There are some cases that walk into our offices, and we know they’re going to do great. And not just great, but we can almost see how fast they’re going to get better in the consult. It may look like magic when we do it, but the reality is just that we’ve seen amazing transformations happen like this all the time. Because what we do simply works! We also cover what is called the 3 T’s that lead to neurostructural shifts: thoughts, traumas, and toxins. While trauma may have started the loss of health process, we cover how your mental attitude and chemical situations (often “food”) can just as plainly affect your health.
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Welcome, everyone, to the show.
How are you doing, Dr. Schurger?
I'm doing excellent. I had a great idea for the show and we're going to do it. We're going to talk about cases that always respond well to care. Some people do not respond well, but generally, they almost always respond well. You're sort of excited to see it because you know it's going to happen.
I'm sorry I'm excited about you not feeling well because of whatever is happening, but I know that you walked in the right door. Usually, they understand. Sometimes they think I'm still a weirdo and that's okay because I am.
We qualify as that because we keep on saying, “There's a little bone underneath your head, and if we fix that everything is going to get better.” Case in point, I had a crane operator come in. He's been operating cranes all his life. He called me on Monday. He was like, “Doc, I hurt my back.” He chopped wood and split wood on his weekends and did something, twisted wrong. Three weeks before, the twisting wrong got his lower back.
Three weeks before, he wakes up with a crick in his neck. Professionally, he needs to look up all day long. As we went through it, he had other injuries and accidents throughout his years. A motorcycle accident when he was very young. I'm like, “I think we're going to get you better.” We got him adjusted immediately because it was his atlas. This might be one of those qualifiers that's because when it's one level, it was a simple misalignment, at least simple by our standards.
By our standards because we see some stuff.
It was his atlas. We get him adjusted and I have him walk around a little bit. He looked at me and was like, “This is real?” He questioned his own senses. After I had done my paperwork check, I watched him stand up to get up out of the front chair with the armrest and his low back caught him. I'd been there. Afterward, he's like, “Doc, this feels awesome. Thank you so much.” On top of all of that, he comes in for his follow-up checkup and he says he slept awesome.
That is such a common thing after getting an upper cervical adjustment. It is some amazing sleep. You wake up almost in the same position you fell asleep in and you wake up refreshed. When you haven't been sleeping well and you get that night, it's amazing.
The last time that you adjusted me, that hour nap or whatever it was, at least it felt long to me. I was like, “We're three-quarters of the way there.”
That's all sorts of stuff going on. You're not one of them, and I'm not either one of those people that doesn't have an uncomplicated misalignment. We've both been complicated.
I used to be and then I decided to get into a couple of car accidents. I like to train and sometimes push myself. I don't push myself through the stupid anymore.
That's smart. I think one of the ones recently that I've had come in, it's a couple of different patients, but one in particular I'm thinking of, has what I call the spot. The spot is not as much the trap but is part of the trap, but a little bit behind the top. It’s this knot that comes on and it's this searing, unrelenting pressure pain that happens.
No matter what they do, they put a tennis ball, hold it, and have people dig in it. It keeps coming back over and over. It feels good when you're pushing on it, but you stop and it hurts again. When I see that, immediately I always look at C2. That doesn't mean it's always C2 because sometimes it's C1, but there's an upper cervical connection between what's happening in the trapezius muscle and the spinal accessory nerves.
That's one of the nerves that comes out of the cranial area and it is affected by the upper cervical spine. When I hear that someone has the spot, I get a little like, “Yee,” because typically, they don't feel better right after the adjustment. About a day later, it starts melting away. I do warn them that it doesn't instantly fix it because it doesn't.
There are some things where we get excited as upper-cervical chiropractors because we see some changes immediately. Some changes take time, some changes take weeks, and some patient changes take months, but for certain things, we typically see changes like this one isn’t about a 24-hour period where they can see a change in that. I pretty much know right away when someone has that, “We got this.” A lot of times they have other things going on too. That's one that I can think of as the trap spot.
Some changes take time. Some changes take weeks or even months. But for certain things, we typically see changes within 24 hours.
A lot of it's that and a lot of it almost feels like it's right between the shoulder blades. They've gone to other chiropractors who say, “Doc, it's here. Work on it down here.”
That's what they want us to adjust low.
Quite honestly, sometimes that's chasing tails.
Just like putting pressure on it. If I massage that muscle, it does feel better but I'm not going to keep massaging that muscle over and over and not get to the root cause. We have to get to the root cause of why that muscle has this giant trigger point in it.
I've got another patient who is not an easy case. She doesn't fall into this category. I will hold her head and move her where she says, "Doc, it's right here.” I'll get right in there and maneuver her atlas into a position where she needs to go. Her head goes up straight in complete relief. I tell her and then she says, "Doc, follow me around for the rest of the day like this.” There are days I've been tempted because she is that tricky of a case to try to figure out like, “How do I get that adjusted so it unlocks.” Knock on wood, there's some wood right there, she hasn't been in a while. Unfortunately, we talked about her so she'll be calling.
That's so true too. I had that experience. It was a patient I hadn't seen in a while and I thought, "I wonder how she's doing?" I was like, "I haven't seen her. I hope she's okay." She was on my schedule in the afternoon and I had no idea. It was one of those things that we can psychically pull them in.
Talking about cases, this one I would consider a complex case until she filled me in on what she's been doing for the past year. She showed up a year and a day ago. It was the last time she was in. That was 362 days because it was a leap year. In any case, she says she's been doing well, but what did she do? She took a medical leave from work. She's been doing all sorts of fun stuff she's been looking for.
She's gotten a couple of medical procedures, including getting her iron level up to where it's supposed to be. I looked at her and I was like, "You've got great vitality. What have you been doing?" Sure enough, aside from getting a couple of proper medical diagnoses and treatments, the biggest thing for her was getting away from work and all the drama and stress that she had at work.
Unfortunately, she's going back here for a couple of weeks. Folks, if you've been going to your chiropractor time and again and they're helping you but not enough, you might need to take a step back and take a look at the rest of your life to see what else is going on because that might be the extra little oomph you need.
If you've been going to your chiropractor time and again and they're helping you but not enough, you might need to take a step back and take a look at the rest of your life to see what else is going on because that might be the extra little oomph you need.
In chiropractic philosophy, we talk about the three T's. What you were talking about is the T is thoughts. What is the emotional stress? What's emotionally draining in your body and all three of these T's that we're going to talk about is what causes your body to go out of normal function and misalignment. What can cause a structural shift in your body?
If I met someone who is going through emotional trauma, one of the things they'll do is they'll hunch forward and protect their body. You'll see that like an emo kid. An emo kid has the hair in their face and then they hunch forward and they're like, “I hate everybody.” They're in a protection posture. That protection posture is an emotional trauma. There is emotional stress that's happening in their body. Emotional stress causes structural stress and misalignments.
The second T is the actual trauma. If you got hit or rear-ended by a car or if I take my phone and I hold it like this over and over again, that's a repetitive trauma. If you put your phone between your shoulder and your ear, and you hold it up with your shoulder, those repetitive traumas can cause misalignments. That's something that patients don't realize they're doing. They could be doing something every day at work, or their computer monitor is too low, or they're using a laptop and they're hunched forward over it and typing on a keyboard attached to the laptop.
