You go into a chiropractor’s office with some sort of health problem, most often pain, most often a back related pain.  He may or may not do an exam.  He may or may not do x-rays.  He may or may not explain anything.  He may or may not adjust you.  He may or may not use various forms of therapy.  He may or may not re-exam you.  He may or may not really seem to care much either way.  I have seen and heard it all in 25 years.  Just like all professions, mine is represented by the good, the bad, and the ugly.  But it must be confusing for the lay-person, kind of like going to the auto mechanic.  “Who do I trust?”  “Do I really need that?”

            To address this I am going to boil down chiropractic into this paragraph.  Time, life, and gravity (TLG) will cause damage to your spine, what we call subluxation.  This damage will eventually, sooner or later, result in a mixture of three things; pain, spinal joint degeneration, and loss of overall health.  We will not go into why subluxation causes loss of health in this article.  You will trust me for now, which is ironic considering the last line of the first paragraph.  Anyway, the chiropractor’s job is to take your history, examine you for subluxation, quantify the subluxation, explain to you what is wrong, get your consent, fix it as best as he can, re-measure the subluxation, and continue the process of fixing until either it’s as fixed as it can get, or you just don’t want chiropractic care anymore.  Lots of chiropractors in their practices do a bunch more stuff, but the above is what chiropractic is.  Anything else that they do may be fine and good and within their license, but it is not chiropractic.

            With that as the working definition of chiropractic how does my practice fit into that definition?  Why do we do what we do?  And do you really need that?

1)      I take your history

2)      I measure your subluxation.  This gives us numbers that can be re-measured; range of motion, TSV (total subluxation value), and phase of degeneration on x-ray (or MRI).

3)      I decide if the reason why you are here is due to subluxation.

4)      If not, I point you to someone who can help.  If so, I use my computer system and a short verbal report supported by a written report to teach you what is wrong and what we can do about it.  After all, the word doctor comes from a Latin word meaning “to teach.” 

5)      I get your consent to treat.

6)      I treat you using these 3 tools and only these 3 tools:

a.       Range of motion exercises for you to do at home to keep your spine moving.

b.      Adjust the joints of your spine that won’t move no matter how many times you stretch them.

c.       Use deep tissue massage to reduce muscle spasm and scar tissue in the muscles.

7)      After an appropriate number of adjustments or amount of time, I re-measure the subluxation using the exact same procedure as in #2. 

8)      The first 50% reduction in your TSV is Initial Intensive Care.

9)      The next 50% reduction in your TSV is Reconstructive Care.

10)  Keeping your TSV from going back up due to the continual action of TLG is Wellness Care. 

In this system you don’t get adjustments you don’t need, or therapy you don’t need, or vitamins you don’t need, or exercises you don’t need, or anything else you don’t need.  I only give you what you need.  So, yes, you do really need that.  Of course whether you do it or not, well that’s up to you. 

            All kinds of parts of our body can get inflamed.  It is a natural reaction to an unnatural action.  If you get a cut, you will get inflammation.  If you have an infection, you will have inflammation.  If you develop gum disease, you will also develop inflammation.  If you are afflicted with arthritis, those joint so afflicted will be full of inflammation.  Inflammation is something that occurs all over the body and is part of the normal process of how the body reacts to inflection and injury, and how it repairs said infection or injury.  What inflammation specifically is is a biochemical process involving complex self-created drugs along with huge amounts of water and other bodily fluids (swelling/edema).  The purpose is to kill germs, clear out debris/poisons, and initiate the repair process.  It is very effective, very necessary, usually very painful, but often it gets stuck in the on position and keeps going and going and going and never quits.  This article will explore why inflammation sometimes never quits and why that is a bad thing when it doesn’t quit.

