I challenge you to perform the following test.  Go to a mall or a busy shopping center.  Take a seat and people-watch for 10 minutes.  Pay very close attention to people older than you, particularly senior citizens.  Watch how many of them move, how they walk, how they bend, how they sit down, how they get up, how they turn their head, how some shuffle, how some use a cane, etc. When you are done processing everything you have seen ask yourself this question, “Do I want to be like them when I’m that age?”  If you are like me the answer will be a vigorous NO.  Regardless of your age it’s really not that far from now.  A lot happens in life but it is none-the-less a very short thing.  And at the end of the day our physical life is about two things, health and mobility.  And I would argue if I had the room on this page that much of health stems from mobility.  So really, our physical life is all about how well we move.  Move it or lose it…

            In your body you have one joint wherever any two bones come together.  Each end of those two bones are capped by cartilage, kind of like snow on Mount Baldy.  In the case of the spine, the bones are separated by a special kind of cartilage called discs.  The joint is held together by a joint capsule ligament which keeps in the joint lubricant, called synovium.  And then TIME, LIFE, AND GRAVITY HAPPEN!

            Time will cause your joints to get stiffer as capsules get tighter and the synovium dries up.  Life’s antics/accidents/injuries/activities/repetitive stresses will cause inflammation in your joints, and inflammation ALWAYS leads to scar tissue (more on scar tissue later).  Finally, gravity beats down on you day after day causing more inflammation and more scar tissue.  Regarding that scar tissue; scar tissue is a protein called collagen that is very sticky and non-elastic…it does not stretch.  So think of scar tissue as duct tape, very sticky and not at all stretchy.  After years of time, life, and gravity you will have duct tape all over your body in nearly every joint to a greater or lesser degree.  Your hips will get stiff.  Your knees will get sore.  You’ll get a bad back.  You won’t be able to lift your arms above your shoulders any more.  You will look just like all those senior citizens you saw in the mall.  Move it or lose it…

            Once you lose your mobility you will never get it back.  Your only hope is to keep it, never lose it.  Inflammation and scar tissue (duct tape) are the keys.  What can you do to reduce inflammation and duct tape while you are young to have less of it when you get old?  What tools are available and affordable?  What has been clinically tested?  It is very simple. Move it!  There are three “move it” tools that you must do. 

Move It #1 - Take a fast walk for an hour, 3 times a week. 

Move It #2 - Stretch your spine every day using my disc pump stretching program. 

Move It #3 - Get the joints that are bound up with duct tape adjusted regularly.

Can you do more?  Sure, there are many recommended and optional tools beyond the above, and once you are doing the “musts” we can talk about the “shoulds.”  Will you change your future?  Or will you give in to it?  Time will tell.  I’m working to change mine.   

            I have a room upstairs in my house that we call the Adventurers Room.  When we travel we pick up knick knacks and display them here.  There’s stuff like replicas of the Rosetta Stone and Stonehenge (not full size), Hawaiian keep-sakes, Egyptian papyrus art, a pirate skull with crossed swords, and certificates of named stars for my children.  My parents have also contributed items such a Persian battle axe, a whale bone Indonesian blow dart gun (that really works…on sisters and overstuffed chairs!), and an Australian boomerang.  Oddly enough, one of my prized possessions is a small cap, much like a colorful yamaka, that I got when I was 6 while on vacation in Iran of all places.  Iran was a very safe place to go in 1967. Now they jail Christians.  Anyway, it really is a very neat room to spend time in looking over the bits of history and culture.  And in the corner of the room is…the black hole, aka the closet.

            The black hole was not always as such.  When we moved in 1998 I built shelves so that everything could remain well organized…a place for everything and everything in its place.  About 7 years ago I reorganized the black hole.  Ah!  It is a good feeling when you unclutter clutter.  And now, 7 years later, it is a black hole again.  Things just find their way in there, initially in the right place, but soon the right place doesn’t have enough room for the right stuff.  And that stuff has to go somewhere.  So it goes in some other stuff’s place mixing stuff with stuff.  The horror!  And pretty soon it just doesn’t matter where stuff goes as long as it goes somewhere in the black hole.  Just put it away.  I don’t want guests to see it.  I will clean it up later!!

