Dr. Schurger and Dr. Bagley discuss Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a loose ligament syndrome that prevents proper collagen formation in joints and soft tissues. If you or someone you know has joints that pop and frequently feel out of place, it could be a sign of EDS. There is help available.
Join us as we explore how we’ve been helping EDS cases and how it parallels the rise of fibromyalgia 20 years ago.
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Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome
How are you doing, Doctor Schurger?
I’m good. It’s been a very nice week. We must have a bigger show with Doctor Brooks and Doctor Shiloh. All of us at one time.
It’s going to be mayhem.
That would be fun.
We should get Drew on too.
That would be pure chaos. If I buy a bunch of equipment, I will bring it down to Florida for the Blair conference, which we were talking about in October 2024, and we’ll spend the day recording when we’re not at the pool.
Success Story Of A Patient With Radiculopathy
I had a good week. I know you had a good week too. I had an awesome win with one of my brand-new patients. She’s been dealing with two years of radiculopathy and weird sensations in her body. She has not felt good. There was no cause. She didn’t have an accident or injury that she remembers and she’s young. She’s in her 30s.
Her medical team had put her on gabapentin and all the pills that you put them on for some neuropathy. I don’t even remember what she was diagnosed with. Probably something similar to what we’re going to talk about. She’s got one adjustment. This day was her second adjustment. After her first adjustment, she had zero radiculopathy and her sinuses immediately opened up so that she could breathe better.
She was thinking better and clearer, and she almost made me cry because she was excited about how many changes were happening rapidly in her body. I warned her, “Great, but don’t go crazy right now because your body is going to fluctuate, and it’s going to go up and down right now.” I adjusted three different things on her the first day she came in. I only had one now, which is great.
It’s when you look at somebody and she’s all put together, she’s gorgeous, this young mother looking beautiful, but she was suffering. You’ll never know how they feel by how somebody looks. What’s cool is one of our patients who is a nurse. She was talking to her other nurse friends at her work, and this nurse friend was one of those who figured, “I’m not a very big skeptic or whatever.”
This nurse friend told this lady who doesn’t even know my patient that she had to come in to see us because the other nurse had been helped a lot. It was a secondhand referral and a life was changed. All I can tell is that people out there tell people about this upper cervical chiropractic because you don’t know how far out it could go. The ripples on this were two ripples away and this young woman’s life was on track again. It makes my heart happy. Chiropractic is the best. I’m off my soapbox.
I’ve got one as well because, in one of my TN cases that we’ve been discussing a little bit, he was on four gabapentin a day I think for the TN pain.
Understanding Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN)
TN is Trigeminal Neuralgia. It is a nerve that comes out into our face, and it can cause excruciating pain in the face to the point where people call it the Suicide Disease, unfortunately. Keep going.
Trigeminal Neuralgia, aka the ‘suicide disease,’ causes excruciating facial pain. Chiropractic care offers hope for those suffering in silence.
In any case, he was taking four gabapentin throughout the day to manage the pain. I mentioned to him, “I’m not going to tell you not to take it but if you can delay.” He said, “Normally, I take it about now, but I’m running a little bit behind when I would normally take it.” I told him, “If you can stretch it out as opposed to taking it as you had been.” For a lot of people, gabapentin has a life cycle of 3 or 4 hours, depending upon what’s going on with the individual. I told him, “See if you can stretch it to 5 or 6 hours.” He said that he didn’t need the one at noon in the past couple of days.
It’s a matter of understanding if we can get the body working the way it’s supposed to. Pain meds are great when you cannot handle the problem anymore and there are no other options, but nobody talks about the downside to pain meds. We could probably do another episode. We’ve talked about some of the pain meds having side effects, but the simple fact that he’s able to back off on that does two things.
One, it means he doesn’t have to refill that prescription as often, which is good because sometimes some of these pain stuff you can’t get as often as you need it. It’s there in case he’s having a bad day, but his body can function better without it. He and his wife are both ecstatic about their results to this point, and we’re only about two weeks in for both of them. Pretty exciting stuff.
Introduction To Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS)
We’re going to get into our topic. If you look at the headline that we’re going to put on top, it’s going to be Ehlers-Danlos, and you’re going to ask, “What is that?” We’re going to get into a high-level overview because we can go deep dives potentially into this, but I want to hit the top level. Anyway, I had a new patient who happened to be in an Ehlers-Danlos case. She’s been having bad migraines, and she had a bad migraine after her massage.