I don't mind if you're out and about and you need to use your laptops temporarily, but if you're using a laptop on your actual desk, you need to have a detached keyboard, a detached mouse, and you need to have your laptop up on a stand so that your screen is even with your eyes. That's what we do at our office or at least we do now because we're hurting ourselves leaning forward over a laptop. The third T is toxic stress and that's the stuff that we are in and around and consume. If I drink Pepsi every day or a diet Pepsi, either way, that's a toxic stress whether it's a sugar overload or it's a chemical SHIT storm.
Also, if you decided like you did a couple of weeks ago right after Easter to eat all the stuff, and then realized, “I ate all the stuff. I feel horrible,” switch back to keto, and all of a sudden, everything cleans up immediately. I had one young lady saying, “Doc, I know the storm is coming through today. I can feel it in my joints and my arthritis.” She's a massage therapist and I told her, "If you want to get it better fast within a week, cut out the wheat. You cut out the sugar. You cut out the seed oils. Even if you cut out one of those three, you'll notice a difference almost immediately.”
If you want to get better fast within a week, cut out the wheat, sugar, and seed oils. You'll notice a difference almost immediately.
I was talking about water to a couple of patients and I did a health talk to a bunch of teachers. We talked about water, and I know everyone is tired of hearing about water, but one of the ways that if you're increasing your water is I take a big bottle. I'm holding a 32-ounce bottle. I try to drink three of those a day. Four is good for me, but three, I feel like I've done a good job. If you put a full bottle of water next to your bed, if it’s a big bottle, you drink half of it when you first wake up, do your business, brush your teeth, all the stuff. Before you get into your car, drink the second half of the bottle.
That's a good idea.
Fill it back up with your filtered water, so then you have the second bottle that you're supposed to drink during the day. If you feel like, “I pee too much,” get over it. I said to people saying, “I have to pee too much,” I was like, "It takes 45 seconds. Go pee. It's fine." Some people like if you're a surgeon, you cannot de-scrub and pee all the time. I get it. If you're an elementary school teacher, you cannot leave kids unattended.
Let's be honest with the surgeons. If they're in a pinch, they will do things that we would not do to do ten hours. Let's put it that way.
They scrub out and scrub back in. I don't want to hear about the other stuff.
I don't either.
They have the tools to put a catheter in.
That's what I'm saying.
Now I want to know. If you are a surgeon tuning in to this, please post and tell us if you put a catheter in for 10-hour, 15-hour, or 20-hour surgeries. I want to know. I want to know if that's what you guys do because that's brilliant but gross.
I'm certain somebody does it. I'm certain at least there's a surgeon or surgeons know of somebody who does that more regularly than not.
You can stay hydrated. You drink all you want.
They're doing a 12-hour to 15-hour marathon sometimes with these things so they have to.
First of all, I give it to the surgeons. They are amazing. You can open up the human body, know what everything looks like, take it apart, and put it back together. You guys are crazy awesome. I love it. Second of all, we want to know how you pee.
In any case, let's get back to talking about these cases that we know are going to knock it out of the park.
What have you had recently that’s migraine-related?
That was where I was going. I had a young lady come in on Monday who has been having horrible migraines. I know I'm confusing her with another young lady who came in the previous week with horrible migraines but this one here is an autotech and loves her job. She did it for seven years, but all of a sudden. these migraines got so bad. She had to take a leave of absence. There wasn't a thing that stood out except she was a twin, she was on the bottom, and she was the one who had to do extra work to resuscitate because of where she was positioned.
She's telling me everything and I'm like, “This, that, and the other.” The other one had all brothers for siblings of like a sixth family thing. She's got those tomboy mentalities on the petite side, but everything she has talked about. I'm like, “You’re in good hands. You're in the right place.” She’s been to 2 or 3 chiropractors from Indiana. The third one and the most recent chiropractor is a good friend of Dr. Liz Hafer, who's one of our Blair Docs.
We love Liz. We should have her on the show sometime.
We should. In any case, Liz says, "I'm close. She sends her over there. All these other chiropractors are saying, "I don't know what to do with you. We've done everything we can, but I cannot get you to that next level." Sure enough, she comes on in. She's never been in an actual car accident, but she's had whiplash-style injuries throughout the years.
Her neck is mostly straight, but a little curved at the top. The kicker is her den, so this is a part of C2. Your head and your atlas pivot around what is called the odontoid or the dens of the axis, which if you can imagine, a finger coming up from a vertebra, that's the pivot point. Hers is bent, not quite 45 degrees, but that's how she was describing it when I was looking at it, or at least when she was looking at it. It bent back towards her spinal cord.
Take a screenshot of that. I want to see it.
I will. We might need an MRI if she's not responding well, but I see this and I'm like, "This is exactly why no one has figured this out for you because you have abnormal structure, very well possible from early birth or early childhood because of being a twin.” Now she's got that pushing against her cord. I told her that she should have a banana-shaped curve, but maybe not because of where that's sitting.
We're not going to be so concerned about the curve as much as making sure things are where they're supposed to be. Her head is on straight. We don't need to adjust her and the symptoms start reducing. If we need to take an MRI, we'll see how bad that looks. She's already doing better. She reported back to me. She did have a migraine on Wednesday. It was bad but normally, her migraines take her out for a day and she was able to work through it.
We're not so concerned about the curve as much as making sure things are where they're supposed to be and your head is on straight.
In itself, it is a feat being able to work through a migraine.
There tend to be about three different things that go on with a migraine. There might be a fourth, but the big things are certainly the intensity of the headache, duration, how long it lasts or how you can get it to reduce, and frequency. Those would be the big three that I think are the ones that stand out. If I can get any one of those starting to reduce, we know we're going in the right direction.
Her duration is already down, her intensity is down. She was getting two of these a week. Now we'll find out next week when I see her next because as much as I would have liked to have seen her today, it's a drive. She's coming from Indiana. Still, we're going to get her better. Sure enough, I was very confident. I adjusted her.
Her friend who helped drive her over saw how it balanced. It's funny at the end, her friend is like, “You take care of all of these conditions just by getting that first bone in place? I might have to sign up too.” It's funny to hear that from somebody. I'm not selling other people to what's going on. I'm saying, "You're here as a witness to make sure they feel comfortable that what we're doing here is getting them in the right direction." That was the migraine case. Since last week, I haven't chatted with her to see how she's doing and I get to see both of them on Tuesday. All sorts of fun.
If we can go back from migraines and go, “It’s just.” It's so funny that I put that word in front of it because we see so many complex cases sometimes when it's just one thing.
“It's just a migraine.”
It's headaches. Somebody has tension headaches. It doesn't go full migraine. They're not in bed in a dark room, but there's intense pain in their head. Their eye is halfway closed because it hurts, yet they can work, they can drive, they're not puking, all that stuff but it keeps coming on over and over again, sometimes daily for these people. That was one of my chiropractic stories that I had. I called them an eleven-year headache. I had a headache every day for eleven years of my life. Sometimes it was more intense like a migraine, some days it was a headache and I lived on Advil.
