Have you ever felt numbness in certain areas? Like when you are shampooing your hair and all of a sudden, your arm goes numb? If you have experienced this, then you might find this episode extra insightful. Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger discuss the complexities of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS), examining the various impacts it can have on your arm, hands, and even back to the head and neck. This boring-sounding diagnosis may be one of the most underappreciated issues of not only neck issues, but also postural issues. They also touch on how being a small business owner without a lot of administrative input helps us save you money on your healthcare needs. Tune in now!
---
Dr. Bagley, how are you doing?
I'm doing fabulous. How are you doing?
I am doing excellent. Folks, welcome to the show. We're getting back to it.
We're talking about feet. We talked about that. We don't go into feet on this show. This is not the Feet Show. That's a whole different channel.
Except everyone who knows me knows that I'd rather not wear shoes because then I have to show you how to do half of the exercises and therapies that I want you to do on your own. I’ve got to take my shoes off to do it anyway, so it's easier.
If you do go see Dr. Schurger and he doesn't have shoes on, yes, he's weird, but he's also doing it for a good reason.
There's a practical purpose to it. In my personal opinion, it helps me with my adjustments. You also won't see Dr. Bagley in a pair of heels.
Never, ever. Not one time.
She does not need them.
I don't. Even if I did want to wear them, I wouldn't either because it would destroy my adjustment in my back. I don't think they're good for us.
Let's talk about stuff and things going on. We have a couple of things we want to cover. Where do you want to start?
Honestly, I love that topic of TOS. TOS is Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. I think we should start off by talking to the readers about what it is, like what Thoracic Outlet Syndrome is. Thoracic means the thorax. Outlet is something coming out and syndrome is something's wrong. They're talking about the area right here in the lower part of the neck where the scalings and the first rib live. There's a lot of people who will start having what we call brachial plexus issues, which is areas coming down the arm. They can get numbness. They can get tingling. They can get weak. If they put their arm up, if they're shampooing their hair, all of a sudden, their arm goes numb or dead.
They can't even get their hands up to shampoo their hair.
That can lead to frozen shoulder and all sorts of things. This diagnosis of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, it covers all of it. Honestly, I think it might be over-diagnosed. What do you think?
I would probably even think it's underdiagnosed because there are multiple components to this going on. We have nerves coming out at the neck, going behind the collarbone. It's called the clavicle, but most people call it the collarbone, how that drops down and behind before it gets into the arm itself. You certainly have the nerves involved with that. You have the arteries and the veins. In fact, I'm seeing in some of the research that I'm reading that they're actually starting to break out the components of TOS into the nervous component, the arterial component and the venous component.
Depending upon what is going on and what you were experiencing, they're all going to call it TOS at the end of the day because I don't think the diagnosis codes have changed that much. Sometimes, you need to identify this is more of a neurological issue. Is it a circulation issue, either coming or going? The next question is where the problem is. You commented before we started that many carpal tunnel problems are not carpal tunnel problems. They're actually TOS problems. You've seen that. Go ahead and talk about that.
I have actually had quite a few patients come in with what we call radiculopathy. They were diagnosed with carpal tunnel. They got bilateral cuts on their arms and they still have the same problem. Those people, I believe, were misdiagnosed or diagnosed with carpal tunnel, but they also had what we call double crush.
It could be an aspect of thoracic outlet syndrome, but it also could be the outlet of the neck syndrome. If we're coming from the like C4, C5, and C6 areas and if there are misalignments, impingements happening in the neck and the symptoms might be in your hand or arm, but if we don't look all the way up to where it starts from, we're missing a whole big problem.
It could be any joint from the wrist all the way up to the neck or any combination of those. It might not be even one area that is more problematic than another. When we start saying, “Where's the problem?” Sometimes, you have to look at the entire path to figure out where it is. Back in my engineering days, it was not uncommon for us to see a problem on one part of the line that was operating exactly as it was supposed to, but yet something upstream or even downstream, oddly enough, was causing trouble that was causing that one spot to have a little bit of a hiccup.
As it were, the signal or the oscillation frequency of how that part was supposed to work wasn't working in sync with everything else before behind. It's always interesting to take that thought and say, “Is there something else that is involved here that can solve the problem before we need surgery?” Surgery is expensive. It's permanent and it may not solve the problem if it is not where the problem is.
I'm not saying carpal tunnel surgery doesn't work. It absolutely does work for some people if that is the problem. My opinion is we always start with the least invasive procedure first. Maybe it's icing. Maybe that's the first thing you do, or stretching. It should start with that and maybe a low-inflammatory diet and going to chiropractic because we need to check to see what's happening. If there's a problem in the neck or shoulder problem, we pretty much can figure that out.
If none of those things work, and it might be months, it might be 4 or 5 months later that you realize, “None of these things work,” then we go to surgery. If I was having that issue, I would never start with surgery. That would be the end thing. I hope to never have to have something like that. Honestly, I don't think I will because I know the things to do to stop things like carpal tunnel from getting worse or even occurring in the first place. If I know how to do it, then you know how to. All patients can benefit from this.
I'm going to go down a quick list of symptoms that are pretty common with thoracic outlet. We have some paresthesia, like numbness or tingling. All five fingers, fourth and fifth fingers, first and third fingers. You can have a combination or you can have either all 5 or the thumb and the first 2 or the last 2 because they're broken up depending on how the nerves go out. That's a longer dissection, literally, of the brachial plexus.
You're typically going to have the last two fingers having problems. You can have pain across the shoulders, which would be the trapezius supraclavicular pain, which is, again, pain over that collarbone, chest pain, and shoulder and arm pain. Occipital headaches can actually go back because there's a lot of stuff that comes from the shoulder blade back up into the skull as far as attachment points.
