Statements you will probably never hear:  “My grandfather clock broke so I took it to my pastor to get fixed,”  “Hey, I’ve got this great barber than fixed my laptop camera,”  “We had our new puppy fixed at Denny’s.”  Your pastor may be able to save your soul, and your barber can fix your hair, and Denny’s may make a mean Superbird sandwich, but they do not fix clocks, repair laptops, or spay dogs.  They are limited in their services.  Similarly your chiropractor is not going to prescribe chemotherapy for your cancer, or beta-blockers for your high blood pressure.  We don’t do chemical treatment.  We use mechanical treatment to fix mechanical problems.  That makes sense.  You treat chemical problems with chemistry, psychological problems with psychology, and visual problems with optimetrics.  Why would you ever use psychotherapy to treat near sightedness?  How about using a dental drill to treat a heart attack?  Then why do so many medical doctors continue to treat mechanical spine problems with chemistry, medications, drugs?  The answer is simple, they do it because it is the only tool they have in their tool box.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  They do have a second tool with which to treat your mechanical problem, a scalpel.  If the drugs don’t work, they can cut it out or fuse it.  Yay!  Does any of this make sense yet?  The lesson here is that you have to know the limitations.

In the case of your spine you need to remember some simple facts:

1)      Your joints are made of two bones separated by cartilage.

2)      Cartilage has no blood supply so it relies completely upon motion to get the vital food, water, and oxygen it needs to live.

3)      Time, life, and gravity cause daily inflammation in the joints of your spine either through postural stress or various degrees and forms of injury.

4)      Inflammation can be measured by the TSV.  If it gets high enough…PAIN!

5)      Inflammation creates scar tissue, also called adhesions, or fibrous tissue, or gristle.

6)      Scar tissue binds the joints of your spine reducing the motion of the joints.

7)      Loss of motion causes the cartilage to begin to wear out which is OBSERVABLE IN JUST TWO WEEKS per the work of Dr. Tapio Vidamin at the University of Helsinki, Finland.      

Question:  Where in the above equation will drugs solve the problem?  Answer:  Nowhere.

            The solution is very simple:

1)      Adjustments to break the scar tissue to restore motion.

2)      Stretches to help prevent the return of the scar tissue.

3)      Return to step #1 because Time, Life, and Gravity act on the spine every day!!

That’s generally it.  The ONLY exceptions are those with significant complicating factors such as those in which the cartilage wear is so severe as to limit the results.  The natural extension of the above is that the sooner in life one begins adjustments and the stretches, the better.           

             

            Imagine in your mind’s eye you are skiing very fast down a medium steep slope.  It is late winter so the temperatures are brisk but you are comfortable in your gear. The snow is a bit on the slushy side.  You can feel the snow gliding underneath your feet and the cold buffeting you, and hear the roar of the wind rushing passed your ears.  It’s like flying but not.  Suddenly and without any warning you have fallen face first straight forward landing flat on the snow, almost spread eagle, with your head downhill from your feet.  Your skis have flown off as they are supposed to during a serious fall.  It feels as if someone is dragging you face down, head first, at a high rate of speed straight downhill.  Your eyes are closed and all you can feel is the snow underneath your face and body as you, foot by foot, dig a trough in the snow with your head and body.  Then, due to the momentum of the speed you were travelling before you fell and the fact that your body is moving faster than your head, your feet and body begin to lift off the ground, and fold over your head and neck, increasingly bending your neck.  Pretty soon, your face is the only part of your body that is touching the earth as your body, legs, and feet are speeding downhill above your head.  It is an odd phenomenon that during moments like this, time seems to slow down, and you are thinking to yourself, “So this is what it feels like to break your neck.  I wonder if I’ll hear it snap.”  Your neck has reached its limit of tolerance for extension and tension in general.  If something does not happen soon, the ligaments that hold your spine together are going to rupture and the bones of the neck will slice or sever your spinal cord.  Quadriplegia, paraplegia, death.  Just as your mind has accepted your immediate future, your head literally snaps out of the trough it has dug and you land on your back with your feet downhill from your head. 