Who gets a migraine after their massage? That’s supposed to relax her. She’s got the day off. Her kid is at camp until later this evening. She’s got time to relax, but no, she can’t. She said that normally, what she would do is she would take an edible to calm that down. Instead, she said, “Let’s see if this is going to take care of the headache.”
She comes in. We get her adjusted, and within 30 minutes, the headache is down significantly to something more manageable for her. That’s exciting but the reason she came in to see me wasn’t so much about the headache because she’d been seeing another chiropractor. It was because of Ehlers-Danlos.
Let’s talk a little bit about that. Let’s start with what it is. At the basic level, it is a loose ligament syndrome. I don’t remember why it’s called Ehlers-Danlos. I hate that name. That couple of guys or gals said, “I’m going to stick my name to the thing. Everyone in the medical community has to memorize my name.” I’m just, “No.”
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) is more common than we think. It’s a loose ligament syndrome that affects collagen production, leading to joint issues. There is help!
If we name something the Bagley-Schurger Disease or Schurger-Bagley Disease, it should have to do something with the butt.
I was told that I should name something for the thermography that we do because of some way that I’m describing it. My response was, “I’m going to call it the Schurger Heuristic Integrative Technique. Do the math on that. Put the letters out there to figure out what I said.
I did. I can spell.
You’ll have fun with that. If we’re going to go that direction, I’m going to have fun with it but. Ehlers-Danlos is a loose ligament condition. The question is, what’s driving it? There seem to be some genetic components that we’re finding. It’s become much more prevalent in practice recently.
I never had any of this when I first started practicing ten years ago.
It’s interesting because when we started practicing, fibromyalgia was all the rage.
That was everybody and their sister. I say sister because it’s mostly women who have that. I feel EDS is more women than men too. Do you see that?
I do see that. I can’t say that I’ve seen a whole lot of men even come in with EDS, but I also contend that if it’s not falling off and we all know what it is with men, they won’t come in.
I’m on the Ehlers-Danlos Society page. I’m going to read what they say, “EDS is a group of thirteen heritable connective tissue disorders. The conditions are caused by genetic changes that affect connective tissue. Each type of EDS has its own set of features with distinct diagnostic criteria. Some features are seen across all types of EDS including joint hypermobility, skin hyper extensibility, and tissue fragility. The other thing I saw on the next thing was easy bruising. It looks like it’s part of a lot of them too. Not all of them.
One of the reasons that we’re bringing up fibromyalgia with the thought of EDS is that 20 to 30 years ago when Fibromyalgia came on the scene, it ended up being a garbage diagnosis. The reason we call it a garbage diagnosis is because if you don’t know what it is and you can’t figure out what it was, and there’s still not a blood test for fibro, you end up saying, “You fall into this category. I am going to put you over here because we don’t know what to call it.”
I don’t know if the rheumatologist has fibromyalgia in their bag of tricks. I don’t know if they ever figured out what they could do with these people other than help them manage some pain. Chiropractic helped a lot of these people at least to make it more manageable. With EDS, I feel it’s similar. There are several things that we can probably point to that could be driving this. We’ve got certainly genetic components that are going on. Why won’t we see this a little bit more frequently fifteen years ago?
That’s such a good question because we know from our research not just on this, but genetics only plays a part. You can have a gene, but it doesn’t express itself or stop expressing itself all the time. Just because you have that gene doesn’t mean you’re going to get something. You could have the breast cancer gene and you’re not necessarily going to get breast cancer.
Your percentage is higher but what can you do to stop that? Many people are cutting their breasts off because they have this gene, which doesn’t always mean you’re going to get breast cancer. I look at this stuff too, and I think of it the same way. What are we doing to ourselves that is causing these genes to express or not express?
One of the interesting things when we get right down to it is they said there are thirteen different diseases, but if I’m not mistaken, I thought it was only four types.
It’s a spectrum. Each type of EDS has its combination of signs and symptoms. Some signs and symptoms are common in multiple types of EDS, while others are only associated with one specific type. There are three. There are cEDS, vEDS and kEDS. Also, my favorite type of shoe is Keds.
Let’s not go into those three because I feel that’s the longer, deeper thing.