Upper extremity pain, upper arm pain, everything gets worse when you raise your arms overhead. This could add to your overhead work if you're doing a lot of overhead work. Basically, pain around that shoulder and rotator cuff area. All of that might have some problems. These pieces might not come together easily, but you start seeing them and you're like, “All of that is related.” There are a number of different things that can be causing problems.
In fact, one thing that's probably missed because these scaling muscles, these are muscles that sit on the front of the neck, the phrenic nerve comes through this as well. That might cause some problems with your breathing. You might feel like you're short of breath because that's the area where these handful of muscles come together. That phrenic nerve drops right through that. It can be pinched.
When people have a phrenic nerve problem, which is C3, C4 or C5, they also can have an increase in anxiety. The reason is that if you can't feel like you breathe, what does that already feel like? That feels like an anxiety attack. If you're even at all prone to anxiety, then this cycle starts stirring. It might be a physical problem that's happening to you, even though if you went to the medical doctor, what would they throw at you?
If you can't feel like you breathe, what that already feels like is an anxiety attack.
There's a pill for your anxiety.
“Here's a pill. Here's an anxiety pill. Here's some Xanax.”
One of the things we should also point out, as we've talked about, is that those lower cervicals, especially C3, we joke about it being the mood bone. Anxiety might be the mood, but it also might be anger.
We renamed it.
Tell me, what did you rename C3?
C1 has that name, Atlas. C2 has a name, Axis. I also call him the dizzy bone because I do think it correlates to dizziness with some of my patients. C3 is called Moody Bob because it was a patient, Bob, who had his C3 out and we were talking about being the mood bone. He goes, “What's the name of C3?” We're like, “It's Moody Bob.”
That's how things get named.
Everybody now knows C3 is Moody Bob.
Those are some of the big ones that always stand out. Where is the problem? Everyone wants to say, “You're only going to have a thoracic outlet right there at the neck.” One of the things that I think people miss, and you might not even notice that you have a low-level thoracic outlet problem until it's been there for a very long time, is when you lose your posture and everything cramps down behind that clavicle. It's having pressure on all of those structures on that brachial plexus, the artery and the vein coming back.
If we lose our posture, we're going to have more problems with our arms in general. What's always curious when they start looking at longevity factors, I haven't seen a good longevity factor that looks at posture. I haven't seen that. I'm not saying it's not out there, but they always look at and say, “People who have better grip strength have better longevity.” Do you get your grip strength thing out and you train that or start saying, “That means I'm going to be strong all the way through.” The latter is probably more the truth of the factor. How much of that is going to be better when you have better posture?
I think that's something that people should be thinking about. If they get diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome and they don't know what the answers are, definitely start with chiropractic. Quite honestly, I felt like I was poorly taught this in school. I think it's probably one of the most interesting and relevant diagnoses that chiropractors, in general, not just upper cervical folks, should be addressing because there's so much that it tells us about what's going on in the neck and the shoulders. How do we start turning that around for an individual so that they can start doing better?
What I would find interesting if I was reading right now is somebody's reading saying, “I have bad posture.” Obviously, our first thing is going to be to get to a chiropractor and get adjusted because that's going to be the number one thing that you can do for posture. If your head's on straight, posture is so much easier. Staying in good posture is night and day difference. You can get in good posture.
However, there are still some things that you can do to help posture. One of the things that I have my patients do is called the Brugger Relief Position. That's when you stand up with your feet shoulder-width apart. I always say put your thumbs up to your sides and back so you're going to turn your hands backward so that you're putting your shoulders back and pinching between your shoulder blades with your arms out.
You hold that while breathing. I try to get people to deep belly breathe at that point, if you can learn to do that. It is a skill. Hold that for about 30 seconds. What you're doing is you're stretching your pec muscles, which get tight when we're sitting in front of a computer. You're activating many of your back muscles at the same time. It's a stretch and an exercise at the same time because we're stretching and exercising, turning on things that are turned off, turning off things that have been tight and all pinched up all day.
That's something that I have my patients do multiple times a day if they're in or posture positions like desk work or if they're hairdressers, dental hygienists, or dentists between patients. Honestly, we do that a lot between patients here in the office, too. That's one of the ways that we can put a stretch and exercise in our daily life, and honestly, it helped me get through school because school posture was awful.
I have no doubt about that. It's probably not the way you teach it, but the problem that people will have hearing is, “That means I need to pull my shoulders back without changing how my neck and my upper body are.” What you're describing is not that. A lot of people hear that. There's something different. You're not pulling your shoulders back, but you're lifting your chest up by doing that.
Doing posture positions, you're not just pulling your shoulders back, you're also lifting your chest up.
There are many exercises that can be done and you can hold your breath through the whole thing, but you're not doing them right if you can't breathe through them because you'll have other muscles that need to relax that need to compensate. As you said, getting that upper chest open and stretched can oftentimes be a problem. I’ve been having people lay on a foam roller on their back. So perpendicular to their spine and lay on it. Foam rollers are not just for rolling. They are literally a place to lay on to give you a fulcrum point.
You're saying it like lying it along the spine?
No. Perpendicular.
Across the shoulders?
I would actually bring it down a little bit. What I'm trying to do is bring the middle of the thoracic straighter. I'm trying to get extension. You naturally have a kyphotic curve going forward in the thoracic spine. Basically, it's a forward-moving curve towards your organs. What I'm trying to do is reintroduce a stretch so that you can get into extension. You're never going to reverse it so that it's going in the opposite direction.
The cervical curve can reverse. That's bad. What we're trying to do with the thoracics is stretch it so that you can get into better extension, which will help open up your spine, open up the rib cage, and prevent that from rolling forward. It also will work against Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. I like the idea that you can find a foam roller pretty much anywhere. You can walk into Walmart, Meyer, or any place on the planet and you're going to find a foam roller in the sporting goods area.
