Living with trigeminal neuralgia can be very difficult. It impacts our life, resulting in problems like, weight loss, isolation, and depression. Today, Frederick Schurger and Beth Bagley welcome a guest close to Beth's heart. Beth Bagley’s sister, Sarah, shares her experience dealing with trigeminal neuralgia and why people should seek care and try it. Beth chimes in with how our body is built to protect, but sometimes that protection mechanism is what holds us back. Frederick and Beth also touch on fasting and its benefits. Tune in to this insightful episode today.
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We have got a special guest. This is Sarah and she’s my sister. I brought her on because she has a story about a little-known problem that has happened to people called Trigeminal Neuralgia. She had it very early onset in college and she’s got a great story about how she had her life turnaround and now lives pain-free from trigeminal neuralgia symptoms and some headache stuff too. We will talk all about that. Sarah, when I was in chiropractic school, I discovered this thing called upper cervical and we had been under some chiropractic care most of our lives, correct?
Yes.
Our grandfather was a chiropractor and then through the years we would get chiropractic care, but it was more of conventional chiropractic care. What was your experience with conventional chiropractic care?
I’m going to be honest, it scared me. Grandpa was a wonderful man, but he did a lot of surprise attack chiropractic care where he would jump behind me so I would cry and try to crack my neck, and then I would cry.
It didn’t feel good to you.
No, I was never relaxed when he did it. I was always tense and so it scared me growing up. I still continued with it. Through high school and college and found other chiropractors that didn’t scare me but, at first, it scared me.
Coming into college, you were having a lot of headaches. One of the things I remember is an industrial-sized bottle of Advil or something from Sam’s Club. How much were you going through of that you think?
I’m sure within a week, I would say maybe 4 of the 7 days I was taking Advil pretty regularly.
That was when you were 19 to 20 years old then something happened and what did it feel like?
Towards the end of my college career, I was up in Kirksville and I did have a chiropractor that I saw up here and there. I remember calling our mom and saying that something in my jaw hurt and my mouth. I was like, “Who do I go to? Is this a chiropractor thing? Is this a dentist thing? Is this a doctor thing?” It came and went and it was a pulsing pain down in my jaw area. It would go away for a little bit and it would come back. I didn’t know what was wrong and who to see. It happened at a time where I was coming back to St. Louis anyway because I was going to start my student teaching.
I remember it being super uncomfortable and painful. It would go away and then it would come back and I talked to you about it. I talked to Dr. Bagley about it because I wasn’t sure what to do and then it got more and more intense. It didn’t go away anymore and was keeping me up at night. The only thing that would help is if I would drink water. I remember repeatedly.
You’d have ice in your mouth too.
I needed something. I don’t know what it did or why that helped, but all of a sudden, it was keeping me up at night. I couldn’t sleep, eat, or do anything and I didn’t know what was wrong.
I was in chiropractic school at that time. I didn’t know a lot yet because I was in school, but I had discovered upper cervical already. There was a chiropractor I was seeing, Dr. Adam Tanase, and he had already changed my life with the chiropractic care that I’d received there. In school, I had learned about trigeminal neuralgia and it was super rare. You are probably not going to see it a lot but this is what it is. When she was describing this to me, I thought this is trigeminal neuralgia. I think you got maybe tested. Did they do an MRI? I can’t even remember.
Trigeminal neuralgia is super rare.
I don’t remember.
I remember you hearing that, “You are too young for that. There’s no way you could have that.” That’s what people would say.
I was calling my doctors and they didn’t think I had it. They were trying painkillers, which worked here or there, but not completely. I was living with it. I remember being at Mom’s house in the middle of the night sitting in the bathtub. I couldn’t sleep or do anything. I remember the nights being the worst because nobody was around, nobody was awake, and I was awake and I couldn’t sleep. I was getting freaked out.
I got a question about that. When you say in the bathtub, you are talking like a hot bath trying to get warm enough because I have had something. I don’t know if I want to call it trigeminal neuralgia but the only thing that would give me enough relief to get myself ready for the day or to go down to get adjusted was sitting under the hot shower.
It was the only thing that calmed my mind and my body. I felt like I could make it another hour or do something else. That’s a great way to put it. I had never thought about that. It was the only thing that was giving me any relief at all.
Again, I don’t even remember the whole story because this was years and years ago. I wanted to bring you on because this confirmed my belief that I was doing the right thing by leaving conventional chiropractic behind and exploring upper cervical as my career. It is because I brought you to my chiropractor.
You did. I had Dr. Tanase.
He had X-rays taken of you and what did they discover on your X-rays?
They discovered that I have a weird bone and for my entire life, even Grandpa was adjusting me wrong. You can tell them what bone it is. They always thought that I was out on that side so they kept adjusting me on that side and I can feel it over and over again and nobody knew.
There’s the skull, the top bone, one side of her is bigger than the other side by a lot. It’s a big chunk. It’s called The Transverse Process. A conventional chiropractor that doesn’t take X-rays would feel that. With a side X-ray of that, you are not going to see it but with a specialized X-ray called The Base Posterior, he was able to see that, “You have got a honk inside to one of your atlas bones.” Chiropractors had been adjusting you wrong since you were a kid. No wonder it hurt so bad for you because it was wrong.
No wonder it never was right. I would feel after an adjustment maybe some relief immediately, but nothing ever worked. Nothing stuck. Thankfully, Dr. Tanase took me on and I remember the first time I was adjusted. I remember laying there and I felt my whole body relax. I was hearing my stomach start gurgling and I was like, “That’s weird.”
We started going there and it took some time. It took twice-a-week adjustments. It wasn’t immediate, but little by little, it stopped hurting. Going back to student teaching, I remember doing that and I don’t remember exactly when it stopped, but knock on wood. Having been under Dr. Bagley and my sister’s care now, I haven’t had a relapse of it. I was telling our mom on the way home I don’t remember when it stopped and I don’t remember a lot of it. I think I have blocked it out.
It’s scary when you are going through something like that. The thing that your brain goes to is, “What if I have to live like this for the rest of my life?
I had that thought in the bathtub. I remember, “I can’t do this. I can’t go to work like this. I can’t sleep like this.” My sister knows me. Sleep is my favorite thing in the entire world and it was awful.
Someone reading this might be going through that right now. That’s why I wanted to bring you on because they might type in trigeminal neuralgia and then find our show. I want them to know that there’s life after this. One of the problems with trigeminal neuralgia is it’s so unrelenting for some people that they end up taking their lives.
That’s painful for me to even think about because there is an answer to this and it is upper cervical chiropractic care, especially Blair Care. If Blair Care is not available in your area, there might be an upper cervical doctor that’s awesome too. We love all of our friends that do upper cervical. Since then, you have been under care. I know you still get headaches sometimes, but not very often anymore, right?
I can tell that when I have a headache, I’m out. I know what immediately, and I need to come and see you. Right now, I had a headache at school but we will take care of that. I don’t know if it’s because I have that weird bone but I can feel it down my ear. I can feel it when I start getting out. It’s almost a tingling sensation that I need to come in and see you. Going back to what you said. I was googling trigeminal neuralgia. I remember it coming up as such a suicide disease. I read those words and I was like, “I won’t do anything.” I completely agree with you. People need to seek out care and they need to try it.
Dr. Frederick, we got her under care relatively quickly after her symptoms started. Do you notice a difference when someone with a big neurological complaint if they get in sooner versus if they have had it chronically for a long time?
With any chronic neurological issue like this, one of the interesting things about nerves is if a nerve starts firing and firing a lot, it starts to develop a memory of that problem. We are going to call it trigeminal neuralgia for sake of this conversation. When I had that, I knew that I immediately needed to get it addressed.
One of our good friends who has now passed, the late great James Tamasi, had TN for twenty years before he got his head on straight. Something that he had told me it was at least a decade since he had been under care. Maybe a little bit longer, but he had a hard time. He would talk about it. He would give talks to people describing how he had bought the gun and how he was about to commit suicide when he had a moment of relief.
He shared with me that just telling that story would bring that pain back on across his face. He was at this point, a decade or more out, not having that pain come on as he tells the story, which is pretty profound. We hear this phrase, “Nerves that fire together, wire together.” Those pain fibers, if they are always firing and you do not get any relief, for some people, they have to be cut because the nerve fibers will not turn off otherwise. Hopefully, we don’t let people get to that point, but that is a reality for these pain fibers and these pain generating nerves. I think most people, before they get to that point, decide that they are done and they are checking out unfortunately.
Last thing, unless Dr. Schurger has any other questions. When I look at my story of how I found upper cervical chiropractic and relief from my own problems, which we have talked about in previous episodes, your story comes into my mind too because of that confirmation. I know there’s a higher power at work and all of that stuff, but what would you say to someone who is in despair with a neurological condition? What would you tell them about the upper cervical?
First, I would say, “Why not? Just do it.” When you were in that moment, when you are in that bathtub and there is nothing else that’s working, just do it. Try it and get under care. Give it a chance because you don’t know but it could change your life the next day. Chiropractic care in general, I have talked to you and a lot of people about this because we grew up with it. There’s a big group of people in the United States that have never tried it and their family never tried it.
I encourage people to try. There are so many medications out there that people take that I believe that if they would try upper cervical care and give it a chance, it could change the way their body functions, works and heals. Lean into it. It’s not going to hurt because it doesn’t hurt when you get adjusted. It’s not going to hurt to give it a try because it could change something that you thought would never be without ringing in your ears, pain, or headaches. What you can be, it can happen.
Dr. Schurger, do you have any other questions for her?
I have one quick question. Have you had any symptoms since, for other TN, that’s even close to what that used to be?
It’s funny because you were saying that you think about it. Right now, I’m gritting my teeth. I’m worried about it because we are talking about it. I would say the closest I get to it is I get tingly. As I said, I know when I need an adjustment because I get a headache or I feel tingles. It’s never a pain again but it’s almost like tingles. I can tell something is trying, not working, not connecting, or something is happening, but thankfully since then, I have not.
It’s interesting how so many people have a little bit of a tell, but after years and years, that tell becomes less and less that you don’t notice it as much and that gets you in trouble. The upside is your sister is right there.
She’s literally closer to my office than I am in my house.
Not just right there, but literally in the neighborhood.
We could walk to your house right now. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate you telling your story and opening up about it. I know that this is going to go places and help a lot of people, so thank you.
I hope it does. Thank you too for having me on. I appreciate it.
We are going to continue on, but Sarah, you can sign off.
I am leaving. You guys have a great evening. Thank you so much.
You too. Bye, Sarah.
That was such a great story, wasn’t it?
That is.
I knew you would like it. I don’t think you have heard that whole story before. You have heard bits and pieces of it.
I don’t think I have. Her saying that she was in the tub clicked with me. As I said, I didn’t want to say that I have had trigeminal neuralgia. I had bad facial pain but I’d never wanted to go to that point. After her describing that was what got her better, I remember I turned on the hot water until it was cold. If you are suffering from this and it takes you a little bit of time to get in or you need something to make it feel better in between even while you are getting adjusted and your body is healing, I highly recommend these spa shower heads.
They are so nice because it’s a lot of little spots. It’s probably one of the most relaxing shower heads I have ever had. I will buy one of these going forward. You need one. The upstairs shower needs a better showerhead when I visit, but that’s another story. I would get underneath it. The trick is I’d sit in the bottom of my shower stall. I’d have to stand up, adjust it a little bit, sit back down, stand up, and adjust it until I got it so it hit all my head and water would run down. I might put my hands like this over my eyes so that I could breathe with the heat coming down. As soon as she said that, I’m like, “That’s probably what this was a couple of years ago.”
The other interesting thing she mentioned and you have mentioned as well, and I have seen this on X-ray was that one side of the atlas was honking big and the other side was itty bitty comparatively. If they were both the same size, we would say, “That’s a normal atlas,” but for her, that’s a major problem. I saw another patient several years ago with bad migraines seeing a good chiropractor here in town, but he didn’t take an X-ray.
Traditional X-rays aren’t going to necessarily show an enlarged part of the atlas because you are taking it straight across and straightforward. You don’t see that it’s shaped like this.
It’s two parts and this is why the Blair work that we do is so critical. I wouldn’t change it for the world. If someone comes up with something better, I’m going to be like, “I’m interested,” but this little bit is key. Looking at, “That one is bigger and this one is smaller. It looks like it’s off to the right and isn’t accurate enough because the joint biomechanics don’t go straight left or right.” They are more forward and backwards and you have to do special views, which we do in our office so we can look straight down the joint to see this millimeter misalignment. Sometimes half a millimeter that you will never see on a conventional X-ray.
As we are talking about this, I will bring Philip on at some point in time in the future because he has such an interesting story. He’s been having such problems with the VA. All he wants is for them to help get a better sense because he knows what we are doing here is great. He wants better diagnostic imaging so we can show what’s effectively screwed up with him. He goes to these orthopedic guys and they are saying, “Everything is fine,” because it’s stuff that they can’t fix. I don’t want to say it’s an old understanding because it’s probably as new as can be, but let’s be honest, the science that you and I were taught in school is based on research from several years ago. The unfortunate part of any healthcare field is the information.
Unless you are into the cutting-edge stuff like you and I are because we are looking at this stuff all the time. I then come down, I teach, and you are picking my brain so that you don’t have to dig into it. I know you. You are much happier that I do the digging. I teach you but that works out fine. You ask me, “Now that you have said that, explain that in plain English and I have to think about it for a second.”
I think that’s relevant because then if you wanted to explain it to a patient, you could or just explain it to me.
To the point, as far as finding some of these ligaments for him that have been damaged in a work-related accident that happened to be VA time, some of these ligaments are so small that traditional imaging isn’t going to find them. You need very specialized imaging which we will get lined up for him. He’s trying to go through the system. I’m not understanding why the system is not conducive to what he’s looking for.
It’s not built for this. I wish it was, but it’s just not.
For the imaging and for what we are looking at, we are at least years ahead of what your average orthopedist is looking at. Nothing against what they are doing but they also don’t have a solution for it because we are looking at very small ligaments. The blessing is the muscles that hold that upper neck. Put that open-neck picture model back up and show me the muscles on the back. There are little muscles that are supposed to be back there. Those are largely not torn but those muscles will hold until the ligaments can heal.
