TBTB – DFY 7 | Weird Symptoms

 

One of the most common occurrences in our offices from patients is when they have weird symptoms, but all of their traditional medical tests come back normal. This episode goes into some of the “weird” symptoms that show up and get corrected with Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic. When you’re out of adjustment, these weird symptoms, like excessive hiccups or central sleep apnea, tend to occur. Find answers to those weird symptoms. Tune in to this episode today.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here


 

Weird Symptoms

It has been a heck of a week for me and this will go into what I want to talk about. I was on top of the world in our last discussion. I felt great. The next day came along and I did my workout, which I’m enjoying this kettlebell workout.

We should get pictures of you for our show doing kettlebells. Everybody would love it.

If I looked better. When I post them on my Instagram, all the naked women chatbots come my way.

It’s great that you get naked women chatbots. That’s amazing. Things are going on around, some viruses that are affecting people. We’ve had a decrease in patients. We keep track of statistics in the office. Usually, we get about a 90% show rate on our appointments. We are down at 83%. Some people call and let us know but that’s a pretty big drop. It’s mostly the flu. I’m sure there’s some COVID in there and all sorts of stuff. That’s part of what we have to deal with.

That’s what I ended up coming down with that afternoon. I was doing good, having a great time but that flu got me. People have been talking about this thing. The flu itself is not bad. I barely cracked a 100-degree fever.

It knocks you out.

It did. I said I’m going to take it easy. The worst was all this cold and heaviness that’s still sticking with me. It’s naggy. I feel weird, which is what I want to talk about, some of these weird symptoms that we have when we’re out of adjustment. My weird is even though my temperature was normal, I was cold and chilled. Not necessarily from the bug but I recognize that I could not get warm. It was crazy how I couldn’t get warm. This is an old symptom that I’ve had years in the making. Beth, here’s a crazy thing. Can you imagine I like chocolate chip cookies?

Before I went keto and carnivore, we had at least one meal where we said, “We’re going to split that dessert because neither of us needs the calories.” I was making these cookies that I thought were making me sick because I was using honey instead of sugar. It’s setting me all sorts of weird off. This was a long time ago. I figured out that my body temperature did weird things and I felt miserable. I didn’t realize it was because I was out of adjustment but for me, that was the weirdest sensation. As soon as I realized it, I’m like, “I need to go get adjusted.” I ran down to Dr. Vuagniaux’s office in Glen Carbon. He got me adjusted.

Everyone, he would come and see me but I’m another 45 minutes away. That adds a little over an hour in the car.

On that note, I might be down there again. I need a follow-up.

You’re going to see him.

I was going to but he’s out of town.

It’s good to have chiropractors that love you. Weird symptoms, back at that. I have a patient who has had multiple head traumas. When she’s out of alignment, she cannot regulate her temperature. With the hot, she’s dying. When she came in, she had a jacket, another jacket and then a giant puffer jacket on. She was so cold. We had to get new images of her because she fell.

It’s hard when you’ve had a brain injury and then you get re-injured. It’s this vicious cycle. Chiropractors are interesting because most of us have weird chiropractic stories of why we became chiropractors. We talked about that. I get two weird symptoms. Number one, I get hiccups. If I’m out of adjustment in a certain way, I will get violent hiccups that last a very long time.

When I was a child, I had hiccups all the time. They would make me sick to my stomach because they were so bad. Come to find out as an adult and a chiropractor that that was a sign of an upper cervical subluxation. I still get those but I don’t get them at all if I’m holding an adjustment. The second thing is the weird one called central sleep apnea. Have you ever heard of that?

I haven’t. Sleep apnea, certainly but not that.

To explain sleep apnea to people, it’s like you’re going to sleep and you stop breathing. With typical sleep apnea, you stop breathing because there’s an obstructive so it’s called obstructive sleep apnea. That could be like there’s too much girth. You’re overweight or your tongue goes back or there’s too much looseness there.

That’s where people would use the CPAP machines that force the air in. Honestly, if you’ll close your teeth for us and move your head up and down like you’re saying yes, you’ll feel your teeth move. When your neck is out of alignment, that can obstruct things too. We see that on our imaging. Central sleep apnea is even more interesting for the chiropractor because it comes from the brainstem. Central sleep apnea is your body forgetting to breathe, which is quite scary.