What we're trying to do with the thoracic is stretch it so that you can get into better extension, which will help open up your spine and rib cage and prevent thoracic outlet syndrome.
I think that is too thick for the average person to start with. I’ve been buying three-inch PVC pipes, cutting them up and prepping them for patients. Even a one-inch pipe, for some people who have what they call a kyphotic or you're rolled forward, maybe you have the dreaded dowager’s hump and you're trying to figure out how to undo that laying on even a one-inch pipe or even laying flat on the ground.
It might be a lot for someone who has a hump.
You need to work on this slowly, and maybe you're used to having two pillows under your neck. Go down to one pillow. Work yourself so that you can lay flat without that problem. The deep breathing is huge for that. That's where I would start with most people. It's a pain. I'm not going to say that it's not, but if you got yourself in that situation, I'm offering ways to get out of it without drugs and surgery.
When we start talking about surgery related to Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, it is very poorly managed. This one study I'm looking at here basically says improvement fails to occur with severe ongoing burdens for patients. You might get temporary relief with the surgery, but it's not going to be long-lasting.
I actually have a patient. He doesn't come in very often anymore because he does so well. He had surgery to resect a rib for thoracic outlets. This was before he became a patient of mine. I can't tell you one way or another if this would've helped him before, but when he did come in, he was having the Thoracic Outlet Syndrome symptoms again, even after the surgery. When we got his head on straight, it stopped.
That's great.
It's pretty amazing. He could have actually had some pretty severe Thoracic Outlet Syndrome and maybe it wouldn't have stopped if he hadn't had that. There can be something going on in more than one place. I love that we get to do something so minimally invasive yet so effective every day.
One of the best parts about what we do is we get to be our own bosses first. Quite honestly, we're able to offer a service that, as one of my patients said, was so great to be able to help so many people, and yet we're able to offer this service that helps people get better at a fraction of the cost of what a lot of healthcare is out there.
One of my patients was getting a dental implant for a tooth that they had to have removed. We need to charge more. I’m not going to. I want this to be affordable for more people. Once I see the prices, they're paying for one thing, one tooth that there's no nerves going to that tooth. You can see it. I get why people don't want to pull in their smile, but one dental implant costs $5,000 to $6,000, and that's a few years of upper cervical care, if not more.
The work we do, as with the Atlas, the upper cervical is a premium service. I'm not going to pretend it's not. Compared to some of the chiropractors, places like the joint, people will pay more here than they will there. The question I have is, certainly, the dental surgeons have a higher liability insurance to be able to do that. They're working for themselves. I heard one doctor say that opening up a dental office costs roughly $500,000 to $1 million.
Equipment and build out all the things. We do have our CBCT, they also have CBCTs, but they also have much more equipment.
Much more overhead. I saw this stat here. I was scrolling through Instagram here earlier and this picture came up when looking at administrative costs and administrators versus physician growth.
We're thinking probably more hospital-based right now.
From 1970 to 2009, the projections of administrative growth have been just as bad. It has been astronomical for people who are not caring for patients or not seeing patients. When you consider the cost of a physician, you might have a few administrators who are making the same amount as a physician. When you have this many administrators doing all the extra stuff. Administrators are not nursing staff. It is not the people who are doing the healthcare work. You have people literally doing paperwork here in this case. It is no surprise that healthcare has gotten so crazy.
We were actually talking before we started. I don't think physicians should be paid any less. The money they make is well worth it. Honestly, maybe they should be paid a little bit more, if anything.
$443,000 a year for an orthopedic surgeon. I think that's fair.
It's fair, if not low, in general, when they're standing for surgery for 6, 8 hours at a time or more.
Cardiologists sometimes do 12 to 16 hours. Some of the surgeries they're doing are crazy expensive and crazy intense.
The thing about it is that they are making a good living and deserve a good living for that. Healthcare costs are still outrageous. It's not because the nurses and the doctors are making more money. It's not them. It's all of the extra stuff. It's that a Tylenol costs $700, and that's all mostly because of the insurance cabal that has sprung up. We've talked about insurance companies before. I was on a Facebook group. I do consider Medicare an insurance even though it is socialized medicine. Inflation has gone up 10%, 15% in the last few years. It's quite a bit, yet reimbursement for chiropractors has gone down a few dollars for adjustment fees. It doesn't make sense. I don't take insurance. You take a little bit of insurance.
Healthcare costs are still outrageous.
No, we just do Medicare at this point.
We have to do Medicare. As chiropractors, we have to do Medicare.
It’s Federal law.
I’ll follow the law. Even if I think it's not right, I will still follow it. Reimbursements for chiropractors, in general, have gone down, and I believe reimbursements for medical doctors have gone down somewhat, too. Things cost more, so where's the money going? Administration costs and insurance companies are making billions of dollars because they are not non-profit. They are for-profit and they have shareholders. When there are billions of dollars of profit, we should all invest in insurance companies. I'm not going to because I don't want to.
I hate to say it, but it makes good sense. It's a good place to put your money. The bigger thing is we, as small business owners, love our job. If we didn't, we would be back in the corporate world where we both came from. What does it take to be a small business owner? It takes a lot of work. I was listening to one of my podcasts and he was discussing how do you become more prolific at what you do. It's like, “If I had the money, I'd be able to do this.”
Maybe, but if you also had the drive to get the degree to work with somebody to make the money to understand and have a business plan, even if you do that on a shoestring budget, you will get further than waiting for someone to show up and give you the handout that says, “Here it is. Here's the magic loan that you wanted. Here's a grant. No, you got to start doing it and doing the work. The sooner you do the work, the faster you'll get to that point.”
I wholeheartedly think you're correct. If you sit around and wait for the perfect time, place, or anything, you're not going to find it. If you want to start a business, jump in and do it. You're going to make mistakes and those mistakes are going to be expensive. That's the risk, but the rewards are great. If you have a passion for what you do, which both of us do, you will be successful. There's good days and bad days. The good, the bad and the ugly. The good is I'm on my own boss. The bad is if I want to take a vacation, I'm my own boss.
