they have good posture as a chiropractor, obviously that posture something we pay a lot of attention to and put a lot of stock in because good posture helps prevent pain.
Speaker 1 00:12:58 So the posture screen app, I take a photo from the front and a photo from the side and then I analyze the alignment of their head over their shoulders, each shoulder from side to side. So I can see if one's higher than the other, how that sits on top of the rib cage and how the rib cage sits on top of the pelvis down to the knee, down to the foot. Then I take a photo from the side and I draw lines on it like you would an x-ray and I can see if the ear is over the shoulder, over the pelvis, over the knee, over the ankle. Right. And then based on that, I then design a home exercise program that addresses the problems that I found on that. So I was using the app the other day and I, there was a feature that I had seen before, but I've never really used until this week.
Speaker 1 00:13:43 It's called squat screen. So it's the same principle. I take a video on through the app of someone doing a good deep squat from the side and I draw the lines on the head, the shoulder, the pelvis, the knee, the foot, and the app does all this for you. It draws the lines on it throughout the squat and it shows you what specific muscles are underactive, what muscles might be inhibited, what muscles might be too tight. So it then gives me a list of say, okay, left perfors, right pers all the way down the body from head to toe and then it designs the whole ex exercise program for me based on these muscles. So that's something I've been getting a lot of value out of for patients lately is that once we get the initial posture right, then I work on that squat because that's gonna put you at less risk for having an injury in the gym.
Speaker 2 00:14:36 Uh, yeah, technology, we used to use the old, uh, posture screen where we actually had not rubber bands but bands and basically you did the same thing, measure the shoulder up and then you have the plum line for, you know, front to back and uh, it took up like half a room,
Speaker 1 00:14:54 So Oh, had like the grid on the wall? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:14:57 Yeah. Yep. Yeah, that's just, that's typically I'll find the same thing about golfers. You know, golfers are going to get the perfect golf swing and um, so they get 'em a pro and the pro says, Oh yeah, we're gonna get you the perfect swing, but I don't care who you are. If the spine and the pelvis is not functioning, there is not going to be a perfect swing. You know, I tell my patients this way, if I had both my legs the same length and I went into the gym and I said, You know what, I'm gonna put my right foot on a two by four and do the squats and not one on the left foot, I would expect to hurt. I expect not to even walk outta there. But basically that's what you're doing when you have developed the pelvic instability and you're trying to do close chain exercises with one length shorter than the other, it's gonna happen. Then the rough thing is, is a lot of times we, it doesn't hurt while we're doing the lift, right? You're not pulling the 500 pound dead lift or the two 50 pound deadlift and going, ah, sometimes it's get in the truck or car, go home and try to get out and that's when it hits you and then you don't correlate those two so much,
Speaker 1 00:15:57 Right? Cause the body crave symmetry from side to side, you know, it wants to be even, it wants to be symmetrical. So when you have one shoulder that's higher than the other and then you start doing rows in the gym or shrugs in the gym or an overhead press, do you have a compensatory pattern there you have where one arm is having to push harder than the other, the other one's just having to stabilize. That's almost the same thing as like a, an am a short leg in the pelvis, you know, when the pelvis is out of alignment, that's the foundation of the body. Then the spine has to compensate for that. And that makes me think about the first time that I got adjusted by uh, Steven, I'd never been adjusted before, so I didn't know that I felt uneven and after that first alignment I went and did a back workout and I was like, holy crap man, I feel like I'm actually pulling evenly with both arms now. And I didn't even realize that I wasn't, before everything felt smoother. I had better control of the muscles, I could contract them harder on both sides and I felt like I just had a better mind body connection after the first time I got adjusted. And it didn't take long, it was immediate.
Speaker 2 00:17:01 Maybe that's where that scenario comes from. Well, you know, once you start getting adjusted, you keep on getting adjusted. Well maybe it's because I know now I can feel this good and that's what I'm gonna stick with and stay with, right?
Speaker 1 00:17:12 Yeah. It's like once I started eating healthy, I kept eating healthy. I didn't just do it one time and expected to continue to give me results. You know, like it's something you, it's kind of part of your healthcare routine.