            The basic reason why inflammation might not ever quit is simply because the thing that is causing it never goes away.  If you have gum disease and never deal with it, you will have inflamed gums until they rot away, as nasty as that sounds.  If you have a stomach ulcer the same thing can happen until the ulcer gets big enough that you bleed to death.  All very bad outcomes.  But the important thing with regard to our work here is inflammation of/in/from the spine.  When your spine is damaged by time, life, and gravity (TLG), there will be inflammation.  And there is certainly no adult spine out there that is not damaged by TLG.  It is a pandemic. 

            So if everyone has some inflammation in their spine how big a deal is that?  To answer that requires you know the 3 consequences to spinal inflammation; 1 – PAIN, 2 – ACCELERATED DEGENERATION, 3 – DISEASE.  Inflammation, if you have enough of it, will cause pain.  It is the primary cause of back and back-related pain.  90% of all humans will suffer from back pain.  Degeneration - More money will be spent on the treatment of back pain than any other single disease or health problem, by far.  Disability from a bad back is the #1 cause of disability.  Over 50% of all whiplash victims will suffer chronic neck pain.   14% of them will become disabled.  That alone is the equivalent of the population of the entire state of Wyoming becoming disabled just from whiplash every year!  Disease - As is stated and reviewed in detail in the Time Magazine Article “The Fires Within” inflammation is becoming the go-to cause or co-cause of a great many chronic diseases that we humans suffer, including cancer, heart disease, asthma, and many others.  In short, inflammation is responsible for more pain than anything else, causes more disability than anything else, and if that is not enough, causes disease and foreshortens your life.  Isn’t that great?!

            There are ways to measure your blood inflammation, and if you ask your medical doctor he can run a test called cardiac C - reactive protein.  There are easier ways to measure your spinal inflammation, which is exactly what we are doing when we examine you here at my office.  At the end of that exam you get your TSV-Total Subluxation Value, the number we use to measure the amount of inflammation and nerve stress you have in your spine.  And every treatment tool we use here is all about reducing that number as much as possible. 

            When I am asked what causes damage to the spine I will first respond in general terms, Time, Life, and Gravity.  And then when pressed about specifics I will state that we have no control over time and gravity, but we do have some oversight on life.  This article is not to convince you that you should change your lifestyle, for few of us truly change.  It is rather to educate you as to some plusses and minuses regarding different attitudes toward exercise. 

            To be specific, the three exercise profiles we will discuss are aggressive exerciser, moderate exerciser, and no exerciser.  This last category can be subdivided into “I don’t exercise” or “I’m going to start on Monday” or “Can you give me a light?”  Now play along with me and commit to one of the above three categories.  Sure there can be other subdivisions, but just go with the flow for now. 

An aggressive exerciser is one who exercises almost daily, perhaps for several hours per day.  He (or she) takes days off of his leg workout to recover from it while he does his arm workout.  He may have a trainer.  He uses the word “core” in conversations every day, and P90X is a frequent topic.  If any of this sounds like you then you are the aggressive exerciser.

The moderate exerciser exercises because he should, not necessarily because he wants to.  He does so about three times a week, does mostly cardio-type stuff, and maybe some weight machines.  He forgets to do his exercises from time to time but keeps at it.  Others talk about “core” and “six packs” but he doesn’t worry about such trivial things, because he doesn’t work out enough to ever have a core or a six pack.  He has a case, but not a kegger.

And if you are a non-exerciser congratulations.  You are among good company, as perhaps the majority of American adults do not exercise regularly or enough.  And if you are a non-exercising smoker…my mother-in-law is a non-exercising smoker who can’t go to the bathroom without her oxygen line.  I very sincerely hope you find a way to quit.

So now that you have sorted yourself into one of the above categories, let’s put the chiropractic twist on this.  When we consider that the joints of the spine, and the entire body for that matter, are made of cartilage, and that the cartilage that we have when we turn 18 is pretty much all that we will ever have, because adult humans do not remake cartilage, who’s spinal joints are going to last longer?  Who is going to have the least disc herniation, disc degeneration, facet arthritis, bone spurs?  You have heard the saying use it or lose it…absolutely true.  People who don’t exercise will have the worst time with spinal degeneration because the joints just don’t get the nutrients they need to stay healthy.  And if you smoke add vascular insufficiency and oxidative stress to the bad for cartilage side of the list.  On the other side of the coin, people who are aggressive exercisers are more likely to cause injury to their joints, which also accelerates degeneration.  So they too are more likely to have more joint problems as they age. 