I know but if somebody has it, at least you go on the EDS and it lists out on their front page what types of collagen and all that stuff.
To my point, I think one or two of those have identified the genetic marker directly, not all three of them. I thought there was a fourth.
There might be. Hold on. I’m looking at it here. That may have been a very basic thing because hEDS is Hypermobile, cEDS is Classical, v is Vascular, and p is Periodontal. Here’s one I’ve never heard of. Kyphoscoliotic EDS. That’s what the KEDS was. Congenital hypotonia, congenital early onset Kyphoscoliosis.
There are all sorts of interesting stuff going on there for sure. It makes sense because the underlying tissue that is being affected more than anything else is collagen. It is your connective tissue throughout your body. There are some genetic components to this. This is why four types stick in my brain from what I’ve done.
They say that the most common, which accounts for 90% of EDS cases, is hypermobile EDS.
In general, with these, some of them can be characterized as a genetic component directly and some of them can’t. The hypermobile one does not require a genetic component.
I know a lot of people are getting diagnosed with this without any genetic testing being done.
Even when they get genetic testing done, they’re not getting an answer, but this is where the hypermobile one comes in especially. I’d be more concerned about a genetic component than the vascular component. That component certainly is a problem, but all of it comes down to you not laying down good collagen.
The strongest collagen in our body is the type 1 collagen, which are super strong structures. This is something we discuss all the time when we’re looking at joint biomechanics. Any slip, fall, bump, bruise, or injury can cause a tear in our joints. Maybe not a severe tear. Maybe it’s a grade 1 tear and it’s discombobulated as it were, but it’s going to be replaced by grade 3 collagen, which has a problem.
It’s not strong. It’s the weakest in the body. It’s putting OSB up when you had plywood and you had good plywood. It takes time to re-fix that and it’s effectively a scar tissue to some degree or it’s not the right material to be strong. The question is why is it lying down and why without necessarily any new trauma, is it breaking down?
A lot of people, if you’ve not heard of collagen proteins and you are listening to a health-related podcast, I am surprised. If this is the first time, welcome. Collagen proteins exist and they are wonderful but one of the problems that they’ve found is collagen proteins, like good healthy collagen, do not help these people build stronger connective tissue.
This is where other components fall into the mix because when we start looking at things that might be affecting people to this nth degree that has created this boom of EDS, we as a society do not eat the soups that we would have eaten or the whole animal that we would have eaten that might have components of that connective tissue as part of our normal dietary consumption.
That’s a big problem right off the bat. The other thing that might be a problem is the main component of collagen is something called glycine. This is a very interesting amino acid. If you want to use it, I think we’ve talked about this in the past, it is a one-to-one replacement for sugar. It’s very expensive. It is insulin-reducing. All sorts of benefits if you use glycine in place of sugar. When you’re eating a piece of meat, all that tastiness and sweetness in the meat is the glycine that you are tasting.
This is why brisket is made by low and slow cooking it until all of that collagen turns into effectively meat Jell-O and it’s tasty. The question comes down to, what is breaking down? Glycine is the most abundant amino acid in collagen and there is a very close chemical neighbor to glycine. Guess what it is? I know that you know. You can say it because I’ve talked too much here.
Impact Of Glyphosate On Collagen
It’s Roundup, also called glyphosate. We’re seeing so many ugly words. I’m going to forget it. That is a chemical they use to kill off weeds or unwanted plants. Monsanto was a company that I used to work for. They promoted it for many years and said that it was inert. It breaks down in the soil and it doesn’t hurt anyone. We come to find out that when you put it on food and you’re eating the food, it’s in the food.
If you’re spraying it all over the place, it’s getting into groundwater. It’s getting everywhere and we did not have as many of these diseases. Many people have celiac disease and many autoimmune diseases until this stuff became rampant in our food supply. It is getting better though. We have more places to go and to get food that doesn’t have it in there but right now, pretty much all of us have it in our bloodstream.
It is rampant. I’d like to know when they started because what they do with wheat is they spray it with a second round to help dry it out and keep it. Glyphosate is not just a weed killer, but it is an antimicrobial. It’ll kill mold. It’ll kill bacteria.
It’ll kill humans.