You are lying on your back facing the sky and you immediately begin damage assessment.  You are still alive.  Good.  You still feel your hands and feet.  Better.  You can move them.  Best.  Anything broken?  You gingerly get up to your feet and quickly realize that you were in full view of the riders on the chairlift.  It is a convention among skiers to cheer a spectacular fall as long as the person is not obviously hurt.  You get your requisite cheers from your audience as they are appreciative of your fall, and that it was you and not them. 

You find your skis, strap them on, and in a slightly dizzy state limp down to the ski lodge where your spouse and child are waiting for you.  This was the planned last run.  You decided you are going to downplay your fall, but the first thing they say to you as their faces convey a look of shock is, “What happened to you?”  How did they know, you wonder?  What gave it away?  Was it the look in your eyes?  “Why do you ask?”  “You have blood all over your face,” they explode.  It turns out that the ice crystals in the snow cut the skin all over your face so not only do you have a severe neck injury, but your face is going to scab over in the next few days so everyone will be staring at you asking, “What happened to you?”  So over and over you will be forced to tell the story of how you were skiing too fast for the conditions causing your right ski’s edge to catch, literally nearly killing or permanently disabling you.   

            This is certainly one of the most serious neck injuries I have encountered, right up there with the body surfing one that tore the disc away from the bone.  The reason I can tell this in such detail is that I was the skier.  It was my carelessness, my face (which explains a lot, right?), and it was my neck.  Since joints are made of cartilage and cartilage has no blood supply, there is always some permanent damage from such an injury, but I underwent a fresh course of Intensive Care to heal the injury and minimize the damage, and then I returned to my normal Wellness Care.  Even chiropractors need a good chiropractor.

For those of you who have known me for some time you have likely heard me talking about my mother, my personal muse of health.  She is 95 years old and physically amazingly healthy, perhaps the proof of which is that the only medication she takes is OTC analgesics for her worn out joints.  She has exercised every day, taken vitamins, carefully watched her diet and weight, and tried everything else she could find in her reading of the magazine, Prevention, which she has subscribed to since the 1960’s.  I do remember on the 4th of July when I was 12 her appendix ruptured, necessitating an emergency appendectomy and a tense few days to make sure that the infection did not spread too far.  This proved to me that even the healthiest among us get sick.  You can’t prevent everything.  And although we all get sick, I feel I have a responsibility to myself, my family, my children, my grandchildren, and to my patients to be as much like my mom as I can be when it comes to prevention.  And in particular prevention of what I might call the top 5, the things that are most likely to kill or disable you.

            To start, let’s look at the 4 largest causes of death in order: 1) Heart Disease, 2) Cancer, 3) Medical Practice (I’m not making this up), 4) Diabetes.  And the condition that causes more disability than any other: 5) Degenerative Disease of the Spine.  When it comes to time and money spent to help to prevent any condition that will eventually lead to your death or disability, the above are the top 5 for most of us to focus on.  They are my focus, and as such, I am simply going to list what I do.

-          Aerobic exercise – Get the heart rate to target rate for 45 minutes 3 times per week.  This helps with all conditions above but, depending upon the type of exercise, can increase the rate of spinal degeneration.  So caution.  I walk/hike which poses reasonably minimal risk to the spine and other joint structures.

-          Weight management – If you are losing weight through diet weigh yourself weekly.  If you are losing weight through exercise, weigh yourself monthly and measure your waist weekly.  If you are in weight maintenance mode, weigh yourself 2-3 times per week.  This helps with all above conditions.

-          Drink 64 ounces of water per day – This helps with all conditions.

-          Take natural anti-inflammatories and anti-oxidants – Substances such as turmeric, omega 3 fatty acids, krill oil, vitamin D3, and vitamin E help to reduce your overall levels of inflammation and oxidative risk.  This helps with all conditions above.

-          Stretching/flexibility exercise – The Lindwall Disc Pump Exercises, yoga, and general stretching help to maintain joint flexibility of the spine and other joints, pumping the cartilage with food, water, and oxygen.  This helps with condition 3 and 5 in particular.  For more information, read my article #56 - LITERATURE REVIEW of “Chiropractic Influence on Oxidative Stress and DNA Repair.”

-          Spinal adjustments – On a weekly basis to reduce inflammation, scar tissue, and nerve stress, as well as to increase motion.  This helps with all the top 5 due to the causal relationship between inflammation, nerve stress, and all disease. 