So the winner is the moderate exerciser!  Walk some, hike some, swim some, lift some, row some.  Three days a week is enough to keep your heart in shape and not wear out the joints.  You may not have the sculpted body and the microscopic body-fat percentage.  But statistically you’ll live longer, have fewer joint problems, a healthier spine, and less medical intervention.  Once again, moderation in all things continues to be the way to go.

As I stated, regardless of what group you are in this article is not to change you, but to warn the aggressive exercise to watch out for injury, and the non-exerciser to watch out for everything else.  

            If you have true sciatica, you know it!  You will have shooting pains down your leg or from your butt to your foot.  You may have pins and needles sensations in your foot or leg.  You may also have weakness of some of the muscles in your legs.  The pains are often constant and debilitating, but can be more intermittent.  Regardless, they are real and severe and need to be taken seriously.  There is also a condition called false sciatica that feels nearly as bad but typically does not travel further down the leg than the knee.  There is usually a lot of buttock pain and sometimes a vague ache in the calf or foot along with very tight muscles.  False sciatica can be nearly as debilitation as the true sciatica, but is typically less serious and easier to treat.  To find out which one you have requires a good history, the right clinical exam, an experienced clinician to discern the nuances, and finally a competent chiropractic technician to get you through this tough time.  This article will be devoted to true sciatica. 

            As with so many health conditions, true sciatica begins with the vertebral subluxation complex, the chiropractic $20 word for spinal damage.  Time, life, and gravity have acted on your spine either severely enough or long enough that inflammation generates scar tissue.  This leads to loss of spinal joint motion.  This causes less nutrients and water to get to the vertebral discs which lack a blood supply.  They then dehydrate, degenerate, tear, bulge, and finally herniate.  So true sciatica takes a long time to develop even though the symptoms may have appeared out of nowhere for no reason over night.  It is years or decades in the making.  And the thing that differentiates it from false sciatica is the disc.  With false sciatica, the disc is not involved as a source of pain.  With true sciatica, the disc is involved, making it much more complicated.  So what do we do about it?

            As always there are only 3 tools we use to correct subluxation; the adjustment, stretching exercises, and deep tissue massage.  The purpose of these tools is to improve motion of the damaged joint, to reduce nerve stress, to reduce muscle tightness, to reduce inflammation, and to break down scar tissue.  In a case where there is no disc damage, these tools work fantastic nearly every time.  They work quickly and with few if any side-effects.  However, when there is disc herniation, as in sciatica, this complicates things.  Disc herniation is when the jelly middle of the disc (the nucleus) oozes out through the degenerated rings of the cartilage outer portion of the disc (the annulus).  The bigger the herniation, the longer treatment will take, the less success they may be in pain reduction, and the worse the long term prognosis.  But, with time, the adjustments can still work fantastically.  But remember, it took a long time to get here.  It may take a long time to get under control.  But nothing can ever truly fix it!

            Adult humans don’t make cartilage, so once the disc is damaged it cannot be undamaged.  The herniation can be made smaller.  The pain can be reduced or eliminated. The inflammation can be lessened.  The rate of degeneration can be slowed.  Episodes of pain can be made less frequent.  But the disc will never be whole again.  Impossible.  This is all about spinal subluxation management.   

            So what happens when chiropractic cannot help the victim of true sciatica?  If you are not getting better we order an MRI to assess the disc damage.  And if you still don’t get better with that information we combine decompression with the adjustments.  And if you still don’t get better, which is a rare few, then and only then do we consider the injections of pain management and the costs, pain, and failure rate of back surgery.  Only then.