 

TBTB – DFY 7 | Weird Symptoms

 

Years ago, I was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. My head was turned because it was a parasailing boat. I was looking. We hit this giant wave out of nowhere. I whiplashed with my head to the side. I immediately knew it was not good. We got off the boat. I’m trying to be happy for my kids and all this stuff but I was like, “I am not good.” That night, I went to bed. Something that had never happened to me before is I would fall asleep. As I was falling asleep, I would stop breathing. I’d startle, breathe awake over and over again where I had zero sleep for two nights in a row.

It was right before I was coming home from vacation. We drove home. At that point, I did not know what that was. I was a little freaked out but I knew I threw my neck. It was bad. I figured being a chiropractor. I put two and two together but I still hadn’t done the discovery work to find out what that was. It didn’t go immediately away after one adjustment. I was re-injured.

With new images, I started a course of treatment with my chiropractor at the time. Over the course of about a month, it got better right after one adjustment but it didn’t go away. I then had the same thing. I woke up at about 2:00 in the morning and was awake not from insomnia. My brain was going. I kept and started gasping for breath again. I needed a double adjustment. It is gone again. It’s so interesting.

I’m on message boards on central sleep apnea on Facebook. You better believe, every time somebody posts something, I’m like, “You need to check out Blair Upper Cervical. Here’s the website.” I can’t imagine how these people live. Some of these people are kids. My brain starts going, “What about SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? Is it central sleep apnea in a baby?” I don’t know but that makes my brain go crazy.

You bring up a good point because there are so many of these message boards out there like Facebook groups and Reddit groups where people are discussing their conditions, trying to find at least somebody who’s had the answer. It was funny. Scott Adams of Dilbert was losing his voice and he’s a professional speaker. That’s half of his thing. He was losing his voice to the point where I don’t think he could talk.

He had some good doctors. It’s not like he didn’t have the Dilbert money to have good doctors but his doctors didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. Sure enough, he starts chatting with people about it. I don’t know if it was pre-Twitter or post-Twitter because he’s on there all the time. He said, “I have this problem.” He described the problem. Somebody else pops in and says, “You have this.” Once he figured out what it was and that it was treatable, he took that to his doctor and says, “I have this.” They figured out how to get him better.

Here’s why I talk about this. Many people are suffering from weird symptoms that they end up in these groups. Unfortunately, they get preyed upon because some chiropractor says, “These chiropractors got you better. I can do what they do but I’m not doing what they do. We’re going to solve your problem.”

We would love to share in these Meniere’s Support Groups for people with vertigo, dizziness, vomiting and nausea and how we can help these people. Unfortunately, they have had so many bad experiences with chiropractors because they don’t understand that there’s a difference between a Blair-trained upper cervical chiropractor and the doctor down the street who graduated from the school with great intentions.

They have good intentions but they don’t know what we know.

At best, they can serve 80% of the population.

I’m glad because honestly, I don’t necessarily want to see somebody with acute low back pain. I will see them, especially if they’re one of my patients already. I’m happy for the guy down the street to have that because I want to see central sleep apnea, Meniere’s disease and neurological conditions that no one’s looking at like MS and Parkinson’s. No one’s looking at it from a structural standpoint. That’s what we do and I love it.

If people are reading and they’re like, “I’d love to share this with so-and-so but they had a bad experience,” it is time for them to look at something outside of what they were doing. That’s what we do daily.

If people have a bad experience, it is time for them to look at something outside what they were doing.

It’s to the point where I still consider myself a chiropractor but I wish we had a different word or name.

This is why sometimes we fall under upper cervical or Blair docs. Other doctors out there practice on the upper cervical umbrella, either be it NUCCA Orthospinology or Atlas Orthogonal. The list goes on and on. It’s different than what everybody else perceives. I had 1 or 2 patients come in at different times.

With their experience with other chiropractors in town, they said, “We went to Dr. Mathias until he retired.” Sadly, he passed away sooner. I would’ve seen him at least daily this week. In a 30-minute drive, it would’ve been one of those weeks just to see if we can get the last of whatever was going on with me. I will drop out a chat here to blow my nose in a moment.

