​COVID 19 (Novel Corona Virus) is in the wild in So. Cal.  I am not an expert by any stretch but I know experts, consulted with one, and have read expert opinions.  Here are some of the things that I will be doing.  This is not an exhaustive list so add to it as you see fit.  No prevention can be 100%.    
 
First, let’s understand COVID:
1)COVID is a lung virus.  It can cause from mild chest congestion to cough to shortness of breath to severe respiratory distress to pneumonia to death.  It doesn’t tend to infect the nasal passages like a cold or flu.  Read up on how to tell one from the other to know when to go to the Urgent Care/ER. 
2)COVID is 3.4% fatal as of this writing.  The flu is 0.05% +/-.  So it’s hundreds of times more deadly.  Most deaths are 80 years of age and up as well as people with pre-existing conditions.  Children under 7 have been surprisingly largely spared from infection.  We don’t know why.   
3)It is possible but unlikely that you will catch COVID from someone sneezing on you unless they do so right in your face, although it is spread by droplets.  Instead, you are more likely to catch it from touching a contaminated surface and then touching your nose or mouth, which we do dozens of times every day.  It is this fact that drives the whole prevention plan.
4)The virus may stay virulent up to 9 days on flat surfaces.  Think cash, credit card machines, ATM’s, shopping carts, door handles, gas pumps, light switches, doorbells, community pens, the use of ipads at urgent care for check in, hand shaking, etc. etc.
5)The incubation is 2 to 14 days and you may be contagious for days before you are sick and days after you are recovered.  We don’t know the rate of transmission (how contagious it is) yet but it’s thought to be similar to flu. 
 
Things we can do depending upon localized risk, where you are at the time, your job, etc.:
1)Wear a surgical mask in public places.  The entire purpose is to keep from infecting oneself by touching the mouth or the nose.  Not touching the face is the #1 preventative and so hard to avoid. 
2)Fist pump or elbow tap.  No more hand shaking.  Always been a terrible thing anyway.  Glad to get rid of it. 
3)Don’t touch community objects with your hand/fingers if you can avoid it.  Open doors with your hip, use a paper towel to pump gas, flip lights on with a knuckle, use your knuckle at the ATM, on credit card machine, etc.  Then use Purell afterward, if you can find any not being hoarded by the crazies.        
4)Keep hand sanitizer in your pocket, car, by the door of your home and office.  Use it often. 
5)Wash your hands for 10-20 seconds several times a day, especially before you take off your mask or before you eat.  If you must reuse a mask know the inside versus outside!   
6)Wipe community surfaces with wipes whenever able.  Carry wipes that are at least 60% alcohol or that contain bleach for just this purpose, again if you can find any that are not being hoarded by the crazies.
7)If you must sneeze or cough into your elbow/clothing wash them.
8)Teach your kids these rules as best you can. 
9)One resource suggested that COVID 19 may be sensitive to zinc like the cold virus is.  I don’t know.  If so then Zycam Oral Spray for Colds and Cold-eze lozenges may be good to have in stock. 
 
Don’t panic like the Costco raiders are.  Be smart.  Have some food stocked up.  Rotate is regularly.  And remember – WASH YOUR HANDS AND DON’T TOUCH YOUR FACE.  

             Every kid at some point touches something hot and gets burned.  It might be the stove or a hot pan.  For my young son long ago it was his mother’s curling iron just before he was to walk down the aisle as the ring bearer in a wedding.  It was touch and go, but he pulled it off.  In cases like this pain is actually a good and necessary thing.  It tells us we have done something bad or stupid, prevents worse damage, and teaches us to not do this thing again.  But all too often pain is just there all the time, day after day, serving no educational purpose, interfering with life, mobility, and happiness.
 