If you have a passion for what you do, you will be successful.
Currently, I do have an associate, Dr. Ladd, who is licensed in the state of Missouri. If I want to take a vacation right now, she could tend to my patients. I don't want to take a vacation right now, but if I did want to, I could. Right now, you don't have an associate, so nobody sees your patients if you took a vacation or a week off. Do you still have to pay rent?
I still have to pay rent.
All of the things. Not only does a small business owner who's a solo practitioner have to take time off not seeing patients, so you're not bringing any income in that week or two weeks or whatever you want to do, but you have to pay all the bills. If you have employees, you still have to pay them. You have to pay for your actual vacation. You get double hit.
Some people call that the golden handcuffs. Yes, you have this beautiful life that you've built. You've helped so many people, but you're handcuffed to your practice or to your business. You could be a plumber, it’s the same exact thing. Hairstylists, same exact thing. That's the service industry. You don't make money unless you are doing what you do.
I think the good, though, is that when you're passionate about what you do, you want to mentor other people to do it. That's one thing I know you've done in the past and I'm currently doing, and I love that. I love teaching either chiropractic intern fledgling chiropractors or new doctors how to run a business, talk to a new patient, or be a doctor. You've learned a lot of that in school, but you don't learn a lot of that in school. You learn how to pass your boards in school.
Unfortunately, that is definitely the case.
I think the good is that I get to choose who I work with. I get to choose who I employ and I get to make my team happen. If my team is not good, I get to change that myself. I always look back at myself as if I have something going wrong, it's me. We were singing this song by Taylor Swift, “It's me. I'm the problem. It's me.” If you're a good leader in your organization, when there is a problem, you first want to look back.
If that's me in the mirror, I could have made a poor hire. It could be that I didn't train this person effectively. It could be that I didn't make myself clear. I'm taking responsibility for any of those things because the buck stops here. If you were starting a new practice now, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently that you didn't do in the beginning?
If you're a good leader in your organization, when there is a problem, the first thing you want to do is look back at yourself in the mirror.
I'd probably change up the layout of my office. I tried to keep my build simple when I moved into this location. What was nice about it was that it had the rooms laid out the way I wanted them to be. I needed a wall put up. I needed a couple of walls, I needed another wall opened up. I made sure that the changes weren't over the top.
Looking back, if somebody's reading that and saying, “I'm starting an office or I'm starting a business,” what would you tell them? You learn a lot of that stuff by doing.
One of the things that I would've done differently, for me, especially coming from the corporate world, you live in a corporate world as an engineer especially, you're like, “The big pie in the sky goal is to get that corner office with the great view.” I’ve got a corner office with a great view.
You do have a great view. You got windows that are wonderful.
It's pretty back there. I’ve had ducks outside the one window on and off for several years. Some days, they come back and they haven't been there in a couple of years. The room for what I need for an adjusting area is too big. I utilize all the space because I have the space, I'm going to utilize it. I would recommend to any new doc starting off, find people who know how to do patient flow, which basically aspires to how long it takes a patient to get into your room and then get out. We're in the middle of winter and everyone's got their coats in their jackets and brings their coats in their jackets and stuff. It does take time.
One of the things that I would do differently, and I have it now, but I have two adjusting rooms. For the longest time, I only had the one adjusting room and the other room was a consult room. That's all it was. It didn't have anything else. I got rid of my consult room and combined my consult space with my imaging space, which is a little crowded with both X-ray systems in there. I’ve changed the spaces up. I’ve changed how I do my process.
I would definitely start with at least two adjusting rooms. I would have a third space, maybe even a fourth space, set up for other professionals. Maybe both those spaces could be occupied by a massage therapist or one massage therapist and another one being someone who does functional nutrition. Give them a space where they can do their work. They’re third-party independent contractors that pay rent.
I think if I were thinking about my office again, this would be my second location. I did get to do it once already. A few things I would choose about location is I would not be near restaurants ever again.
It smells so good, except for when they smoke.
I guess the restaurant next door had a grease fire or something. For a whole week, we had the smell of burnt food in the office. Don't be near restaurants. I didn't consider that. I did, but I was like, “I like this location,” and I made all the excuses. I would never do that again. Also, I'm a big fan of open adjusting areas. Go to some offices and look at the spaces and what they're doing. Do you like the vibe of an open adjusting area? I love it.
I’ve got specific rooms. If I had a space that was conducive to open adjusting, I would still have a barrier between the two tables I'd have. I could go back and forth with the next person. My problem with the open adjusting is when you've got somebody who wants to talk and you need to get to the next patient, you are done with them in the room, they're going to the resting room, or they're going to the front desk to check out or they've already been checked out. You're already going to the next patient to take care of that next patient. I love chatting with my patients. Some days, I have time and some days, I don't.
You never want to make someone feel like you don't care when you do. Sometimes, we have to move along.
Sometimes, you have to tell somebody. It's like, “I have to get to here. I have to get there. I’d love to chat another time. We'll pick up on this.”
If it's something that is clinically valuable, but you don't have time, just say, “I want to set the site. I do not want to rush this conversation. Let's go up front and set up a time for a consultation. I won't charge you extra for it so we can sit down and have that conversation,” and then finding a time that works. First of all, they'll feel good about it.
I think another thing I would do if I were starting my business over is when I'm ramping up, like I'm a brand-new chiropractor and I'm ramping up with new patients, I would, as quickly as possible, as quickly as I could afford it, and if I had taken out a loan, I might do it right away, is hire an assistant. Not even a front desk assistant yet because I wouldn't have enough patients for that yet. I would hire an assistant to help with marketing because it's a hard position to hire for. When you find the right person, it is amazing. Once you are busy with patients, you don't have time for marketing anymore. You have a minuscule amount.