They are trying to protect. Your body is built to protect you. Sometimes that protection mechanism is what’s holding you back. Speaking of rebuilding my body, I have been doing a fast.
How are you doing that? Are you doing it quick or slow?
Very quick. I’m going to show my app here. I am 70 hours into a 72-hour fast. I’m doing well with it. I have been hungry. Right now, I’m not hungry, which is incredible because I know I’m going to eat in two hours. I decided to do this for my health. My church is doing 21 days of prayer and fasting. That kicked my butt a little bit saying, “I have done a three-day fast before and afterwards, I’m going to continue to fast but One Meal A Day also called OMAD. Through the 21 days, I might do another three-day fast in there.” As my church has been going through the Bible, there are lots of fasting in the Bible, which is incredible.
Every religious tradition has a fasting tradition to it.
I wish I had it with me but there was this cool passage that was talking about fasting so that your body consumes itself. My jaw dropped because this is written thousand years ago. That might have even been in the Old Testament. I don’t even know how that old passage was. Somebody can look it up and let me know.
That sounds like Old Testament to me.
The process that now we have discovered is called Autophagy. One of the main reasons that I like to do a three-day fast is it gets your immune system refreshed because your body consumes the old cruddy parts of the immune system itself.
A three-day fast will refresh your immune system because your body consumes the old cruddy parts of the immune system.
I like the word detritus, which is all the old cruddy junk, all the crap, and all the dead tissues. It allows older cells to clean themselves out. We are not the same matter that we were a week ago and it’s changed a little bit. They say seven years. I don’t know. Maybe.
Every seven years, you have a new body or something.
Something to that effect, which may or may not be accurate to all pieces and parts, but the cells will go through their cell division. Old cells die off and new cells replace that and that’s how we are. That’s the process. We don’t have a good measure for it yet, but we do know that we can start to see in these 3 to 5-day fasts lots of benefits very quickly.
A couple of things that I have noticed already. I was testing my blood sugars beforehand to see where they were at. They weren’t super high but I did have a day or two when I was waking up in the morning in a fasted state before eating anything. That was over 100.
That’s a little high.
If you’re fasting, you should be under 100.
Even just an overnight fast, the big question is how late. You and I have run the same problem because we will run a long day especially now. We will get a meal and we won’t have a full twelve-hour fast by the time we wake up the next morning and we should have been at least twelve hours.
That’s true. I get home late and then I will eat. That’s not always the best thing and it’s not always the best food sometimes. I was noticing that was creeping up. Since the last few days, my blood sugars have been steady in the 80s, which is fine. Seventies would be a little bit better, but I’m happy where I’m at right now.
When I got out of bed, I got ready and everything, and then I walked down the stairs. I had been in the last week or two, maybe longer, and every time I took those first steps down the stairs, I was like, “Ouch.” My feet and my knee were hurting. I was in inflammation pain because my body was inflamed. I hopped right down the stairs and I even noticed it when I looked at my face. My face looked fresher and it looked not as poofy.
You look skinnier.
It’s just been three days. I think that’s incredible. I’m going to continue the OMAD. I do think I will probably do it because the church is doing 21 days of fasting in prayer. Sometime towards the end, I will pick another 3 days and do another 3-day fast. I know not everyone is religious but fasting is part of a lot of religions. The one thing I can say that’s been better, I have done 2 other 3-day fasts in the past but I never did them prayerfully and gratefully. I have been praying on this fast and it has helped me. If that is something that you want to try, know that when you are doing a fast, it can help to pray. If you are not a praying person, have a moment of meditation and gratefulness.
We are starting to see the science come out that is backing up why fasting is great. A lot of people are like, “I’m not crazy about religion,” except it kept society together for thousands of years. Let’s not pretend that there aren’t aspects of religion that have serious problems.
There’s been lots of problems and lots of religions and still are.
There are, but there are tenets that we should take a look at and say, “Is this good? Why was this practice? Why is this a thing?” It’s a recognition that we have got to clean out the body from time to time. I’m not saying that all of these things should be accepted blindly, but maybe we should revisit them in a manner that is at least intellectual and say, “Why does this stack up the way it does?”
We have to clean out the body from time to time.
If you wanted to sit down and learn some other interesting fasting facts, Dr. Mindy Pelz on YouTube has tons of great information. It’s wonderful. My sister-in-law is going through her book as she tries to get herself healthier so that they can get pregnant. That’s the end goal there. Fingers cross. All of these things, there are so many benefits. Here’s my next question. You are going to go to OMAD, which meal are you going to eat?
The only way I can successfully do OMAD is if I plan it day by day. Sometimes I will eat lunch and sometimes I will eat dinner. Sometimes there’s a get-together and if I can skip lunch that day and do dinner, I’d prefer to do lunch. I think OMAD is better at lunch because eating late at night isn’t the best thing for our bodies no matter what, and it’s part of sometimes what I have to do.
I do think I’m going to switch it. In a 24-hour period, I’m going to have a 2-hour eating window. Some days, it might be an 18-hour fast, sometimes it might be a 28-hour fast depending on what’s happening. That’s what I’m going to try to do. Again, the best way to do it is to pick the meal and keep it consistent through, but I’m going to be honest, I’m not going to be that person. I’m not going to be a psycho about it.
It can be because between your schedule, keeping up with the girls, and everything you have got going on there, you are going to have weeks where everything is topsy-turvy like you said. For me, this week was a non-Arthur week. I didn’t drive over to Arthur, Illinois to see patients over there on a Tuesday night.
When I do, I don’t get back until 9:00 PM. At 9:00 PM, I make my eggs and bacon on Tuesday night, and that’s what I’m doing. Whereas now, it will be 8:00 PM by the time I get home. Again, I’m not going to do that consistently. I would rather try to get that meal in earlier. The more that I look at intermittent fasting, I realize this. Everyone is now coming around to this without me even saying anything. Breakfast and lunch are probably your best choices when you are doing intermittent fasting. Eat a morning meal, eat a noon meal, and skip dinner. Everyone has been very adamant about doing a skip breakfast and eat lunch and dinner. Dinner ends up getting pushed late.
It might be better not to eat it then. Breaking the fast. We need to talk about that too.
We will get to that here in a second. There are a couple of big pieces of research out there. One being with women, they were looking at breast cancer markers or whether or not they were elevated in these women. There were two groups. Both were doing intermittent fasting but one group made sure they were eating their meals during daylight hours.
We are short on daylight. We are done by 5:00 and int comes up at 7:30. They would eat all their meals in daylight versus another group that would have noon and maybe 8:00 PM or 7:00 PM in darkness. The group that ate that second meal or had some of their meals in that darkness or in that evening time had higher incidences of breast cancer indicators.
There is something to our circadian rhythm driving when we are eating. Whatever that might be for you or somebody else who’s reading, it’s something to think about and try to focus on getting those meals in earlier in the day. We have our schedules and we have our lives. Sometimes food and our meals have to be put in around our work. Restricting that eating cycle has shown to be very beneficial across the board. What are you breaking your fast with now?
My refeeding will consist of a soup that’s in the freezer right now. I got to defrost it. It’s a vegetable and it has some chicken in it, a brothy soup. The tendency for some people is then they go like, “Let’s go to the Chinese buffet.”
I’m tempted to come on down to go to the Chinese buffet with you.
No. Maybe if it’s in my eating window. Pretty much that’s what I’m going to eat. I’m going to eat that and then let my body absorb it. I’m not going to continue to eat through the night and stuff. After that, I got to decide what time I want to eat again. I know I will be hungry in the morning, but I think I’m going to wait until late afternoon to eat again. Refeeding is important. A lot of people will start with a bone broth. I don’t want to stop at the store. If I had some or if I made some, I would do that, but I don’t.
I got to read this comment that my wife Jean sent me because we are going to do some bone broth. She says, “I saw bones in the freezer. This idea has been brewing for about a day or so.” She’s got the best jokes. Bone broth is easy to make, but it takes about a day. It takes a day to 48 hours. It smells so good. It’s hard to maintain a fast. It smells awesome.
I bet it would be. I wouldn’t want to smell it.
It makes the house smell awesome, but you have got to know how to make it. It’s not very difficult because it is bones. I have got a bunch of bones. I was eating bones. It’s a T-bone that goes in a bag after I’m done eating it. If it’s some short ribs, that goes in the bag. What I will do with that if it’s been cooked previously, I will throw that right into the stockpot, fill it up with water, and add some salt.
I might add some seasoning. Something like a robust herb that won’t burn in the first eight hours or so, but I will let that soak at a simmer for 8 to 12 hours. You could probably push it to 24 without a problem if you have got some heating element that you are not worried about like fire and open flame. Don’t do an overnight if you don’t trust your stove and have open flames. That’s all it takes, and then you start scooping that off and drink it straight. A couple of cups two times a day.
Sometimes there’s some stuff that floats on the top. I have heard you need to scoop off the top. Is that true?
Some of the stuff that’s scooping off the top is going to be straight fat. At that point in time, I take the fat off and I reserve that because that’s my beef tallow. I will throw that in with my bacon so I have a little bit extra fat because most pork is too lean for my liking. It ends up being a leaner animal. Anyways, that’s another story if we want to go down the ketone rabbit hole. I will reserve that. I will use that for cooking. I’m making popcorn with beef tallow right now and it is awesome. It’s like, “I have had enough popcorn.”
You are saying you fill up faster because it’s cooked with the correct oil?
The itty bitty little thing of McDonald’s French fries satisfies most people.
Did we talk about that?
We have touched on it, but we didn’t necessarily go into the entire supersize-me-world. I use it as a skin conditioner. When I use it regularly on my hands, especially where my calluses are, I make sure I keep my hands well moisturized with the beef tallow.
You then smell beefy.
I don’t. I will bring some down. I do use some essential oil.
What’s that smell? It’s beefy.
When I do my kettlebell workouts, I don’t rip up my calluses.
You used to do that a lot.
I did and I did a couple of weeks ago and my hands hadn’t been conditioned for a couple of days. Sure enough, it got them back to where they are supposed to be and they heal and stay better that way.
The last thing I’m going to talk about with the bone broths because that’s a great way to refeed after a fast is collagen. That’s part of bone broth, but there’s a huge collagen fad right now where you can buy collagen powder and that stuff. I do have some of that in my house because it’s a good supplement. Where do you think the collagen is coming from? People, it is coming from bone broth and they are separating it out. A lot of it is coming from beef.
A lot of it is coming from cow hides. There’s a company out of Chicago. I don’t know if that’s subsidiary or if they are selling too. Great Lakes Collagen or maybe it’s Great Lakes Gelatin. Either way, they have collagen. They get their hides from Brazil, I believe, and they have a process of breaking down the hides and turning that into collagen substrate. Some of it is coming from bone broth, but I’d say the majority of it is coming from hides. It’s still edible. It’s the collagen protein. I think there are other benefits. There’s a young lady by the name of Mary Ruddick who did broths to heal her autoimmune problems. I’m certain if we got her head on straight in the process.
It would have been helpful. These are pieces to the puzzle.
It would have happened faster, but it took her a year of doing chicken bone broth.
No other food. That’s all she was eating.
That’s all she could eat. She couldn’t keep food down. She was a young college student who could not function. She ended up moving back in with her mom living upstairs. For a year, all she did was chicken bone broth. The story is funny because she didn’t realize that she could switch over to beef because she felt so good on chicken. When she switched over to beef after about a year, she was like, “This is so good. It was amazing.” Since you are having broth soup, one more thing that you might want to try. I know it’s going to get late and that’s the problem.
I stay up late, so I will be okay.
I meant more for the digestion in your blood sugar in the morning. I was watching Thomas DeLauer talking about five mistakes he made breaking his fast. What he recommended and certainly bone broth is to break the fast with. About 90 minutes after the bone broth, this is where it’s going to get to be a little late. He would add protein.
I’m going to cut out. I’m going to be honest, I’m going to be eating protein anyway. I’m going to straight in but I’m not going to eat a hamburger. It is what I’m not going to do.
No. That sounds good though.
That does sound good. Everything sounds good right now because I get to eat in 1 hour and 39 minutes. That’s what I get to eat again.
The last time I did a long fast, it’s been 2019. The last day I went to a Christmas party, I was dry fasting and I’m like, “This looks all nice.” I’m a little lightheaded. I don’t recommend dry fasting and operating heavy machinery.
For people reading, dry fasting means you are not even drinking water.
Also, not taking a shower or brushing your teeth with water.
It’s like nothing is entering your body. No water and no food. Other than breath. You can breathe. You are allowed to do that. We would not recommend that for most people, and we would not recommend that long-term.
You need to talk to somebody. Talk to your doctor. Do your research. They are coming around to it. In ‘19 when I looked at it, this was one of those, “Be careful. Maybe not. Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” and now they are coming around. It’s like, “We can do this under good controlled circumstances.” If you understand your limits, go talk to a doctor or talk to somebody who will help guide you through that process.
What’s the maximum amount of time you would tell one of your patients?
For a dry fast, I wouldn’t do more than 24 hours personally. Anything longer than that gets into weirdness.
I think you might even have heart problems and stuff after three days.
As I said, I started Friday morning, the party was Friday night, and I walked down there about 9:00 or 9:30. I probably stuck around for 45 minutes or so just visiting with friends for the Christmas holiday party, and I was lightheaded the whole time. It was a thing where I sat the entire day. I was doing a lot of reading and research. I found myself a corner to stay away from everything else. The only thing I needed was the bathroom because I was going all the time. I was surprised by how much I needed to go to the bathroom. In any case, that’s what it was. It was a good experience, but I also haven’t done any fasting other than intermittent fasting for a few years.
We should do a three-day fast together.
Probably not. I’m training pretty heavy right now.
Don’t be cool like me.
I’m not going to be cool like you.
It’s impossible.
Very much so. I got to be cool like me.
We will talk to people in the next episode. I will let you know how everything can continue to go OMAD. Is there anything else you want to cover on this episode? I wanted to tell people in case they were wondering what app that is. It’s called the Zero App. You can choose how long you want to do your fast. If you are doing intermittent fasting, it has pre-programmed ones too.