            Perhaps you have your own black hole in your house, or two or three of them.  You might even have the ubiquitous “junk drawer” or two or three of them as well.  Oh, what about the junk cabinet.  The junk shelf.  Let’s not talk about the garage.  Life is busy and we all have a lot to do.  Things just get put off.  In reality we all have a bunch of black holes where things are set aside waiting to be sorted out later.  In reality it’s really not that big a deal.  So I have a junk closet.  So what.  It’s just a bunch of stuff.  My kids can sort through it when I die.  I joke that I will put a note in my sock drawer for my kids to find that reads, “Now you know what it feels like to pick up after someone.”  Would that be funny or morbid?  I’m not sure yet.  

            Anyway, household black holes represent the places where we put stuff until we can get around to organizing and sorting that stuff.  By that train of thought then your body is a black hole.  You put ice cream or other goodies in it that sit on your waistline until you can get around to sorting out that extra fat.  You store bacon in the fatty deposits of your arteries until…well, until you have a heart attack, stroke, or angioplasty.  You store football and soccer injuries in the joints until they become arthritic and need replacement.  You store whiplash in your neck until you need it fused.  Indeed, your body is your walking talking black hole that you carry around with you until it gets overstuffed, until its shelves break down, until the doors are falling off the hinges.    

            We all get one body to make last a lifetime, and it will do just that and no more.  One lifetime.  I will challenge you to take the rest of your life to clean up your black holes and keep them from filling up again.  Pick one thing and clean it out.  Once it’s cleaned out pick another thing, and then another, and then another, just one more thing at a time until health and mobility are ensured not just for a lifetime, but for a long lifetime.      

You might wonder why a chiropractor is writing about the topic of evolution.  It may have nothing to do with chiropractic or it might have everything to do with chiropractic.  Let’s amble through the topic and see where we end up.

            Evolution is one of those topics that evokes strong emotions in many people.  That’s how humans and life in general came to be, many argue.  Others brand evolutionists as heretics, anti-God atheists.  I suspect most people just don’t think about it much either way.  But for some reason I spend a great deal of time pondering it, studying it.  And what I have learned is that, like many complicated topics, it’s just not that simple.  There are in fact, 5 types of evolution.  So in order to have a discussion of this emotional topic, we need to have 5 separate discussions.        

            Chemical Evolution – Scientists claim that billions of years ago there was a primordial soup of chemicals that gurgled and bubbled and slowly over time from this primordial soup evolved the pre-chemistry of life, or protochemistry such amino acids, nucleic acids, peptides.  These protochemicals then combined to form primitive life, which evolved over time into more complex forms of life, unicellular bacteria, protozoa, animalia, humans.  Scientists right now are working feverishly in laboratories world-wide to duplicate this.  They are trying to create life in the lab.  They combine just the right chemicals in just the right environments for just the right times and they are making life, or proto-life, or are close to it, perhaps 5 years away by some estimates.  Of course it takes a mind, a designer, a chemist, to control the chemistry and environment for this very complicated process to occur.  It will not happen in the very tame laboratory environment just by random chance.  It is doubtful that it could have ever happened in the harsh environment of the early earth.  In fact there is no archeological or other evidence for a primordial soup to have ever existed.  I believe there is good reason to be skeptical of chemical evolution.

            Microbial Evolution – In 1917 the swine flu virus developed a mutation allowing it to infect 28% of the human population of the time, killing millions.  It had at that time evolved into a more virulent germ that primarily targeted the 20-45 year old population.  Today we are well aware that bacteria have evolved and are evolving to become resistant to our drugs we call anti-biotics.  There are two traits of microbes that allow for them to evolve.  First, they have very large population sizes, billions in a small petri dish.  Second, they have very quick reproduction cycles.  These two traits are very important for any sort of evolution.  Evolutionists teach that populations evolve, not individuals.  Viruses and bacteria make for the perfect populations to evolve.  Microbial evolution is a fact. 