They said they won’t trust any other chiropractors in town if they’re not doing this kind of work. Quite honestly, I had one person who said, “I was with doc.” “When did you start with doc?” “In 2008 or 2009.” It was a closer drive for her to come to see me than it was to go another 30 minutes, 40 minutes South to see the doctor.

She didn’t know that I was doing what the doctor was doing, she would only go to that doctor and she was happy with that. There’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s curious how hard people have a time finding this stuff. In any case, speaking of which, the one I was talking about, she’s doing tons better. She’s almost sleeping through the night, maybe just a quick wake-up. She hasn’t seen the doctor in close to a year because he did retire.

When did he pass away?

Beginning of June 2022, I believe it was.

That’s called working up until when It’s your time. I told somebody, “I want to be in a newspaper because I’m old.” I know there won’t be newspapers but some form of communication when I’m 90-plus years old. I want to be interviewed still practicing chiropractic when I’m in my 90s. Maybe only two days a week but I want to do it. I don’t want to stop. This is unbelievable work.

Why I retired from engineering is to do this. I’d rather do this up to the day I’m going to pass. There was a medical doctor here in town who loved what he was doing. He was teaching over at the school. He was a big proponent of chiropractic and testified for chiropractors in the suit for us. He’s teaching and doing his thing. Everyone goes home from school at about 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. He’s toiling around at his desk.

Nobody asks where he is when they come in on Monday. They find him slumped over his desk and figure out that he’s been there all weekend. He had passed away at his desk peacefully. He was a good friend. I like chatting with him. It’s nice to have those colleagues who were dedicated to the craft all the way through. What testimonials do you have for us?

Tech gadgets are super cool. Everyone’s got their Fitbit and all sorts of other ones that are out there that are more expensive and cooler. I don’t have any of those. I don’t wear anything on my wrist because I constantly am using my wrist in the adjustments. Anytime I’ve been given a watch, I return it because I will never wear it.

I love data. I love collecting information. That’s cool that a lot of my patients do. One gentleman came in with a lot of issues going on. One of them is not sleeping well. He tracks the sleep on his watch. He didn’t realize how bad it was until he was tracking it. He gets adjusted on a Wednesday night. He was showing me the graph. It was cool.

It was like 64% or 47%. Percent of what? I don’t know. Full sleep, whatever it is. The day after his adjustment or that night, it turned to 94%. He goes, “I’ve never had anything in the 90% before.” He’s sleeping better. He’s got some other things that are getting better too but I feel like he’s on the right track. That’s cool and he does too.

The second one is also another Fitbit, measuring heart rate. She’s got a lot of things going on like bad histamine reactions and a lot of systemic things. One of the things she oftentimes has was pretty much constant tachycardia. Not to the point where she needs to be in the hospital but her heart rate is higher than it should be with someone her age when she’s at rest.

It does spike pretty far if she’s going up and down stairs where it shouldn’t spike that much. She gets her first adjustment. She’s laying there. We have people lay and rest after the adjustment. The reason we do that is I tell people, “It’s like if you reset your computer. If something’s going wrong with your computer, you turn it off and back on.” This is the reboot program so we’re rebooting people while they’re resting.

She was rebooting. While she was doing that, she was looking at her heart rate because she felt chill, a little woozy. Her heart rate went down into the mid-60. She goes, “It’s never in the mid-60,” unless she’s in a deep REM sleep. She was like, “I couldn’t wait to tell you.” She had a couple of other cool things to say after her first adjustment. One of them was about temperature regulation. She felt normalized with that, which was cool. I’m excited. This has only been a week with her and I can’t wait to see where she is in her health by mid-part of 2024. It’s going to be a whole new ballgame for her.

I’ve got the Oura Ring, which I like conceptually. It’s a ring. It does all the things.

I wear a ring every day so I could wear a ring.

That’s why it’s not too bad.

Do you have to have your phone close to you?

No. It’s very passive. You check in periodically on it. It’s showing that my sleep has been crap.

It’s because you can’t breathe.

That’s the funny part. It’s not that I can’t breathe. I’m not congested. It’s lingering.

That’s disgusting.

It is but it’s not as gross as normal. A couple of years ago when you were in a car accident, that one was gross. That was me for many years. That was miserable.