If they spray it on the plant early on, then the plant grows, and they do nothing more, it’s probably okay because it has probably gotten off the plant. We won’t talk about how it binds up magnesium in the soil. We’ve covered that but I think it’s the latter because what’s curious about many people with celiac, when they go overseas, they can have all the bread they want overseas because of whatever European standards are, they are not allowing glyphosate to be used.
It’s also possible that the wheat is different there because they might have more traditional wheat, and we have the highest starch sugar wheat that can be grown.
We also have Roundup-ready wheat, which is supposedly that doesn’t have any Roundup in it.
It’s resistant to Roundup. You spray it with all the Roundup you want, and it’s not going to die. That’s what any Roundup-resistant crop would be is that it can get sprayed with that chemical, and it doesn’t die, but everything around it dies which is good. Farmers love that because then their crop is pure corn or pure soybean. It’s pretty much that’s what’s in there but the big problem is what is it doing to that food?
Downstream, it will be food for something. It’s a cow or us. There are many questions. If you’re spraying your weeds, that can be enough exposure. To kill the weeds around my house, I said that I was going to get some high-octane vinegar at 45% purity and that stuff worked.
They sell that at Lowe’s or Home Depot. I can’t remember where I bought it. You can get it in a mainstream thing. It makes your eyes water a little bit when you’re spraying it because it smells like vinegar.
It is very strong vinegar. I said, “I need to be downwind from this.”
It does work though. You could drink it but it will burn your esophagus because it’s 24% or whatever percent it is but it works. Within an hour, the plants are droopy, and then two days later, they’ve turned brown. You wouldn’t want to spray it on something you’re about to eat because it’s vinegar unless it’s a salad. Throw a little oil or vinegar.
You dilute it a lot if it’s 25% or 45%.
It will probably burn your mouth a little bit.
There are alternatives to it. What I’m curious is what is the safety recommendations for spraying that stuff. Ultimately, most people are not wearing that. I have seen stuff that suggests that it’s a full hazmat suit.
You see the people who are even still to this day using it in like lawn maintenance companies and things. They’re not wearing respirators. They’re spraying it around, and there’s all these lawsuits right now.
Some people are winning against Monsanto and Bayer for those lawsuits.
I don’t think of these companies as inherently evil. Their goal is profits. I don’t think of the people who work for those companies as inherently evil. Some of them are still my very good friends. It’s this plausible deniability where it’s like, “I’m not going to tell this hand what this hand is doing. This came out, but let’s not say that you don’t know what you don’t know.” Now, it’s coming out because, during discovery and these lawsuits, it comes out that lots of things were known.
The question will come down to how much is glyphosate. Is glycerin part of that molecule interfering with collagen protein and collagen production, and how is it breaking down?
The other issue is this is probably happening to a lot of these people in childhood and or even in the womb as they’re being grown by their Mamas because the collagen is being laid down incorrectly. There’s maybe a genetic component, but I think there’s an environmental component and it might not just be Roundup. It might be other things too because all sorts of things have been injected and done in the last few years that could be changing the way people’s bodies are working and the way mom’s bodies are working when they’re building their children.
EDS might have a genetic component, but environmental factors like diet play a huge role in its development and management. Start with what you eat.
As to things that people can do with EDS that are going to be a step in the right direction. Collagen protein by itself might not be enough. If you read most of the collagen proteins, “Two tablespoons.” That’s probably a good start. I will throw probably about a not quite a half cup of collagen protein into my coffee at lunch to have a little bit of an extra boost.
Collagen protein, for rule aside, if you’re looking at it, it’ll say that there’s 0% protein in it. The reason is that it’s an incomplete protein. It’s missing tryptophan. An egg protein is complete, but it’s still a protein. It still has calories, and it’s still going to help you build your body, but you can’t live on collagen alone. That’s what I want everybody to know when they say, “It’s 0% protein.” No. It’s 20 grams of protein.
If I’m tracking my macros for protein, collagen is not on my radar. You can track it, but I don’t include it because I’m going to throw that in there and I’m more worried about my complete proteins than anything else. This is something James DiNicolantonio and Siim Land wrote in their book, The Collagen Cure, that it’s not just the collagen that you need, but you need the glycine.