If you find yourself taking Advil, Tylenol, or Aleve multiple times a month, most people with that stuff are taking it daily or multiple times a week, that's not right. Something is not right. Your body is telling you, “Help.” The help that you need is not in a bottle. It's not in a pill. It is in chiropractic care. What we see recently with headaches is normal headaches. It’s still funny that I say words like that, but we know that there's no normal headache, but there would be typical headaches that happen to people. It is that tension headaches.
Some people are like, “I just have sinus headaches or tension headaches.” None of those are normal. An upper cervical alignment can help tension headaches, but it can help sinus headaches too because of the changes in the structures of the face. You've been doing some cool work with the sinuses lately.
There are no normal headaches, but there are these typical headaches like tension and sinus headaches. None of those are normal, but upper cervical alignment can help.
I've been doing a nasal release. This is not upper cervical, butit is in the same vein as the neural disconnect that people are having. If the bones in the skull do not move the way they're supposed to, they will not pump cerebral spinal fluid the way it's supposed to. Things will get stuck or things will get hung up. In the case of the sinuses, things get stuck in that mucus membrane layer that doesn't work.
Funny story. There’s one young lady that I've been taking care of for a little bit now. Every time we do eight passes, the one pass that we get to is way high up towards the sphenoid. Every time we do that one, she's like, “There's a nasty smell up there. I don't know what it is.” As it breaks up and it starts to come out, she's waiting to blow her nose and see like a big old seed. I feel like she's expecting some grapefruit seed to fall out and I'm like, “Probably not.”
Maybe it'll never be anything. A lot of times, those sinuses drain down your throat, not out of your nose.
That would be the case once it finally starts working better. The interesting thing is I do an eye test in the process of figuring that out. I got her looking simply down to the right, so looking over this direction. She gets a moderate pain response setting her eyeballs in that direction. When they happened, that was the worst one today. Sure enough, we did the procedure while she was looking in that direction. It opened up the sinuses and decreased the pain level and intensity as we did that. I would have horrible chronic sinusitis when I go out of adjustment if we let it go that long, and that turns me into misery. Even after getting adjusted, the drainage will stop, but all of the sinuses in my head are inflamed. It takes me at least a day for that to settle out.
How exciting it is that it takes a day for something in your past that was chronic. Now when you get an adjustment, it's like, “I know in a day or two, I'm going to be feeling a lot better." That's incredible. Your body is incredible that it can heal like that.
I'll lose a day. That is the biggest problem I see with it because I lose that time. I'm not productive either with the problem before I get adjusted or after I get adjusted until I feel better. A lot of things fall off the radar. I apologize to people for that as much as I can, but when you feel like crap, you feel like crap.
Dr. Thomas and I both lose words when we're out of alignment. We forget how to say things. I think that's another one that I get excited about when a patient comes in with maybe not a chronic. If it's chronic, we know it's been there a long time, but they've noticed recently that they live in a foggy feeling or a cognitive. They have trouble coming up with words or they have trouble reading and then understanding like comprehension.
If it's a newer thing for them. I love it when I hear that because that's one of the things that people can see the biggest difference quickly. You can have neck pain and we see that it gets well relatively quickly for a lot of people. That's a big deal as doctors look at some very atypical presentation of pain patterns when someone has simple neck pain. it's not simple to them, but it's simple to us.
It hurts when they turn away. They cannot look up as it hurts. We can see some incredible changes but when somebody is cognitively impaired, like what's the reaction time when they're driving, some things can be scary with that. Seeing that change sometimes immediately after the adjustment is cool. You probably have a test for that.
What's curious is I don't and I don't have anything that I like.
I feel like a reaction time test.
Quite honestly, there's a lot more work.
That would be like a study we would have to do.
Dr. John Chung down in Miami has been doing a lot of that with some of the work that he's been doing with patients and such. I think that's going to be a research project he's going to do showing the efficacy of these things.
Probably, we can make a computer model of a click where you could do a 30-second or a two-minute test beforehand or whatever. and then do it after and then see maybe two days later.
They exist. We could do the research study. That stuff exists. What I get excited about is when the patient who has had two car accidents and concussions and had to get on Medicare because she cannot take care of herself. She cannot work. I either get her atlas adjusted, sometimes her C2, and sometimes do the cranial work. I'm giving her direction and she cannot take direction. She's like, “All right, I got to think about this.”
I'm saying, “Push your legs together, push your legs apart.” It takes them a second and they're like, “What did you say?”
You get them adjusted and it's like, “Doc, I have no problems here. Everything is working fine.” This is the problem. Those cases don't hold well. They need a lot of extra support. I lose a day and this one young lady is losing a couple of years. I've joked with her that I would hire her for my front desk in a heartbeat if she was able to be consistent. It's not that it’s not her personal desire that she can be consistent. She cannot be physically consistent because of everything else that is going on when she goes out of adjustment. Life doesn’t work for her.
Life is hard when you're not in alignment. For some people, that is devastating. We went from things that easily get helped with chiropractic. They are hard, but that's just us. Let's think of a lot of people with lower back pain who don't realize the effect that an upper cervical adjustment can have on the lower back.
One of the tests in the Blair technique is something we call a leg length check where someone lays down and we see if their feet line up with each other or they don't line up. If they don't line up with each other, meaning one leg is what we call a “short leg.” I put quotations around the “short leg” when I was saying it because it doesn't mean the leg is short. It means that the hips are pulled up and twisted a little bit.
When you hear the hip complex and back have pulled up and twisted a little bit, that's back pain right there. We're testing for something that causes back pain with the leg length checks. When we do an upper cervical adjustment, the leg lengths become even and people are like, “Why does it help low back pain?”
If the legs have become even, the torquing and the twisting into the hips and lower back have stopped. That's one of the reasons if you don't have low back pain and you get adjusted upper cervical, your back can get sore. It's because those muscles are now working in a different way and it can hurt for a day or two. I do warn people who don't have low back pain that it can hurt a little bit after you get an adjustment and that's normal.
The muscles are shifting. You've got muscles that hadn't been engaged, hadn't needed to work, switched over to needing to work, and vice versa. Other muscles that have been tightened and shortened are trying to lengthen back to where they're supposed to be. You've got a lot of stuff that's shifting in motion almost immediately.
Especially in the first 48 hours to 72 hours, some symptoms can get worse before they get better. It's not unlike going to the gym and working out. After my two-week hiatus from working out regularly, I'm getting back into the swing of things. I think I was exhausted on Sunday when I got back. I skipped my workout on Sunday and I got back to my workout on Tuesday. It felt good. I pushed 38 sets in 30 minutes, so I was pushing. At the end of it, I didn't feel exhausted and did my stuff. Yesterday, I felt fine. Today I wake up and my shoulders and my upper back feel like, "What the heck did I do yesterday?"
Sometimes it takes a little bit of time for that delayed onset muscle shortness to kick in. It's the same principle in working out as it is in healing. Just because I worked out versus I got adjusted or somebody got adjusted for the first time doesn't mean the principles aren't identical, and they are. That's where we have to recognize that if we do something new, it's going to ache a little bit.