Once you are busy with patients, you won’t have time for marketing.
I'm looking at my marketing schedule right now. Just to have the bandwidth in my brain to focus on that is very difficult.
Trying to switch it back and forth because the clinical and business brains are separate. The business brain works well with the marketing brain. That's part of the business brain. When you're in clinical brain, you don't want to turn it off because you're in the middle of seeing patients. You need that part of your brain turned on. I have to have separate times scheduled for my business brain. Sometimes, it works because I get pulled in seven directions in a day. If you're starting off, schedule your marketing and business time and make that no patient time. Later on, when you have to fill that in with patient care hours, you can hire someone to continue that and your marketing won't fall off.
For the patients who are reading this, they're like, “Doc, this is boring. We don't want to read this,” this is why we're not available sometimes because we actually have to get work done that doesn't involve patients.
That's not fun. Patient care is fun for us. I would rather do it all day long.
Five or six days a week. I’ll come in on Sundays for you. People know this for a fact, but I have to do this other stuff sometimes.
People will look at our schedule and they'll say, “You don't work that much.” Erin says the perfect thing. Erin is our front desk, super CA, super chiropractic assistant. She's amazing. She says, “That's the time the doctor sees patients, but we are in the office a lot more than that.” It's so true. We are having meetings. On Thursdays, I'm here from sun up to way past sundown. That is my choice. I love it. I don't want to change it, but I am not seeing patients the whole time.
One of the other things is if you're reading this and you're a student chiropractor, and you are like, “I want to start my own business, but I'm not ready,” that's where associates come into play. You can do all the things you love to do and let someone else take care of the business stuff because I'm good at it and enjoy it, but not as much as patient care.
I’ve got all the systems set up. I’ve got everything. I just need associates to come in and plug into the system. When they're plugged into the system, you get to grow. You get to make money. You get to see people. You get to change lives and you don't have to do all the gross stuff that we have to do, like payroll taxes.
My wife Jean handed me the quarterly payroll thing to sign. I'm like, “All right, here it is.”
Fortunately, I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. One of the things I'm not good at is bookkeeping. I do hire a bookkeeper to do that for me.
That makes good sense. We've got an accountant who takes a look at everything at the end of the quarter to make sure everything's where it should be. We've paid the tax man when they’re due.
It's all part of business. I do think that a good point is why you aren't open 40 hours a week. We work 40 hours a week. We're just not open 40 hours a week.
Don't tell them we work 40 hours a week. It's 60. It's easy.
In the beginning, it was. I can honestly say I don't work 60 hours a week anymore.
It's a little bit less.
I definitely put in 40 hours a week.
There are plenty of weeks where it's 60 or 80 and it's like, “I got to keep on going and plug and plug.” No, there are only so many hours in the day and we've got to utilize those hours to be as effective business entrepreneurs as we can be. We're making good money so that way we can continue being here.
We’ve got to keep the lights on.
Quite honestly, there is satisfaction in doing this work, but at the end of the day, satisfaction does not pay the bills. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the capitalist society. I'm okay with that. The point is if it wasn't satisfying and we didn't make some money at it, we couldn't do it. That's not practical. Your husband, Jason, would love to paint miniature figurines all day long. That is satisfying for him. I know that for a fact.
He'd like to play the games.
He likes to play the games. I don't think he's got the time to do that, either.
He does sometimes. He'd love to do that, but that doesn't pay the bills.
No, it doesn't, unfortunately.
The last thing I wanted to say about the difference, that chart you put up, was the administration costs. Even years ago, when we started practicing, there were still some medical doctors who existed outside of medical conglomerates. There were some that saw patients out of a little office like we have. I don't think I see those much anymore, except for what we call boutique practices.
I think they're coming back.
Why boutique practices work, which is what you do is a lot of them, you pay a yearly fee. They have a cap of how many patients they have on their yearly fee. They might only see 200 or 300 patients in their practice, and everybody pays $2,000 or whatever it ends up being. Guess what happens? They have cut out the administrative fees because they're not working with insurance companies.
I think we can consider our chiropractic offices to be boutique practices as we have also cut out insurance in general. I give people super bills, allowing them to turn stuff into their insurance company and get reimbursement, but I don't have a full-time insurance biller in the back. I don't have the administrative costs.
People are like, “Why don't you take insurance?” I'm like, “It’s because it's a racket,” but I don't usually don't say it like that. They don't allow us to treat our patients like they deserve to be treated. They might say, “You get six visits and if they're not better by then, you don't get any more.” I'm like, “I'm not going to play that game. You're going to get what you need and I'm going to tell you exactly what you need and I'm going to tell you what's working and what's not working.”
I’ll use a great example. I’ve got two couples coming in, and both are seeing great results. The one, they were both holding, and she needed to be adjusted more than her husband. Her husband's doing pretty good. He started about a week later than her. He would have a couple more visits at twice a week. He's doing so good. I don't need to see him twice a week. They're driving far enough. They can come in once a week. It helps them out. Quite honestly, it works out for where they're at. This other couple, the husband started about a week or two later. He's also doing good. He had one more twice a week scheduled.
He's doing great. He's going to come in. We don't need to do twice a week for him and yet she might need a few extra visits. It works out. Why? As she put it, she's got that little bit of a tomboy in her, I would say. She played with the boys and was warned that she shouldn't roughhouse with them the way that they were roughhousing. She decided to do it anyway.
As a result, she's like, “Why am I not holding?” It's like, “Here's why. By your nature, you’re not as strong as the boys. Sure enough, you might need a little bit more care.” We compared it to one of their friends who referred them in and how bad she was for 3 or 4 months before she started turning a corner. Your care needs to be met where you are, not where some bureaucrat has never seen you.