They are good. It’s a nice little program. It gets a little annoying when you haven’t done 1 in 4 years. It says, “Shouldn’t you do a fast?”
It’s like, “How are you doing?” You can turn that off, but it will ask you.
Do we even want to be asked when was the last time?
They will tell you, “It’s 756 days since your last fast.”
Something like that. I did some intermittent fast. It’s only been 432 days since my last fast.
Look at you. It’s not been 700.
Yes. Make sure you like and subscribe to the show. Give us a five-star review. That helps people find us. After reading Sarah’s story about trigeminal neuralgia, there are people who are suffering who absolutely need to know that story. They might not even know they have trigeminal neuralgia. They might hear, “The only relief I get is when I’m sitting underneath the shower or sitting in the bathtub in the hot water.” That’s their answer to get better and get back to life. Make sure you give those five-star reviews even if it’s the first time that you are tuning in. If you need to find us, KeystoneChiroSpi.com in Springfield, Illinois.
I’m in St. Louis, Missouri. We have got PrecisionChiroSTL.com.
We will see everyone next episode, and you have a grand old day. Dr. Bagley, enjoy your soup.
Bye, guys.
Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger, go in-depth into Dr. Frederick’s autoimmunity journey of losing his hair (alopecia totalis) & pigment spots (vitiligo...or maybe tinea versicolor) and what may have been the cause of it. He explores the role of genetics, environmental factors, and other potential triggers of autoimmune disorders. And that's the topic that shall not be named…
If you or someone you know is suffering from an autoimmune disease, this episode will give you a better understanding of the condition and give you hope that you can find answers. Join us as we uncover the unspoken cause of autoimmune diseases and learn about the latest research on this important topic.
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Dr. Bagley, how are you doing?
Dr. Schurger, how are you doing?
I’m good. I’m all purple. I didn’t realize.
You’re purple. I’m all black. I wear black pants and black shirts. I went all black but my mood isn’t black. I’m feeling quite good.
I hope everyone is ready. This is going to be high-energy.
We are pumped up.
It’s going to be fun. I hope everyone is ready to buckle up because this is going to be a crazy one based on some stuff that we saw in the news. We will get to that. We will talk about how I’m becoming a little bit less bald. You can’t tell but it’s getting there. Let me tell you about this funny story though. Hopefully, by the time you get to this episode, you’ve read the other ten episodes we’re doing. This should be episode number eleven. This will be a fun one. We have been working on getting all the pictures that you’re going to see on the websites and all the social media stuff.
It’s because when you do this stuff, you have to have all the stuff ready to go so we can make sure that it gets out to everyone so that they can enjoy it. Hopefully, you will enjoy this episode as much as we’re going to have fun going at it. I was tweaking some stuff and one of my patients was helping out with some stuff. I asked her, “How does this sound? Does this click with you?” She’s had bad brain fog after her first car accident. Her second car accident has screwed her up. We’re slowly getting her out of that mess. She was back in and helping out cleaning up the office a little bit. I had another patient come in who also has lots of brain fog and lots of ups and downs with his condition. He was a mess.
They started telling stories. They’re like, “This is exactly my story.” It’s so funny how this has helped both of them out so they can start returning to life but so much of this has been a problem. He is disabled through the military. That got him his discharge. She’s got some stuff going on that’s keeping her from working the way she needs to. I help out here and there a little bit but quite honestly, it’s one of those, “We have the same story.” It’s fun.
That story is common. Here’s the way a car accident works. The force of your head is forward. You’re being held back by a seatbelt. Thank God for those. We like that but your head comes forward. You’re stopped and there’s shearing force. It’s terrible.
It’s not just the shearing force that’s going on but you’ve also got these compressive forces up and down at the same time, which is why a lot of people will feel pain in their lower back. We talked about this a couple of episodes back. The amount of compressive force that is going down at the lower back is four times gravity. It’s eight in the upper body. With the head, there’s nothing holding everything together. You don’t have a lab belt at this point.
We got a bowling ball on a stick. That’s what we got.
If I’m not mistaken, it’s 12 G-forces that go through within about 250 milliseconds. Most people won’t even realize that it happened but if you had a high-speed camera, you would be able to pick it up. It’s devastating for some people, more so than others. It doesn’t matter. We have talked about the differences between men and women as far as the integral strength of the ligaments. However, once the ligament damage has happened, the symptom profiles are almost identical because the damage has happened and the neurological damage is setting in. In any case, it was funny for them to both identify. That will be an interview with certainly both of them individually but maybe both of them at the same time to see. If I had both of them going, I would sit back.
We got the show done. It was a busy day, which is wonderful. We love that here at Precision. We had a woman bring her sister in. She was the one who told her sister here about the upper cervical. She’s a Blair Chiropractic patient from Lee Angle in Fort Myers, Florida. He got hit badly by that hurricane. She found him. I don’t know the story of how she found him but he changed her life. Chiropractic has changed this woman’s life. She tells everybody. She told her sister she had to find me. Her sister is the one who sent that lady who we talked about, Marge, who has asthma and lower back pain. She’s 93 and it’s getting better.
They all ended up coming in at the same time. I was able to get the sister adjusted based on what Lee Angle had done in Florida. That’s a cool thing how consistent Blair Chiropractors are. As long as I know the doctor and I trust them, a patient can come in with a screenshot of what we call listings, how bones have moved out of place, and what are their angles of how they get things back into place. I was able to adjust her and get her back on track while she was here in the great state of Missouri. They were all out there talking and conversing about how amazing the upper cervical was. I was like, “Can we bottle that up and keep that?”
I’ll stay right here as the rest of my patients come through so they understand.
A few people did come through. It was buzzing. It’s the electricity with. It was a wonderful time, except they all needed to be adjusted. They were all three in the resting room.
It didn’t stop. When we get you adjusted, you are supposed to then go to our resting rooms. We have these wonderful recliners. Both of us have zero-gravity chairs. There’s some science to a twenty-minute cat nap throughout the day and after getting adjusted to letting your nervous system come back, get used to it, and reset. It is not time to jabber on your phone. It is not time to get your phone out, go through the Instagram posts that your cousin or your brother sent you, and catch up because I only get about twenty of those. My entire Instagram experience is curated by about five people. They keep on sending me stuff.
That being said, it’s a wonderful time to relax and allow things to reset. I always tell people, “I’m not your mom. I’m not going to tell you what to do,” but they were chatting away. It was cute so I didn’t go in there and yell at anybody.
I remember we had a pair of young boys. They couldn’t have been more than junior high at that point in time. The older and younger brother were jibber-jabbering. My wife Jean was working the front desk. She goes over there. It was just them, and I was doing something else with someone. She goes in there and says, “I don’t want to hear a peep out of you.” She closed the door and they go peep. It was so funny. She broke out laughing. We still laugh about it. Those are sometimes the best experiences.
Another time, I had an Amish family. It was a brother and three sisters. They all got into the restroom. All of a sudden, not that they told a joke, they all started giggling and laughing the entire time. I was like, “What’s going on?” “We’re giggling, laughing, and having a good time as we’re trying to rest.” It was funny. Sometimes the energy does weird things like that.
One of the things that a lot of people would be interested in is hearing about your struggles with autoimmune disease, how it happened, and what you’ve done that has made the biggest impact on healing.
We would technically diagnose me with two different autoimmune diseases. You see all these little white spots. My old joke was I have the same disease that Michael Jackson has, except I was born White. That’s not funny now but it’s funny. I have two thoughts on it because one, it could be vitiligo, which is what it was originally diagnosed with, which is white spots. Your pigmentation isn’t filling in. The back of my hands was all white a couple of years back. I’ll talk about that in a moment.
My other thought is it’s a skin fungus, which is called Tinea Versicolor, which you would also present very similarly. As far as dealing with that, it was more embarrassing to some degree. At some point, you get a thick skin and you don’t worry about it. I don’t have fewer problems with it. I don’t worry about them. Some of these patches would burn worse. I would be more concerned at that time about putting on some sunscreen or something to that effect. That’s a whole other story that I don’t do anymore.
The other one is my lack of hair, which is slowly coming back in, which would be considered alopecia totalis. It’s all gone. For anyone who has gotten on my Facebook page, scrolled back, and said, “Who’s this guy with a ponytail and a goatee?” that was me probably since college. I had hair. I could sneeze wrong and I had a full beard in undergrad. That carried through chiropractic school up until about 2009. That was in 2009 when I had hair. I’ve always had some alopecia issues. Stress would knock it out but never to this level. It would be a spot. I wouldn’t have hair but I would have enough hair to cover it up.
Do you think it’s common for someone who has one autoimmune disease to trigger other autoimmune things?
I don’t know.
I feel like I have patients and more coming in that have more than one thing.
That’s a good assessment that there are multiple things going on. It’s a question of, “Where do they cross over?” Mine makes sense that the two might be intertwined because it’s a skin condition and a hair condition, which is largely associated with the skin. There are things I would like to grow back. I can feel little stubs of eyebrows and eyelashes. You have no idea how bad not having eyelashes are until you get a good dust storm here in the Midwest where it has been dry for months.
It’s not just to look pretty. There’s a purpose to that.
It keeps some dust away but my eyes adapted. Let’s say that. I’ve been pretty good about protecting them and making sure nothing gets into them as best as possible. My vitiligo increased shortly before going to chiropractic school about a year before. We will talk about why in a moment. All the hair came out after a car accident. I spoke about this in the past when I got rear-ended, a minor fender bender but I didn’t address it properly. I did not go to my chiropractor at the time who was in the Quad Cities because that’s where I was running to. I don’t think you were doing Blair at this point yet.
I don’t think we knew each other.
I should have gone up there within a week or two, gotten new X-rays, and figured out how I needed to get adjusted differently but I didn’t. Within about six months, all the hair decided that it was going to not be on my head. I decided, “I’m going to shave it.” I still had a little bit of facial hair on and off through the years but there was nothing consistently growing back. It was a question of what was going on there. Since I’ve reintroduced Braunschweiger, I thought hard about going full Liver King and eating a pound of liver.
Didn’t you hear about Liver King? You missed it. This is the guy who was saying, “I’m selling all these ancestral supplements of the liver.” I tried some of them. He’s like, “Look at me. I’m so ancestral. I’m so strong.” I think he was on steroids to look the way he did. They proved that after he said, “I’m not,” but there is something to having these high-nutrition meats in your diet. I like liver. I don’t mind it. I like the Braunschweiger. I eat half a pound of that a day. There’s something going on there.
As far as skin pigmentation, I used to have a complete white spot. For those of you who are big comic book fans, Spider-Man always had that big odd white spot on the back of his hand. I’m not sure why he did it. It was part of the costume but I had it as well. It was this hand that got it first, which is interesting because it’s a nervous system connection when you start hearing and putting these pieces together. The back of this hand got pinched in a doorway as I was going to do a spinal screening over in Decatur, Illinois.
At about that same time, I was starting to tan because it was so dreary here in the Midwest, especially in Central Illinois. We are in a bowl. All the clouds hang over our heads like this. All I see is no sun for several months out of the year. I needed it to give me a pick-me-up. It has been great. I’ve been doing it for 8 or 9 years a couple of times a week. I ran over there. I feel good. I get my vitamin D and sunlight fix. I figured low levels weren’t going to burn me too badly.
What’s interesting is the area that got the skin torn open. I took the Band-Aid off because I don’t want tan lines. What was interesting is the area around started getting pigment. I was taking a whole iodine supplement. You need more iodine and iodide, especially for whole-body iodine levels. Most people in the Midwest are certainly deficient in iodine. There are ways to check it that are better than others. The whole skin test thing is bogus. I started taking iodine as a supplement every now and then.
I don’t do it as regularly as I did back then but all of a sudden, all of that pigment came back. There were a couple of spots. If I was a little bit darker, you can see the whiteness that’s right here in my thumb web. You can make it out there. All of this one came back too. I broke the skin here. My theory is that somehow breaking the skin brought all of that immune system up to the surface because whatever response I was having to create the vitiligo in the first place had died down enough that now the body can fix it on its own.
My brain goes to what could someone do. Microneedling is something people do for their face to try to take away scarring and that kind of stuff. What if someone brought health back to their body through nutrition, chiropractic care, and all that stuff but they still have the spots on their skin? What if a microneedling treatment might help to restore it?
I’ve considered that. With all my callus and kettlebell stuff, I have taken a spot and said, “I’m going to rub down this skin because it’s easy enough.” They have these little callus removers but all the callus removers are sandpaper of sorts. I’ve thought about doing the left arm, roughing that up a little bit, and then going to the tanning bed. Your face exactly is why I haven’t done it. I’m like, “I’m going to rip open.” Look at my pretty purple shirt. My purple shirt will also be red. I don’t want that either. It will be a white shirt that day anyways. That’s how I would roll it. Everything else is dirty but now the white is red.
In any case, it is a consideration that I have thought about. I haven’t seen it but I have other places where I’ve had spots. All of a sudden, I spot a pigment. It’s a little island that starts coming in. That’s what I’ve been doing. That seems to have been reversing it but the bigger question is, “Why might it have come on in the first place?” This is where things are going to get spicy.
We‘re going to go onto the spicy part.
Let’s talk about my vitiligo first when that flared up. I had mild vitiligo since I was about twelve. I seemed to recall scraping up my elbow pretty badly riding my bike around the neighborhood. We had a chip-and-tar black top for the main runner that we were doing. No big deal, as boys do, we’re going to find ways to beat ourselves up. I don’t know if there were any jabs at that time but certainly several years later. I’ve got patches. Instead of this arm being all like this, I’ve got a spot. It was a wound. When the wound healed, it was white on top.
It’s an interesting aside. I’ve got another one underneath my left wrist where you can see this white strap. It’s intact. I had been wearing a watch right about here when I was cleaning in the restaurant I was at. As I was cleaning over the Broaster, the Broaster goes off. It’s got a vent. I’m cleaning the back vent wall of stainless steel. All of a sudden, I get that burn on the underside of my wrist. It destroys the watch band. The watch band is dead but I’m under cold water trying to recover this. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, this comes back, and the pigmentation does not.