            Most of my patients come to me for help with chronic pain.  Sometimes I’m the first doctor they have seen, but more often they have been to their medical doctor for help, and sometimes I’m their last hope.  When you are in the thick of it pain makes it is hard to think clearly, to objectively analyze the situation.  You just want to be rid of it.  You don’t care about philosophical questions such as, “do I treat the symptom or the cause?”  I argue it is better to ask the question and make a thoughtful decision as this decision may determine much of your future. 
 
            The symptom is pain.  Simple right?...Wrong.  Pain is so incredibly complex that books are written about it, conferences held, degrees awarded, and specialists devote careers to the study of it.  But the treatment of the symptoms of pain generally comes down to chemistry; anti-inflammatories, pain killers, opioids, injections.  Maybe these help.  Maybe they don’t.  If they do reduce symptom might they mask the underlying cause and make it worse in the long run?  Something to think about.  And what is this underlying cause I speak of?
 
            Essentially, it’s scar tissue.  It works like this.  Trauma and gravity cause stress on the joints of the spine.  Stress causes inflammation of the joints.  Inflammation causes scar tissue.  Scar tissue causes loss of joint mobility which causes more inflammation (infinite cycle).  Inflammation and scar tissue cause nerve stress, pain, and cartilage degeneration, thereby making it a permanent condition (arthritis/disc degeneration/disc herniation).  And it goes on from there to other articles for me to write.  But, essentially, the cause is scar tissue. 
 
            Remember that inflammation/scar tissue is a major player in many chronic diseases:  Arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries which causes heart attacks and strokes), endometriosis (pelvic inflammatory disease), cirrhosis (liver disease), COPD (emphysema), are just a few examples of diseases of inflammation/scar tissue.  And so is vertebral subluxation of the spine.
 
            So if you have spine-related pain then the cause is most likely scar tissue.  From there it’s just a matter of logic.  Treat the cause with adjustments to the specific affected joints until they are maximally corrected or otherwise proven too damaged to correct.  Then go from there.  

            Bifurcate – “To divide into two branches or forks.”  33 years ago this was the word that my wife used to describe childbirth.  For example, it used to be a thing that two kids would take the wishbone from a turkey, each grab one end, make a silent wish, and then pull.  Whomever got the larger piece of the bone would get his/her wish.  In the process the kids have bifurcated the wishbone.  Makes me very glad I’m a guy!
           
            Imagine that you can bifurcate your life.  Live two lives at the same time.  No I’m not talking about how some politicians live a double life, one for their family and one for their constituents.  Rather I’m asking you to pretend that you can have two bodies at the same time to live within.  I know it’s ridiculous, but just buy into it for a minute.  Go back in your mind to the day you called my office to set up your exam.  After you made the call and set up the appointment imagine you downloaded what we will call the Dr. Rick Bifurcation app.  One of the tabs on the app is self-duplication.  You own a very smart smart phone and open my app and press on the self-duplication tab.  Instantly, your body is duplicated and your life is bifurcated.  Now there are two yous sitting in the room, the you-you and the duplicate-you.  Yeah, I know it’s weird.  Play along.
 
The you-you keeps the appointment with me while the duplicate-you wants nothing of this crazy chiropractic thing.  You-you buys into what I’m selling, spinal/neurological wellness, gets the adjustments, does the exercises, gets the massages, completes the Initial Intensive Care to get the spine under control, and then goes onto Reconstructive Care to maximally correct the spine of subluxation, and finally embarks on a lifetime Wellness Care plan to allow for maximum healing and spinal-neurological health.  In the meantime, duplicate-you goes forward with life like most people do, without chiropractic care, managing their pain and health issues with an ever increasing supply of prescription drugs and little more. 
 
Here’s the question:
 
Which you is going to have better posture, stand straighter, feel better, have less pain, have more flexibility and greater mobility, and generally be healthier when the two of you are in your 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and beyond?  You-you of course. 
 