            Microevolution – In England there lives the Peppered Moth that has made its home in and around groves of birch trees for thousands of years.  As you may know birch trees generally have white bark with spots of black and brown.  Not surprising the peppered moth is predominately white with black spots.  This makes it difficult for predatory birds to see it around and among the white birch trees…until the industrial revolution.  England was blessed with large coal deposits which it has burned incessantly for the past 200 years for heating and electricity.  Over the decades soot from the coal plants coated the otherwise white birch trees turning them all into various shades of gray and black.  As you might imagine, the birds began to pick off more and more of the whiter moths while the moths that tended to have more black coloring survived to make baby moths.  Within a short period of time the population of white moths with black spots became black moths. The Peppered Moth was no longer peppered.  Late in the 20th century they figured out how to more cleanly burn the coal.  The soot eventually washed off the trees, and now the Peppered Moth population is back to its old black and white ways.  This is a perfect example of natural selection operating on a population favoring a particular trait, in this case color.  Clearly microevolution is a fact of life.

            Speciation – This is a similar process to the above in which a particular species of animal evolves into a different, but closely related species.  The new daughter species is no longer able to breed with the parent species.  They may look very similar but they are now two distinctly different animals.  There are many examples of this in nature.  The most classic example is the Galapagos Finch, first discovered by the founder of the concept of natural selection, Charles Darwin.  To make a long story short, the Galapagos Finch did evolve into a separate species due to geographic isolation.  The population became separated from each other on different islands due to geological activity.  The natural selection process of this split resulted in one population becoming so different from the other due to the pressures of surviving in their separate and distinct local environments that they became unable to mate with each other.  They became different species.  In the Peppered Moth story one population changed its spots but was still the same species.  In the Galapagos Finch story one population was forcibly separated into two populations and they went down different genetic pathways to eventually become two similar but distinct species.  Like microevolution and microbial evolution, speciation is a fact. 

            Macroevolution – I save this for last as this is the form of evolution that there is so much controversy over.  When teachers are teaching evolution this is what they are referring to.    Macroevolution is the idea that one species evolves over time into a completely different species.  The overall concept of macroevolution is that the primordial soup evolved the first chemicals of life that evolved into the first primitive life forms, similar to bacteria, that united to form the first multi-cellular organisms, who went down various pathways to become plants, insects, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and finally mammals, including humans.  The evidence for macroevolution is the archeological record, which is spotty, with no evidence of real transitional species to show a clear-cut line from fish to mammals, or dinosaurs to birds, or even hominids (such as Neanderthals) to man.  So while microbial evolution, microevolution, and speciation are scientific facts, macroevolution remains a theory.  I find that people are divided into four groups in dealing with macroevolution.  The first group accepts it as fact, that life evolved from the simple to the complex diversifying over time.  These are evolutionists, also called naturalists.  The second group accepts it as the best explanation, but argues that the divine hand of a creator must have guided the process to lead it to the ultimate creation, humans.  These are theistic evolutionists.  The third group rejects it arguing that this creator created life de novo, anew, fresh from nothing.  He uses common designs in his creations, but life forms do not evolve from one type to another unrelated type.  This group are the creationists.  For the record creationists are subdivided into two smaller groups, those that trust the scientific record that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and those that follow the idea first promoted by Bishop Ussher that the universe is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old (old earth versus young earth creationists).  And the fourth group really could care less about the whole issue anyway.  These are probably most Americans. 

            In the big picture which group you fall in probably really doesn’t matter too much right, or does it?  I would argue that how we got here determines why we are here.  And why we are here determines how we should live.  And how we should live determines what we do every day.  And what we do every day is who we are.  Are we random chance?  Or are we purposeful?  The great thing is we each get to decide.  That’s how it works. 

For my part, I am my wife’s husband, my children’s father, and Jackson’s grandfather.  I am your chiropractor.  In those things I will give my all until I can no longer.  The rest is just passing time.  As always thanks for reading.  

            The bird eats the worm.  The cat eats the bird.  The hyena eats the cat.  The puma eats the hyena.  The hunter shoots the puma, freezes the meat, and puts its hide on the wall.  The hunter contracts malaria on his safari and the malaria parasite kills the hunter.  He is eaten by bacteria that are eventually consumed by the worms to feed that early bird again.  Here comes the cat again.  And over there on the piano is Elton John singing “The Circle of Life” from the Lion King, a great movie, a great song, and a very good play.  There is a food chain in all of nature and we are at the top, so we don’t have to look over our shoulder for the next predator to jump us, except other humans but that is for another article.  There is also a food chain inside your body.  Every cell and every organ needs food, water, and oxygen.  The brain is the top predator consuming some 80% of all your energy.  Then comes your heart, and then everything else gets its slice.  And on the bottom of this internal food chain are the 23 discs of your spine and the cartilage that makes them up. 