I don’t know what all that means but it wasn’t until 2001. I’m at my folks’ place. I’m running down to Terre Haute for something related to my alma mater. I stayed at their house overnight because it was a work thing. As I’m walking down the steps, all of a sudden, I catch the back of my Achilles area on the step. Dad has got a little aluminum piece that comes down like that. I rip up the skin around my Achilles. We’re cleaning it out. Dad was like, “When was the last time you got a tetanus shot?” I’m like, “I don’t remember. When was the last time you took me in?” At this point, I’ve been out on my own. I hadn’t seen a doctor in several years. I’m generally healthy. This is before chiropractic school.
We didn’t know but the other side of this was, “Is chiropractic school already on the table?” I don’t remember. Dad was like, “Let’s run you in, have them take a look at it, and then get you a tetanus booster.” I didn’t realize this at the time. This is where pieces and parts of the story come back as you think about it in hindsight. This was a September or October type of thing. I get a tetanus booster, no big deal. There were no real problems.
I go down to Terre Haute, hang out at the career fest thing, visit some of my fraternity brothers, hop on the road, and come back up North. It was all well and good. That winter, I lose what tan I had. Come spring, the white spots are en masse. Everything got worse all of a sudden. I don’t have any other explanation until I think about it in that respect. It makes me wonder what was going on with that. Did I need a tetanus booster? No. First off, it was a superficial flesh wound. We were able to clean it out. It was not a deep puncture. People say, “Tetanus is a real problem.” Tetanus is a real problem if you have a rusty nail that is 3 to 4 inches long.
Sheep poop, cow poop, or whatever it is but more importantly, it’s long, it penetrated deep, and it comes out. If it goes in straight and comes out straight, that alone is going to give you enough of a problem because you can’t clean that well. It’s the same reason that cat-scratch fever is a problem. Cats have those long fangs. They get in deep. There are bacteria. There’s stuff in there. When they come out, the wound will clear up very fast superficially but the deep stuff has already penetrated and will cause problems. Those are the times when you might need something more to get that stuff cleaned out and maybe a tetanus shot but I did not need a tetanus shot.
Not for a scrape.
It was a bad scrape. It was bad enough. For anyone who has scraped up their Achilles area, there are reasons that it’s a pain in the butt because it’s a sensitive area that doesn’t get a whole lot of blood flow, to begin with. We could go on and on. It’s one of those silly things.
Can you prove it? Everybody will say, “What’s the double-blind placebo-controlled study to prove that?” There’s none. We don’t have it. I can’t tell you about it. It’s story after story of things happening after jabs. It’s parents talking about their kids that are never the same. It’s my patients telling me how things have changed, or their cancers come back. Going forward, I want to read something that you sent me. I don’t know if I’ll read the whole thing because it’s going to make me so mad.
The link is something called IQfy.com. I’ve never heard of this website.
It could be somebody trolling. I don’t know.
That’s the question because I got this off Robb Wolf‘s page who is a big keto guy.
That’s IQfy.com Health and Wellness. It’s not even signed who wrote it. There’s no author’s name. My question is, “Is this somebody trolling?”
It’s not a troll because they had comments that they were allowing at the bottom of it, which is very curious. If you’re going to read this article, read the comments.
I haven’t read the comments yet.
The comments are interesting. Read what you’re going to read, and then we will go down and read some comments.
The title of this is, “They Knew: Why didn’t the unvaccinated do more to warn us?” Immediately, I was like, “What?” I’m going to read a few paragraphs, “The unvaccinated knew what we didn’t. Some of them said too little. Most of them said nothing at all. A lot of blood is now on their hands. As the world struggles to come to terms with the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, one question that continues to surface is why the unvaccinated didn’t do more to warn us about the potential dangers of being injected.”
“Well-intended citizens lined up and did the right thing. COVID-19 vaccination is now seeming to do more harm than good. Their unvaccinated friends stood by and let them do it. Some of them said too little. Some said nothing at all. Even though they knew what we didn’t, our blood is now on their hands.” That’s interesting right there.
As I read that first statement about them doing the right things, I’m not going to criticize people who in the fog of war took a jab because they thought it was the right thing to do but was it the right thing? Honestly, we still don’t know what the right thing was. As COVID goes, I would argue that we have what was probably a lab-grown virus 99% but there’s a 1% that it happened accidentally somewhere else.
It’s not even 1%. It’s 0%.
Where else are you going to have a lab outbreak next to a Wuhan research lab that has been known to be studying Coronaviruses?
They created the cure before we even had the disease.
That’s another question.
I want to go back to this lady. It sounds like it’s a lady. Am I sexist? Yeah, probably. This lady says, “Our blood is on their hands.” Why can’t we say this on YouTube? We have been saying this.
There have been a lot of people.
We can’t say it on YouTube. We can’t say it on Big Tech platforms because they will take us off. We might still be taken off from some things by having this conversation right here.
Before you go on, Candace Owens of The Daily Wire is a celebrity icon or something over there. I can’t remember what her actual title is. I was listening to her on Timcast. She has a twelve-part series that she put up on Parler. She knows she can put it on Parler because her husband is the CEO and it will not get taken down. That’s why she said, “This is a safe place.” She did twelve videos going through the history of vaccines. I haven’t had a chance to watch them yet.
I haven’t either. Does she have it up on Daily Wire also?
No. It’s free on Parler so get a Parler app.
I pay for The Daily Wire.
I do too. It’s on Parler. Parler is free anyway.
There are lots of places you can look for this stuff.
She’s a good one. She said, “Something is off with these vaccines.” She had some vaccine injuries when she went to get the HPV shot when she was younger when she was coming into her teens. She had two. There were supposed to be three after the second one. She passed out in the office the first time. They said it was dehydration. She passed out after the second time. She was like, “I’m done. No more.” She started asking questions. Another good place is The High Wire. It also has been banned from YouTube for having these conversations.
We started seeing people who were asking the right questions and starting to say, “What’s going on with the science?” They weren’t saying, “This is this and that.” They started asking questions. When we started seeing them get taken off YouTube, I’m like, “That’s a thing. We should pay attention to that thing because somebody has decided.” We’re seeing all the Twitter files and everything else. Even with the FOIA coming out of the great state of Missouri against Facebook, the government was colluding with Big Tech to not allow us to have our freedom of speech.
Our chiropractic profession has been strongly suppressed by people in those strong or powerful positions to prevent us from having our ability to share with you that there are other questions and other places to go to. This is not to say that we haven’t asked the questions. We’re asking the questions. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t do this but we are pointing out that when you ask questions, then you will not get an answer because they’re saying, “You’re stupid. You’re this and that.”
The chiropractic profession has been strongly suppressed by people in those strong or powerful positions.
A) You’re probably onto something. B) You’re not getting a direct or straight answer. If you can’t get a straight answer from the two of us, we’re going to tell you, “I don’t have a good answer for that. I’ll be honest. I don’t know.” I’m not going to come from a place of authority and say, “You’re going to take the vitamin D at 10,000 IU because I said so.” I’m never going to say that. There are reasons you shouldn’t.
You get a choice. That’s the whole thing.
I forgot to mention that I’m taking 30,000 IU for my vitiligo.
As long as you’re checking your blood levels occasionally, that’s fine, especially in the winter. The point after reading that which made my heart jump is that I’ve lost friends and family members over this. I’ve lost people because of the jab. I’ll go into that in a second. I did speak up. I was called crazy, grandma killer, and all of the things. I didn’t stop. People cut me out of their lives and that’s okay. I’m not upset by it. I’m like, “We tried to tell you, and we couldn’t because you wouldn’t listen.”
“I don’t know what else to say. There were plenty of people screaming about this. You decided to not listen. Even if you heard no one say it, you have the power to do research too. You get to decide what goes in your body. If you are coerced into it, it sucks but you still made that decision.” That being said, there were some people who barely did not get that decision. People would either lose their jobs or couldn’t get medical treatment.
This is a story that makes my blood boil. A one-year-old child has a peanut reaction. The mom wants him to get some therapies through an allergist or those shots. They work for some people. I’m glad that she was exploring those options. The doctor would not give the baby the shots until he got the COVID vaccine. That is unacceptable. First of all, children had a 0% chance of dying from this virus. Thank you, God.
It’s dangling the fruit like, “You could do that but you can’t have this treatment unless you get the vaccine.” There are stories about people not being able to get transplants because they’re not vaccinated. My colleague has MS. She was coerced into it because she was told she can’t have her immunotherapy without having the jab. That right there is medical malpractice to me. That is unacceptable.
The Nuremberg codes after World War II say, “We will not do medical experiments and give informed consent to medical treatments.” There are people that were tried for war crimes for that. That was supposed to be the ethical standard that medicine and healthcare aspired to. Medical coercion is a real thing. It still happens, not just with this. It happens all the time, unfortunately, but at least it’s recognized, “We need to explain to you why this thing is going to happen this way.”
We do not have that transparency. Quite honestly, anything that lacks transparency, I have a problem with. I try to be as transparent as possible, “This is how we run our practices. This is what we do to get people better. If you want this other thing, I can help you with some of it if you want to go down that rabbit hole.”
I will tell you, “See that guy down the road for what they offer. They’re going to do it better because that’s all they do. We focus on this.” Unfortunately, we have gotten to a point where I don’t want to have this conversation with people. I don’t want to have it in public but it needs to be said because at what point do we stop having the right to speak about it at all? When do they start coming for us when we didn’t speak up in the first place?
Let me go back to this article because I wanted to see any of their other pages. It looks like they have shut down their entire moderation staff but if you scroll down in this article, first off, they say, “Commenting has been disabled.” It’s suggesting targeted troll storms. They opened up conversations and allowed it for a little bit a couple of times. One of the first comments that I see here is, “We have been telling you for years but have been ignored, laughed at, and accused of being mentally ill and murderers by the same people stupid enough to make medical exemptions because that nice Dr. Hilary off the telly said it was safe.”
I tried to have this conversation with friends and family members. I don’t talk to some people about this anymore. I had one thread on my Facebook page that got taken over. I disabled notifications for it. I let one set of my chiropractic classmates keep on talking with my other medical doctor fraternity brother. I don’t know where that went to.
Quite honestly, I never looked back but the thing is if we want to have this conversation and ask these questions about any healthcare procedure, I’m saying anything. It doesn’t matter but for whatever reason, these jabs have a religious connotation to them. There should be no religion to it if you don’t understand that this is supposed to be science. Science is about asking questions.
Trust the science is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. Science is asking questions over and over again. When you think it’s settled, you ask a different question and find out it wasn’t settled. Science is never settled.
In the late 1890s, Sir Kelvin announces to the British Royal Scientific Society or something to that effect that we have done all the science and that we have no more science to do because we have figured everything out. It’s all up to the engineers to apply it. A couple of years later, Einstein comes on the scene and says, “You’re wrong. Go away.” You get to have absolute zero on kelvin, which is Lord Kelvin’s name, which is when there is zero energy in the universe, even space is four degrees kelvin. It’s asinine to think that we are the epitome of the intellectual world at this point in our lives when we know for a fact we know nothing.
We know a tiny piece. We don’t even know what we don’t know.
That’s the crazy part. Leaps and bounds, this phone here has so much more power than a phone a decade earlier. I don’t want to say a decade earlier than this because this is about ten years old. It works. It’s an Apple. Therefore, it still works well. I don’t want to change it out. The battery is having issues now but it might not be a decade old. Somebody told me that 2016 was a few years ago. I’m like, “That’s when I got this phone.” Let’s compare a modern iPhone to the first iteration of the iPhone or even the third generation, which was my first iPhone. It is so much lightning difference in all the applications. That’s in a very short window. We are constantly turning over new stuff. We might have AI during an episode.
I played with ChatGPT. I had it write me a 500-word blog post on something. It’s interesting.
How did it turn out?
I didn’t post it. I would have to touch it up a little bit but it was pretty awesome. Jason, my husband, had it write an HTML webpage on baking chocolate chip cookies. We took the code and put it into the generator thing. We were able to look at the webpage it made. It didn’t put the picture on. There was a spot for a picture but it was written out. It was unbelievable. I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m a little scared but I’m pretty excited also because that was cool.
If it becomes the thing that helps us do more, then great. If it’s the thing that takes over our lives like this, then we’ve got problems.
It’s going to create even more laziness and decrease creativity because there are some people who are amazing writers. I am not one of them. I am not a great writer. I never will be but if they don’t feel like they’re needed anymore, they might not want to write because this thing can write a book.
It’s very curious how it works that way. Technology is changing rapidly. We’re learning new things every day. The human genome has been unpacked. They said, “This will tell us exactly how we make all the proteins.” Quite honestly, the crazy thing about the genome is once they got it figured out, they were like, “These things have different combinations. There’s not enough genome for the number of proteins in the human body, yet there are other signals and factors that unwind and turn on different proteins that are allowing my hair to grow because of whatever I’m doing with my diet and my lifestyle.”
It is all meat and eggs. Everybody needs to know that.
I’m thinking of backyard chickens. I got to figure out a way to keep them from my dogs.
I wish I could have backyard chickens.
You need backyard chickens.
I wish I could. The coyotes would eat them immediately.
The point is $10 for two dozen eggs is a lot more. I’m used to spending $20 on eggs. It’s not for two dozen.
I watched an interesting TikTok video on this lady. We’re talking about all the conspiracy theories. A lot of the backyard chickens have not been laying at all this winter. Typically, they will lay less but not, “Not at all.” It will be 2 or 3 eggs versus 10 eggs. She had the theory that it was the feed. She started letting her chickens free roam and do some foraging, which they should do. She started doing that. All of a sudden, her chickens started laying again. Other people have done the same thing or switched their feed to goat feed instead of chicken feed. Their chickens are laying again. What are they doing to the chicken feed? That’s another conspiracy theory.
Quite honestly, this is where it gets more interesting because you’ve got a small anecdote of a couple of cases. I heard somebody else mention that a larger investigative reporter asked several big family chains what they have noticed. They said the same thing, “The chicken feed got the chickens to stop laying.” They didn’t change chicken feed or something to that effect but whatever they were doing was implying that the chicken feed is doing something to keep them from laying all of a sudden. It’s very disturbing.
Who’s in charge of that? Who did that? Somebody did that.