To most people, glycine is not considered an essential amino acid because we make about 3 grams of it a day in our body. The problem is is we need 15 and this is where it keeps coming back around to saying that we need more. Here’s the kicker. It might not be 15. For you and me, we’re doing fine. Our connective tissues are fine. We don’t have EDS. We’re strong. We can go to the gym. We don’t cry too much three days after with Dom’s. Maybe this is where you may need to add some glycine to them.
I have it, and I haven’t been adding it to my tea. What I could do is what you’re saying is I could throw my collagen powder in my tea and then instead of using Stevia because I do use that in my tea because I like some sweet tea, I put in a tablespoon of glycine. Do you know how many grams or how many milligram grams would be around a tablespoon?
I think a half. That’s going to be close to 6 grams.
That will at least give me quite a boost in what I would normally have.
What I find curious both with my workout routines and wanting to push an envelope that I probably shouldn’t all the time is if I’m starting to feel achy, I push the collagen. If I’m starting to feel lethargic, I push more eggs. What’s curious is what Siim Land and James DiNicolantonio have figured out. Siim is a genius in the longevity space, and he’s been diving down to this for the better part of a decade now. I’ve got some of his first books. The Collagen Cure was one of his newer books.
James DiNicolantonio is a research PhD who has been looking at all of these things as far as what to eat, what is healthy, and good science if you want references. What they’re suggesting is some people need 6 grams extra straight glycine to get all the processes to work the way they’re supposed to, but some people might need up to 50 grams of glycine to get those processes to work, which is a lot. If I throw a half tablespoon of glycine in my coffee, I can taste it. It’s maybe sweeter than I want.
It is. I feel like I need to take it to separate a little bit or something.
You might need to work up to it. There is another combination of two products that are good for helping your inflammation and your overall body process. It’s something called, GlyNac. What that is a ratio of glycine and NAC. The more that I ran the numbers, the more I’m going to tell you to go with a one-to-one ratio of both. For the average 180 to 200-pound individual, 6 grams of both of those is where you want to be. If you mix glycine with NAC, which is what it is. I’ve got an NAC powder and a glycine powder at home, it tempers it.
It’s not NAD. You’re saying NAC.
NAC is a precursor to glutathione. Which you’re going to need if you have EDS because you need something to help clean up the junk. It is your equivalent to your natural vitamin C. It’s your nano-natural antioxidant. The best way to boost that is glycine and NAC. A one-to-one ratio is going to be the sweet spot for most people. I believe it’s in their book Collagen Cure.
It’s been a while since I figured out the math and ran the numbers. A couple of other people have talked about this. As far as how you use those two pieces together, that’s the way to do it and that’s the most research. The two together in a glass of water go down pretty easily because the glycine acts as a spoonful of sugar for the medicine to go down.
I had a thought process while you were talking, and I half-listened to you. My father had a propensity for stretch marks on his skin very much so. I also get stretch marks very easily and so do my twins. I know that’s a collagen problem. I don’t think it’s EDS necessarily because we don’t have hypermobile joints to an extent. I don’t have hyperelastic skin. I don’t think so. There is a collagen issue there because you shouldn’t get stretch marks as normal growth happens. With babies and stuff, almost everyone does but some people don’t. Some people have elasticity.
There’s a vitamin E component that you’d have to take a look at. That might be a vitamin E deficiency but certainly, adding the collagen in is going to be a good start.
That’s what I’m thinking. I never took that. Collagen wasn’t a thing even ten years ago.
Benefits Of Bone Broth For EDS
It wasn’t. Collagen has been around for 30 or 40 years and they’ve been around ahead of this because they were using collagen and other stuff, but we weren’t realizing we should be taking it directly. What we’ve done in our society is we’ve moved away from using the whole animal. When you make a bone broth, you take all the bones. You throw the animal you process and you throw them in with all the meat scraps that were on top of it that you can’t get to. They were too tough or who knows what it was, you created this broth and you would boil it. You bring it up to a light simmer, then, you keep it there for an extended period.
You put it in your Instant Pot and it’s done in 90 minutes.
There is that. There are the recipes that I go with are from a book called Brodo. This is where I was introduced to bone broth by a gentleman who owned a restaurant in New York City. He had one small door that opened directly to Times Square or something like that. It wasn’t a usable door for anything else. It was access to the kitchen, but what they figured out was that he started making bone broth. He did some stuff because he was 350 pounds and he started drinking pure bone broth and that helped him lose 150-plus pounds as well as getting him healthy.