If you do other things, please share them with me.  If you don’t, pick one or two and go for it.   

            In 1999 the pain in my right buttock, thigh, calf, and foot was so bad that I actually was worried that I might be permanently disabled.  Every step came with a sharp stab of pain.  If you have read my story in one of my other articles this was about the time when I got my own “health-religion” and began taking very good care of myself in many ways, including, ironically, my spine.  But it took several months for my chiropractor and me to get this first problem under control.  And even today, if I don’t stay on top of the subluxation, the old pain can sneak back in, necessitating short periods of Intensive Care.  In 2009 I had another bout of low back pain in which I could not stand up without help and support.  I went through more months of Initial Intensive Care in addition to time-consuming decompression treatments.  In late 2010 I injured the plantar fascia of my right foot.  I re-injured it a couple of months later in the very same sport as the first injury, so I stopped playing that sport, called pickle-ball (Funny name…really fun to playL).  Months later just as it was improving, I ran less than a mile and I injured it again.  Over a year later after treating it at home every single night it finally healed.  So while I am your doctor I am also a devoted chiropractic patient.  And as a doctor I have learned many lessons that I employ every day to help you and my other patients.  But as a patient the greatest lesson I have learned is the lesson of patience.  I am the patient patient.

            How long does it take to recover from a heart attack, assuming you survive it?  Months?  Years?  Never?  It may take weeks to return to your normal activities.  It will take months for complete healing to occur.  But the heart will never ever be the same again.  Cells have died forever.  As a patient you accept this and know it will take a long time to recover.  You are going to have to change your lifestyle.  You are going to have to exercise, lose weight, change your diet, and on and on. 

            How long does it take to recover from cancer?  A more difficult question to answer since there are so many types of cancer.  But whether its breast cancer, lung cancer, bone cancer, or prostate cancer, the damaged tissues will never be the same again.  And again you accept this time-line, the length of recovery, 5 years until declared cancer-free.  And again you change your life-style, and do so willingly. 

            Beyond the fact that both of the above are life threatening diseases, the main reason I argue that we are willingly patient with these and other similar chronic diseases is simply that they are diseases.  We understand that diseased organs take time to become sick and time to heal.  We understand that diseased tissues may never be the same again.  After all, they are diseased.

            And that is exactly what subluxation of the spine is.  It is a disease of the joints of the spine.  It is Degenerative Disc Disease.  It is Erosive Cartilage Disease of the spinal facet joints.  It is the disease of spondylosis causing bone spurs on the spine.  It is the disease of disc herniation, protrusion, and prolapse.  It is a disease of pathomechanics of spinal motion.  It is a disease of hyper-inflammation, hyper-scar tissue formation, hypomobility, and hypermobility.  And ultimately it is a disease of cartilage, the only tissue in your body that has absolutely no blood supply of its own, and cannot heal or repair. 

            And yet, with my three tool model of chiropractic care, we can repair these diseases enough to reduce your pain and significantly slow the rate of degeneration.  I am awed by this every time I see it happen.  But because it is a disease, I am both the patient doctor and the patient patient.

I’ve been to many seminars in my time ranging from chiropractic, to educational, to scientific, to motivational.  I remember a few of the gems from some of those motivational seminars.  “Act enthusiastic and you’ll be enthusiastic.”  What a bunch of baloney.  There is nothing wrong with acting enthusiastic, but acting it will not by itself generate it.  “A successful man makes decisions quickly and changes them slowly.”  More hogwash.  That was said by some clown that wanted me to make a rash decision to give him lots of money.  I made a slow decision to keep my money and I’m still successful.  “A failure to plan is a plan to fail.”  What a bunch of…wait…you know what, I actually like that one.  Let’s look at that.  What’s your plan?

            If you have ever taken a vacation it requires planning.  Reservations, travel arrangements, rental car, hotel, transfers, someone to take care of the house, the dog, the pool, a packing list, cleaning the house before you leave, and taking out the trash.  And you have a plan to get up in the morning, a plan to get ready for work, a plan to get to work, a plan to work, a plan for lunch, a plan to get home, a plan to eat dinner, a plan get to bed.  You have a plan for the weekend, a plan for a wedding, a plan for a party, a plan for retirement, a plan for raising the kids, and on and on and on.  That is not to say that you might not change your plans or that at times you sometimes go without a plan.  But when you go planless you think “I’m not going to plan this out.  I’ll just go with the flow.”  You actually plan to go without a plan.  We plan everything, except our health.