            There are locations in the body that are just so difficult to be able to function with while in pain.  If you have ever had pain in one of these parts you can relate.  You cannot concentrate when you have sharp cramps in the belly or electrical pains in the arms or legs.  Try to sleep or work with a toothache, impossible.  What about a throbbing headache, or a sharp stabbing-type headache, or a sinus headache, a muscle tension headache, vascular headache, visual headache, or the mother of all headaches, the migraine?  There are many types of headaches and they come in all shapes and sizes, but unbelievably the vast majority either has the root cause or at least a relation to vertebral subluxation.  If someone you know gets headaches, you need to get this article to them.

            As I stated above, there are many types of headaches, but most of us just take a pill or two when we get one regardless of the cause.  We just want to feel better.  Some of us get headaches every day and some just once in a while.  Actually, I am a chiropractor because of headaches, but not my own headaches.  I have been married to my best friend since 1980.  Way back then she suffered daily headaches and took more than a dozen Excedrin every day to find relief.  She got help from a chiropractor and my career was born, more or less.  But most headaches come in 5 major types; muscle tension, vascular, sinus, visual, migraine.  There are others but these are the most common.  A true visually cause headache is actually rather rare which leaves only 4 major groupings.  Of those four types of headache all are either caused by or related to the subluxation.  Let me explain.

            As you know from my teaching, subluxations are joints in the spine that have been injured due to time, life, and gravity, that don’t move well, that cause nerve stress, muscle spasm, inflammation, scar tissue, and spinal degeneration.  So one at a time:

1)      Muscle spasm in the neck connects to the fronto-occipitalis muscle that runs from the neck to the forehead leading to muscle tension headaches.

2)      Nerve stress in the upper neck feeds into what we call the sympathetic branches of the autonomic nerve system, and then travels back into the head to control the blood supply to the head and scalp – leading to vascular headaches.

3)      Those same sympathetic nerves also control the mucus membranes of the sinus cavities in the head – sinus headaches. 

Migraines are much more complex, and warrant an article by themselves.  But the current theory on them is that they are due to faulty wiring in a portion of the brain.  They are genetic.  There are two types of migraine for our purposes here.  One type links up with the sympathetic nerves in the top of the neck and one doesn’t.  So, with migraines, one type has a connection to subluxation and one type doesn’t, and there is no way to know which is which without trying care.  My wife has migraines that are connected to the neck so chiropractic helps her.  Her cousin has migraines that are not connected to subluxation so chiropractic doesn’t help her.  It took trial and error to figure both out. 

So that’s it.  Most headaches are caused by or intimately tied up with subluxation.  You can suffer, take the pills, or fix the cause.  Your choice.  Thanks for reading.  Please share this. 

            The scourge of childhood, the ear infection.  It is a rare baby indeed that does not have an incident or two of this nightmare condition in which your baby is crying with inconsolable pain and you feel helpless to do anything other than to hug and hold and wonder what to do.  Complicating matters further, often the pain begins in the middle of the night making it even more difficult for every party involved.  In this article I will explain what an ear infection is and what your treatment options are. 

            Technically, there are several different types of ear infection depending upon which part of the ear is involved, but the one we are discussing here is otitis media, middle ear infection.  The middle ear is a chamber just on the other side of the ear drum.  The entire purpose of this chamber is to house the three tiniest bones in your body, called the hammer, anvil, and stirrup.  And the purpose of these three bones is that they connect the eardrum (tympanic membrane) to another very similar membrane in the cochlea (inner ear) where the sound waves are translated into a nerve signal for your brain.  Back to the chamber…this chamber actually has a small tube that connects it to the back of the throat called the Eustachian tube.  And the whole purpose of the Eustachian tube is to drain fluid from the middle ear chamber and to maintain the pressure in this chamber (when you pop your ears while flying/driving to a higher or lower elevation you are using this Eustachian tube to equalize the pressure in the middle ear chamber). 