That changed his life significantly because you’ve got all that collagen, you’ve got that glycine, probably some more whole proteins from the meat that and the meat broth that would come out of that. That changed his life, and he started selling all his bone broths in a little cup to go, so you could have something hot and warm to drink that wasn’t coffee and that wasn’t tea.
That also had a whole bunch of nutrients in it.
It was very healthy for you. I don’t know if that place is still around. Restaurants turn over a lot, but Brodo is the book and it’s a beautiful little book. It’s a coffee table book that you want and it’s got simple recipes to make it. What they would do is they’d have the thing running all night long. They’d be selling it and they’d be running through it fast. That’s what you have to do. You take about a day, maybe two to get all of that stuff, and then if you’re not drinking it, you can store it. Several different ways to do that.
I typically freeze my bone broth so that I can use it for recipes. Here’s my trick. It’s not the healthiest trick, but for those who are starting their journey, something you can do because ideally, in the perfect world, you want to use grass-fed or pastured animals to make your bone broth. 100%.
I am not in a position in my life where I am going to go kill chickens on my farm, and I don’t have a farm. Could I go out and find the chick? I could but this is what I do in case you’re asking, “How do I even get a bone broth?” At Costco or Sam’s Club, I get rotisserie chickens occasionally. It’s quick easy protein.
It’s maybe not the healthiest protein. You can fight me. I get it. I use my chicken off there and then I take the carcass and put it in a ziplock bag and then throw it in the freezer. When I get 2 or 3 of those, depending on how big they are, that’s when I make my bone broth. I add some vegetables. I usually don’t do the seasonings till afterward.
I’ll do some celery stalks that were the inside part and some scraps. Some vegetables for some flavoring in there. I throw it all in my Instapot, fill it up with water, and put it on for 90 minutes. It makes the most beautiful collagen-rich, gelatin-rich bone broth. The difference between a bone broth and a chicken stock is when it’s cold, the bone broth turns into gelatin. It’s amazing.
It is lovely and tasty.
When you add salt. It’s not tasty until you add salt.
You do need to add some salt to it. My dogs look at me when I give them the stuff from the store, and they’re like, “This isn’t the good stuff.” I’m like, “I know.” I might have to make a small batch up because I probably got a couple of bags of bones from all my steaks and whatnot.
That’s a great idea too when you’re eating bone in steaks. Keep the bones, throw them in the freezer, and then when you have enough, you can make a bone broth out of it.
I noticed that half of my cows are going to get butchered. That’s another thing you can do. You can call local butchers and say, “I would like 10 pounds of bones.” You want soup bones and you want marrow bones. Oftentimes, unless you have somebody who knows what to do with marrow bones, most people don’t, they will get sold for something else.
You can get them relatively inexpensive. They don’t have to be organic grass-finished. Beef, we’ve talked about this in the past. Cows in general still have to be on silage through their entire life cycle. They’ll get some corn at the end in conventional feedlots, but it’s not a lot of corn. It’s not more than not and you’re still going to get a lot of good nutrition out of conventional beef.
This is something easy. I’ve heard many people. Once you start getting them on a bone broth, you can do that. You go to the Chinese, not a buffet, the Chinese grocery store if you want to make a chicken broth. One of the things that is super available are chicken feet, and they’re loaded with collagen. It looks weird in the pot.
It sure does. It’s freaky.
It’s your magical spell for your health.
We’re talking about EDS and how we can support people with EDS, but bone broth is also super supported by people who have digestive issues. People with leaky gut and damage to their gut. Honestly, anyone with digestion issues should start drinking bone broth regularly. It doesn’t sound easy, but it is easy. We’re used to not making the things that we don’t but bone broth is easy.
As you said, Instapots are readily available.
It makes it faster. If you don’t have an Instapot, you can put it overnight on carefully.
If you’ve got electric stoves, overnight. I broke down and got a fancy setup where I’ve got an induction heater and I went ahead and bought a new pot for the induction heater, but that works great because there is no flame, and doesn’t even get hot except for the pot itself.
I typically use my Instantpot outside, not because I’m afraid of it, but because I don’t how my house smells soup for four days after I let all the steam out. I use it on my porch and set it up and mix the outlet, and it’s outside for a couple of hours because it takes time for it to come up to heat.
Let’s end up because we could go on and on about that, but I think that’s enough.