One thing popped into my brain in chiropractic that I don't even want to call philosophy. To me, it's not even very scientific because there are not a lot of studies on it. It’s this thing called retracing. I like to call it the healing cycle because our body will ramp up healing, and things are getting good and feeling good, and then something is healing that doesn't feel so good, and we go into what we call a dip. It's like a symptom dip.
When someone is in that certain part of the healing cycle, we can have, “I've had three good days. It's awesome. I've never thought I could feel like this again. Thank you so much, Doc,” and then 2 days or 3 days later they come in and they're like, “I don't know what happened. This is the worst I've ever felt. I don't know if this is working and I'm never going to get well.” I get it because I've been there.
When you know what it feels like to feel good again and then it gets taken away from you, it is devastating. The good news is that if you know what it feels like to feel good again, you can get back there. That’s what the healing cycle is. I call it a roller coaster, and it is an up-and-down. Some occasional patients get all the way better and they’ll be perfect. That is a tiny percentage. Most of us go through ups and downs and that is normal. It's not what we expect.
We do not expect it to be the patient who holds their adjustments right away and everything is perfect. It's going to take time, the healing cycles and these dips as I call them. When people come in, I would warn them or hopefully, I remember to warn them, “Are you in a dip right now? This is what we talked about.” If you are an upper cervical patient and you notice that you are experiencing a dip, tell your doctor about it first of all. Second of all. know that that is so on par with how your body works.
We do not expect everything will be perfect right away when patients have their adjustments. It will take time, healing cycles, and dips.
It's life. Any other cases that we want to share? Those were the big ones for me.
In general, I wanted to bring those up. When we've been talking about this with some of the doctors who are doing some TikToks lately, there has been a complex of cases and these are very complicated ones. Some people are experiencing chronic fatigue. They can have dizziness. They can have headaches, like all the things, but they also have some digestive tract stuff. We're noticing if we look at how the vagus nerve works, it could be a vagus nerve issue on that too. They may or may not have gotten jabbed with something.
We talked about the three T's. We've got toxins as one of them. If we put a toxin in our body, the reaction can be a structural shift. Lots of other reactions can occur as we've discussed, but a structural shift can be the reaction. What we're noticing is that some people are coming in 2 years or 3 years post toxin injection and are having these symptoms that are coming on and it's a lot all at once. The upper cervical is helping with that. We cannot take things out of your body, but what we can do is help your body adapt to the current state that it's in.
We can't take things out of your body, but we can help your body adapt to the current state that it's in.
Adapt to heal past the problems that are there. Dr. Phillip Shallow and I were sharing that a lot of his patients who got the jab ended up needing to get adjusted almost immediately. I didn't put those two pieces together but that often wasn't shared during that time either. In any case, it is what it is and now we know better as we learn more and more. There's more evidence coming out that that was a bad choice.
That was not the best thing that we had done for our health. If you are a person out there who is suffering from some of the easy things we talked about or maybe a complex of things, I want you to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is hope for you. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call one of our offices. You can also text our offices. I don't know if you do text. Do you text at your office?
I do text about three different ways now.
You can text, you can call, and you can shoot us an email. You can comment on one of these and we may see it. You might want to text your email list.
Come out to us directly. It's a little bit better than some of our social shares. Sometimes we're not on those as often.
We'd be busy at the office. We are here to talk, chat about it, and find out if this upper cervical care can help you. If you have a family member that you're thinking about when we're talking about these things, get them this information so that they can do the research, or make them make the appointment if they're close enough to you. We're in St. Louis, Missouri on the west side. Our office is Precision Chiropractic. If you go to our website at PrecisionChiroSTL.com, you can find information about our office and how to get ahold of us.
I sent you a referral because she was having all sorts of sinus problems as I got off the airplane and said, “You need to go see Dr. Bagley.”
I love that, thank you.
I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com here at Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois. It is a long day and I'm ready to go home and eat some dinner.
We're going to see in St. Louis.
We've got a St. Louis seminar with a bunch of students coming down from Palmer. That's going to be a blast. In any case, folks, thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure you like, subscribe, and leave a five-star review. That's what helps get these episodes shared with people in the public so that they can hear about this. They know that there is a ray of hope in that dark tunnel where they have been suffering for way too long. Unfortunately, as cliche as that sounds, it's the truth when you start meeting these people who have been suffering for as long as they have been. All right, folks. You have a great evening. Dr. Bagley, we will see you tomorrow.
See you.
Ready for more Blair chiropractic stories and rabbit holes? In this episode, the docs talk about different cases that they've seen recently including trigeminal neuralgia hydrocephalus and other things. We also get into discussing how you might have received a situation that is completely different than how it was presented to you. This is one of our concerns when we are presenting to a patient to try to keep everything that we share as simple as possible because when we get confused about something, it can really make things worse for all involved. Kudos to you if you're listening to this while walking! And we wrap things up talking about meditation & breathing exercises you can start today.
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Dr. Bagley, how are you this fine day?
I'm fabulous. How are you?
I am good.
This is number 49, which means we're going to have a big bonanza. It's going to be amazing. We don't even know what we're going to talk about next episode, but it's going to be great.
We'll even plan for it and have some extra special something.
We had a good talk with Philip and that was amazing. That opened my eyes to a couple of things I didn't know. I have already talked to another patient about what Philip was going through and what he's doing on top of his upper surgical care, which is cool. I've had a lot of new patients with some interesting symptoms. There are some things that I think we could go over there. How has your week been?
I've been good and not necessarily different symptoms, but certainly some cases that stand out. Let me start with this. This case that came in was a trigeminal neuralgia case. I've spoken on these in the past. I can't say I've had a trigeminal neuralgia case. I had one that didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. I don't know what else was going on that got her down that rabbit hole.
Generally speaking, trigeminal neuralgia cases do great, except she's got a three-hour drive to get here. She's over in Indiana. I'm racking my brain, “How can we make this easier for her?” I've got some people from that area that she's in driving over sometimes to the office and sometimes over to my Arthur office to save an hour.
I'm calling up Dr. Tim Gurrola in La Porte, Indiana. He was a Gonstead full spine practitioner. For those of you who are unfamiliar with all the chiropractic techniques, Gonstead is one of the more popular techniques out there. It's generally taught at most of the chiropractic schools to some degree or other. There's advanced work involved in getting good at it. It's a full spine technique. He'd been doing that for 20 or 30 years when I ran into him at Palmer while his son was at school who's like, “You got to dad, you got to learn this Blair work.” Dad's doing the Blair work. Tim's comment was, “My case fee isn't as high as it used to be because I don't need as many visits as I used to.”
He was happy about that. He made the funny comment as we were chatting that it was a new patient who'd never been to chiropractic before. They're like, “You did the thing. It got better, but I think it was going to get better on its own,” whereas if someone's been to a chiropractor before who's either maybe another upper cervical doctor or even just a regular chiropractor, the funny thing is they're like, “This is very different. I feel a ton better.”
There's one more category that falls into those views that people have. It's this case that came in to see me for trigeminal neuralgia because she has been through the wringer of the medical profession trying to find anything to give her some relief. Sure enough, we get her head on straight. I just adjusted her, so we don't know how well she's going to do.