And how much would duplicate-you pay to have the health and mobility that you-you has in the second half of life?  $1,000?  $100,000?  $1,000,000?  It doesn’t matter.  Health is not for sale.  It has to be earned day by day by making good decisions at a point in life when you can still prevent the problems in the first place, at a time before the bifurcation.  I hope you’ll continue with me along that path.

​You have probably talked to your friends and family about chiropractic and you know that opinions about chiropractic vary greatly.  Some love us.  Some merely utilize us.  Some are afraid of us.  Some are skeptical of us.  Some think we are quacks.  But what does the American public really think?  Now we know.  Published in the prestigious medical journal Spine last year, this article analyzes a survey that included 34,525 adult responders out of 42,366 households.  That is a bunch of people and offers great statistical rigor.  There are a lot of numbers in the article that will cause your eyes to glaze over so I’ll stick to the highlight reel.
 
24.0%              adults in the U.S. have consulted a chiropractor in their life (too low)
 
8.4%                adults have consulted chiropractor in the last year (way too low)
 
Chiropractic is more utilized out west, by whites and Hispanics, by people with more education, and by people in relative good health.  Plus, chiropractic patients are better looking (my personal observation).
 
93%                 Percentage who sought help for back and neck related problems (expected)
 
90.3%              Said we either helped a great deal or some (awesome!)
 
3.5%                Said we did not help them at all.  THAT IS A REMARKABLY LOW NUMBER!  
 
While most people start chiropractic for relief of pain, most people continue using chiropractic for general wellness and disease prevention, to improve energy, improve athletic performance, improve immune function and memory, and more.  Plus: 
 
40.2%              Said it helps to reduce stress level (makes sense)
 
66.9%              Said it helps to improve overall health and make you feel better (impressive)
 
41.9%              Said it helps them sleep better (I agree)
 
And how important was chiropractic for maintaining health and well-being?
 
77.5%              Said very important to somewhat important
 
3.3%                Said not at all (the same ones that weren’t helped in the first place)
 
That means over 90% of chiropractic users get what they want fixed, get something else fixed too, and feel that ongoing care is important to their overall health and well-being.  We must be doing something right.  Share this with someone.      

​January is the traditional resolution time of year, coming just after a prolonged period of waist-line expansion that began at Thanksgiving dinner and ended at midnight on New Year’s Eve.  It is a time when we state our intentions for the coming year.  Some do it formally and broadcast their plans on social media.  Others do it silently so that no one else will know when they fail.  This is my preferenceJ  And still others show antipathy to this annual self-analysis, either ignoring their shortcomings or convincing themselves that they have nothing which needs improving.  Which are you? 
 
            For reasons beyond my control this past month I have been spending a great deal of time in places with names such as Urgent Care, Emergency Room, Intensive Care Unit, Telemetry Unit, Skilled Nursing Facility, Rehabilitation, etc.  There’s a lot of misery in these places, people suffering, and worse.  Some of them are there through no fault of their own.  Sometimes you just get sick.  Stuff happens.  Others are there simply because they are old and their bodies are wearing out.  But I would argue that more than half are there either because their actions did not mirror their intentions, or they made no intentions in the first place to take action upon.  In short, they didn’t take care of this very fragile temple we live in. 
 
            Have you spent time in one of these places either as on observer or participant?  What do you think about when you walk down their hallways?  I’ll tell you what I think about as I see bed after bed filled with folks recovering from any number of ailments.  I see people sitting around in wheel chairs as if waiting for…anything to happen.  Walkers.  Bedside commodes.  Bed pans.  Call buttons.  IV’s.  Fear.  Pain.  Despondency.  Crying for help.  I feel great empathy for these folks, but what I constantly think about is, “Am I doing all that I can or should to keep myself out of this place in my not very distant future?” 
 
            To address this question we have to quickly review the largest preventable reasons for admission to these places.  Did you know that the single largest cause of disability on the planet is the spine?  The vast majority of the money spent to treat this problem goes to back surgery and drugs (giving us the current opioid epidemic).  I could adjust you every week for over 100 years for the cost of one fusion back surgery!  After spine issues comes everything that can happen from a combination of eating too much, eating the wrong things, exercising too little, and of course, smoking (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, others).    
 