Here’s where the conspiracy ends and where reality begins. You know this as well as I do from being out in the industry. How much of it is somebody doing this on purpose? How much of it is poor quality control that caused other problems? Let’s hit on one other thing. For those who want to deep dive into what I’m going to talk about, go to Peter McCullough‘s podcast.
What should they search for on his podcasts? What’s the keyword they can search for?
Peter McCullough is the podcast.
Peter McCullough is a medical doctor who’s pretty freaking amazing. He’s one of the ones who did continue to speak up and out about not just the vaccines. He is talking about that a little bit but more about how people were treated with COVID and how to help people who have COVID get better. For the people that were getting sick, he had some protocols that were helping and saving lives yet he was not allowed to explain it or tell other people about it. He was shut down. They tried to take away some of his credentials because he is a medical doctor that is super well-respected.
He is both a researcher and a practitioner.
That is not common.
You either get one or the other.
He has saved so many lives yet was not allowed to tell what he was doing. He did speak out a lot. People got his protocols, which were amazing but the problem was it was too late for many.
This was the McCullough report from November 7th, 2022, “Department of Defense Driving Mass Vaccination While FDA and Vaccine Companies are Powerless to Stop it.” It was curious because the doc that was doing the research into this and looking at this was realizing that first, this was largely a DARPA-run project. It was the Department of Defense because Trump had control of the Department of Defense, and Project Warp Speed could run faster that way. That’s one argument as to why it was run that way but the other one was there’s something in the making of this vaccine.
Can we stop calling it a vaccine? We’re already off YouTube. This is not a vaccine.
You are correct. They changed the definition on the FDA website.
They changed the definition so it could be included.
An experimental genetic injection is probably the better way to describe it.
It was teaching your body to make a spike protein. The spike protein itself was dangerous.
It was the toxin.
It was teaching your body to create something dangerous.
Here is where we can ask the question as to whether or not the injection did anything at all. Here’s one of the things that they discovered as they were going through the manufacturing process. You heard about all the people with the little magnets on their arms that they would stick. Apparently, there is a filtration process that uses a little magnetic BB that was not supposed to get into the final product.
Do you think that was real?
That was real. They can explain why that happened.
Maybe it was just some lots and not all of them.
This is where it wasn’t consistent. You had a contaminated lot with a manufacturing product that should have been filtered out but wasn’t for whatever reason. That’s where that piece came from. There’s a settling issue because you have a saline solution. It’s some sort of aqueous solution that you’re putting this stuff in, except the thing that you are trying to deliver is encapsulated in this nano-cholesterol or nano-fat particle. Do you want to have some fun? Put some fat in water, see what it does, and mix it up. Watch what happens after you mix it up for a while. It’s going to start separating again.
Why some people had more severe reactions to this than others is that as they separate it out and then get them into vials, maybe one vial has a bunch of the active ingredient and another vial is effectively saline. Some people get nothing, “I didn’t have a problem.” They get COVID a couple of months later, and they’re like, “It didn’t help.” Others get a hyper-dose that they shouldn’t have gotten, and maybe now they have some horrible reaction.
I’ve never heard that but that does make sense.
It’s a great podcast to listen to.
Is that what Peter McCullough was talking about on that one?
That’s the doctor that he was interviewing on that one. It’s worth a listen. It begs questions and explains so much immediately. Is the chicken feed contaminated on purpose? Did somebody screw up at the plant? Was there some manufacturing error? Let’s face it. People make mistakes and screw up all the freaking time, and because they’re going to screw up inherently, sometimes things get through the cracks accidentally. It’s not done on purpose, and now you see this reaction.
People make mistakes and screw up all the time. Sometimes things get through the cracks accidentally.
If it’s a large manufacturer that has been doing stuff, then all of a sudden, you’ve got bad products out on the streets that they should have recalled if they can put the two pieces together. I’ll have to tell that to my Amish folks and make sure that they are not doing whatever feed that was. That will be the next big piece of news.
Supposedly, people are saying it was the feed from Tractor Supply but I don’t know. I don’t have chickens.
Where do they get them? We need chickens. We need to let them forage but in the middle of winter, they have a hard time.
There’s not much.
The bugs are not at the surface as they should be. We shouldn’t always imply that malice is the active participant in these situations.
I don’t blame a medical doctor who has been promoting the vaccine. I don’t look at them and think they’re evil. That’s not evil. They truly believe that this was going to help people and save lives. I don’t think you’re evil. The people in charge knew what we have been talking about and knew that there was going to be an antibody-dependent enhancement. People are going to get it more often and need to get jabbed over and over again with the autoimmune diseases that were going to come up, the deaths, prion diseases, and all the things that we are seeing now.
Talk about the prion disease.
Do you want to tell my story about it?
We’re already there.
Pretty much, prion disease is like Mad Cow Disease. It’s something that you should never see in your lifetime. It is so rare. We should never know someone who has this. I still call her a family member because she was close enough for many years. She died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which is Mad Cow Disease. She started getting dizzy one day. Three months later, she was dead. It’s scary and sad. Four adult kids are now without a mom. They said, “It was something she ate when she was younger, and it activated.” Can I prove it? I can’t prove it but I should never know someone who dies of this. That should be in a textbook somewhere.
Wasn’t that right after early ‘21?
I don’t know if she got the vaccine. Honestly, I don’t know but I do know she worked for an airline. They were some of the first ones to get it. It lined up at work. It could be coincidental. The other family member I have who is now blind permanently had an autoimmune reaction called Giant Cell Arteritis or Temporal Arteritis. A symptom of that is a pain in the temples. They say something like their hair hurts and double vision. Over the course of about two weeks, he went completely blind and now is permanently blind.
When I have older patients come in and they’ve got that burning, it gets me worried. I say, “Call your medical doctor, get an appointment, and maybe get to the ER.”
It can be stopped if they can catch it early enough. He did do everything he did but nobody caught it. It was too late by the time they caught it. Usually, steroids can knock it out or at least stop it temporarily. Unfortunately, it causes blindness. That happened not too long after a jab. Can I prove any of it? Can I prove that my cousin died because his kidney shut down, and he had other problems going on too? A couple of my patients had cancers come back, or any of those things. I can’t prove any of it but it sure is happening a lot.
This comes back to how we need to ask questions. We need to get answers to these things.
Be allowed to ask questions.
This is the bigger issue. Hopefully, we can share this with you all, or at the very least, it’s going to be a handful of people. This is the super private part of the thing.
We will see if this one is allowed out there. It’s sad that we live in a country where the First Amendment is the freedom of speech yet we’re trying to moderate ourselves so that we can speak.
At the very least, we can put this up on Rumble. Rumble won’t have a problem with it.
I would love to put it on Rumble.
We will get to that bridge when we get to that bridge.
We better end it soon because we could go on for hours.
Let’s talk about two points. One, there are more questions than answers now that I understand what I understand about vaccines. I want better answers, which is why when I listen to someone like Del Bigtree or Mr. Siri, the lawyer. When I hear them talk about where the safety trials are for vaccines, they don’t exist. Quite honestly, that’s what the Informed Consent Action Network that Del Bigtree is in charge of has been simply asking, “Can we run the safety trials?”
They can’t because they would fail.
They have been told that they will never run those trials. That’s a problem. There’s a whole vaccine court. For those of you who are like, “Is this true?” Do some research.
Even now you can’t sue for the COVID vaccines because they put it on the kids’ list that the kids have to get.
Is it on the kids’ list now?
They put it on.
I didn’t think they made it to the kids’ list and the recommended list.
I don’t know but I don’t think you can still sue. They got to the point where you can’t sue the manufacturers for it.
Do some due diligence.
Do your research.
You’re not going to find it on the front page of a Google search.
It’s not the first page.
It might not even be the 3rd, 4th, or 5th but there are resources out there. Sherri Tenpenny is a good one. There’s Robert Kennedy Jr.
Children’s Health Defense.
There are places out there. Don’t take our word for it. We’re going to be the first ones to say, “Look at this other stuff.”
I want you to look at it because I was where you were sitting at one point. I had no idea about any of this. It took years of research to get to the point where I am. I’m glad where I am but sometimes, it’s frustrating and sad.
I still remember the DuPont commercial. I already planned on going into engineering at this point. It was DuPont’s, “Better health through science,” or something to that effect. We might have done this backward. Quite honestly, I’m going to have some bacon and eggs to do it forward. There are kettlebell snatches to do. I’ll rip up my hands. They will get ripped up. I’m going to be strong. I’m going to push through this and see how much more of this hair I can get.
Get some more of that hair but then we will have to change the name of the show. Don’t get too much hair.
I’ll stay bald. This is not coming in the way it’s supposed to be.
You look good bald.
When I get hair, what I’ll do is shave everything except for the top knot right at the top.
I’m going to have a conversation with Jean, your wife, about that. We will veto that.
I will probably.
It was good to talk to you. I love that we had some harder conversations. I hope that this gets out there to the world. I’m Dr. Beth Bagley with precisionchiropracticstl.com/.
I’m Dr. Frederick Schurger with KeystoneChiroSPI.com. If you got questions, email us. We are more than happy to chat.
I would love that.
We will talk on these topics directly at that point if you would like to sit down and talk to chat. We’re asking questions and trying to get answers like everybody else. We will see you next time for another episode.
Did you know that some chiropractors do more than adjust patients during their visits? Sometimes chiropractors don't even need to adjust you during your visit! That's an excellent sign of healing, and that's great news because that means you can go longer and longer between visits! On top of that, it might help with your allergies! In this episode, Drs. Frederick Schurger and Beth Bagley share the value of their profession and the importance of holding your adjustment. So tune in to this engaging episode with Frederick Schurger and Beth Bagley.
Listen and read the full blog post here
Chronic inflammation is a huge issue your body needs to deal with. The worst part is you may not even feel the inflammation until it has already been present for many years. There is a strong concern that too many omega-6-rich oils are causing a very high level of inflammation. And that oil is in nearly all the food we eat, and particularly in seed oils! Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger cover the concerns & how best to address these inflammation issues in your life in today’s episode.
Listen and read the full blog post here
Let’s face it: We don't like the hard truths. But that doesn't mean we should avoid them. In this episode, Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley go over some hard truths about improving one’s health. They discuss how to understand the right way of making better decisions for yourself with proper guidance.
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Good evening, Dr. Beth Bagley. How are you?
Good evening. I'm great. How are you, Dr. Frederick?
I'm excellent. Folks, welcome to The Blonde & The Bald.
It's not The Bald & The Blonde. It's the most important person first, and then the second most important person. That's how I like to set it up.
Yes, not age before beauty. We're not doing it that way. It was a beautiful day yesterday.
It was gorgeous. I was inside the whole day working, but that's fine.
We had new gutters put on our house and I got to walk out. I didn't see patients until the afternoon, but when I got into the office, my windows were open.
That's nice. A lot of people were in pleasant moods. Opposite now, where everybody is sad because it totally changed again.
Did you even see the sun? We didn't up here.
The weather's giving us whiplash. I haven't been outside since 7:30 this morning. It is now 6:30 PM. I've heard it's windy and it's cold, so I'm looking forward to getting into my car.
That seems about right for January 2023.
It does. We have to have realistic expectations of the weather. It's good we had a couple of good days. That doesn't mean that we have to get all sad.
Yes. I saw a funny joke about how the proper way to enter someone's house in the Midwest is not through the front door, but rather through the garage.
That's pretty true.
Except for my garage. It isn't connected to the house.
Yours isn't. Mine is.
Still not the front door, because that's silly talk.
I've had such a great week. If you're reading, and you don't leave some of your favorite businesses Google reviews, please do. Small businesses love Google reviews of good ones. If you're having a good experience or you love the small business you're working with, leave them a review. We've gotten three reviews, which is a lot for a week, honestly. They're all great.
I want to read one of them because it's wonderful to hear. This is from Dina. She goes, "Dr. Bagley is a master at her craft, and so very compassionate as well. What more could one want in a medical provider? When I first came to Dr. Bagley, I had headaches, neck pain, and some nerve compression issues that caused me a lot of discomfort. I no longer have neck pain or headaches, and when the nerve issue rears its head on occasion, it is quickly resolved by a visit to Dr. B. That's a big deal to me. I can't thank you enough, Dr. Bagley, Dr. Shilo, and Erin. The best team and the most welcoming healing environment. The treatment is life-changing stuff."
That's amazing.
It's a pretty good one. I feel like I should pay her for that. It was so good. Isn't that sweet? She walked in not feeling good, but she has been doing well with care. She could tell something wasn't right. She got the care when she needed it. She walked out and then wrote an awesome review, which was nice.
That's great.
That's why we do what we do. We put all this time and effort into learning how to adjust specifically an area of the spine that affects so many people in so many different ways. I love what I do.
One of the guys that were putting up the gutters was asking me, "Do you deal with this occipital neuralgia?" I'm like, "I deal with that a lot." The other guy chimes in and says, "I've been to 4 or 5 chiropractors. None of them can take care and pop my lower back." I'm like, "Neither will I."
Don't do it.
The problem is probably not there. He's just feeling it there. There's a reason that he's hurting. It's always exciting when patients are like, "This is what I've been missing." That's just great. Now, you had a couple of others, didn't you?
Yeah. The other one is Michael. Michael had been having serious headaches. He's a guy's guy. He is a woodworker and he's super nice. I love him to death. For him to go out of his way to write a review was a big deal. What he said is, "Simply awesome! They meet you where you are with your treatment. I've never received an adjustment that I didn't need," which is important. "Many times I have a checkup with no adjustment because I didn't need one. My major neck pain and headaches, they are gone. Thanks to their treatment. Not sure I could be more positive about how awesome the team is."
That is fantastic. That's exactly what we want to hear because that's exactly the care that we're delivering. We want to make sure that we're doing the job the way we're supposed to be doing it. That feedback is always great. That's wonderful.
Again, please leave reviews for the small businesses that you go to. First of all, it makes us feel fantastic, but it helps other people find us. That's another reason we're doing the show. More people are exposed to this awesome type of chiropractic care. We're happy to see you in our offices if you're close enough by within a few hours of driving. There are Blair chiropractors all over the country that are wanting to help so many people. One of the things you can go to is BlairChiropractic.com. Hit Locate a Doctor and you will find a doctor based on your location.