            We just take our health as it comes.  We take it for granted until we lose it.  “I’ve got to die of something,” I hear from many.  Well that may be true but you do have some control over when and what of.  My goal is to live a long happy life with good health and mobility until that final moment then I want to go quickly and quietly.  My goal is to avoid medicine, medical doctors and hospitals as much as I can from now to then.  To do this I have a plan and I urge you to make your own plan.  A failure to plan is a plan to fail, and failing in health may be the greatest failure there is. 

            My plan starts with the center of my health, my spine.  I plan to get adjusted every week, and occasionally more, and to do my disc-pump exercises daily, to keep my spine mobile and free of scar tissue, inflammation and nerve stress.  I plan to get my heart rate up to its target zone for a minimum 2.25 hour each week by hiking up and down hills, to do 100-200 pushups every week to maintain upper body muscle tone as I age, to drink 64 oz. of water per day to keep my cells flushed, to take a variety of supplements to reduce oxidation and inflammation, to eat a reasonable and manageable diet to maintain my weight, to get enough sleep nightly for daily body regeneration.  No less important I also plan to work on and maintain relationships with my wife, family, and friends for emotional health.  Finally, I plan to introduce one new item into my health regimen as the old ones become firmly entrenched in my daily schedule so that I can continue to counter the aging process as best as I can.  I call this “Just One More Thing.” 

            Do you have a plan for your health?  How about for your family’s health?  I invite you to participate.  You’ll be happy you did.  Mostly you’ll regret it later if you don’t.  

            You are in the year 1895.  Grover Cleveland is president.  The Spanish-American War is still three years in the future in which Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders will gain fame.  Wilhelm Roentgen is in the process of discovering the x-ray.  Tchaikovsky has just written Swan Lake.  And you are the proverbial fly on the wall in a small magnetic healer’s office in the mid-west town of Davenport, Iowa.  The healer, named Daniel David Palmer is known to his friends simply as D.D.  The furnishings are sparse, a desk and lamp, an examination table, a chair, and a copy of the local newspaper to read between patients.  There in the room you see D.D. and his patient Harvey Lillard.  Harvey is a partially deaf black man, a local janitor by trade.  You hear him tell his story of losing his hearing 17 years prior. “I heard a sound in my neck and then my hearing suddenly faded.  I could no longer hear the ticking of my watch or the sounds of the street cars outside.”  As you watch, D.D., a curious self-taught man, feels around Harvey’s neck to find the source of this sound that Harvey heard, just before he stopped hearing at all.  He finds a lump of some sort.  You hear him talk under his breath.  “If a bone displaced and caused this man’s hearing to fade, then perhaps I can replace that bone and restore it.”  You see the thrust of the first chiropractic adjustment.  You here the loud crack.  Harvey gets up and leaves only to return the next day, and the day after that.  On each of those days D.D. goes through the same procedure, makes the same adjustment, and then magic seems to happen.  Harvey’s hearing returns.  A miracle?  For Harvey yes, but for D.D. it is the beginning of an idea that will grow into the second largest primary health care profession in the world.  .

            A friend of D.D.’s, Reverend Samuel Weed, will go on to coin the name “chiropractic” from the Greek meaning “to do or to make by hand.”  But it was D.D. himself who introduced the world to the spinal lesion he called subluxation.  And let the confusion begin.

             In Dorland’s Medical Dictionary a subluxation is a joint that is out of position, but less than a luxation (or less than a dislocation).  So a subluxation is an incomplete dislocation.  That fit with the early ideas of D.D. and his students and colleagues, but not with later scientific discoveries.  In the 70’s we began to understand that in the vast majority of cases, the chiropractic subluxation was not a bone out of place pressing on a nerve.  It was something much more complex.  In fact, only in a very few cases is the alignment of the bone important. 