            So based upon the above paragraph, am I arguing that if you merely ate responsibly, exercised a little bit, reasonably managed your weight, didn’t smoke, and took moderate care of your spine (weekly adjustments and disc pump exercises), you would be much less likely to need a hospital, a skilled nursing facility, or any other critical or chronic care facility? Absolutely!!    
 
            If you accept my argument and decide that you are worth some effort, then state your intention to do these few things, consistently act on your intentions, and then reap the benefits years and decades from now.  It’ll be worth the effort.    

​So my grandkids like this cartoon called Blaze and the Monster Machines.  It’s an amalgam combining entertainment with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in which these talking trucks with giant tires solve a variety of problems and help each other.  During the show they involve the kids by having them repeat a STEM word to learn what it means.  In one episode they are launching pies from a giant slingshot toward the sort-of bad guys to teach about the concept of trajectory.  I can hear both Jackjack and Eli saying “trajectory” at the appointed moment.  It’s very cute. 
 
            Trajectory actually has more than one meaning, but in general it describes a directed path.  So let’s apply it to health and mobility, but in reverse order.  To do this I need you to play along.  Think of a person you know who has limited mobility due to arthritis.  It doesn’t matter if it’s arthritis of the spine or knees or hips or whatever.  It’s only important that your person has arthritis somewhere and can’t move well because of it.  Now imagine you have the magic ability to play this person’s life-tape backwards.  Do this in your head and take them to an age well before they even knew they had arthritis, a time when their mobility was 100% and they didn’t have an inkling of what was to come.  Are you there?  Perfect.  We are going to call their “health trajectory” the pathway that took them from where they were then to where they are now. 
 
            The boys learned by watching Blaze that a small change in trajectory made huge changes in the final destination of the pie, whether the target was or was not hit in the face.  So with your magic imagine you could reach into the past and tweak your loved one’s health trajectory just a bit so that today he/she would have full mobility.  I wonder what you would change?  There are lots of options of course, and of course this is academic since you don’t possess that magical ability.  Ah, but you do have that magic, but for your own life.
 
            You are on a trajectory.  You are heading down a path.  You must be first willing to open your eyes to the reality of that path to have the remotest ability to tweak it.  Are you willing?  I’m stubborn.  It took a hospital E.R. visit in 2000 to open my eyes.  I hope you are not as thick-headed as me.  Ask if you don’t know my story.  I have listed below a partial list of the changes I made to tweak my path.  I didn’t do them all at once.  Rather, one at a time, each when I was ready, willing and able.  Today, my trajectory is far from where it was in 2000. 
 
            Drink 64 oz. water per day.  Lose 50# and keep it off.  Regular aerobic exercise.  Cut out soda.  Cut back caffeine.  Take antioxidants (D, E, Omega 3).  Take anti-inflammatory supplement (Curcumin).  Develop and do my Disc Pump exercises daily.  Get adjusted at least once a week.    
 
            If you want to talk about your trajectory and how you can change it let’s talk.  I’ll help but only you can make it happen. 
 

I’m sitting in the co-pilot’s seat of a Cirrus G3 propeller driven 4-seater plane.  My right hand is on the control stick.  We took off from Santa Barbara airport heading south back to Fullerton, just passing over Oxnard air space.  My wife, Diana, is in the left rear seat.  The pilot, Aria, is to my left.  “See that mountain over there.  Head toward that and maintain our altitude at 5,500’… now bank to the right heading toward Point Loma and then take it down to 3,500’ at a descent rate of 500’/minute.  That’s a comfortable descent rate for passengers.”  My first and probably last flying lesson, lasting about 10-15 minutes.  I didn’t break the plane.  That’s a good thing.  How did I get here?
 