She's like, “This feels a whole lot different.” It is the experience of the patient, knowing how bad it can get. I don't want people to get to that point, but unfortunately, they find us and they're like, “You tickled behind my ear a little bit. The headpiece dropped. I don't know if you did a whole lot,” not understanding the amount of work that we've put into making it look super easy.
It feels easy. Blair adjustment is so gentle most of the time. Sometimes, it hurts a little bit because something is tender, but it's not like a traditional chiropractic adjustment or, God forbid, one of those adjustments you see on TikTok where they're yanking people's heads. It's so profound. A patient I had came in earlier this week for his CT scan and his exam. He is the nicest guy, but he's been suffering for three years.
Blair adjustment is so gentle most of the time. Sometimes, it hurts a little bit because something is tender but it's not like a traditional chiropractic adjustment.
He played hockey his whole life. He had three different head injuries in a short amount of span where he hit his head on hard surfaces at work, fell back, and hit three different times hit his head. His body started doing weird stuff. One of the things he just started getting is these terrible chronic headaches. He felt that pressure all the time. He did get a CT scan and they found the hydrocephalus. The brain was under normal pressure. They did a puncture to see if he had any pressure in his lumbar spine. There's no extra pressure. I was like, “That's because the pressure is there and not down there.”
For readers, a normal pressure hydrocephalus is a situation where the cerebral spinal fluid is not in a child. Hydrocephalus is an uncommon finding, but it does happen more frequently because the skull is not connected. Not more or less one piece. It's not one piece, but it's more or less one piece. The head will blow up like a balloon, and they will try to shunt that off. In normal pressure hydrocephalus, maybe it's still within the normal range, but it's enough that it's starting to cause pressure into the soft tissue because liquids or fluids are non-compressible.
That means you can't squish them down and they've got to go somewhere. They can't go into the bone and cause that to expand. It goes into the brain's soft tissue and causes all sorts of problems. Often, there's a stop because the upper cervicals are out of place pulling down on the spinal cord, brainstem, and cerebellar tonsils, causing them to stop to work.
This guy is a smart guy. He started doing research, looking at and seeing different things. He does come across the upper cervical. He came across some of Dr. Scott Rose's work. Scott is his first name. he lives in St. Louis, so he found me, which I'm super grateful for because he's a sweet guy. He got his first adjustment. For doctors reading this, he's got a double PI.
If you're looking at me from the side, my atlas bone should be shifted slightly up like this. It should be at an angle that's towards my nose. For his, when I looked at his atlas, it was just this flat. When I looked at his different ankles and everything, we could see on the ProTrac views that he's got posterior misalignment on both sides, which is not super common, but it's a more common thing now.
I see it because we see so many neurologically compromised people. We see it more than an average population would ever see. When I told him, I was like, “This is a pretty compromised position for this atlas bone. It's putting pressure where it shouldn't be pushing. It makes sense that things are as bad as they were and it makes sense to me, too.” His wife didn't come, but she heard from him what I had said on the first day.
She was so excited. She's like, “I just want my husband back.” I don't know how the whole case is going to go, but I'll keep you guys updated as we go. I'm going to guess he's going to probably want to come on the show because he's so funny. He is such a nice guy. I made two adjustments on him, but the second one was the PI adjustment. He felt weird afterward.
I was like, “That's good.” He felt warm. I was like, “I think it's your brain draining. I don't know for sure if that is, but I have had people have that sensation where they're like draining.” That pressure was starting to relieve. He didn't feel like perfect as he was leaving or anything like that. I wasn't expecting that, but I was excited about all the changes he was feeling as he was resting because it's not how we walked in. All we did was move this tiny little two-ounce bone. It's incredible what we do in. In my meeting, we were talking about capacity blocks, like what's blocking the office from getting bigger. We discussed that maybe quarterly and just talk about, “What can we change?”
One of the things we want to do is remodel a room in the back where my X-ray mission used to be. One of the questions is, “Where are we? Do we have sound philosophy?” Not a lot of healthcare practitioners talk about philosophy, but I think chiropractors do more than physical therapists or something. The philosophy of chiropractic is the whole above-down, inside-out thing. If anything, and I know we're talking about the intelligence of our body, but what's profound about that is where I was comparing what this guy is even feeling and even the cerebral spinal fluid above down. The flow of information. I know there's two-way communication, all that stuff. It's pretty incredible to watch someone change like that. I feel so blessed that we get to do that every day.
This is a good point because most people know chiropractics doing something different than a medical doctor. They don't understand that medicine has a philosophy. The medical philosophy believes that something is inherently wrong. They have to figure out if they either have to give you a pill or some sort of medicine to cause that problem to get better or to make it turn on more, make it turn off less or take out something.
Something has broken down and died. That's where surgeries come in place. Sometimes, there are valid reasons to do that, but oftentimes, and I make this joke, there are times when the orthopedic surgeon wants a new boat. It's not even the orthopedic surgeon that wants a new boat. It is the manager of the orthopedic surgeon unit that says, “We need to do this many surgeries because I want my new boat.” I'm not saying any one particular doc doesn't deserve a new boat. Some of them do.
Sometimes, this is the problem. If you are selling a product or a service, you look at every nail. If everything looks like a nail, you're going to use a hammer every time. The difference between that philosophy of doing a thing and chiropractic can be just as guilty of this because if I look at it and say, “I need many bones to make this kind of money to buy my boat,” and I buy all my kettlebells from all my teaching. That is how I buy my kettlebells. Thankfully, I don't need any new ones. It's going to be at least a year.
The difference between the philosophies in chiropractic is that they focus on, “How is the body healed? What drives the body's healing?” Our philosophy says that everything comes from above, down and inside out at or a very superficial level. In simplest terms, the body heals itself. We understand that the body is a self-healing organism as long as we're alive. What is the thing that is interfering with our body's ability to function and heal? We find that it's the nervous system that is not functioning the way it's supposed to because something is out of place in the upper neck that is driving that problem that is preventing the person from healing.
This gets into the other story that I wanted to share about a new patient who's coming in soon. She went to see a newly graduated doctor. I won't say what city she's practicing in. Unfortunately, I will say she graduated from my alma mater, Palmer College. I understand that not every doctor out of my class, certainly not even upper cervical doctors, has even bought into the philosophy that chiropractic facilitates your body's ability to heal and benefits your nervous system. That is an unfortunate problem in the profession, in the education system, that there are enough people, both teaching and people who are trying to accredit doctors, that would rather see all this philosophy go away and become a part of the medical system, give out drugs and surgery.
Quite honestly, you and I would make a ton more money and knowing some of the things, the procedures that I would do, like what Philip is going through, if I decided I wanted to have a medical degree and go and off and do those procedures and those injections, hands down. I'd be all about it. Unfortunately, that's not what I want. I want to get people's heads on straight so they can go out and do everything they're supposed to do. In this case, this patient calls me up. She is freaked out. I have very little information about her other than she's got some back pain and some other problems. They did take an X-ray and I applaud.
You don't see that as much anymore, but I'm glad they did.