            Your discs are so low on the food chain that God didn’t even give them a blood supply.  There are no blood vessels to bring food, water, and oxygen to your discs?!  What kind of crazy system is that?  You could think of your discs as the bodily equivalent of the beggars on the freeway off-ramp.  The discs are sitting next to the bones of the spine holding up a cardboard sign saying “will work for glucose, oxygen, and water” as blood circulates freely through the neighboring bones ignoring the bum disc as the blood cell makes a left turn on the arterial freeway.  The analogy breaks down when we realize that unlike the beggar, the disc has an important job to do.  It has to support the weight of your spine.  Every time you move it has to twist and bend.  And it has lots of little babies to feed in the name of chondrocytes, chondroblasts, and chondroclasts, the millions of cells that make up the disc.  It needs food, water and oxygen, and lots of it.  And that leads to three questions.  One, what happens when it doesn’t get enough handouts?  Two, how does it get handouts in the first place?  And three, what can I do about it?

            When your discs don’t get enough food, water, and oxygen they dehydrate and then they degenerate.  They develop cracks and fissures.  They tear.  They rip open.  When that happens the center of the disc, a glob of jelly called the nucleus, seeps, leaks or gushes out, bulging, herniating, prolapsing, sequestering.  Not good stuff.

            The way your discs get enough food, water, and oxygen is through imbibition.  There is a built-in pump that when your spine moves the discs are squeezed this way and that, literally pumping nutrients from the body of the vertebra above and below the disc into the disc itself, where the hungry cells eat it up, make new cells, make new jelly, and stay healthy to keep that jelly right where it needs to be, in the center of the disc absorbing and distributing the weight of the body.

            If you have ever used a hand water pump, the handle has to be pumped all the way up and then all the way down, over and over to get the water flowing from the depths of the well, up the pipe, and into your bucket.  And so to do your discs need to be moved forward and backward, left and right, from one end to the other, over and over, to pump all that they need from those cells higher on the food chain to the bottom dweller.  And so that is why I use the two tools of my trade, the adjustments to restore motion to the joints, and my exercises/stretches to pump the discs.  And until some new stem cell therapy comes along to get cartilage to regrow, these two tools are quite literally the only hope beyond just general exercise, to preserve your begging discs.  Discs that you will want and need for your entire life, but that you will only appreciate once you lose one or two.  I hope it doesn’t come to that.      

            Disease is the state in which your body has malfunctioned to the extent that whatever is wrong can be classified into a diagnosis.  Once a diagnosis is made then, by the medical model, treatment can be initiated and the healing and repair process can begin.  Every one of us has been sick at some point in his/her life.  Most of the time the disease is nothing more serious than a cold or flu, a relatively minor viral infection that makes us feel lousy for a few days but from which we can recover just fine without any medical treatment.  Of course some diseases are more serious and some can be fatal.  But while there are many very notable exceptions to what I am about to say, most diseases that you and I will encounter will come and then will go.  We will get sick.  We will get diagnosed.  We may or may not need/get medical treatment.  We will recover.  The disease was temporary. 

            Now let’s consider the joints of your body.  Joints are hinge-points between bones that allow for movement of those bones.  Joints are held together by tissues we call ligaments.  Joints are moved this way and that by muscles, while tendons are the tissues that connect the muscles to the bones.  The most important fact is that every joint is lined with cartilage.  One kind of cartilage between each vertebra in your spine is the disc.  It is similar to the cartilage of your ear.  Another kind of cartilage is a glass-like layer covering the bones in all the other joints of the body.  It is ultra-smooth so that the bones can glide over each other without friction, and is kept smooth by a lubricant call synovial fluid.  So in essence, joints are cartilage.  

            One very important fact of human physiology is that adult humans essentially do not make cartilage.  When you are done growing up what you have is what you get.  It’s all downhill from there.  When you lose cartilage you never never get it back, ever.  There is no treatment to replace cartilage.  No drug.  No surgery.  No supplement.  No exercise.  No stem cell therapy.  Nothing.  I could go into the subtle differences between the cartilage of the disc and the cartilage of the other joints as to how they behave, how they wear out, and their function.  But for the sake of this article they all wear out due to the effects of Time, Life, and Gravity.  The discs narrow, degenerate and herniate.  The glass lining develops pock marks and fissures, eventually becoming more like sand paper than glass.  And some day, when the cartilage is gone, you have bone on bone.  That joint is done.  You can drug it, deal with it, fuse it or sometimes replace it with plastic or steel. 