I don't care if they've got an MD behind their name or an RN and that they said, “This is what the plan says.” They are not treating you. They're not taking care of you. They have never sat down with you to understand your condition to do what you're supposed to do. This is why we see administrative costs skyrocketing. You have administrators who, on behalf of the doctors, are trying to get some of this insurance through. There is that aspect.
This is why we see administrative costs skyrocketing because you have administrators who are trying to, on behalf of the doctors, get some of this insurance through.
The insurance companies are trying not to pay you or pay the doctors. It's a fight.
This is why we don't play in that game because Illinois had decent insurance until about 2010 or 2011. We billed insurance until then. Quite honestly, all of a sudden, it all dried up. I looked at how much it cost a patient to come to see me for the initial round of care versus how much their out-of-pocket was to see me. Someone who had insurance versus someone who didn't have insurance. The cost difference was $100. What benefit were we getting for doing all that insurance billing? I don't know because it was a lot of stress. People who bill insurance burn out of that job very fast.
It's awful. Sometimes, you're fighting for pennies. It's ridiculous. It’s not worth it. Our healthcare system is broken. We've talked about it before. We're not going to solve it in this episode. I can tell you that when a doctor, chiropractor, medical doctor or dentist tells you that it's going to cost so much, realize there are other things built into that. Most of us aren't trying to gouge you. There might be some. I can tell you, I'm not trying to gouge you. We try to keep it fair and reasonable so that anyone can afford this.
Sometimes, you have to make some sacrifices. Maybe you're not going out to eat as much or there are some things that you might have to change to get through it, but it's worth it. Honestly, after you've finished the initial phase of care, it's so much easier. You might only be coming in once a month just to get checked. The hardest part is the beginning. Is there anything else you wanted to add to this episode?
I think that is the extent of it. I’ve talked about some of the wins that we've had. The patient, who is going to borrow some of her husband's extra visits, needed to get adjusted extras. She was the one that had the Clydesdale clamping down on her shoulder. Not even there. Not even a pony. She's making progress. It's taking time.
It does. Some people take longer than others. That's okay. Don't give up hope. It is going to help. If the doctor has found a misalignment and we're at least somewhat decent at fixing it, this is incredible work that we can do. Where can they find you, doctor?
I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com. Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois. Find me on all the Google and all the socials. I'm out there somewhere.
Find me on all things. My web address is precisionchiropracticstl.com/. I am in the Western part of St. Louis County. You can find me on TikTok. I'm going to give my TikTok. @Dr.BethBagley on TikTok because I'm going to try to post more on TikTok. I'm going to do it.
We'll see what happens, but we're not going to get the heat button from them. I'm almost confident. They're like, “Chiropractic? That's not acupuncture.”
You have a good night, sir.
You, too. Folks, we'll see you. We'll be back.
I’ll be here.
Health isn't just about what you take; it's about what you surround yourself with. In this episode, Dr. Bagley and Dr. Schurger discuss the hidden truths behind over-the-counter medications in the second part of their discussion. They talk about the history of medicine, exploring how aspirin's dominance declined and the interesting shift towards the use of Tylenol. But that's just the beginning. Throughout the episode, they shed light on chiropractic care, the real effects of aspirin, the sustenance of holistic health, and so much more. Don’t miss out on this value-packed episode. Tune in now and learn how to live a healthier, more vibrant life.
---
Dr. Bagley, how are you?
I'm well. It's been a great week. It has been a little slow because deer season is about to start here in Missouri. Is that in Illinois?
It's been deer season. Rifle season starts. It's slow because of the silly daylight savings time and nobody knows what time it is.
It’s dark and sad.
Here's mine with daylight savings time. First, we changed the time and I got an extra hour of sleep. I'm like, “I didn't get to bed until midnight. I was out with friends on Saturday night. We didn't get out of Fogo until about 11:30 midnight almost.”
That's way past my bedtime.
I started eating dinner way past my bedtime and then got a nice extra hour of sleep. I was in a hotel room. I was able to ease into my workout and get prepped. Monday morning comes along and what happens? I woke up at 3:30. Not 4:30, which would have been 5:30 before. I wake up at 3:30. My brain says, “No, this is definitely not the right time to get up. Go back to sleep.” I go back to sleep for three hours, sleeping through both of the alarms that I have.” I'm finally getting out of bed a little bit after 7:00.
What time do you start seeing patients on Monday mornings?
9:00.
That was getting started pushing it because it is your morning routine.
My morning routine is not happening. It becomes, “Get my coffee and try to resemble being a human. It wasn't bad on Monday. On Tuesday, I do the same thing. On Wednesday, it's still that way.” For this Indiana boy, it takes two weeks to get reset after the silly time change. I don't care which side it is on.
We've talked about in the previous episode how the time change will cause people to have heart attacks. One of the subjects we're going to talk about is a medication that is a lot of times given to people to prevent that, how that works and what they talk about now. There's no research on it. I have a win from one of my patients. We've talked about her before. This person has pots that she passes out when she changes position.
She's been doing fabulous. She’s doing more things around the house. She’s good, but then she had a real bad fall and knocked her way out of alignment. It was quite a dip in the progress she had made. She came in. She was holding her adjustment and amazingly, how fast she's recovered. That's one of the things I want to put out there.
When you've been under upper cervical care for a long time and you do have a setback and injury or something happens to you, it's not the end of the world because your body is in such a better state to heal from that injury or that stressful event in your life where that could have set her back quite a bit or kept her bed-bound in the past. I'm very excited for her. That's Dr. Lad's patient. She is graduating in December 2023.
She's doing great things already. An interesting thought that came to me as you were saying that. When you've been under care and you have a set, what would traditionally be a setback. You recover and maybe you don't go back as far. I've had patients say that they feel like they had a set fall or something to that effect. They're like, “It feels as bad as when I first came in.” I tell them right off the bat, “No. First off, definitely not, because you're not going to fall back that far unless you take off months to years.”