From what I saw, I think she's using a torque release technique.
That can be good. There are some aspects of testing and addressing misalignments.
Based upon what she was telling me, this doctor was a radiology intern. I don't know this doc at all. I'm not saying that the patient understood everything the doctor was trying to get across, but certainly, the patient was freaked out and the doctor told her this, that and the other. I'm looking at it. She was part of the pre-med club for a couple of years, and I'm looking at all these other things.
Do you mean an undergrad, she was part of pre-med?
Exactly.
I was probably part of the pre-med club as an undergrad, too.
Some people know that they're going to do that kind of stuff. My point is the way that they told her, “I can't say every symptom's going to get better.” We can't say that. I'm going to take the patient's word for this. The doctor told her, “This would never get better. The numbness or tingling along the legs is never going to get better.”
What? It's possible it might never get better, but we see that it gets better all the time. I see that it gets better in the afternoon.
This young lady strikes me as a young lady. She doesn't strike me as somebody who's in her 60s or 70s, and situationally, the damage has been done. This is where surgery sometimes comes in.
Sometimes, people need it. Sometimes it's too far gone. There's been too much damage.
This is one of those situations where Dr. Gurrola was talking about where, hopefully, the patient comes in, and we go through all the history. I'm like, “Here's what we're going to do. Here's what it's going to cost,” because that's the other part of it. She doesn't want to start something that's not going to get her better. I'm 100% on board with that. She's freaking out and I'm like, “I got to take a look at stuff,” because something about her experience just scared the heck out of me, but yet I've heard that from other patients before. I'm like, “Maybe this doctor is the best, but she just explained it wrong, and the patient didn't understand because of the white coat.”
You can get freaked out by it. You can mishear things. I feel like if I say something to a patient that freaked them out and then they go to a different doctor who happened to know me or didn't even know me, I almost wish somebody would call me and say, “I want to let you know I've got a patient here that heard that you said this and I want to know what that meant.” He'll be like, “I didn't say that,” or whatever it is.
There's that too. We have to get back to the question of, “How do we communicate to the patients as best as we can and keep it stupid simple or is it simple, stupid.” Sometimes I'm the one who's stupid.
I am, too, sometimes, especially on Thursday nights. The other part of that is that this stuff is serious, though. Subluxation, misalignment or whatever you want to call it is serious. When this happens, your body is moving towards destruction rather than healing. I get telling people that, “You have this going on and that is serious.” To take away someone's hope that they could get better knowing that we are self-healing and are miraculously made and Our bodies can heal. Our job is to help stuck people get unstuck.
Our job is to help stuck people get unstuck.
If you say, “You could get unstuck, but you are never going to get better.” What the heck? I don't even think a medical doctor would say that because it's taking away someone's hope. I don't want to give false hope. Typically, we can see big changes in something like numbness and tingling in a short amount of time and permanent changes in that.
As she was explaining it to me because she didn't understand some of what was going on and the doctor did tell her, “Don't go to somebody who's just going to turn you on on your neck and roll you because that's going to be a problem.” I'm like, “Don't do that.”
Was this a chiropractor who told her that?
This was an actual chiropractor. My concern is, “What else are they doing?” This is the other thing that people should be worried about. We've got some “Influencer” docs in the Blair work. Dr. Drew Hall and Dr. Kevin Pecca are fantastic at doing marketing because they love making TikTok videos. I hate that they love making TikTok videos. I love that they make videos. I hate that it's TikTok.
I try not to consume TikTok. I do make TikTok. Right. You all can find me @DrBethBagley.
If you watch any of Drew Hall’s TikTok, Kevin's are better, in my opinion.
It's all of the same stuff over and over. He is like, “If you're suffering from blah blah blah.” Honestly, he gets a lot of views on that stuff. Between Drew and Kevin Pecca, I have had patients who have started care because they saw one of their TikTok.
Kevin's looks a little bit more nice. Drew is very raw.
The thing about TikTok is people don't necessarily need it to look nice. They just need it to be real. It doesn't have to be full-on production.
This other doctor and I are looking at their website. It feels like they're trying to be an influencer more than they're trying to be a doctor. At the end of the day, Doctors Drew and Kevin are trying to be clinicians who also put out videos as opposed to someone who's trying to be an influencer.
They never want to not be a doctor. They always want to be a doctor.
This is the same for us. We would rather be a doctor all day long. I love doing this and having this conversation with you[MM1] .
I'd rather people just come in and I don't have to market at all. I don't love marketing. I don't hate marketing, but I don't love it. I love seeing people's lives change behind that door over there. To see people's lives change, I have to market. It's a business.
That's part of what we're doing here and we're just getting the word out there so we can share what's going on. This young lady that's coming in once we take a look at her images, I'll be like, “Here are the things that I worry about. If I were your age, these are the big problems. Sometimes we have sunk costs and sometimes things in our body are sunk costs.” We have to work around that. I've got another patient who didn't have any of the jabi jabs, but he still had the heart problems associated with it.
It could have just been from the COVID.
He had COVID about three times. He's got all these health issues.
Does he have a weak weekend immune system before that?
Other than the fact that there were some beverages that he likes and cigars, he was not bad, but there was a lot of stress work-wise. He had several stents put in. There are certain medications you have to take to maintain the patency of those stents so that blood will flow. My dad still regrets getting the one stint put in. They didn't need to do it, but they highly recommended the stent in the widow maker that he had, which was 90% blocked or maybe 70%, whatever it was. It was a big blockage. The upside was, and the reason he didn't have a whole lot of heart damage was because the heart had already made new vessels around the blockage.
Dad is like, “I wish they hadn't done it, but they did it.” I'm not going to fret over it. There are some things that you have to maintain. Otherwise, that thing will block up, which is the unfortunate side effect of getting a stint if the body says, “I don't like this. This shouldn't be here. Let's get rid of it.” It's keeping blood flowing.
Does the body attack it with the immune system?
Yeah. The coating on the outside of it, if I'm not mistaken, prevents it not from being necessarily rejected by the body as much as keeps it from getting stuff clotting it and things like that. That only lasts for so long. Anything in the body that isn't of the body and even stuff of the body will turned over. The body says, “I don't like this and we're going to change this.” That's why there is a medication to deal with the stent.
This young man has been a patient for a couple of years. He's been under upper cervical care for a good long time as well. He's like, “I'm not happy about what happened with the heart attack and everything else, but this is where I am. This is the bare minimum that I have to do to move forward.” He's loving cardio rehab. I think cardio rehab is one of the best things I have ever seen the medical profession figure out.
I honestly wish that every person who is eligible for cardiac rehab could continue it for the rest of their lives because the changes I see in my patients who have had to go through cardiac rehab are so profound, but then it ends. You're rehabbed. First of all, people are afraid that they're going to have another stroke or a heart attack while they're exercising. This puts them in a safe place where if something were to happen, there would be people there who could help.
I wish it were true because these people go through those changes, and most of them don't keep doing it. Most of them don't continue that path. Most of them just go back like, “I'm better.” You can't stop exercising. Many of them are still afraid to go to the gym or even just go for a walk because they're fearful that something bad could happen when that's the opposite.