That was one of my biggest pet peeves when I started practicing and getting involved with the Blair Chiropractic Society. I said, "We don't have a good website that's easy for people to find." We figured out all of the bits and pieces. I helped try to get that on the path that we're on now. It's taken a while to get it good.
It's a great website now.
It's fantastic what they've been working with to get it to that point. You mentioned, within a few hours, that's the upside and downside to finding a good Blair chiropractor or finding a good doctor. Sometimes you got to travel a little bit. In fact, I had one young lady who had forgotten how long ago it was when she came in to see me the first time.
It was 2016 for bad migraines apparently. She came in to see me three times. I adjusted her maybe twice. She felt so good that she was like, "I don't need to go back if I'm feeling good." Let's fast forward. She's been apparently taking pretty high-dose medications for a while. She's Amish and she lives an hour and a half away from where I am. Transportation's tricky. I go over there every other week.
That's not enough at first, sometimes.
It is better than nothing. Sometimes they need to get in here more often. For her, she only needed a couple. It was funny because her driver was telling her she probably needs to at least get checked if she's doing that good every couple of months. That's what her and her husband had been doing up in Chicago. Again, from Central Illinois, it's about a 2 to 3-hour drive to get up to Chicago.
They were doing that a couple of times a year until their doctor left. She's like, "When can we get in here?" She got pregnant. She got married. Her husband's like, "You can't take these high-dose medications to take care of this migraine. You're getting adjusted almost on a weekly basis by the local chiropractor who doesn't do a cervical for that matter. What else can you do?" She's like, "Dr. Schurger will help."
This goes back to an idea that popped into my head. I call this the dad talk. You can call it the mom talk or the parental talk. It's the talk that we as doctors do. Sometimes we have to tell our patients to remind them that there is a process that needs to be followed. We are the ones who have seen enough cases to know what that process needs to be. You need to follow it. We're not telling you to come in here three times a week. We're going to tell you, "This is the best process to get you back and keep you in health. Someone's got to be an adult in this relationship, and we got to tell you what's going on."
I don't have children, I have nieces and nephews. I've had a conversation with my dad several times on the other side of this on the receiving end, saying, "Remember when I told you this years ago?" I'm like, "Yeah, I learned the lesson now. It took me ten years to learn the lesson." Sometimes it does. This is the problem a lot of people don't get. We're going to tell you what the solution is. Not everyone's going to accept that solution at face value. That's okay. You're going to be there.
It's a big deal. There's financial involvement in it.
There's a time involvement.
There's an aspect of trust, too. You may have seen ten other doctors before you've seen us. They've told you, "It's all in your head." I call them the shut up meds. "Here are some shut up meds. Take them and shut up." People have been through a lot when they come in our doors, but we set up ourselves. We are leaders in your healthcare. We are leading you down the path. We're doing it from our heart. We have to pay the bills and stuff. No chiropractor I know personally does chiropractic just for money. We're doing it because we truly want to save humanity.
When they're sitting across from me, what we have is compassion. Both of us, Dr. Frederick and I, have been on the other side of this. That's the reason we're chiropractors. That's the reason we're upper cervical doctors. We know what it feels like to be you. When we come from a place of compassion and set ourselves as leaders, that's when people follow. The following is showing up. It's because we can't help you if you don't walk in.
Getting back to this patient that I hadn't seen in seven years. She's like, "This worked." I took new pictures and I reanalyzed her. Good news is she didn't have any major traumas other than she's getting pregnant.
Which is sometimes a trauma in itself.
She's not that far along yet, but still. She's like, "I want to be healthy. I want to be able to take care of my family." We were joking about egg prices because her husband's like, "You paid how much for a package of eggs? We just bought a farm that has a barn and a chicken coop on it." They're going to put chickens up there, so I might have two sources of eggs.
Smart move, because you eat a lot of eggs.
I do. We could talk about that when we review some of my health goals later on. When she was seventeen, she was like, "I don't need to go in. I feel good." Now, she's in her early twenties. She's about to be a mother. She understands, "I need to do a little bit more to take care of things, because if I take care of things now, it's going to be less of a problem later." I joke with all my patients, but especially the younger ones. I ask them to look at the older folks in their community, if they go to church, especially. They sit in a poor posture. I'm sitting in a chair that I would not normally sit in for good posture. In fact, it's not my choice of chair, but it's the chair that's good for the show.
That being said, when you're pregnant, there are things that you avoid and things that you're told not to consume or take. You don't want to take a whole bunch of medications like she was saying. There are even things that you're not supposed to eat. They say, "Don't eat fish more than once a week or whatever, because of the amount of mercury in it."
That goes back and forth because sometimes the benefit from the fish outweighs the mercury potential toxicity that is there. There's this back-and-forth on that stuff.
There's even the crazy, "Don't eat lunch meat." You could go way far with these things not to do when you're pregnant. It's amazing some of the things that the pharmaceutical companies get away with allowing people to take when they're pregnant. We won't go into that. I want to treat myself as well as I was treating myself if I was pregnant.
Pharmaceutical companies get away with a lot of things, especially with the things they allow pregnant people to take.
I don't want to put things in my body that are going to be toxic or harm me at any point. When someone comes into my office, I tell them that there are things that we should treat medically. There are things that we should probably stop treating medically. There are a lot of over-the-counter medications that people take because they think they're safe and fine. It's over the counter. It's as simple as taking a vitamin.
It's not true. Some of these over-the-counter medications are pretty dangerous. Let's go for the first instance. Dr. Schurger, you have a fever. It's a fever of 102. You don't feel real good. You have two choices. We could let the fever run its course, or you could take a fever reducer, which would be an Advil, Tylenol, or Aspirin. All three of those medications have their own side effects. What do you feel like when you have a fever? How do you feel?
I feel like death.
Especially if you're a man and caught a man cold. Man cold is terrible and awful. People should be scared of the man cold, but you feel like death.
The funny thing is, when I was an undergrad at Rose-Hulman, we joked about them being the blue bombers. I don't know if this was antibiotics, Advil, or Tylenol. I don't know what it was, but it would come in this cute little pill box. I still probably have a couple from my undergrad days. We would square. We would all get the same box and take so many for so many days. We'd all be sick at the same time.
When you're all living together, it makes sense. Just like a family does.
It's funny because they were joking. I saw a meme on the internet about how they feel like they're living on Kamino, which is a Star Wars reference. If you get that, then great. I joked, "It's only January. Wait until it feels like Hoth, and then you thought it smelled bad on the outside."
For all of you who don't understand it, I don't either. My husband would get it.
That's a funny joke for all the geeks out there who appreciate Star Wars and realize that Rose-Hulman was an all-male school at the time when I was there.
You feel like you've got a fever and you feel like death. What do you do when you feel like death?
You go lay down, you rest, you sleep, and you drink lots of fluids. Quite honestly, once we figured that out. A buddy of mine told me, "How long does it take you to get better with that little blue bomber box?" I'm like, "About three days." "How long does it take you to do that if you don't get that box?" "About three days." Once I tried that out, I'm like, "That makes sense."
What do you do when you have a fever? Rest, sleep, and drink lots of fluids.
Just go rest.
I recognize that my body was overwhelmed. That's what most people are doing when they get a fever. Their body is overwhelmed. You need to let the immune system do it.
We take, let's say, an Advil. It reduces the fever. I feel much better. The fever's gone. I go to work. Maybe I get someone else sick. People are doing that less now that COVID's happened, but still, people are taking fever reducers to feel better. You're not supposed to feel good when you have a fever. There are a couple of different reasons your fever spikes. You have to rest, but also it activates the immune cells. It helps your immune system fight whatever baddie is in you. A fever is a good thing.
There's a time and a place. If your fever is crazy high, or if you have a baby with a fever and you're scared, it's time to go seek medical attention. I'm not saying don't seek it. I'm just saying, consider not treating a fever, so that your body can fight the virus or bacteria faster. I wish you could split yourself into an AB group when you have a fever. Be like, "This one I'm treating, and this one I'm not." See who fights it faster. I honestly think if you let the fever run its course, you're going to fight that cold or virus off faster.
How many times did you effectively do that with your twins?
Many times. These kids have never been on antibiotics in their lives. I'm not saying that to be like, "I'm the best parent in the world." I'm not, but they get chiropractic care. They eat a relatively healthy diet. They're not perfect. We don't treat a fever. The fever gets better.
The fever is the protocol to heal.
That being said, we did have some scares when they were little. To put that out there, there was some scary stuff that happened when they were little with febrile seizures. That was scary. They were like two. I'll tell that story on another day. To this day, one of the girls had symptoms of strep. We did gargles, colloidal silver, not super hot, but hot baths, and hot showers. Two days later, she was back to normal. If I would've taken her to urgent care, you know we would've had some Penicillin.
Getting back to your point about some of these over-the-counter meds being troublesome, Illinois got a new statute and law that says we have to take a class to identify Alzheimer's to perceive what's going on. The presenter pointed out that there are certain medications that are oftentimes over-the-counter. Not always. I'll throw out a couple of others.
If you're taking those on the regular, the question ends up being, "How much of that is leading to Alzheimer's symptoms?" One of them which is common is an antihistamine. In this young man's family, he doesn't let his children have antihistamines in the house. It's not happening. Other natural ways are examined instead.
His father had Parkinson's and his mother had Alzheimer's, and they were both taking antihistamines along the way for some of that. This gets to the question of prescription drugs that people have to take for the rest of their lives. Statins were ruled out on that, but statins lead to other muscle wasting fatigue issues.
You've got that issue, and then you've got beta blockers for heart issues. That was another one. That one also leads to Alzheimer's. When we start weighing the back and forth, what is the immediate problem that we are trying to fix? Great. Maybe we need that. I'm not saying that these medications don't have a place in your healing regimen. We shouldn't get to a point where we are dependent upon these for the rest of our lives.
In fact, funny aside, the comic strip writer, Scott Adams, who writes the Dilbert comic strip, has been dealing with asthma forever. In fact, I knew he was dealing with asthma back in the day because I'd heard about that in one of his earlier books. Again, I'm an engineer and Dilbert makes fun of engineers. Less making fun of engineers, and more the environment that we get stuck in.
He recently went in for a reevaluation of all of his meds, because he's getting into the 65 age group. They said, "You don't need this asthma medication that you've been on for twenty years." He's like, "What do you mean? I've been taking it for twenty years to keep my asthma away. " The doctor said, " you don't need it. This is if you're having a case and you're having symptoms. You're not having symptoms. You don't need this medication." He's off of that feeling great. That's the funny thing. As he's been taking off some of these medications, he's identifying that he's feeling better. Some of the symptoms that he has been having from other things went away all of a sudden.
When you said asthma, I forgot about this thing that happened. I have a 93 or 94-year-old patient. She started with us. It was a referral from another patient who's had amazing results. She brought her in. She's been with us for 3 or 4 weeks. She's the sweetest lady. I love her. She's so funny. We should have her on the show. She could take over this show.
She has had asthma symptoms since she was a child. She's been on medication since she's been a child. She forgot to take her asthma medication three weeks ago, like 1 day or 2 in a row. She realized that none of her things were there after 1 day or 2. She goes, "I'm going to try not taking it." She stopped taking it, and she came to me.
She said, "Doc, could this help my asthma?" I was like, "It can." We talked about Dr. Blair in past episodes where his asthma was "cured with upper cervical care." I told her that story real quick. I was like, "This can affect the asthma." She goes, "Oh, my goodness." She was so excited. I'm so excited for her. She's feeling so much better. It's never too late to get chiropractic care unless you're dead.
We're still working on that.
I started getting sick to my stomach, I started puking. You're puking or the other way.
Did you go to McDonald's?
I went to McDonald's.
Did you get runs from the border?
It could.
Did you have some bad fish?
You may had bad chicken, or whatever. You can get food that's bad. We eat the bad food, we start puking, or it comes out both ends. We have medication that stops puking, and we have medication like Imodium that stops diarrhea. If you have a bug that has entered your body through the digestive tract, and you want to stop doing the things like puking and pooping, should you take the pills? It'll make you feel better.
It might. My only concern would be, can you keep it down enough fluids? That would be the exception to the rule.
That's when you should go get medical treatment, and get some IV fluid. I still don't think you should take those. The reason being is your body is doing what it's supposed to do and getting rid of it, going these ways. Getting that crap out of your body as fast as possible, so that you could not get septic or get hurt by this. If we take the pills and lock everything in there, what could happen? You could get sicker. In my house, we don't treat diarrhea and puking. We just go through it. Not fun, but we do it.
When getting medical treatment, don’t get IV fluid. Your body is doing what it’s supposed to do. Get that crap out of your body to avoid getting sicker.
It's one of those things. Usually, we're talking a couple of hours.
It's usually the 24-hour bug.
It's hard to ever track down where you got the food poisoning from. You go out to a restaurant. I'm not saying that restaurants have on sanitary conditions, but sometimes things get through. In fact, one of my patients decided he was going to put some Parmesan cheese on his pizza for the first time in a long time. All of a sudden, he tastes the pizza and he's like, "Something's wrong here. Something's moldy." Sure enough, the Parmesan cheese in the shaker had gone bad. It happens. It's not something that anyone's trying to do to kill you, but it is a reality of real food. Food molds. Food goes bad.
It does. It's supposed to. If it doesn't, then it's bad for you.
The fact that you can eat that McDonald's French Fry that is hiding in the back of the van for 3 or 4 years since the last time you remember buying McDonald's.
It looks exactly the same.
It tastes exactly the same.
You're going to eat it. That's gross.
I was young and hungry.
If you can add any to this list, you will. Let's say the sniffles, I've got a runny nose. I could take antihistamine if it's coming from too many allergens, or I could take SUDAFED. You can make meth out of it. It's awesome.
You now have to go and sign your life away.
You give your ID.
You give your driver's license and everything.
Even your passport, or your firstborn child to get it.
I'm like, "How many times do I have to sign to get enough to make meth?" It seems ridiculous.
It's a big issue.
It is, apparently.
We take that thing to dry things up, but there's a reason that the nose is trying to run. It's trying to remove the pathogens that are in there. It's doing a good job. We stop it up, and now we've stopped the natural body process.