            “That won’t happen to me,” you think?!  I would argue that  90% of us deal with back problems.  Back problems cause more disability than any other single cause.  More money is spent in the treatment of back problems than any other single health care issue.  If you live long enough I can all but guarantee “It will happen to you.” 

            When joints wear out we become increasingly immobile.  At some point we use canes and walkers.  We stop hiking, walking, and running, moving.  We sit more.  We give in.  The way I look at it is very pragmatic.  Death is when all of our parts stop moving.  I think that longevity and health rely upon mobility.  And mobility depends upon cartilage.  Once cartilage is gone you don’t get it back.  The only logical conclusion is that we need to hold on to the cartilage that we have.  There are only two tools to help with that.  Stretching of the healthy joints to keep them moving.  Chiropractic adjustments to the sick joints to get them moving again.

            If you get sick odds are you will get better, that it is temporary.  But once you lose your mobility (and by that I mean lose your cartilage) that will be for the rest of your life, forever.

What psychomotor skill (a learned activity that is not normal physiology) have you done 1.5 million times in your life?  A professional golfer will take 28 years to accumulate 1,500,000 swings if he does 200 per day 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year.  Ruben says that a professional batting practice pitcher might throw a baseball that many times in his career.  Allen says he has strummed/picked a guitar that many times in his 60+ years.  If you are 52 years of age you would have to have done the exact same thing 79 times every day from the day you were born to have done it 1.5 million times.  If you started it when you were 20 you would have to have done it 128 times every day.  I think we can agree that this professional golfer, pitcher, and guitarists are experts at what they do.  In fact they were experts long before they reached 1.5 million. 

I have been in clinical practice for 26 years multiplied by 51 weeks of practice per year times 230 patients minimum per week times 5 spinal adjustments per office visit per patient equals 1,524,900 spinal adjustments my hands have rendered so far in my career.  1.5 million times I have felt patients’ spines, decided where to adjust, how to adjust, and then adjusted.  There are 24 vertebrae plus the skull and sacro-iliac joints, and each joint can be adjusted a number of ways, so the decision making process for each of these 1.5 million encounters has been quite a learning process in itself, and likely much more valuable to you than the adjustment skills themselves.  In other words, while 1.5 million may qualify me many times over as an expert technician at the skill of adjusting, what is far more valuable are my learned skills as a doctor to sift through your history, examination, and imaging to know what to do.  Or, in some cases, what not to do.        

Adjusting the spine is what is referred to as a psychomotor skill.  It requires the basic knowledge of anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, and physics to perform.  To obtain a license to perform this skill requires nearly 5,000 hours of education in other areas such as biochemistry,  radiology, nutrition, physical examination, embryology, microbiology, pathology, differential diagnosis, pediatrics, psychology, and much more.  Written and oral examinations must then be passed for national and state recognition of clinical competency.  And that is when the real education begins.  With adjustment #1 I had my basic knowledge and primitive skills.  Not much really.  Be glad you were not patient #1.  When I look back to that day I realize now that although I had thousands of hours of education, I sure didn’t know much about people and how to care for them.  That knowledge would take dozens of years, hundreds of hours of additional seminars and training, and hundreds of thousands of adjustments. 

So what does this mean to you?  It means that I have probably heard your story before, probably many times, so I probably know how to take care of you.  In many cases it means that the examination is mostly a confirmation of what I already know just from taking your history.  It means I can sense or feel things by touching your spine that I could not even 10 years ago, let alone 26 years ago.  It means that I can give the right adjustment to the right vertebra in the right direction to give maximum results with minimum force.  So why write this?  If I were you I would want to know that chiropractic is safe and effective and that my chiropractor knows what he is doing.  Also, as a patient I might need ammunition to explain to family, friends, co-workers, and even my medical doctor why I am choosing to utilize chiropractic rather than drugs and surgery, folk-remedies, or doing nothing at all.      