I think everybody likes our recipes.
The Importance Of Chiropractic Care For EDS
They do but let’s talk about chiropractic care for EDS cases. One of the reasons this young lady came in is because she’s having all these neck problems. She didn’t feel comfortable with the chiropractor she was seeing who was a regular guy and he’s a good guy from everything I can hear, but she wasn’t comfortable with a traditional chiropractic adjustment for the neck.
There are some cases, especially when we were talking about vascular EDS problems, where about once a year they have a problem. I want to back up. I don’t know if that’s the case or not truly because we’re dealing with an interesting population that has EDS. The EDS cases, generally, we’re seeing them in the mid to late childbearing years.
Anywhere from about 25 to let’s call it early 40s. There are two problems with this group. Women in that age group already have some other problems with what they call dissecting arteries because of birth control, and because if they’ve had a child or they’re carrying a little bit of extra weight, that automatically puts them at risk. We’re not talking about women who are vastly overweight.
We are talking about some of these more petite young ladies, but they’re carrying a little bit of extra belly fat. That is enough to cause some problems where these dissecting aneurysms can present without chiropractic care, without any other presentation, and it might be a very bad migraine that you’re experiencing.
If you go into the ER and they look at you and they say, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not having a stroke. You’re not having this or that. It behooves you to find a good upper cervical chiropractor, and I’d be more than happy to review cases that fall into this if you hear this and you’ll say, “That’s me.” I had one of these cases.
She couldn’t come in because she was having some of the worst headaches she’s ever had. Her friend said, “Go see Schurger because he deals with this stuff all the time.” She comes in to see me. I got all the stuff back and this was within three days. Saturday or Sunday, she’d gotten a CAT scan of her neck to see if there were any problems with some of the arteries. I think it was a head and neck.
I get the results Tuesday right before I run over to Arthur. That’s a 90-minute drive for me. We’re running around. I read what it was and I called up the radiologist who I’ve got a decent relationship with and we chatted a couple of times. I asked him the question, “Will this show this dissecting aneurysm based upon what they did?” He said, “No. That would not show up.”
Once I saw what was going on, they were missing something. She needed an MRA or some CT angiogram where they’re looking at the arteries. I was trying to get her because I know how the ERs are and you’d go in and you’re saying, “I think I’ve got a problem. I need this.” It’s a four-hour wait. The good news is at her ER, it was not a four-hour wait. I called her. I’m supposed to adjust her on Wednesday.
I’m trying to make sure I’ve got a green light from all of her medical background that I’m not going to cause something worse for her. This is not an EDS case. This is a case of a migraine that ended up being a dissecting aneurysm. She ends up going to the ER. Her doctor said that her primary said, “Go to the ER. They can order that for you.”
She gets the right test. She was like, “They’re giving me the runaround.” About 5:00 to 5:30, she gave me a call, and I remember I had a chance to pick it up because I had a free moment. She is in tears as they are taking her over to Springfield to the hospital because they did find something. Tears of gratitude because everything turned out okay.
She was fine, but they did find a small aneurysm. They didn’t have to do any surgery. It was a watch-and-wait type situation, but they needed to keep her for a couple of days. This group of women, we’re talking about 25 to about 45 or somewhere in there in childbearing years, you might be on birth control and now you have this potentially and carrying a little bit of extra weight. This is where you might have these problems. Who else falls into this category? The EDS cases.
Here’s a question. If they would have gone to a conventional chiropractor and gotten a rotary adjustment, which is ahead to the side and we’ve all seen them online. This could have been an extreme tear, possibly. We don’t know, but it could have been.
This was a mother of two young children. It could have been bad.
That’s scary.
We do our due diligence to ask the question, “Could this be a bigger problem?” We also do an adjusting technique that does not involve taking a person into their end range of motion.
There is no twisting or bending.
That chiropractic is very safe. This is the good news but as I’ve stated before with my made-up statistic, the general chiropractic works for 80% of the population but 20% of us need something a little bit more specific and gentle. That’s what we do here in our offices. That’s why you guys came up this past weekend for a seminar. Technically, I’d had people from as far as Northern Canada in that seminar. I had brisket and we had collagen.
I’m going to have to say one thing about the show. He’s been hyping up this brisket that his smoked brisket is good, and I didn’t believe him but I’m going to let you guys know it was the best brisket I’ve ever had in my entire life.