            You have the anatomy.  Now the physiology.  Anybody’s Eustachian tube can get blocked off for any number of reasons, it’s just that in kids the Eustachian tube is shorter and more horizontal, making it more prone to clogging than when they get older.  But when it gets clogged then fluid, which is being made constantly by the mucus membranes inside the head and middle ear chamber, begins to build up in the chamber.  If the tube never opens then the fluid keeps building up and up and up until the chamber is full.  This can hurt incredibly and will impair hearing.  But remember that bacteria are a constant part of our life and grow everywhere in our body.  The bacteria in the middle ear chamber love this warm moist environment and grow very quickly.  Pretty soon, not only is there fluid in the ear, but the middle ear becomes infected.  There are grades of infection so not all ear infections are alike.  And due to pain thresholds some patients will experience severe pain, while others, like my daughter, can have their eardrum rupture from internal pressure without any pain at all.

            To fix an ear infection is simple, just get the Eustachian tube to open up so the junk can drain.  In medicine there are three tools for this.  The first, most common and least effective is antibiotics.  This just kills the bacteria without addressing the real cause, leading in most cases to re-infection.  The second is antihistamines and anti-inflammatory medication, but these methods are only mildly effective and subject to some nasty side-effects.  The last is ear tubes to bypass the Eustachian tubes altogether, but there are risks to any surgery and lots of side-effects as well. 

            But there is a simple chiropractic adjustment that quickly and painlessly opens the Eustachian tubes.  It is safe and very effective.  It was taught to me by Joan Fallon, D.C. when I attended the ICA diplomate program on chiropractic pediatrics over 20 years ago.  Dr. Fallon published findings that showed the procedure was effective in correcting 114 out of 116 clinical cases of otitis media.  I have done this hundreds of times very successfully.  If you want more information on this technique please just ask me.  I love helping kids.

            Altruism is the process of doing something for someone else just because it is a nice thing to do.  For the person doing the nice deed there is nothing physical to be gained, no money, no favor, just a good feeling for helping out another human in need.  Sometimes there is not even a good feeling.  As an example the ultimate altruistic act is to give up one’s life for another.  No good feeling there for sure.  We have all engaged in some form of altruism many times in our lives, and hopefully we do something altruistic every day.  But most of the time our behavior is guided by the benefits of doing whatever it is that we are doing.  Whether it’s going to the bathroom, brushing our teeth, eating, working, sleeping, reading, or watching TV, we are doing whatever we are doing because there is a payment, we get something for doing it.  Sometimes we get a physical need fulfilled, and other times a mental need, an emotional need, or perhaps a spiritual need.  We spend most of the day fulfilling our needs or our wants.  So every action has a reason for being, a benefit.

           

            With that as a background, we certainly don’t take the time out of our day, and pay money out of our pocket to go the chiropractor for any altruistic reasons.  We go to get something out of it in trade.  Generally we want less pain or just to feel better.  But isn’t it nice when you get more than you thought you paid for, when your time and money were worth more than you thought when you get something extra?  These are the fringe benefits of chiropractic, real measurable benefits of getting adjusted that you probably didn’t know about, didn’t count on, but you get whether you like it or not, ask for it or not.  It’s just a result of what we do here.   

            The most basic measurable benefit of being adjusted is that your spine will function better.  So when I adjust your spine to reduce subluxation I am essentially forcing it to move more, which means it will work better.  And when it works better, there will be less nerve stress, less inflammation (really important), calmer muscles, and less scar tissue.  And so the direct benefit to you is that you will have less of whatever brought you in, usually pain, but perhaps some other health issue.  But what about these fringe benefits I speak of?  You are paying me to improve spinal function to help you feel better, right?  But as seen on TV, wait there’s more.

            There are exactly 3 fringe benefits to better spinal health.  These are things that you get that you didn’t count on when you walked in the office, things you probably didn’t even know about, but things that I view as critical to your long term health.

1 – (Least Important) – Less inflammation/nerve stress (lower TSV) means you are further away from experiencing not only the same pain you came in with, but any spinal related pain in the future.  It is preventative.

2 – (More Important) – The more motion your spine has (within limits) the longer your spine will last, leading to greater mobility as you age.