That's that Secretory IgA stuff that we did on my research study a couple months ago. We talked about it. That's exactly your frontline defense for your immune system. Now, you're turning it off. This is not a great way to try to be healthy. The better way would be to say, "What triggered it?"
What did I do to allow my body to get into a state where it was accepting of this pathogen? We are the host of the pathogen. Was I just unlucky? Maybe. Maybe I ate too much sugar over the holidays. Maybe my vitamin D levels are low. Maybe I need a chiropractic adjustment.
All of the above. Those are the big ones.
What are you doing? During COVID, when someone didn't feel good, we were told not to see them, and that's anti chiropractic. In the past, we were like, "Come in if you're sick. If you're puking or what, please don't come in then. If you can get in, get in. We'll keep you separate from other peoples because we don't want to spread stuff around. At the same time, this is when you need to get seen." Are you back at that now?
I never stopped. In fact, usually what I would do is, "I've got real bad problems." I'm like, "We're going to have you come in at this point in time. I might not have a bunch of patients coming in or maybe it would be an off-time for me." One of the good news, bad news things about COVID for chiropractors is we had a whole lot more free time because going to find new patients weren't happening. The traditional ways that we would do our marketing weren't there. Quite honestly, I'd rather just do a podcast.
I wish we were doing this podcast at that time. It would've been fun.
It would've been so much more fun.
We didn't think about it.
We would normally be out in the community visiting people, going to the gyms for working out, and things like that. Yet, you didn't have that, so we had more free time. It's like, "I'm going to be here anyways. I'm not going anywhere. Might as well see patients."
We did. We never closed down. We weren't forced to, which was nice. In some states, people were forced to. We did see less people because people were scared, or they were just following the directions of the overlords. I am glad that everything's back to normal. The people who are not back to normal, I'm praying for you that you can get yourselves back to normal.
Thank you. We're technically still on a health emergency over here in the state of Illinois. I don't understand that, but it is what it is.
In Missouri, we're pretty much doing it all. I'm in St. Louis County. St. Louis County tends to be a little bit more run, a little bit more like a dictatorship. Right now, everything's okay. We're excited about that. Are there any other things that you can think of? If your leg fell off, would you let that not get treated?
That's a different situation. I saw this one video where a man woke up in his tent in the middle of the night to look out and see a sea of crocodiles surrounding his tent. That's the worst camping trip ever. It cost him an arm and a leg. That was funny. Not as funny as my Hoth joke, but that's another story.
That one, at least, people will get. You're all welcome for that.
At that point in time, if you and a crocodile or an alligator get into a wrestling match, or if you and a big cat gets into a wrestling match, anything that's got a long tooth that might penetrate the skin, it might be broken, but it might not be severed. You're going to want some antibiotics for that.
We live in a time where there's amazing technology. Our emergency medicine in the United States is amazing.
It has always been the forefront of medicine. Especially, again in the US, we have learned to excel at emergency care, critical acute care. The problem is the chronic care. This ends up being the joke about a lot of older chiropractors like to make this joke. They say, "The DC doesn't stand for chiropractic. It technically stands for Doctor of Chronic. It's all the chronic conditions that have been around forever. We're the ones who, generally, by getting your body to start healing and functioning again, can get you back into proper working order so that your body can heal from those chronic conditions as best as possible."
Matter has limitations, but at the same time, it's never too late. Go get the care you need. Find a chiropractor in your area. It changes lives. You're telling me, if your leg fell off, you would get emergency care?
Find a chiropractor in your area as soon as you can. It changes lives.
I'm going to try to see if they can stitch it back on. It's hard to do kettlebell swings with one leg. It's not possible.
You could do it.
I'd get a prosthetic.
You'd be okay.
Again, it's hard.
Moving on to goals. We talked a little bit last show about the beginning of year, how we've done, what we wanted to do with goals. I've come along pretty well. I've been very busy, which is great. I'm so excited. I did skip my workout that I was going to do, because I needed a time to relax, but I'm going to get my two workouts. I know a lot of people are like, "Two workouts. That's nothing." I know. When you haven't worked out for a month and a half, two workouts in a week is amazing. I'm excited. If you want to poo-poo it, that's fine. I'm all about my two workouts. It'll be Friday, Saturday or Friday, Sunday.
All goals need to hit to be reasonable and achievable. If you can't achieve it, you'll burn yourself out. All the negative self-talk that will naturally happen. "You're not good enough. You can't even get out and go for a walk." That'll get you in trouble. Two is good, and then here come maybe February, you're going to say, "I can add another one."
That's my mindset on it. I can be able to do it.
I had another patient came in this week, and she's like, "I'm hurt all over. I've been walking two miles." I was like, "Wait a second. Every day?" "Yeah." "Where?" "In Washington Park." All the good walking paths are all paved there. I'm like, "I've done those. How much were you walking before you started this?" "Not much. Maybe half a mile." I was like, "No. Back up. Do a mile, 30 minutes, you're done. Try to do it a little bit more or a little bit faster."
Every week, go a little bit more or a little bit faster.
"Keep that time short. Try to figure out what your limitations are, so you don't hurt yourself." "I'm pretty fit. I went for a run and my knees hurt. I hadn't run in ages. I was running with the form that I've always used." I'm like, "I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to walk." My goal was try to get some sun while it was vitamin D time. It was pleasant.
We've had some good weather for that. I've got lots of business goals, but everybody's going to be bored with those. My other personal goal is to track my food. I track every food that I eat on my phone. I like doing that because it keeps me accountable to myself of knowing, "I ate this and this." At the end of the day, I'm like, "I don't need a big dinner because I had a big lunch," or vice versa. I like knowing it and seeing it in front of me, because if I couldn't see it in front of me, it's real. A lot of times we forget what we ate. It's not a big deal.
What app are you using?
I use the WeightWatchers app.
Got it. Are you using a scale?
Yeah, food scale, for sure.
There are so many apps out there. The WeightWatchers has an app. MyFitnessPal is one of the apps.
Yes. There's Noom and a couple other.
I like Cronometer, personally.
I don't know that one.
Cronometer is one that's got a lot of extra stuff. Dr. Mercola has been using it and doing some studies with people who are utilizing that app. All of these things integrate on your phone. I don't care if you're Android or Apple. Dumb phones, not so much, but some days, I want a dumb phone.
I want to go back in time.
The two things you need to track that food, and you're doing it 100% right, it's something that you can put in fast and easy. You can say, "I am eating this."
A lot of times, if you're eating the same thing, a lot of these apps are just like, "Bing."
You can just copy and paste, but you need a food scale.
It's interesting. You usually think, "I'm just going to have a serving of chips or something." Not that I recommend chips, but so many people overeat chips. The serving of chips is like ten chips. Who eats ten chips? I do if I'm weighing them. This is a good little hack. I have kids and stuff, so we buy organic chips. If I buy a bag of chips and it's not single-serve chips, the kids will eat all of them into servings, even though that's six servings in a bag. When I get a bag, I open the bag, I weigh out each serving. I know it's wasting plastic, I'm sorry, but I put it into Ziploc bags, and then I put it back into that bag. When they reach in, they just pull out one serving.
That works, but it also means you pull out one serving.
Exactly. That is so true.
That makes a huge difference. I've tracked calories when I've done my keto journey in the past. I lost 30 pounds doing a keto cut. I had to track everything because I was making sure and I'm trying to get all my macros. We can talk about keto macros another time. You have to do all of that work and you need that scale. In fact, if you were going to buy a scale, I would buy a food scale and I'd throw out your scale in your bathroom. Quite honestly, that food scale will get you better results.
Better results than weighing yourself every day.
Plus, if you're into baking, you are so much better off using a food scale to figure out your ingredients, than you are to say, "It's a cup." Maybe, but maybe your flour is light.
That's what I use for my sourdough baking. It's a food scale to get all the ingredients. It's so easy to do. Once you get used to it, you put it on, and then you add until you got them enough, and then you add the water. I just add it all together in one bowl. Just clear it out between ingredients. A food scale is a lifesaver on that stuff.
That makes all the difference. You're watching your calories, and I'm trying to figure out how to get to 300 grams of protein in a day and how I will consume that.
That's a lot. That hurts my stomach.
One of my goals is try to figure out how I can change body composition so that I can lean out.
How many grams of protein is in an egg?
You'd have to look it up.
I'm going to look it up because I want to figure this out.
I probably had a pound and a half of meat, six eggs, and a little bit of bacon. That probably isn't a pound and a half.
There's six grams of protein in one boiled egg.
Yeah, 6 to 7.
You want to get how many?
I'm not going to eat.
I know, but I wanted to see if you were eating it in eggs.
It would be a lot of eggs.
Fifty eggs.
That's a lot of eggs.
That'd be expensive.
Especially at $6 a carton right now, I'm thankful that I can get $2 for 9 at the one store. I'm not going to tell you what I can get from certain people who are good friends.
There you go. You got to have your egg supplier. Some people have their drug supplier. We have our egg supplier.
'm just hoping that the chickens are laying.
They're starting to a little bit now.
Prioritizing protein as you're counting all these calories is important, because if you make sure you hit your protein goal on a regular, you will be less hungry and your body composition will change. Most people are not getting one gram per kilogram of body weight. I'm 188 pounds, which is about 85 kilograms. 1 gram is 85, 2 grams would be about 160.
That's still not even close to 300, like you're trying to get.
It’s not. Yesterday, I ate about 190. That's no protein shakes or anything like that. I'm going to try and experiment. I'm going to try it for a week to see if I can even get close to that, because that's a lot of food. Quite honestly, I'm eating a lot of food as it is. Again, it's an experiment. The study that they did was 3.7 grams per kilogram of protein.
They saw significant results compared to the group that was doing two grams of protein. Even 2 grams of protein is better than most people are doing. Most people are not getting that gram that they need. This is important. If you're trying to lose weight, if you're trying to improve your health, protein is your building block for everything.
Protein is the building block you need when trying to lose weight or improving your health.
It's a very big deal. Yes, and healthy fats. Are there any other personal goals? I know you're going to now try to eat 300 grams of protein. I can't wait to hear how that goes.
We'll find out. I only missed the cold showers on one day, but I finished with one. I got up about 5:00, and I said, "I'm going to do it." At 3 minutes and 30 seconds, I said, "That's enough."
That's pretty good. I did zero minutes of a cold shower.
I realized that. If you shivered for me, then you probably got the benefit.
I have nothing left to talk about. Do you have anything left?
The other thing that I'm doing, and the reason I'm looking to increase the protein and the cold showers is the workout routine I'm doing right now. This gets back to slowly step things up. The amount of volume that I'm doing is four days a week. I was used to doing three days a week. Four days a week of volume of kettlebell training is a lot.
At three days, I said, "I feel good. I've got a little bit left in the tank." Even at this program, at four days a week, I've got some left in the tank. There are very often mornings when I'm like, "Can I sleep in for another hour?" It was already 8:00 at that one day. Again, ease yourself into these goals because sometimes you think you're able to do something, and you're not.
It's okay to fail sometimes and listen to your body.
It is okay to fail sometimes and listen to your body.
This is why I decided to pick up some eggs for the first time in about a month, and pound those down because that usually gets me back into my ability to lift heavy weights.
It was good to talk to you, Dr. Frederick Schurger.
Dr. Bagley, how are you? Where are people going to find you?
They are going to find me at PrecisionChiroSTL.com. They can find me on Facebook on Precision Chiro STL, or on Instagram @PrecisionChiropracticSTL.
Got it. I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com. I've got one on Facebook. There is KeystoneDoc on Instagram. My kettlebell journey does show up there from time to time. I might have kettlebell snatches, so there might be a video.
Everybody, go check that out.
I will see how cold it is in the house, whether I've got myself worked up to take the t-shirt off. Anyways, we will adjourn. Everyone, keep on liking and subscribing to the show and the channel. Give us a five-star review. Share us with your friends and your family. We look forward to hearing from you. We'll see you next episode.
While this was recorded as a New Year's resolution podcast, there is no better time than the present to make a healthy change in your life. In this episode, Dr. Frederick Schurger and Beth Bagley discuss how to start healthy eating and make your life better in 2023! Tune in as they explore keto diet, slow-carb diet, and why you should cut sugar from any diet. They also cover different eating strategies to make your life easier and more successful while staying healthy.
Listen and read the full blog post here
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.
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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.
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.
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.
People make mistakes, but as Chiropractors, our goal is not to make those mistakes. Why? Because a mistake can be life-threatening. In this episode, Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley share some experiences of seeing the wrong adjustments made and how they were corrected. They dive deep into the use of technology, explaining how X-rays can be an important tool in Chiropractic. Listen for more stories of anomalies done in Chiropractic and learn from them today.
Listen and read the full blog post here
Have you ever wondered why chiropractors and medical doctors don't get along? The answer is much deeper rooted in the political world than you think. In this episode, Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley cover some of the political landscape around Chiropractic and some of the common misconceptions that have been going on over the years. It’s high time to put these again to light, as some of these political issues are still ongoing until today. Tune in and learn what’s going on in the political world of medicine and chiropractic.
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We are going to go over some interesting ideas and topics. Don't run away because I'm going to say it. We are recording this about a week after all the elections. We are going to talk a little bit about politics but not be political. It is important. It is something for people to understand a little bit about where chiropractic came from. Your grandfather probably went through some things back in the day.
This goes to the state that our world is going through for whatever reason. People don't understand why some people are so passionate about where the world needs to go. Let's back up. Let's talk a little bit about the politics around chiropractic, going back to the 1910s to 1920s when chiropractors were being persecuted for practicing medicine without a license, even though they weren't practicing medicine.
I had a patient ask me, “Why do medical doctors and chiropractors not get along?” I was like, “That is an excellent question but the answer is way longer than I have to talk to you about that.” The truth is it is not true anymore but there was a time when that was true. It was about misinformation. There was a campaign of misinformation.
There were multiple levels of this throughout the years. I mentioned it before but there was a time when there were chiropractic schools as far as you could throw a stone from one school to the next sometimes. There were also medical schools available throughout the country. Now, if you have more than about 2 or 3 medical schools in a state, that is a lot. Some states have more than others, certainly. There was a big change in what was being accepted for medicine. We could go back and forth and talk about Rockefeller but I don't care to. Quite honestly, that is another rabbit hole we don't have time to get into.