Now she’s going to buy a smoker.
I’m going to. I’m speaking about it, and my mouth is watering thinking about it again.
The crazy thing is you’ve got Dally’s right across the street from you.
It’s not as good. Yours is way better and it was good. Anyway, that was the best brisket I’ve ever had in my entire life.
I’m very surprised with how it keeps on coming out well. In any case, if that is concerned back to the chiropractic side of things.
Let’s talk about brisket again. You’re right. The type of adjusting we do when people say, “I’m worried about stroke.” I said, “I’m also concerned about that.” I am and that’s one of the reasons we do this technique. This technique does not involve stretching the vertebral artery because by turning my head right now, I’m stretching the vertebral artery. It is stretching.
It’s designed to be stretched. It’s designed when we turn our head left or right, it has extra material to allow that but there are conditions and there are circumstances. Who knows what it is? Is it the food we’re eating? Is it a lifestyle? Is it the extra weight that’s causing inflammation? Who knows? There are many factors to say, is it one thing?
If we can create an intervention that is easier on the patient and does not require pushing things to a limit, I think that’s better for those cases that especially are concerned about it. With an EDS case, the beautiful thing about how we adjust is we don’t push the ligaments. We’re trying to guide the joint back into its proper position so that the ligaments can start healing the way they’re supposed to. We don’t want to over-adjust and that’s the other nice thing is we don’t adjust every visit for these cases. Only when you need it.
Chiropractic care for EDS focuses on guiding joints back into position gently, allowing ligaments to heal without stress. It’s all about precision.
EDS cases do fabulous under Blair Care. It’s always women. I know there’s going to be a man saying, “What about me?” I know you exist. I have not had you as a patient yet.
Over the years, I’ve met one man with fibromyalgia.
Me too.
Maybe it’s the same guy.
It could be.
Do we have two or do we have one? In reality, more women have had this. For guys, it’s not falling off so they’re not having a problem with it. I’m starting to see more of my 50s and 60s folks coming in because they’re saying, “Doc, I can’t push myself in the gym anymore.” I replied, “That’s because you’ve been broken for twenty years and we got to fix you now and back you up.”
I think for people with EDS, I would take a hard look down the collagen rabbit hole. I can guarantee that three of my EDS cases, my big three, the ones that I’ve been dealing with for the better part of a decade or more now, don’t do enough protein and they are not getting enough collagen in this form.
It begs the question, they’ll say, “I’m more on this pescatarian diet. I don’t have an appetite.” Do bone broth. I don’t care if it’s chicken bone broth. I don’t care if it’s beef bone broth. Find a bone broth you like and make it. Mary Ann Rudick. I don’t know if we’ve talked about her in the past. She’s been on many podcasts. You could look her up.
In her early college years, she was so sick. She goes to college and then she can’t go to college. She’s got to live in her mother’s house upstairs and the only thing that she could tolerate for a year was chicken broth. That’s all she had, but that’s all she would eat because once she started noticing that chicken broth was helping her, she would do one, maybe two.
She wouldn’t want anything else but chicken broth. It took her a year before she said, “Let’s try beef broth.” All of a sudden, everything blew up for her as far as being better, being stronger. You listen to her on her podcast without seeing her picture. This is a powerful young woman who has a goal to tell people that animal-based proteins are not the devil that we were taught they were, as well as how to revitalize your health.
I don’t know if she had EDS, but certainly, she was not healing and not functioning the way she was supposed to. In any case, a couple of ideas. If you’ve got EDS and you feel like you have something stuck in your skull, it would be a good idea to give one of us a call or find out where we’ve got a Blair chiropractor near you to help you out. Doctor Bagley, where are they going to find you?
I am in Saint Louis, Missouri. We’re on the west side. You can find me at PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com. I’m on all the socials @DoctorBethBagley.
Conclusion And Final Thoughts
I’m at KeystoneChiroSPI.com and on all the socials. Like, subscribe, tell people about this, and share this episode with a friend because you never know how that secondhand person is going to say, “I know somebody who needs some help.” As we do this, we help people get better. In any case, folks, thank you for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with another episode of The Blonde and The Bald.
Important Links
- The Collagen Cure
- Brodo
- The Blonde And The Bald – LinkTree