            It all started about 18 years ago when a young attorney walked into my office with terrible lower back pain.  He was bent over a bit.  Had a rough time getting out of a chair.  He was desperate.  It was not his first time like this either.  He had tried other chiropractors with no success.  But what else was there for him to do?  Drugs…not a viable option for this young man.  Surgery…not a candidate, nor a viable option either.  So in he walks into my office.  I listened to him.  I examined him.  I took his x-rays.  Then I did something no chiropractor had done before, or has been able to duplicate on him since.  To be just a bit technical, I did a base-posterior adjustment of the sacrum with a superior to inferior torque.  Right after the adjustment he got off the table nearly 100% pain-free, a rare but wonderful outcome.  A true success story.
 
I would take care of him, his then wife, his kids, and his brother for several years as he began his young law career.  He was one of those types that was self-assured, even cocky, some would think him arrogant.  Within about 5 years he had sold his house in Southridge and moved on.  I saw him a couple of times when he would limp into my office needing a fix and happened to be in the area.  He kept trying chiropractors wherever he was, since his back would “go out” far too often.  He even tried several chiropractors who were “experts” in the Gonstead technique, the same technique I use, the same technique that taught me the base-posterior adjustment that provides instantaneous relief to this young attorney.  And then I heard nothing from him for several years until last Friday.
 
I played the voice mail left by him on my cell.  “My back has gone out,” he says.  “I would really appreciate your help.  Are you willing to make a house call?  No other chiropractors can do what you do.  I’ve tried them all.  By the way, I live in Ojai now!!”  For those of you who don’t know, Ojai is inland, sort of in between Ventura and Santa Barbara, at least a 2-1/2 hour drive from here.  I’m not driving to Ojai to make a house call.  I don’t drive to Fontana from my home in Yorba Linda for house calls.  But he needed my help.  I couldn’t leave him high and dry.  So I called him back and we settled on a plan.
 
In the intervening years he had become quite successful, so he sent one of his three planes to pick up me and my wife in Fullerton and flew us to Santa Barbara where I had arranged for a very good Gonstead chiropractor to accept him as a new patient.  I adjusted his lower back to demonstrate the technique to the new doctor, got a Starbucks, got on the plane, took my flying lesson, and went home.  The longest house call of my career.  What a day.  You just never know what tomorrow may bring.  

​No, I didn’t make up the word glymphatics.  We know that we don’t know everything there is to know about how the living cell works, but we know a lot.  But we thought we knew everything about what is called gross anatomy, but it turns out we didn’t.  This requires some explanation so stick with me.  It will be worth the read. 
In your body you have two fluid drainage systems.  The first we all know about, veins.  Blood comes out of the heart to the aorta to arteries to arterioles to capillaries to venules to veins to the vena cava to the lungs and then back to the heart again.  Simple.  The second is the lymphatic system.  It is a series of tiny nearly invisible tubes with one-way valves that drain all the cells and space (interstitial space) between the cells of your body.  It then filters this drainage through the immune system in the lymph nodes in the groin, arm pits, chest and neck finally dumping the filtered garbage into a vein in your chest for further processing by the kidneys and liver.  It’s the trash dump of the body.  Here’s the catch.  We absolutely thought we knew that there was no lymphatic system in the brain.  We just found out we were completely wrong.  It is there and it’s critical to brain health and it’s called the glymphatic system.
There is much you can learn by web-searching this, but here’s the must know.  The function of the glymphatic system is critical for brain health, both in the short term and the long term.  In the short term poorly functioning glymphatic drainage appears to play a role in migraines.  In the long term Alzheimer’s Disease is characterized by a build-up of b-amyloid protein.  This protein is a normal by-product of the brain but it is supposed to be drained by the glymphatics.  So Alzheimer’s may be caused or at least related to inadequate glymphatic damage.  There are a whole bunch of other neurological diseases that are very likely related to damage to this system as well, including Parkinson’s Disease and stroke and much more.  There is still much to learn.  It appears that concussions are one pathway of damage to the glymphatics but we are very early in the research to build a comprehensive list of causes of glymphatic injury. 
But one thing we do know is that drainage is critical.  And it has been shown that this system only drains when we are asleep!  This may be the critical reason why sleep is so important, as it is the only time when the junk produced by the very busy brain cells all day are cleaned out.  During waking hours the glymphatics are completely shut down.  It’s not that we should have 8 hours, research is indicating that we REQUIRE 7-9 hours per night for complete rinsing of all the built up gunk.  Furthermore, studies are showing that alternate side sleeping helps the glymphatics to function best, then back sleeping and stomach sleeping is worst of all.  
And here’s the chiropractic implication.  The glymphatics drain into the lymphatic system of the brain which drains into the deep cervical lymph nodes which are surrounding the cervical spine.  It is well understood by chiropractors that subluxation of the neck vertebrae can impair lymphatic drainage due to inflammation, nerve stress, and mechanical blockage.  So, subluxation correction followed by regular chiropractic adjustments as part of an overall wellness plan may help to improve brain drainage and function, both short and long term.  There have been studies linking chiropractic care to improved memory, behavior, and mental health.  Perhaps this is the link.  More to come.