Honestly, I have a resurgence of weird things like hiccups, breathing or a headache. I don’t ever get headaches anymore and I had a doozy of a headache lately. I’m grateful for it because then I go, “I know where I am with my health and I’m grateful for everything that I’ve done to get to where I am.” When I get those symptoms, I’m like, “My body’s trying to tell me something. I’m going to listen. I’m going to make sure I’m well-adjusted, eating well, getting adequate rest and healing.” Symptoms are our body’s way of saying, “Something’s wrong. You got to pay attention.”

I have one other thing I wanted to say. It’s about times of stress. When you’re super stressed, let’s say holiday stress, your body may not be functioning well but because you’re so stressed, it’s going to turn off some of those signals that tell you you’re not functioning well. If you’re running away from a bear and your knee hurts, your body doesn’t want to hear that.

What happens after times of stress, whether you finally got through the divorce, funeral or holidays? Your body then goes, “All of those things that we’ve been telling you that aren’t there are there. You just haven’t been able to feel them because we turn the signals off so that you could survive. Now that you have survived, you got to feel all that stuff.”

That can happen during any part of your life when you’re overstressed. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s lovely. I love that my body can survive but when somebody says, “My body’s falling apart,” I’m like, “Let’s talk about what happened months ago and what you’ve gone through.” Your body has been falling apart through the whole time. You just couldn’t feel it until now.

This was like that one patient that I was talking about with bad vertigo. She couldn’t move around the house. She had to have an extra hand on everything, not just her cane. She was in her follow-up because I knew she was going to be good for at least a week. She comes in by herself. She was able to drive herself to the office.

What a win. For someone with vertigo to be able to have the independence to drive themselves somewhere is incredible.

Even bigger. Someone in her 80s who had to be reliant for that one trip on her son and his schedule. She was able to come in and do all the shopping.

That’s incredible, the independence. You could think, “That’s not a big deal.” That’s a big deal but it’s the little things and they stack up like, “I can’t do this now.” All of a sudden, you can do anything. That’s a true testimonial.

I expected it. I’m like, “This is what it’s going to be.” I didn’t expect her necessarily to be driving in by herself. I didn’t think she’d have that confidence back. She also said, “I can do this.” She’s got some spirit. There’s so much stuff. The beautiful thing about the world we live in is there’s so much technology available to say, “I need to start unpacking my health.” They don’t have to come into our office immediately. Some people are like, “I’m going to buy an Oura Ring, Fitbit or WHOOP Strap.” I’d like you to get back to me on what those two straps were because I’d be curious about what the brands are.

The beautiful thing about the world we live in today is there’s so much technology available to say, “Hey, I need to start unpacking my health.”

I’ll ask them. They’ll come back in.

As much as I like the WHOOP, there are some limitations to it. It’s hard to lift a weight with a ring that you’re going to scrape up and/or pinch. I don’t like either of those.

Maybe we can implant you with a microchip.

We’re not doing any implants ever.

Why? It’s just a microchip. It’s fine.

You’ll be the one implanting it and saying, “Dr. Schurger, we’re going to make you do my bidding.”

I’ll have a PlayStation remote and make you move with it. That’s probably already happening. There are puppets on TV in the mainstream. We’re not in the mainstream so we can say what we want.

We can but we might be on YouTube at some point. I want to make sure we don’t get kicked off YouTube before we start on YouTube.

I can call people puppets, it’s fine.

We’re not naming names. In any case, the technology is great because a lot of these things will track your body’s physical stress that you’re under. It will show you when you are overstressed and then all of a sudden as you get adjusted, things start getting better. You can start saying, “How do I take care and take charge of my health with these technologies?” I’m excited that you’ve got two patients that had very positive outcomes with their health with the stuff that they’ve been looking at like, “How do I get this better?”

Technology is great because many of these things will track your body’s physical stress. It will show you when you’re overstressed, and then suddenly, as you get an adjustment, things start getting better and better.

For so many people, it comes back in the Oura Ring groups on the internet. There are two things for sleep that they’re like, “How can I get better sleep?” It’s either deep sleep, which is my problem. I can’t get any deep sleep or REM sleep. Deep sleep is supposed to be restorative. Every time I get a bunch of restorative sleep, I feel lethargic. REM sleep is supposed to be for memory if I’m not mistaken. I get plenty of that, which probably means I’m dreaming all the time. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work.

 

TBTB – DFY 7 | Weird Symptoms

 

How accurate is that?