The other thought that sat with that was if you're taking medicine for the symptoms and trying to manage the symptoms with some medication when you have a fall like that, it doesn't just like, “I need more of the med.” You're probably taking as much of the measure you can tolerate, to begin with. The med is managing the symptoms as opposed to getting your body to function and heal better.
if you have a fall like that, it is not a, “It'll be better here in a couple of days.” No, it might be a significant setback that might take you months to recover from where you were. That is one of the big differences. A lot of people, in fact, the medication we're going to talk about takes care of pain as fast, if not faster, than a lot of chiropractic adjustments as they've compared. What is the long-term benefit of one versus the other? In any case, speaking of a similar situation, I have one of my patients. She was in the Army. She had a medical discharge due to rocking and they overloaded her pack or something like that.
What is rocking?
In the military sense, they basically have to carry all of their gear. You're carrying 80 to 100 pounds for a 20-mile walk. It makes sense in the military. You're training your infantry to be able to carry the gear that they need to survive from one spot to another.
I chose to be with my trainer. My trainer had me and my girls, because I trained with my twin, carry weight for 1 mile. I carried quite a bit of weight because I was like, “I'm strong. I can do it.” At first, you're like, “This is fine.”
How much weight?
It was a 40-pound sandbag. It was a front carry. We relied to drop it when we needed to drop it. I did drop it quite a bit. That was the hardest workout I've ever done. Many times, I thought, “I'll drive my car back here and I'll pick this weight up. I will come and get it for you.” She was there saying, “You can do this. Take it back up. Get to the stop sign. Get to the next stop.” You know that place. I should have probably picked a lighter weight. I'll be honest, that was my ego, but I still did it. I was proud of myself at the end. I was miserable the whole time.
How many people have carried not just 40 pounds in a sandbag but 40 extra pounds on their body? That's the same problem. That's why for people who are overweight and who are not physically active, going up a flight of stairs is a lot of work for them.
One more thing. When I was pregnant with the twins, I was 40 pounds heavier than I am now, but I did it. Let’s go back to your patient.
She's got some lumbar degeneration. She's had a couple of surgeries to take care of that. We've been keeping her head on straight as best as we can. We finally started putting all the pieces together because she was coming in to see me for her neck and headaches and yet that didn't all get cleared out, but then we figured out that not only was her head off balance, but her psoas, which is one of your main hip flexors to lift your leg up and spinal stabilization. That's a mess.
We started training her on how to strengthen the psoas and then she started working with a massage therapist and a PT to do even more with that. She's finding all these pieces. She gets the psoas and her hip is doing better, and now her headaches have started getting better. It is all these parts and pieces that are coming together.
She's been coming to see me for a couple of years now. We're finally integrating all these bits and pieces to get her better, which I'm excited about because she's on disability. She was medically discharged from the military and then she eventually got on disability outside of the military because she still couldn't function. Now we're putting all these pieces together again because sometimes you don't get all the answers from one doctor, which is fine.
We love our colleagues.
There's no one better than you and I put these top segments back in place, but we also realize that when it comes to hip stuff, it's like, “We can do this much. There's all of this other stuff that needs to get taken care of.” I'm excited for her. I would be surprised within about 6 to 8 months because she wants to work. She wants to be out there and doing things. In 6 to 8 months, she's going to be fully functional. She's tried to take the meds to try to calm down the pain and her response is, “It's candy. It's not touching anything. There's no redeeming quality for it.”
The topic that I wanted to bring up is Aspirin. It's something everyone knows. They've heard words like baby Aspirin, one Aspirin a day, and all these things that have changed, yet there are many people who have not changed their behavior because nobody's told them. I'd like to reiterate that we are not your doctors. We don't prescribe medications or take you off medications. We are podcasters.
If you need a doctor, find a doctor. Don't take any of my word for it. Talk to your doctor or chiropractor about this stuff. In general, chiropractors don't deal with medications directly. We do talk about medications and give people research so that they can make some decisions on their own, but this Aspirin is over-the-counter. It's something that anyone can get.
This is part of our over-the-counter medications safe series because a lot of these over-the-counter meds are not as all that they're cooked up to be.
Aspirin was the first anti-platelet medication and it decreases blood clotting and pain. People notice that pain affects. It reduces fevers.
It was originally made from Willow Bark.
If you did chew on the bark, that would be a healthier way to take it. It's probably a different form of it.
The question becomes, “How much of the Aspirin out of the willow bar, but the willow bark had other protective things going on?”
You make a tea out of the tincture or something, and it would be different. We take the one active ingredient and we market that. Aspirin has been around for hundreds of years. It was around during the 1918 flu epidemic. It was probably a little bit before then. It reverses the enzyme activity for the body that creates blood clots. The low dose or baby Aspirin can almost completely inhibit the enzyme activity. It does affect the body for a prolonged time. It does a job. It works, but there are side effects to lots of things. Aspirin has quite a bit of side effects. There's a lot.
Aspirin has quite a bit of side effects.
I'm not putting them in order of severity, but let's talk about one, which is Aspirin-induced asthma. I didn't know much about that and I was like, “That's something that can happen.” There are these people taking Aspirin daily. Maybe they have breathing difficulties, too. Could this be related? I don't know, but it's something that I should know because I did not even know about Aspirin-induced asthma. That's interesting to me. It can cause nasal polyps. This one we do know about is chronic gastritis. It causes bleeding and problems in the upper GI and it can also cause things in the lower GI. It can cause ulcers. That's a pretty big deal.