​Researchers looked at medical data from 68 countries on 32 different types of cancer and the conclusions are shocking.  Before I tell you the shocking news understand that this is not new information.  This most recent study supports a previous study in 2015 that was also not well received due to the shocking nature of its results.  The shocking news is that about 66% of all cancers are just bad luck, 29% are attributable to environment, and only 5% are inherited from your parents.  In other words, you have no ability to reduce your risk of cancer in 71% of all cases.  Now it varies depending upon the type of cancer, but still, that’s really kind of scary.  Let me break this down.
 
            How about a quick embryology lesson.  We all start as a single cell, right.  Then that cell begins to wildly duplicate until we are a tiny ball of identical cells.  And then one of those cells changes, differentiates is the word, and becomes a nerve cell, and then a heart cell, skin, bone, etc. until we are us.  It’s kind of important that each adult cell type stays as that type.  But sometimes, a normal adult cell type will change backward and become abnormal, become more like its former undifferentiated self, and then start replicating uncontrollably.  Cancer.  There are different types of cancer and they come from different cell types and they behave differently.  But what they all have in common is they replicate uncontrollably and take over the immediate area.  If they metastasize, meaning they spread through the blood or lymph to other parts of the body, they can lodge somewhere else and take over that area too.  Sucks.
 
            Turns out there are 3 general categories of cancer.  The first is the kind that we inherit.  Bad genes that are passed down.  Not much we can do about that.  For example, there are genes for colon cancer that are 100% certain to develop into cancer.  Only thing this person can do is to have his entire large intestine removed.  The second type of cancer is just bad luck.  When cells duplicate (called mitosis) sometimes the duplication process just goes wrong, a mutation happens in the wrong spot, and voila, cancer.  Finally, the third kind is the kind that we can do something about preventing.  These are environmentally caused mutations.  We can reduce the incidence of mutation by not smoking, drinking clean water, breathing clean air, that type of thing.  And we can reduce the incidence by increasing our ability to prevent and repair mutations by taking anti-oxidants like fish oils, vitamin d, vitamin e, etc., and by eating a better diet. 
 
            So there’s no twist at the end of this story.  No chiropractic overlay.  Overall, you only have influence over 29% of cancers by changing your behavior.  71% of cancer cases are out of our control.  Seems bleak but that’s our world.  It is riddled with disease and evil.  So what’s the good news?  In my opinion, the good news is that we have each other!  We are all in the same boat together.  We have each other for research and for treatment and aid and guidance and comfort and support and hugs, holding hands, lending an ear, handing a tissue.  We have love.  And for that we can truly thank God.