They need to be out and being active and physically doing things. My dad's heart attack was 2008 or 2009, but he kept on doing the rehab because they offered it and they said, “You can keep on coming in on the regular.” They had it at the hospital. There was a core group that was there all the time. That core group would come in and do some yoga. They would do some other activities at the hospital and then afterward, they'd all sit down and have coffee. When COVID happened, all of that got shut down.
I was listening to someone talking about how we have lost our socializing skills since COVID. COVID puts so much fear into people that we can't interact with others that we don't have. That's a psychological rabbit hole that I don't even want to go down because I know it. We are not islands by any means, and we certainly are not. We are social creatures that need to connect.
This is why, if nothing else, religions have been around in various forms throughout the years to have social interactions. Something that happened during COVID put so much fear in people, and it's not the fear of God. They are not interacting socially as we should. That's a whole other thing. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but I just want to get out, go to a gym, and keep active. My dad's got a 2-hour routine that he does at least 3 days a week at the local gym. Some people do continue.
He's the exception. So many people don't.
Two or three days a week, it's yoga, and then, on other days, he's finally getting into strength training. I haven't gotten him to do kettlebells yet, but he's doing sled pools. Dad's a former judge. A lot of those guys are former cops. I know his brother better than I know him. They both had big egos. They were going back and forth putting, “I did 200 on the sled,” and then they put that on the chalkboard. Dad would come over and he said, “ I did 225.” “I did 250.” “I did 250, then 275 for three laps.” I think they got up to 300 or maybe even 325.
For me, I've never pulled that on a sled.
They got to that point.
Were they pushing the sled or were they pulling it with a rope?
I think they were pulling it.
Were they doing that, that one where they pulled like that? No.
I think they had something around their waist.
They were walking with it. It was usually like their legs. I might be able to do that.
You could do it pushing as well. Dad got up to the 303. He beat the police officer's record and they both sort of said, “We have proven that we are both stupid.” I told Dad, “Back it down to 275 and start walking it backward.”
I love that he had a scary thing happen to him and then he made some changes. If we could just convince people to make the changes before the scary thing happens.
If we could just convince people to make the changes before the scary thing happens.
You're spot on there. Remember going through school and I was not an active kid going through school. I was the pudgy kid who I wished had kettlebells because if someone said, “Do this and you'll be strong,” and I'd be like, “I like that,” because I can race against myself or even just having gotten into a weight room, that would've been good. Having something physical and growing up there was the big Arnold Schwarzenegger National fitness thing.
That’s presidential fitness.
I don't think that stuff exists anymore. We're seeing kids who are less and less physically active. Even my buddy's son, while he plays hockey a lot, is given nothing else to do. He will spend more time sitting in front of a TV playing Minecraft or whatever the new fad game is more than anything else. As you're looking that up, I'm going to bet that the presidential fitness test when you and I were going through school is considerably less than what it was back in the Kennedy years.
I seem to recall that one involved a lot of pull-ups. There was some sort of ring thing that you would do overhead. Mm- there was a rope pull where you would pull, you'd climb a rope. There are two stories, almost the old gyms where they would have those, quite honestly. I'm not going to say that pulling yourself up on a rope is a mandatory thing, but that's a lot of upper-body strength. That's strong.
It’s ended in 2013. It was replaced by some with something else. I agree that it started off probably way harder, like everybody gets a trophy at this point. That's probably why it ended. I remember being a kid in gym class, and I am not a super athletic person. Back then, I couldn't even touch my toes. I can now because you have found out that you can improve your flexibility when you work on it. Nobody ever even explained that to me as a kid. When I played basketball, nobody said, “You could do these exercises and improve your vertical. No one told me that.” I just thought I didn't have a good vertical. I might be 6’2 foot, but I don't have a good vertical. Now I'm like, “I could have had. Nobody explained that to me as a kid.” I never knew when I did the sit and reach. Remember that?
I hated that thing.
I couldn't touch my toes worth crap, but I could do it now because I realized that you can improve upon flexibility and you can improve upon your fitness.
A lot of the rehab that I'm teaching patients now after they've been in care for a little bit is all about regaining basically flexibility in the legs and the hips. I was chatting with a patient who was having a lot of hamstring pain. Something was cramping up, and sure enough, she was out of adjustment. I'm showing her a hip hinge and saying, “Add some weight to this.”
It's the reverse deadlift form that I'm recommending. If you want to go find some reverse deadlift forms, I think Ethylene X did a wonderful video talking about it. All you're doing is you're trying to load up and stretch the hamstrings in the quads in this process. This was over in my Arthur office, which was a concrete slab that I'm standing on.
I'm always tight over there. I went to touch my toes as a demonstration. I could touch the floor. I was shocked because I had a workout that morning and everything else, but I'm constantly doing flexibility stuff. About five days a week, I'm good at that, and seven if I have the extra time. Some things you have to do daily to maintain and function the way you're supposed to, like the one young man who needs to take his medications.
His wife is certainly in the healthcare. I don't know if she was a full-on nurse or where she's at in that, but she's like, “Here's your meds and don't say no.” He's like, “I don't say no. I do my rehab at least five days a week.” Sometimes, I'm doing the rehab here in the office, showing people so that I can get my minutes in for the day.
You're not wrong. It's amazing. I will oftentimes show patients with their arms back. I call it the Angels because that's strengthening between the shoulder blades and turning some muscles on that get turned off when you're sitting on your butt in front of a computer screen all day. People don't realize that that's a trauma in itself. This is the first time I've sat. I sat for twenty minutes to eat lunch. This is the second time I've sat. I am blessed. I am so excited to stand all day and bend, twist, and move because the long run of my body is so good for me. I'm not complaining at all.
Whenever we're in seminars, when we're at the Blair conference, it kills me to sit that long. My body doesn't even understand what that is. I get all antsy. I don't know how people do it, but I do know that you can do things daily to help eliminate that stress on your body, which some of the rehab things you're talking about, Wall Angels, there's that thing called the Bruger Stretch. You guys can look at all that. You can comment or shoot us an email and I'll send you all the stretches that we do.
You can do things daily to help eliminate stress from your body.
The sitting is rough. It's a trauma in itself and it's like a repetitive trauma rather than like a car accident, which is an instant trauma. This is a repetitive trauma where you're doing the same thing over and over. If you grabbed your phone and you held it with your shoulder, don't do that. You could do it for like a minute or two. If you're doing it for a minute or two, let me tell you, every time you grab your phone you're doing it. How you do one thing is how you do everything.
Right before we started this, I watched a video, The Godfather Of Kettlebell Stuff, Pavel Tsatsouline, who has been doing some research. One of the things that they found that helps improve cardiac performance is doing effectively a bodyweight lunge uphill. You're not doing a full lunge as much as you are just taking long strides on a hill, climbing up the hill multiple times and apparently, that increases your cardiac output volume while you're doing it. That way, you've got a stronger, more robust heart down the line.
If you're sitting all the time, the heart will not have the demand on it. They're basically saying sitting is the new smoking. At least when people were smoking all the time, they were walking around. They were going outside. I had one buddy who said, “Let's go play some basketball. Hold on a second. I got to light up first.” He's playing basketball with a cigarette.