But why 3,000,000 as the title you ask?  That is how many adjustments I hope to render before my body forces me into retirement.  Now how many people have done any one thing 3,000,000 times in a life?  I hope I can and that you will be there for my 3,000,000th adjustment party.   

“Is my pain due to stress?”  “My headaches seem to be brought on by stress.”  “I am under so much stress.”  “This has been a stressful year.”  “I’m so stressed out.”  I get asked about stress all the time yet I have never written an article about it.  It’s just too stressful to write about a topic as stress-inducing as stressJ  You see what I did there?  The reasons I have never written about it is that it is too broad a subject, there is little humor in it, everybody has a slightly different definition of it, and everybody handles it their own way and in their own time.  Stress does not fit in the single page format I have developed.  But there is one effect of stress that needs to be discussed, that fits in this format, that relates to everybody’s health, and that affects your chiropractic care.  This effect of stress is what I call AMPLIFICATION.  

            Aunt Bea is prone to migraines.  Sarah has stomach cramps.  Gregory’s eye twitches.  Sam gets heart palpitations.  Connie suffers from asthma.  John’s lower back gets tied up in knots.  Allison has a contemptuous gall bladder.  Tammy’s sciatic nerve radiates electric shocks down her leg.  Rick has ringing in his ears.  Barry drinks.  Bart smokes.  And on and on it goes.  Our bodies are fragile.  We are born with genetic coding polluted by thousands of generations of mutations.  Our lives are subject to what I constantly refer to as time, life and gravity (TLG).  Bad diet, oxidative chemicals, polluted air, toxic water.  We all have a physical, mental, social, or spiritual weakness or two, or three, or … 

            Look at your own weaknesses.  They are CAUSED  by genetic coding being subject to years of TLG.  You had fewer weaknesses when you were born, perhaps none.  As an adult you can list them out.  Some people do list them out.  They carry a list of medications for them in their purse or wallet.  And then some are completely preoccupied with their weaknesses.  They talk to complete strangers in the grocery line about them.  Your weaknesses are typically EXPRESSED more as you get older, as your body becomes less able to adapt around them.  But your weaknesses are AMPLIFIED by stress.  When your stress level gets higher you will find that whatever it is that you have as a weakness, it will be expressed at a higher level, more severely, more often, amplified. 

           

            While stress AMPLIFIES your weaknesses, stress does not CAUSE your weaknesses.  The reason why I make this distinction is important.  If you are seeking to CURE the CAUSE of your weakness, getting rid of stress (an entirely impossible act anyway) will not cure the cause, only reduce the amplification.  While I am all for reducing the amplification of my personal weaknesses, I know that to rid myself of that weakness, to cure the cause of that weakness, I will have to look long and hard at things other than my stressors to do that.  As an example, if I had heart disease, I will not cure it by reducing stress at work.  It is great and perhaps necessary to reduce the stress, but to cure my heart disease I will have to eat better, exercise and take better care of myself.  I will have to change my life.

            As a conclusion consider this; if you blame your weaknesses on stress you are resigning yourself to a life dominated by that weakness, unwilling to face the real change necessary to fix or cure that weakness, because the truth is that you will never get rid of the stresses in life until your body is done with this life.  Confront stress.  Sometimes embrace stress.  Deal with stress.  For cures, however, look for real CAUSE.  

            What do piano lessons, oil changes, dental visits, radio stations, solar flares, electromagnetic waves, medication doses, garbage pick-ups, toddler’s naps, and ice ages all have in common?  Look them over and you will see that they all occur with some sort of regularity, at a known frequency.  The reason for that certain frequency is as varied as the frequency itself, but there is a reason.  Piano lessons are weekly for one reason.  Toddler’s naps occur at a different frequency for completely different reasons.  The frequency of electromagnetic waves determines if it is ultraviolet, infrared, visible light or if it is an x-ray that just goes right through the human body.  Medication doses are determined by rigorous medical trials.  Some of these frequencies are outside of our ability to change.  KLOS is always going to be at 95.5 Mhz.  Solar flares will always peak every 11 years.  Conversely some of these frequencies we can change.  I can choose to not take my trash out on Sunday night, but my cans may overflow.  I can choose to not see the dentist every 6 months, but tooth and gum problems may develop faster as a result, and be more painful and costly to treat.   I can choose to not take a medication as prescribed, but my medical problem may not be helped.  And finally I can choose to not get my chiropractic adjustments at the prescribed frequency, but if I do then I must understand that I may not get the results I hope to get in the time-frame I want. 