            In the vast majority of cases the spinal and extraspinal lesions that we chiropractors adjust is a joint or joints that have lost their mobility.  They have been damaged by injury, by repetitive trauma, by posture, and by gravity.  They are in perfectly good alignment but the damage has resulted in inflammation which has resulted in scar tissue, which has glued and tied up the joints so they can’t do their job any longer.  And this leads to three consequences.

1)      Pain – When the dysfunction is high enough it hurts, sometimes unbearably.  More health care dollars are spent chasing this down than any other medical condition, by far.

2)      Degeneration – A joint that has lost its mobility will begin to wear out in just 2 weeks, at the microscopic level.  Left unfixed, the cartilage will eventually wear out.  This is the single largest cause of disability in the world. 

3)      Disease – Your entire health is determined by how well your nervous system communicates with all your parts.  If you damage this system, parts will begin to break down because they cannot keep up with metabolic demands.  Any and every disease can have a spinal cause or partial component.   

So perhaps D.D. got the name wrong, but when it comes to the cause of pain, disability, and disease, he was exactly correct.  Subluxation is absolutely the single largest cause of pain and disability, and a large component of disease.  My profession discusses changing the name all the time, but as incorrect as subluxation is, we just can’t think of a better one.  Got any ideas? 

            When I’m checking the spine of a newborn baby it will look very different from my examination of an adult, which will look different from my examination of a pregnant mom-to-be, which will again look different from my examination of a 6 year old child.  I have had patients ranging in age from day 1 to year 90+.  For a person to be a patient the only requirement is that their spine has vertebral subluxation.  If their spine is perfect they don’t need me.  The first step away from perfect is a small restriction of motion of any joint in the spine for any number of reasons.  The next step from perfect would be multiple levels of restriction.  From there we might see curvature loss, then early degeneration, then disc space loss, disc herniation, bone spurs, scoliosis, increasing loss of mobility, eventually total disability.  The time-line from the first subluxation, most likely early in childhood or during the birth process, is long, taking years to decades.  According to well established data, your spine is the most likely organ in your entire body to cause your total disability.  The same data shows we will spend more money on the care of the spine than any other health problem we will ever have.  And finally, your chance of significant back problems developing in your life is 90%.  Only 1 in 10 people will NOT have back problems.  To put this in another light, if you were Angelina Jolie you would have your spine removed to prevent the inevitable problems you are going to have.  But that’s not really an option is it?

When it comes down to it you have only three options.  Your first option is to do what everyone else does, deal with the problems as they come.  But isn’t this the exact option that has resulted in the above statistical nightmare?  That doesn’t seem such a good option, even if everyone else is doing it!  The second option it to live in a gravity-free environment like space, and never do anything that could remotely cause spinal injury or strain.  True, but a silly non-option.  The last option is to take reasonable proactive steps to try to prevent a future disease that is nearly absolute. 

            Let’s look at this through a different lens, if you were told that you have a 90% chance of developing any other disease that you can imagine (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.) and that there were simple, cost effective, and reasonable steps you could take to drastically reduce your chances of developing that disease, would you or would you not take those steps?  Perhaps not…  But I know I would.  But if you would, what age should you start?  What is the perfect age to start these simple, cost effective, and reasonable steps? 

            I have my first grandson who is now 10 months old.  I checked him then and every couple of weeks since.  He has been adjusted a handful of times.  The perfect age for him was the day he was born.  I, on the other hand, did not get serious about my own chiropractic care until I was 39.  Yes indeed, I was a poor example of a chiropractor during the first 13 years of my practice, but I freely admit it as a prime example of someone who knows better and still messes up.  My lack of seriousness resulted in some serious spinal problems that I manage extremely well with the help of my chiropractors, but problems that I would not have had to deal with at all if I had taken these simple steps earlier.  That said, the perfect age for me was apparently 39 (but I wish now it had been earlier). 

            I am reminded of the old adage, what is the best camera in the world?  The one you have with you when you have a picture to take.  The best age to begin to take a serious attitude toward the largest disabler on the planet, the disease that more money is spent on than any other, the disease that you have a 90% chance of contracting, is the age you are this minute.