At least he's moving. He’s probably getting a little Vitamin D. You got the sun hit your face while you're smoking your cigarette.
John Daly does all the golfing with a cigarette and a whiskey and he just pummels everybody else.
My friend Ginger, who used to smoke, was talking about what she misses about smoking. One of them was getting up and getting outside once every hour or two. We should institute movement breaks or sunshine breaks where it might only be five minutes, but getting up from your desk and going outside for five minutes.
First of all, I think it'd make your brain better. Second of all, your body suffers in these positions in front of a computer screen all day. Especially now with people who are mostly still working from home, and I don't have a problem with it. I think it's amazing for lots of people, and it's a resurgence in small towns because you can live in a small town now, have an amazing job, and not have to leave your room.
You can also shop and keep these small towns going because I love small towns. One more thing is that the implementation of that is nothing you can't do by just setting a phone alarm. All you have to do is set an alarm for 90 minutes and it beeps at you. Once you're done with that email or meeting, the next thing you do is get up and walk away from your computer for five minutes.
I think they do this in either Japan or South Korea where they'll be sitting at a computer screen at their desk and all of a sudden, there's a mandatory it's going to shut off. There's nothing you can do for five minutes. You've got to get up 5, 10 minutes or whatever it is. Go for a walk before the computer will let you back in. It improves productivity. There's a whole Pomodoro theory that you take these frequent breaks every so many minutes of working. There's something to it. You get up, go for a walk and go do things. Don't go play on Instagram or TikTok.
Don't take your phone with you.
Don't just get away from things. This goes to the same patient I was talking about earlier, who has a heart condition. He has improved his mindfulness of being in the moment. The more that he is in the moment, the more calm he has been. He said it was a Sikh doctor, but I can't remember what the doctor said exactly was profound. It was about living in the moment and not living for the next moment.
I learned that lesson from when I was doing my kung fu. Shifu would count out in Chinese the next motion that we were going to do or the next rep. Not to anticipate the rep and just wait for the count and then go because that is being in the moment. Meditation for me was like that because I could sit for 20 minutes and sometimes I wanted to sit for 30, but if I had 20 minutes, I set the timer for 20 minutes, knowing that I could always go longer.
I can't go shorter because I've already allocated that time. I can relax and say, “I'm just going to be here. I'm going to try to calm my mind. I'm going to just be aware of what is going around in my breath,” and then that alarm will go off. I said, “I've got this 20 minutes, 10 or 15 or whatever I set the timer for to do nothing more than breathe.” That just helps clean up my head. I'm more aware. I'm more in the moment. I need to do it more. I don't do it as much as I'd like to.
That's the time management. I honestly have sucked at time management. In a good way, I'm busy. I love that I have patience and all the things, but being a business owner, a doctor, and a mentor, I told my team I apologized to them during the meeting. I was like, “I have not been a good leader.” They were all like, “You're fine.” They're all trying to be nice.
I was like, “I appreciate you guys, but I know I'm not living up to my potential.” One of the things I need to do is exactly what you talked about. I need to set aside time every day to breathe, meditate and pray. I need to set aside two hours a week to just do management, and that's just the business end of things. What's happening is I'm trying to do it in between things and I get called. My door is closed. It is a day when I'm not seeing patients or a time I'm not seeing patients. I need no one to bother me for an hour or two so I can get that stuff done because I have list after list of lists and it's like, “Oh my gosh.” I'm going to let you guys know the next episode because I'm going to be better about it. I'm going to do ten minutes because I think that's all my brain can take.
I've been bent over all day adjusting patients and I did get adjusted so everyone calmed down. I'll be fine. My body's working some stuff out. I am going to do a better job. I'm going to set ten-minute times where I breathe, pray, and take that time for myself. I might turn on music because I'm going to be honest, me being alone with my thoughts for ten minutes is scary to me at this point in time because I don't know where my brain's going to go.
That's half the fun of just being quiet and in the moment. You get to find out where your brain's going and you're like, “Come back over here, butterfly.”
I'm so distracted.
This is the biggest problem, and I think this is the bigger problem that we have as a society, is we have so many distractions and so many literal dopamine hits throughout our day. Honestly, I challenge everybody reading this to after you're done reading this, think about the last Instagram post you had from a friend. I've got about 3 or 5 friends who regularly send me posts. Some of them are political. Some of them are funny. Some of them stick with me, but not most of them.
Even when you're watching with something like that, it's minute, but can you be mindful of it to say, “This was worthwhile.” Some things are a funny joke. You need to learn how to tell that joke. Take a moment. No offense, Dr. Bagley, but I was learning blonde jokes because they're funny, and so are the brunette and the redhead ones and the bald ones because they're jokes.
This is fake, so it's okay.
I made it a point. My uncle gave me this sheet of jokes and I read through them multiple times and then I had to learn how to speak them because I was not a good speaker back in high school when he gave me this list of jokes. Even now, if I'm going to practice a speech, there's some stuff that I can do that is extemporaneous, like quite honestly having a conversation like this, but there's a lot of stuff you have to practice.
If you see something good on Instagram, especially something that is uplifting, take a moment and repeat it a couple of times. My favorite, I can't quote it word for word, but the man in the arena comes to mind regularly. That was a Theodore Roosevelt speech. I don't know if that was the speech that he gave as he was bleeding after having been shot by somebody.
That's a great story.
That's for a different episode. It's fun stuff. I challenge people to be more in the moment. Be aware of your surroundings and get your head on straight.
I'm going to do it right now, and I challenge everyone reading to do the same thing. Pick a time on your phone to set a timer that says breathe, pray or meditate. Set a timer and make it go off every day, like 8:00 PM or whatever time that you're done eating and the kids are done. All the things are out of you. You might be sitting there going through Instagram or doing something. When that goes off, you're like, “I’m turning this off. Now is my time to pray.” Whatever you want to do, I'm going to pray. Thank you. I'm going to do that right now.
This is a perfect time to do it as we wrap up and nobody's expecting you at home for a little bit yet.
I'll do that before we leave. My alarm is going to go off at 9:15. That's going to be my time. What a great episode. We were like, “Let's talk about this.” I was like, “Let's just chat because we have good chats,” and you guys don't always get to read them. Now you got to read it and you got to read about some cool new patients. I can't wait to keep you updated with a few of these guys. I'm excited to get some updates about how your new patients are doing.
I need one update from you. How are you doing with the boron?
What boron? I don't have it. I didn't buy it yet because I'm afraid.
Get it. Break down. Don’t let me buy it for you.
I like it when you buy me stuff, but what should I buy again?
Get a pharmaceutical-grade boron.
I'll order it tonight because I want Jason to start taking it, too. Thanks for asking.
We even keep ourselves accountable on the show.
You all do, too.
Now that we've got that taken care of, where are they going to find you?
You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/, TikTok at @DrBethBagley, Instagram and Facebook.
I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com, Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois. @KeystoneChiro on Instagram. Send me funny stuff if you find me on there. Thanks for joining us for another episode. We'll be back with our 50th episode. Bye.