It’s as accurate as they can get. That’s a good question as far as how close it is. One of the interesting things that I will point out that I have found for myself is if I do not get to sleep before midnight, there will be no deep sleep. All of my deep sleep almost always happens before midnight. Which almost means I need to pull B.J., start going to bed at 9:00 PM and kick everybody out of the house. Apparently, that’s what he did when he entertained. He was firm at 9:00 PM that he would go to bed and he’d be up at 3:00 or 4:00 AM.

For everybody reading, when he said BJ, it means B.J. Palmer who was the developer of chiropractic and died in 1961. Not all chiropractors are going to be reading this. Some of them might not even know what you meant by that. B.J. was one of the original biohackers. He was always looking for new ways to test and change. He would use himself as the tester and do things. One of his biohacks was to go sleep at 9:00.

I think he might have something.

He does. I just like to stay up late.

I do too. I’m slowly learning that when I fall asleep in my chair at 9:30, I’m probably good to go and then I’ll crawl into bed a little bit later. Hopefully, not wake my wife up too much.

That pisses us off. I’m going to be honest. I go to sleep probably earlier than the rest of my family because I wake up earlier than everybody. My kids will know that I’m going to sleep when I say goodnight but they will still come in 3 or 4 times while they’re still awake. They have their bedtime whenever they want. They will come in to tell me one more thing and I’m already dreaming at that point. They’re like, “One more thing, mom.” I’m like, “Just let me sleep.” I’m going to have to throw some rules down. Once my door is closed, unless the house is on fire or your leg falls off, do not come and talk to me.

This is where you can set the phones to Do Not Disturb. If they have a specific thing that they have to remind you of for the next day, they can text it to you. It won’t go crazy. Sometimes you got to set those boundaries because we all have different schedules anymore.

I don’t even keep my phone in my room with me. My phone is downstairs plugged into the internet. I don’t have it anywhere near me when I sleep. People are like, “What if?” I was like, “I’m going to survive.” Plenty of people for many years survived without having a phone in their bedroom. I do not need one in my bedroom. I don’t have my phone with me when I sleep. I use an actual alarm clock that has a CD player in it. I had it when I was in high school and it still works. It’s one of the radio ones. I don’t even use my phone as an alarm.

I might even have an older one that I have. I have Snoopy stickers on the side of it because that’s how old I was. I was probably 7, 8 or 10. That’s where the Snoopy stickers went. It still works.

The funny thing is I still have my CD in it from high school because I never changed it. I don’t have it on CD. It just turns on the radio. It’s a Tori Amos CD. I love Tori Amos.

Anything else?

No, it’s been great. I get to do my Patient Appreciation Day. What that is for us is we are hosting as many patients as we can get in 3 to 4 hours. We have about 55 people scheduled. They all get a free checkup. They’re going to bring big bags of food in for our local food pantry called Circle of Concern. That food pantry services the people of Valley Park. They are an amazing food pantry. They help so many people.

In 2022, we pretty much filled up the back of a van full. In 2023, we’re hoping for a little bit more because we’ll have more people. It’s going to be an awesome event. I’m so excited. It’s so much fun for me to do that because everybody comes in a great mood. They’re bringing big bags of food. We’re throwing it all over the office. It’s pretty amazing. That’s what I’m excited about, our big Patient Appreciation Day. It will be hopping.

You’ll be very happy about going to bed early at night when you’re like, “I’m exhausted.”

I will be. It’ll be great. I will be tired by the end of that morning.

Dr. Bagley, where do people find you?

You can find me at PrecisionChiroSTL.com, on Facebook at Precision Chiro STL and Instagram at @PrecisionChiropracticSTL.

Mine is KeystoneChiroSPI.com for the website. My Instagram is Keystone Chiropractic. I’m going to warn you, there’s very little office stuff on there at this moment and more kettlebell stuff.

If anybody wants to be so in love with kettlebells, they can watch that. You could find me on TikTok too at @DrBethBagley. Are you on TikTok?

I will not.

It is evil. I have funny things on there so you should go and check it out.

That’s what you use to put those on Instagram and be done with it.

I put them on Instagram reels too but I make them on TikTok.

Everyone, have a good day. We’ll be back next time with another exciting episode.

Take care.

 

Important Links