3 – (Most Important) – Less nerve stress means increased organ function and health in general.  And less body inflammation has been strongly linked with reduced risk of several chronic diseases (See the article from Time Magazine, “The Fires Within.” 

            Frankly, as a chiropractic patient myself, the fringe benefits are more important to me and my family than the primary benefit of less pain.  What do you think?        

            If you have been to other chiropractors you may have found that we all seem to be a little bit different from each other in the manner in which we treat our patients.  I don't know if this is a good thing or not but I imagine it can be frustrating to the consumer not knowing what you’re going to get.  One of the main differences between all of us are the tools we use in our daily practice.  Examples of chiropractic tools run the full gamut including nearly everything that is not a drug and does not use needles to administer; this includes vitamins, supplements, massage, ultrasound, electrical stim, vibrating tables, traction, decompression, inversion, iridology, reflexology, acupressure, lasers, exercise, stretching, mobilization, manipulation, adjustments, and more.  And if that is not enough there are perhaps as many as 40 adjusting techniques as well; Diversified is the most common, Gonstead I consider the best, Toftness, HIO, BEST, NUCA, drop, recoil, Logan basic, sacral-occipital technique, applied kinesiology, posture work, and a whole slew of others that I can't even remember.  Where does one begin?

            This may sound trite but I would begin at the beginning.  The first chiropractic adjustment in 1895 restored the hearing to Harvey Lillard.  Despite that miracle Dr. Palmer did not find the cure for all deafness, just Harvey's deafness.  If you read some of my shadow boxes and success stories you will find that chiropractic adjustments resolved Danette's asthma, but it does not cure all cases of asthma.  It took care of Andrew's ear infections, but it is not the answer to all ear infections.  Yolie's migraines stopped due to her adjustments, but not all migraines can be cured through chiropractic.  Think about this for a minute, I listed four different cases with four different symptoms in which each person got the same treatment (the adjustment) which allowed four very different conditions to resolve. 

           

            Imagine for just a moment the same four people going to a medical doctor for treatment, the first one is a deaf man, the second is a 2-1/2 year old asthmatic, the third is an 8 month old with 4 continuous months of ear infections, and the fourth is a middle aged woman with daily/constant headaches and migraines.  The deaf guy would get a hearing aid.  The asthmatic would get an inhaler, oral medications, and a nebulizer, the infant would get amoxicillin, and the woman would get pain killers.  But they came to the chiropractor and got just one thing, the adjustment, and the result is that all four had their long-standing conditions resolve.  And in all cases, the response was within just days to a month.  How can this be?  The answer is that regardless of the condition or symptom that you bring to the chiropractor, we have only one job, to detect and correct subluxation, aka spinal damage, that we all get from time/life/gravity.

            Now in reality, despite the multitude of techniques and treatments that various chiropractors employ, there are only 3 tools necessary to achieve maximum correction of subluxation.  Anything else that a chiropractor does to you is for some other reason, and you won't find any of that at this office.  I'm not saying that the extra stuff that chiropractors do is bad or unnecessary, it's just that with rare exception you only need the three tools to enjoy the benefits of a subluxation-free spine, the same tools we went over in my last article, the adjustment, deep tissue work, and regular stretching. 

            But what about this 4th tool in the title?  The 4th tool in my office is education.  After all, doctor is Latin for teacher, and more than adjustments, and stretching, and massage, you need the 4th tool to make good decisions for you and your family now and in the future.  Thanks for reading!!  

            Many of you have heard parts of my story and some of you have read an earlier version of it, but I wish to update a few points that you may or may not find interesting.  I confessed to my practice in the year 2000 that I was a hypocrite.  For the first 13 years of my career I did not practice what I preached.  I was too heavy.  I did not exercise.  I did not stretch.  I did not drink enough water.  I did not take my vitamins.  And most importantly, I did not get adjusted each week.  Since then all of these things have changed.  I try to be a good example of what I teach and encourage of you.  But just like everybody else, it took a wake up call to get my attention.  What it took for me was an incident in which I nearly accidentally killed my entire family.