            As you know, the way Dr. Rick measures the results of the adjustment is by monitoring the TSV (total subluxation value).  Taking any complicating factors into consideration, we expect the TSV to reduce at a certain speed.  When a single adjustment is made, the TSV will go down just a little bit, almost immediately.  Unfortunately TLG (time, life, and gravity) will act to bring that TSV right back up in hours or days.  Therefore, if you have your next adjustment while the TSV is a little lower, it will go a little lower still.  Add up enough of these adjustments in the right period of time, and before you know it your TSV is half of where it started and your pain is much less or gone.  Your spine is stable.  You will be ready for Reconstructive Care.  BUT, wait too long between adjustments and the TSV just creeps up to where it was before the last adjustment and you are starting all over again.

            4X – 4 times a week is reserved for the most serious of cases, someone who cannot move well and is unable to work.  This lasts for a week or two at most.

            3X – 3 times per week is for nearly all Initial Intensive Care patients to start.  At this frequency the majority of patients can expect their TSV to get to half their starting point in 12 adjustments.  A small minority may take 20.  And fewer yet 30.  Recent car accidents can take much longer.

            2X – 2 times per week is for when Initial Intensive Care is winding down, or the beginning stages of Reconstructive Care (the goal of which is to drive the TSV as near zero as possible).

            1X – Once per week is our minimum recommended frequency.  Based upon research at the University of Helsinki, Finland, if our goal is to slow or stop spinal joint degeneration, the subluxated spinal joints need to be adjusted more often than every 2 weeks.  The research demonstrated that when a joint does not move properly, it will show signs of “permanent and irreversible” degeneration in just 2 weeks.  We based reconstructive care on this model.

            As always, you have complete freedom to accept or ignore or modify the doctor’s recommended frequency, just understand his recommendations are based upon the science, plus 26 years of clinical experience, plus over 1.5 million spinal adjustments.  The consequences are yours.

We have all submitted our bodies to Crash Care, even though you may not have heard this term before.  Crash Care is another way of talking about emergency care, or urgent care.  Crash care is largely what the TV medical shows are based upon.  One day the person is fine.  The next day he gets deathly ill.  In comes Dr. House, makes his observations, runs his tests, applies his treatment, saves his patient.  That is the formula for crash care.  Some crash care is unavoidable.  You are in a car accident, fall off a ladder, run your bike into a fire hydrant or a parked car or a moving car (I did all three), trip down some stairs, shoot yourself in the foot with a pellet gun assuming that it is unloaded and that there is no CO2 in it and that the safety is on while walking upstairs in the house and bleeding all over the carpet (my son did this many years ago…needless to say he lost his pellet gun…but his foot is fine).  Anyway, these are all examples of choice times when you need and perhaps even appreciate crash care.  It can save your life.  But it can also take your life, and that is the theme of the rest of this article.  How can crash care take your life in ways you have perhaps not thought of?  And then briefly what can you do to avoid that!

            OOPS!  While having surgery the doctor leaves a sponge in your abdomen.  He cuts out the wrong organ.  He cuts off the wrong limb.  He doesn’t rerun a bad lab test.  His hand slips during a procedure.  He got the diagnosis wrong.  He applied the wrong treatment.  He didn’t check for drug interactions.  He’s looking at the wrong file.  He doesn’t speak your language.  Accidents like these and many more result in the death of 120,000 Americans every year.

            NOSOCOMIAL!  A nosocomial infection is the $20 word for a disease that you get in the hospital while you are there being treated for something else.  The problem with nosocomial infections is that the germs that hang around hospitals have to be pretty nasty buggers to survive in that “sterile” environment.  They are often antibiotic resistant.  They often are much more serious and severe than the reason why you might have gone to the hospital in the first place.  The proof of this is that they result in the death of 90,000 Americans every year. 