Speaker 2 00:17:22 Yeah. Getting back to a very good point that you just made about symmetry, the body has to have it and you know, the fight or flight syndrome ingrained within us has to have that. That's why regardless of a high hip on one side and maybe a compensating shoulder tilt on the other side, the one thing that a patient will not walk in with very seldom is with the head tilted hard to one side, right? Let, should just say everything's short on the left, the leg short on the left, so therefore it's not hovering above the ground, it goes to the ground while the patient may be leaning toward the left, but is he not gonna walk in or walk around town with the head tilted to the left, the riding reflex within the brain center of the brain's gonna bring those eyes horizontal. So now he's going through the day not realizing that he's compensating the whole day, right? Where if we walked around in our head tilted towards the low side and we walked around like that all day, we'd know, hey, something's up. And so would everybody we pass on the street would know something's up. Right? That that's not the way the body works.
Speaker 2 00:18:28 Uh
Speaker 1 00:18:29 Oh. Oh, oh yeah. And speaking of symmetry, this has happened to me several times this week. It's such an easy fix as a chiropractor, this has to be the easiest fix you can help a patient get through is when they have a chronic short leg on one side we've talked about it, we've driven at home that's coming from the pelvis. That's because one of the side of the pelvis is rotated and that gives the appearance of a short leg. It's not that the bone of the leg is shorter, it's that the pelvis rotating, pulls the leg up with it and nine times outta 10. When I see that is because a male patient is carrying a big fat wallet in his back pocket on just on one side obviously. And he is got receipts from Home Depot from 2014 because I guess you never know when you might need to return a toolbox, but so I tell the patient, Look, just start carrying your wallet in the front pocket because when you're constantly sitting on a one inch thick wallet, it's pushing that pelvis up on that side and your body's having to compensate for that.
Speaker 1 00:19:32 It's throwing your foundation off. So empty out the wallet, just get down to the bear minimum. Maybe a co maybe a, a credit card, a debit card, a driver's license, and a little bit of cash. Those are the big things that I always keep with me in my front pocket wallet. So maybe, uh, get a minimalist wallet, carry it in the front pocket and that will fix a lot of back pain cases right there.
Speaker 2 00:19:55 The George Castanza wallet.
Speaker 1 00:19:58 Yeah. That way exactly. That's what the patient said. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:20:01 Yeah. That keeps us busy. What I do with the guys is I say, Right guys, you know, gimme that wallet. And uh, sometimes is, you know, sometimes these things are wonder doing just thick, right? And I'll explain it to him this way. I said, Now look, would you go home at the end of your day, go over and grab a book off the bookshelf that's that thick and just sit it underneath one butt cheek for the heck of it. <laugh>? No. Oh no. Well you're doing that all day, especially when you're riding in the car, right? You understand that you're shimming up one side, you know, are, um, engineers know what we're talking about. Builders know what we're talking about, and you shim me up one side, you either gonna have to shim me up the other or it's not gonna be balanced. So, um, very good point to, cause people ask you all the time, you know, Well how did it get like that, how my leg get short? It's almost like, well how didn't it, you know, crossing your legs when you sit sliding into second base when you're in, you know, 13, um, roller skating. I mean, my gosh, even the the toddler trying to walk. I mean, when are you not compromising, falling on the butt or just, um, not sitting perfectly balanced?
Speaker 1 00:21:05 I had a patient this week and he, in his wallet that we were talking about <laugh>, I was like, let me just, lemme see what you got in there cuz he is a buddy of mine. Oh yeah. And one of the things he was carrying was <laugh> the certificate of authenticity for a pocket knife that he had lost. <laugh>. Like, why do you need that? But I swear
Speaker 2 00:21:24 I found out, man, I did the same thing myself. I remember when I got the money clip, like you were talking about, I got it for Christmas or something like that. So I took it down to the bare skinny, right? Get your credit card, maybe your driver's license and uh, you know, some pocket change and put that in the money clip and put it in the front pocket, right? So what'd I do with my wallet? Well I said, you know, I gotta have all this stuff. So I said I'm gonna put it in, uh, glove compartment in my car next year I am cleaning out the car and there in the glove compartment is that wallet with all that stuff that I had to keep still in it, that I miss it. Obviously not <laugh>. So yes, sometimes you might wanna think about what you really need, right? You
Speaker 1 00:22:05 Wanna wrap this thing up Dr. Jay?
Speaker 2 00:22:06 Yeah, that's it for this week. Everybody have a great one and uh, we'll be back on air soon.