Have you ever done something in your life that, looking back, was just a really dumb thing to do?  No?  Perhaps you would like to hear about a couple of mine.  One day when I was about 8 my father was working in the garage.  I snuck a Philips-head screwdriver out to the front lawn to perfect my professional knife throwing skills.  On TV, when you see a knife thrower, he has a collection of sharp knives, a beautiful assistant holding a cigarette in her mouth who is standing in profile in front of a wooden background.  On this day I had my dad’s screwdriver, the lawn, and instead of a beautiful model, I had my foot.  On my final throw, I got the timing perfect and embedded the screwdriver into my flesh.  It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t have a model, eh?   

            Oh, what about the time I was making a balsa gliding plane by hand.  I was carving balsa wood with an X-acto knife kit and learned the very valuable lesson to not point the sharp end toward one’s own body.  The entire inch-long knife found its way deep into my left hand before I even knew what had happened.

             Oh oh, what about the time I cut off the pad of my left index finger during a chili cook-off, or about the time I severed a tendon in my right hand shoveling ice.  Yup. 

            And what do these stupid events all have in common other than being proof of my carelessness?  If you look carefully at my foot or my hands, you may see that commonality.  It is that the human body makes scar tissue…and sometimes in abundance.

            Think of scar tissue as organic duct tape.  I like this analogy because scar tissue is essentially a very sticky protein that does not stretch.  Sticky and unstretchable…duct tape; right?  This organic duct tape is made by the body whenever there is an inflammatory process, any inflammatory process, anywhere.  Inflammation can be brought about by things such as a cut, a scratch, a contusion, an ulcer, gum disease, arthritis, spinal subluxation, and even smoking.  Therefore, whenever you have inflammation, you have scar tissue.  Conversely, wherever you have scar tissue there is or was inflammation.  Inflammation and scar tissue go together just like Forrest Gump’s peas and carrots.

            It is this marriage of inflammation and scar tissue that makes ridding the body of inflammation so important for your health.   Studies now show that chronic inflammation/scar tissue is either the cause of or at least part of the cause of a great many “diseases of aging,” diseases such as cancer, heart disease, emphysema, asthma, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, in fact, all the arthridities, strokes, many of the complications of diabetes, most of the complications of smoking-related diseases, tendinitis, bursitis, nearly all the –itisis, dementia, and probably Alzheimer’s.  And this is just a partial list.

            Sometimes it’s the inflammation that is the demon, and sometimes it’s the duct tape.  But since the duct tape comes from inflammation, it is the inflammation that is the main target to reduce.  The less inflammation your body has the longer, healthier life you will have.  You can actually measure inflammation in your blood.  You can naturally reduce inflammation through the regular use of diet, exercise, weight control, supplementation, and stretching.  Probably the largest collection of inflammation and duct tape in your body is in your spine, and the best tool to reduce that is, of course, regular adjustments.  Every step you take now to reduce your inflammation and duct tape will add quantity and quality of life to the other end.      

This is a true story.  The names have been changed.  Once upon a time there was a little girl named Sherry.  When Sherry was conceived her mother was addicted to drugs.  Sadly, she continued to use drugs during the pregnancy.  This mother did make one good decision, and that was to put Sherry up for adoption once she was born.  The aunt of this drug-addicted mother-to-be heard about her niece, her addiction, and her pregnancy.  The aunt, Maria, did not have children of her own.  She spoke with her husband and both agreed that they would bring Sherry home from the hospital, adopt her, and raise her as their own.  They did this without care for the emotional, physical, or other problems that a drug addicted baby would surely have.  They did this without consideration of the potential dollar costs of raising such a child.  They will tell you that they did this because God put a calling in their hearts that drove them to love this child regardless of the consequences.  And they did.  They would tell you that Sherry was a gift from God.

            Sherry was born.  Maria took her home.  They adopted her.  They raised her with all the love, attention, and affection that any child could ever hope for.  When Sherry was about 6 she had a final high risk pediatric neurological examination with the team of doctors who had been looking after this child since day one.  The doctors told Maria and her husband that not only was Sherry doing fine, but she was excelling, and that there were NO residual effects of her drug addiction that they could detect.  But the doctors didn’t stop there.  They told Maria that the reason why Sherry was doing so well was not due to her medical care or her occupational therapy or any other intervention that she had along the way.  Sherry was doing so well simply because of the time, love and attention that Sherry’s mommy and daddy were able to give to her.  This adopted family, the only family that Sherry had ever known, without a doubt had completely and utterly changed Sherry’s entire future life.  They were God’s gift to Sherry.