            MEDICATIONS!  We all take drugs.  We were trained from an early age when you don’t feel right there is a drug for that.  One in perhaps six TV ads is for a drug.  It is in the culture.  Drug use can range from an occasional Advil to treat too much Saturday night all the way to chemotherapy in which poison that would eventually kill the patient if used long enough is used to hopefully kill the cancer cells first.  There are thousands of different drugs in the medical pharmacopeia.  They have all been approved for the treatment of certain conditions and then they are often used for conditions for which they have yet to be approved.  In the end, however, either some of us are too sensitive or some of them are too strong or both.  100,000 Americans die every year from a reaction to drugs that were properly prescribed to treat a correct diagnosis. 

            TOTALS!  The above three categories do not overlap.  That means that Crash Medical Care results in the death of 310,000 Americans every year, thereby making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S.  Only cancer and heart disease kill more people than Crash Medical Care.  How do you inoculate yourself against this risk?  The answer is simple in concept but very hard in practice.

            You need to avoid the Crash Care system as much as you can.  Exercise, eat well, maintain your weight, get adjusted, keep flexible, etc.  You know the drill.  An ounce of prevention may be worth 310,000 pounds of cure.    

            I think it must be confusing for the public, to figure out what it is that chiropractors do.  There is far more variability from chiropractor to chiropractor than there is from M.D. to M.D.  M.D.’s do some exams, run some tests, and prescribe some drugs, occasionally some surgery.  In contrast my profession is all over the map.  Chiropractors do exercise rehab, or iridology, or homeopathy, or nutrition, or electrical stim machines, or inversion, or traction, or reflexology, or soft tissue, active release, applied kinesiology, sacral-occipital technique, muscle testing, surrogate muscle testing, not to mention about 40 different chiropractic adjustive techniques.  Dizzying!!  This article is meant to cut through the ____ and get to the bottom of what chiropractic is supposed to be and what we are supposed to do.

            The confusion is in our license.  We are by law primary health care providers, just like M.D.’s and D.O.’s.  Therefore, we are mandated to be able to recognize if not diagnose any and all disease processes and at the least know who to refer the patient to, if the condition does not fall under our umbrella of treatment.  As a matter of fact, of all the types of doctors there are (DDS, DO, MD, OD, DPM, PhD, PsyD, DC, EdD, etc.) there are only 3 that are licensed primary care providers, and we chiropractors are the second largest group of those behind only M.D.’s.  Didn’t know that did you?  The reason why this is confusing is that over the decades of having this sort of license and mandate, some if not most chiropractors have forgotten what we are supposed to be doing.  Our first mandate is to make sure you are in the right office.  Our second job is to measure spinal subluxation.  Our third job is to correct spinal subluxation as much as can be.  And our last job is to keep the subluxation from coming back.  THAT is chiropractic.  Any and everything else that happens in a chiropractors office, while legal and within his/her license, is NOT technically chiropractic, but is rather a chiropractor doing other stuff.  To my way of thinking you are here to see a professional who does one thing really well, not someone who does a bunch of stuff really mediocrely.  Yes?  No?  Therefore, in my office I do chiropractic pretty much by the book.

            And that leads to the title of this article, the three tools.  After roughly 1.5 million adjustments I have given, I have concluded that the correction of spinal subluxation requires only 3 tools.  Everything else is a waste of your time and your money.  Or in other words, if the subluxation cannot be corrected using these 3 tools it cannot be corrected by anyone, ever.  (As an aside I could spend another article discussing the meaning of “correction” or “corrected”, but in short I generally mean 75-95% correction, never 100%).  Those 3 tools are: 1) spinal stretches that you do at home for the rest of your life to maintain spinal range of motion, and to help pump the joints and disc cartilage with water and nutrients.  2) deep tissue massage to reduce scar tissue adhesions that build up in the muscles from years of subluxation.  3) Specific chiropractic adjustments to restore motion and break adhesions in the most damaged spinal joints, the joints that you could not move by yourself no matter how much and how long you stretched them. 

            As a chiropractor, there are professionals better qualified than I am to do nutritional counseling, or exercise rehab, or homeopathy, or therapy, etc.  If I want those things for myself or my family I will go to those professionals.  But no one should be more qualified than a chiropractor to find, measure, and correct subluxation.  That is exactly what I want from my chiropractor and that is exactly what you get from me.  If chiropractors all practiced only chiropractic and chiropractic only, then there would be no confusion about what we do.  Then you could just pick the one that you think does that job best…me.