Books have been written on that subject.
Back at the turn of the century, there was a large push for medical doctors to try not to have chiropractors get their sick patients because prior to antibiotics, that was a big thing.
As we go through this, know that we were not attacking a medical doctor in 1918. I'm not attacking them. This is what they were taught to do. They were taught to do this in medical school because of the influences of why you were talking Rockefeller but influences of big pharma. It became big pharma all the way starting back then. That was real.
It became a standardization of things. We talk about what is the difference between chiropractic and medicine. It is a field of study that is even separate from something like osteopathy, although osteopaths and medical doctors look very similar in what they are doing. This continued. There was fighting but it wasn't bad until about the 1960s when the American Medical Association made a big push to eliminate chiropractic from the landscape.
That is why the schools did a hard push to say, “No, if you are associating with chiropractic, it is a cult. Chiropractors are this side of the devil. If you associate with the chiropractor, we are not going to give you your hospital privileges. You are not going to have good standing in the community.” They would run out of medical doctors who were siblings to a chiropractor. It was a big issue.
As things go, it wasn't a conspiracy theory. It was real. Wilk suit started in the ‘80s but continued into the ‘90s. My brain says 2001. There was still something going on. It has been a while since I have looked at that but certainly, it started in the ‘80s going into the ‘90s. They had realized there was an active campaign by the American Medical Association to eliminate chiropractic. Thankfully, some people were whistleblowers at that time. For those people who wanted to do a deeper dive, that was Wilk versus the AMA.
The only sad thing is we have a situation where chiropractors and medical doctors still have this. There seems to be this disconnect that is slowly being healed. There is not necessarily an active engagement with chiropractors in medical school unless they reach out from time to time. The flip side of that is even worse. I was talking with a medical doctor who is a patient of mine. She is into functional medicine.
We were talking about the A4M Convention, which is a functional medical meeting that brings all sorts of medical doctors, other doctors and health practitioners into the same room to talk about stuff that is beyond your normal medicine. People don't understand that when they get their labs done and I have said this in other places I might not have talked about on the show yet but there is a range that people go that you fall into that is the “normal.”
The problem is all the people that they are doing medical tests on are sick people. You have the standard deviation or that old bell curve they talk about, within two standard deviations of the people in your community who are getting tested for red blood cells. Anyone underneath the standard deviation twice, which is the end of that bell curve, is sick on either side of the spectrum. Everything in the middle is normal. That is a mathematical term that doesn't translate to what is healthy. Functional medicine looks to a much narrower range that might shift one way or the next that says, “You should be in this range to be functionally well.”
I love this idea. It is great for everyone to understand this better because what is healthy? What are you doing on a day-to-day basis that will make you better? Is it 10,000 steps a day? Is it drinking half your body weight ounces of water? We could go down the list. I love to go to the A4M meeting someday because I'm a numbers geek and I'm fascinated by this stuff.
The problem is we have chiropractors who want to do all of this functional medicine stuff and some of them are doing it well. I hate to say bad things about my colleagues but they don't know how to adjust. if they knew how to adjust like we know how to adjust and get people, they probably wouldn't do the functional medicine because they wouldn't have time.
You and I have both had busy weeks seeing lots of patients. I sat down with one guy at his cholesterol and I said, “Here is your problem with your cholesterol. Retest this in three weeks. It doesn't take a whole lot. Stop eating the bun at McDonald's. Stop eating the fries. Get a bunch of burger patties, have a good time with it and you will be fine.” I know that sounds weird with cholesterol but that is a story for another day. I love this stuff but I rather adjust you, get your body working and tell you, “Don't eat that piece of junk food. It is almost that simple.”
We recorded this back in November 2022, right before Thanksgiving. What does being a chiropractor mean? The things we are trying to protect some of our rights were simply being able to take an X-ray. You are getting your cone beam installed, which is a CT but it is technically an X-ray machine. In some states, they are still a little bit fuzzy on letting us take or utilize a device like this, even though we have been using X-rays since the dawn of the profession.
Even in other countries like Canada, if they are not close to it, they have already taken away X-ray rights in some provinces.
They have had trouble. We want to make sure that doesn't happen here in the USA. We want to make sure that we can physically take a picture to see what is going on with the person and how they are built because it makes a huge difference in how we need to get them adjusted. I had a patient. Her kids have been under care for a while. She was like, “I don't like anyone adjusting my neck.”
She has been seeing a regular chiropractor for a while and she is seeing the kids doing great. She was like, “It is my turn. Come on, Doc. Can I get in this week?” I said, “Sure.” She feels better already. The best part about that one is I put her on the balance scale. She was 20 kilograms off. It was a lot. Afterward, she was within 6. She was like, “I feel straighter.”
You measure people in kilograms, for real.
I do and there is an important reason. Beth, how much do you weigh in kilograms? Do you know?
You are saying, “It is because we don't worry about the weight.” I see what you are saying. You are probably correct. I'm going to try that out. Thank you for that.
Quite honestly, it is because my scales, when they power up, they start up in kilograms. There are two reasons. One, I can be lazy, not have to try to go through it and reset it every time. Two, you don't have to think about the weight. The difference should only be about 1.4 kilograms.
For someone reading who has no idea why we are doing a bilateral weight scale is because your two feet should carry equal weight on both of them when you are standing straight. What happens is someone's leg will start pulling up but you can't stand on a floating leg. What happens is you put more weight on that leg and 20 kilograms is quite a bit.
It was a lot. She was having neck and arm pain but no low back pain at this point. She had it in the past. This wasn't a thing going on at the time. She had adapted to it. I told her, “With this change, she might have some low back pain on the opposite side coming on.”
It tries to rebalance.
Getting back to politics and where chiropractic starts, I don't want to infringe upon a medical doctor. I got some supplements here. Half the reason I carry the supplements I do is because I take these supplements. I get a better discount. If people want them, I send them to a place where they can get them online or buy them from me. I like these things and I play in that functional space for my health. I don't want to infringe upon my medical doctor friends who are going to deep dive. They have the time to spend with a patient to appreciate these things.
This is where I want to be able to protect my rights as a chiropractor doing what we do, not have somebody else trying to do what I do. Whether it be a PT, MD or osteopath, we all can play a role in improving people's health because we have to be responsible for ourselves. The other thing is I don't think people appreciate that they need to be responsible for themselves. They want to give it to somebody else. I was listening to Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand.
Chiropractors like playing in that functional space for health, but they don’t infringe on their medical friends to do the same. This is among a chiropractor’s rights that deserve to be protected.
I watched part of that. I didn't watch the whole thing.
The fifteen-minute video or the clip that I got was interesting because Jordan Peterson is talking about how Moses took the Israelites into the desert in Exodus. One of the things that people around him, I think it was his father-in-law, noticed how much he was being worn down because all the people were coming to him to solve his problems. He ended up being effectively a mini Pharaoh in the desert. What he did is he said, “You need to make it smaller. People can solve their problems at a smaller and more centralized level instead of these hundreds of thousands of people that he had brought out into the desert.” A group of ten can figure out what they need to do to solve a problem a whole lot better than anything else.
Jordan goes on to say, “What do you need to be responsible for?” He was like, “You need to be responsible to your spouse. You need to be responsible and have a job to make a healthy wage. You need to take care of yourself. You need to stay healthy and fit as part of this. You need to have a family. You need to engage in your civic organizations. Join your business organizations and a political party. All of these things are very important.” This was the point he made that I thought was amazing. He said, “Every bit of social responsibility you abdicate will be vacuumed up by a narcissistic tyrant.”
That is where we are at.
People don't appreciate this with their healthcare. This is the beautiful thing about us as chiropractors. We will not take responsibility for your health. We will help guide you along this path but it is not your responsibility to make sure that I'm as healthy as possible. If I show up at your office for a seminar, I might say, “Check and adjust me.” We go down and eat a copious amount of McDonald's. I hate to harp on McDonald's. Maybe I should harp on Arby's. It doesn't matter. Wouldn't that frosty be awesome?
People don't appreciate this with their healthcare, but when you abdicate your own health to somebody else, chiropractors will not take responsibility for your health.
No, I can't imagine. My stomach hurts thinking about it.
It tastes good in the mouth but the rest of the body doesn't love it. I got at least one frosty right here.
I tell people, “If you have a stomach ache. It might be your body is out of alignment or it could be that you eat Doritos all day long. I can't adjust away the Dorito habit.” There has to be an aspect of personal responsibility, whether it comes to your healthcare or the world.
The worst part is if you get yourself far down a path, you have to go down the medical route. There is a time and a place for it. If you have to go down that medical route, how much do you trust the hospital system that you are going to get stuck in that is being run not by the medical doctors but by lawyers and bureaucrats that have more interest in their bottom line than your health and wellbeing? It is pretty scary stuff.
One of my goals with my patients is to keep them out of that system. I don't want you in the system. If you have to be there, I love you and l will pray for you. I will still help you in my office. My goal is to keep as many people out of that system as possible because it leads to one drug, another drug, surgery and another drug where we can solve so much by being in proper alignment, having proper nutrition, enough water and moving our body.
It is great when it is there because I had a patient who had her third child. It was a seventeen-hour labor. Anything longer than about 4 to 6 hours is considered traumatic labor. She had to get induced. They had to give her some Pitocin. She had some additional bleeding afterward. They sewed her up and fixed her up so that she didn't die because it wasn't long ago that women would die in childbirth. This is where the medical system is great. That is their job to fix you when you are in that acute situation. She was so happy to get her head on straight. She was like, “Doc, I went through too much. Put my head on straight so I can take care of my baby.”
It is incredible to see that change. We take care of a lot of pregnant people in our office. With these women, I do see better outcomes with their pregnancy than typical. They talk about their sister. The laborers are short. I calmly tell them. I was like, “If you want to have this baby in the hospital, know that being under care, your labor could be shorter than you are used to than your friends are having. It is a good thing but you need to go to the hospital and get checked out first.
Every now and then, you want the best possible situation in those where you love to have a home birth and no drugs.
That is up to each mom.
Sometimes that works out fine. Other times, you got to go to the hospital. You need that level of healthcare. This is understanding where the different specialties where those of us who are doctors, whether it be a medical doctor, chiropractor, osteopath, peds, gynecologist, you name it, we have roles that we are trying our best to do. We don't want to cross over those roles. That is the extent of where we should end on the politics side of things.
People need to know that there are different specialties where doctors have different roles, and they don't want to cross over those roles.
Do you have any case studies or any miracles that have happened in your office? I got one and I want to talk about it.
Why don't we talk about yours? I have been talking too much.
I saw her for her second appointment. She came in with several years of chronic headaches. Someone referred her in. It is a family member. She got her first adjustment. She said she realized and wondered if this is how normal people feel. I said, “Yes, that is how normal people feel.” She didn't have a migraine or headache. She felt good. She had energy. She got two littles at home. She was able to take care of them and be the mom she wanted to be.
The simple answer was she needed her head on straight and it wasn't. I feel incredibly blessed that I was able to help her, give her that chiropractic adjustment, that Blair adjustment and get her back on track with her health. She got checked. She only had 1 of the 2 vertebrae out that I had to adjust. She didn't need another adjustment but she felt like she did already. She may have overdone it a little bit because she felt good, which I didn't warn her about. I try to tell people, “If you feel fantastic, still don't go crazy. It needs time to heal.”
What most people don't realize is that you can't just go. Those people who have that miraculous change in the first 24 hours and sometimes even less are the ones who need to take it easy more than everybody else. If they push far too fast, it overwhelms the nervous system. We might talk about my kettlebell training routine another time because it is pertinent.
It is interesting. The Russians have figured out physiology better than the rest of us. All the research going into things like heart rate variability and nervous system, the Russians were doing it years ago, knowing how hard they can push, especially their athletes, which would translate to their soldiers. Neurologically, what they could do and when they had to break, pull back to address things. It is curious.
We may talk about that another time simply because it is interesting to think about how that translates. This translates to how hard I can train for the course of six weeks. At the end of that, what else is going on? How does that translate to someone's healing ability through their care and what they can and shouldn't do right off the bat? What we don't know is, conceptually, what is healing. Is it healing of the physical organ? Is it the body as a whole? How much of it is the nervous system trying to catch up and trying to fix everything else?
We could imagine a home renovator being overwhelmed down in Florida with some of those floods and the hurricanes that have come through and how hard it was for them to clean out a house and rebuild it. They can do that with a road within about 2 or 3 weeks that were decimated. I find that it can happen that fast. If only roads in Illinois got repaired that quickly. Missouri might have some better roads.
They are better. I hate when I'm driving to your office. I'm in Missouri and I'm driving across the bridge.
Hopefully, that is going to get all fixed. They have been working on that forever. Those are the big highlights of this episode.
We covered a lot. We got some good information and some wheels turned in on. People say, “Why haven't I heard of chiropractic before?” It is because, for years, it was suppressed. I'm glad to bring it up and at least have conversations around that.
The other side of it is for people to understand they need to be responsible for their health. You cannot help them heal and not go down the road to eating all the junk food. It is like you said, “You can't adjust out of a Dorito habit.” I like that. Dr. Bagley, that is going to call it for us. Here is the crazy thing. You and I are going to see each other after this. We may try to do a recording.
We should do an in-person one.
We will bring some mics. We will see how the audio works out. If people hate it, that is because we are playing things fast and loose with some hardware. We are going to try that with a couple of student doctors that are learning the ropes of this so they can share some of their experiences as well. People appreciate that more.
You can find me @PrecisionChiroSTL. I’m in St. Louis, Missouri.
I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com. You can find me in Springfield, Illinois. Thank you so much. We will see you next episode.
Asthma is a horrible disease, and it’s unfortunately an extremely common one. Dr. William Blair knew the struggle all too well, and his own experiences gave birth to the ground-breaking Blair technique. In this episode, we look back on how Dr. Blair's battle with asthma took him to a chiropractor who practically doubled his life. Learn what inspired him to always look for “the better way” when treating diseases and finally be able to breathe life. We also go through a little bit of history of the Blair technique and why it continues to change lives today. Moreover, our hosts Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley talk about some tips on staying healthy and keeping your immune system active during the holiday season.