            While driving in the high desert on the 15 freeway on Memorial Day weekend in the year 2000 I quite suddenly got very dizzy, my chest tightened, and I knew instantly that something was very wrong.  I quickly managed to get to the right shoulder of the road and put the car in park when I lost consciousness.  Had I passed out while driving...I hate to think.  I am told that I was out for just a couple of minutes.  Once I regained some awareness my wife drove to the nearest emergency room where tests were performed and blood was taken.  I assumed I had had my first heart attack.  I was 55 pounds heavier than now.  I was a couch potato.  It should have been a heart attack.  But it wasn't.  To this day no one knows what went wrong.  Later tests were also inconclusive.  But regardless of the diagnosis, this was my wake up call.  This was my moment in which I was given the opportunity to do it right.  And I took that opportunity. 

            I learned how to drink water.  I slowly lost 55 pounds over the next 10 years or so.  I began to exercise.  I started taking vitamins.  I stopped drinking alcohol.  I began what I now call "Just One More Thing."  And if you want to know about that just ask.  AND, I got serious about my own chiropractic care, later than I should have, that is for sure.  But it is never too late.

            I have had two times in my life (2000 and 2009) in which I was disabled due to low back pain.  I have three herniated discs in my lumbar spine confirmed by 2 MRI's (keep in mind that my x-rays look perfect, proof that the spine is nearly always worse than the x-rays show).  But thanks to aggressive chiropractic care during bad times, and weekly adjustments during good times, I have no pain.  And I think more important than not having pain, the weekly adjustments combined with my personal stretching program will slow the rate of degeneration of my spine so it will last longer.  And the weekly adjustments also help to lower my overall bodily inflammation (which last measured 0.6 on the blood test C-Reactive Protein).  This puts me nearly off the charts, in a good way, as a risk for heart attack as well as a number of other diseases.

            I have heard my wakeup call.  I hope you have heard yours.  Health is good.

          If you have a job you have tools.  Your tools may be a hammer, a computer, a pen, or just your brain.  Medical doctors arrive at their office and open their tool chest and take out two tools, a prescription pad and a scalpel.  When I get to work and open my tool box I have but one tool, the adjustment.  So while it is half as many as the medical doctor, it is very specifically designed for a single purpose, to correct subluxation.  However, while I may personally use only 1 tool, there are 2 others that we use in the office in the correction process.  The first one I call global motion, or stretching.  The second one is deep tissue massage.

          Remember that subluxation is essentially joints of the spine that no longer move due to scar tissue, and that this results in nerve stress, inflammation, muscle spasm, and degeneration of those spinal joints.  Therefore, correction of the subluxation is done by restoring motion.  So the first tool of the 3 is the adjustment.  The purpose of the adjustment is to restore and maintain the motion of the joints that would never improve on their own or from any amount of stretching no matter how far and how often you do your stretches.  The adjustment works by breaking scar tissue adhesions, resetting joint function, and restoring normal motion patterns.  So this is my part in this fight against time, life and gravity (TLG).

          The second tool is stretching the spinal joints.  We use a simple program specifically designed by Dr. Rick to restore global motion to the spine and support the work done by the adjustments.  It is your job to do your exercises to improve the motion of your spine in your fight against time, life, and gravity (TLG).  It takes just 80 seconds a day and should be done every day as long as you have an aging spine, in other words the rest of your life. 

          The last tool is deep tissue massage.  While the first 2 are needed by all patients, this last one depends upon how much chronic spasm you have, or how much scar tissue you have in the muscles.  This is recommended on a case by case basis, although many of you just like to do it anyway.   

          You just have to show up to get the adjustment tool used on your spine.  If he hasn’t done it already, in the first few visits the doctor will teach you the stretching tool and give you an explanation/reminder sheet to post somewhere at home.  And if the doctor recommends the massage tool you will receive your first 30 minute massage at our cost.  You just need to make the appointment.