            In the middle of all of this, when the doctor’s told Maria how good Sherry was doing, Maria sat down with me to share a part of her story that she had not shared with me up to then.  It would seem that several years before I met Maria a chain of events were set into motion that were intimately tied to this story.  Fellow church-goers for at least a couple of years had been trying to get Maria to come to my office for treatment of her headaches, which were daily and constant, severe, and quite debilitating.  She kept ignoring her friends, taking her medications, muddling through her work day, and staying in her darkened room all weekend.  If there was a weekend family event she would up her meds just to get through the event.  Thankfully, some loving soul kept nagging her and nagging her and finally Maria made an appointment, came in, told me her history, had her exam and x-rays, and we started care.  As is the case with at least 95% of my patients, she did very well and her headaches abated.  Eventually, she moved on to reconstructive and eventually wellness care.  End of story right?  Wrong.

            While we were sitting down that day she filled me in on the missing piece.  She told me that if it was not for her finally listening to her friends, getting her chiropractic exam, participating in chiropractic adjustments, and finally finding relief from her debilitating headaches, that she physically could not have even considered adopting Sherry.  Clearly without Maria and her husband Sherry would be a vastly different person with a much bleaker future.  This is not really a chiropractic story.  This is a love story.  But it does show the power of referral.

            Consider if you will the four characters Veruca Salt, Mike Teevee, Augustus Gloop, and Violet Beauregarde.  Just how do they differ from their counterpart Charlie Bucket?  Do you even have any idea what I am referring to?  If not, the movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory featured Gene Wilder as the eccentric candy maker Willie Wonka.  The 5 above named children earned golden tickets to take a tour of the fantastical wonder that was Wonka’s chocolate factory.  Spoiler alert!!  In the end Willie gives the entire factory including the Great Glass Elevator to Charlie Bucket.  Charlie had that special something that none of the other kids had.  While it is true that Veruca was a spoiled bad egg, Mike was a TV addict, Augustus was a glutton and Violet was an obnoxious gum chewer, what set Charlie apart from them was something that is really missing from the hyperspace world of today.  We live in the age of sound-bites, the world of Facebook, of instant messaging, 24 hour a day news, satellite transmission, a world in which when we pause for a moment in line at the grocery store or sit down with a cup of coffee, we log into our email, check our text messages, read the latest post or blog.  Our world today is summed up when Veruca declares to her daddy “I WANT IT NOW!!”  The thing that Charlie had that those other 4 kids did not and that is largely lacking in the 21st century is something called patience. 

(And if you skipped any part of the last paragraph you are just reinforcing my argument.  I thank you.)

            If I have learned one thing in my decades treating people is that health and healing do not fit into the 21st century model of quick and speedy everything, the era of impatience.  When the 21st century American gets sick, what he wants is to go to the medical doctor, get a pill, take the pill, get well, and move on.  Sometimes that model even seems to work, particularly when we are young and when the health problem is not serious.  But what about the four conditions that effect more Americans than any other conditions; back pain, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes?  What about a thousand other chronic conditions, any two of which you are likely to have to deal with in your life?  (Fun fact - I’ll bet you didn’t know that the average human dies with a minimum of 2 diseases inside his/her body, according to autopsy studies.) 

            What those four conditions and nearly every other chronic condition have in common is that once you have them they will always be in your life, they require a long-term plan to overcome, manage, and prevent recurrences.  They require life-style changes to be adopted by you, and sometimes right now.  They require what the 21st century has ill prepared us to have, patience. 

            And with regard to the spine, this is the reason why I spend so much time educating you about subluxation, about spinal damage, about the effects of time, life, and gravity.  This is why I encourage you to do my disc pump exercises every day for the rest of your life.  This is why I have three types of care and three different fee schedules.  This is why I am a chiropractic patient myself getting adjusted every week, doing my disc pumps every day, and doing all the other stuff I do to help prevent and manage my current and future health.  I have learned patience.  I look to the future for my health.  Health is indeed a marathon.