We're taking it daily. You can bruise your, which makes sense because if you're reducing blood clotting, it's easier. Nosebleed is another thing. It makes total sense. You're decreasing your clotting. Shortness of breath, which I think has to do with asthma. It could be other things, such as hemorrhage and decreased platelets. It all makes sense with the mechanism action. We call it baby Aspirin because it's 81 milligrams. It's a small dose because there are bigger doses of Aspirin out there. Can babies take Aspirin? What's your answer, doctor?
I would be very hesitant to give babies Aspirin.
They don't call it baby Aspirin anymore for a reason. People say it that way but you won't find that on any bottles.
Interestingly enough, it was always Saint Joe's baby Aspirin, which I’m like, “Really? I thought it was Bayer or Johnson & Johnson because it's been off-patent forever.” Funny aside, before we go on, I want to tell a short story about one of my good friends, Keith Wassung. We've talked about Keith in the past.
I'd love to have him on. He's so great.
He would be great to have on the show. One of the things Keith shares is he would do these health lectures because chiropractic saved his life. He would do these health lectures at various places, including medical institutions. One of the things that he would do is talk about baby Aspirin. He would take either 1/2 or 1/4 of a baby Aspirin.
Sometimes at the beginning of his lecture, the other thing he would do is he would take one of these lancets that people use to prick their fingers so that they can do a glucose or Ketone test strip. He would show how. He'd squeeze his fingertip and all of a sudden, this nice little red droplet of blood would come out. It wouldn't just pour out or money python squeezing out everywhere. It would make this nice little bubble. He'd be like, “This is how the platelet flack. Factors are supposed to work.”
He put a bandaid on that. Take that 1/4 or 1/2 baby Aspirin and then continue with his lecture. About 30 minutes later in the lecture, he would have a slide talking about the process of how the platelets, fibrinogen and all of these things come together to seal up a wound like that and how Aspirin interferes with this pathway, then that doesn't work. At that point in time, he would undo the Band-Aid and squeeze a little bit. Instead of having that little droplet of blood stay there, it would now bleed freely onto the floor.
That's how quickly it got into a system.
That's how quickly that went through the whole system. He took it in the mouth and hit the stomach. Within 30 minutes, his finger would not clot at all. It's a curious experiment. He told me that story and I'm like, “I don't want to do that.”
“I'll just talk about your fingers. I don't want to put Aspirin.” That's a great story. I've never heard that one. We definitely have to have Keith. Babies don't take Aspirin. We don't give kids Aspirin because of is this thing called Reye's syndrome. It's a rare condition. It causes swelling in the liver and brain. If children and teenagers are recovering from chickenpox or flu-like symptoms, they should not take Aspirin. It's not safe for children. It’s no longer marketed to children, which is great, but it's still being marketed to adults.
Let me bring up this CNN article, “Daily Aspirin to prevent heart attacks is no longer recommended for older adults.” Interesting. This was in 2019 and many people still don't know about it. In general, they are beginning to say that it could be good for some, but it's not one of those things like everybody takes a baby Aspirin every day. I do see it less in my patient population. Have you noticed it less?
I have. People are starting to hear about this. I don't know about you, but I remember when I was in chiropractic school around 2003, they were even talking about how half a baby Aspirin daily was too much. They were even suggesting that all signs indicated that half every other day might be a better choice, whether or not that's true or not at all.
The case studies that CNN put together and I'll bring up some more recent ones, but said, “Taking a daily low-dose Aspirin is at best a waste of money for healthy older adults. At worst, it may increase the risk of internal bleeding and early death.” It is not such a good thing. It's got to be at least twenty years of people taking these daily Aspirins.
It's been longer than that. I think that's been a standard of “care” for much longer than that. Heart attack risks started in the ‘80s, but in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, it became more prevalent. I don't remember when they said they were starting to do the daily half an Aspirin.
On this abstract, what we see is the US Preventative Service Task Force. Their guidelines are based on evidence from thirteen studies that suggest that Aspirin provides a small benefit for select patients aged 40 to 59 but no net benefit with potential for harm for patients 60 and older. It's on a case-by-case basis, adults 40 to 59 with a 10% or greater 10-year cardiovascular disease risk, but typically, doctors were putting people on baby Aspirin for, like you're older and you need to take it. It’s like statins, which is something we can talk about. That's not over the counter, though.
The interesting thing is 40 to 60 is the age range that they're looking at. How many people between 40 and 60 are like, “That's what I'm supposed to do,” then they get busy. They don't get in to see their doctors. They're not hearing about this information.
There's no benefit from 40 to 59, except for this tiny percentage of people who have this cardiovascular risk, and maybe that's not even true. It could be a random study that might or might not have been done. We don't know, but all of these other studies are saying no. My question is, who funded the study that said it was great? I didn't look that far into it and I'm not going to conspiracy theory my way out, but I'm going to guess it was a manufacturer of Aspirin.
It's that big Aspirin company.
They still sell Aspirin, a big old container of it, 81 or 300 milligrams. When a heart thing happened to my husband, we were pretty much sick with COVID. It was scary if we went to Afib. They tried to put them on daily Aspirin. He did take it for a little bit because he was scared.
It might help.
He never went back into AFib. It was like the one time. It was because his heart was probably being attacked with Spike proteins and all sorts of stuff. He doesn't take it anymore. I don't know if it's still like a better night. I'm a hoarder, not really but I don't throw things away like medications and supplements. I have a plethora of supplements, but we don't have a lot of over-the-counter meds. That might be one that I may have thrown it away, but nobody takes in in our house.
As an aside, if you show up at our house and hang out overnight and they have something that they're not using it will end up in your cooler on your way home.
Especially if it's road bacon. One time, Dr. Sugar was spending the night at our house because we were having a seminar the next day. We were finishing it up and my husband was like, “I'm going to make breakfast,” and I was like, “Dr. Sugar doesn’t eat breakfast.” I don't eat breakfast either, but he was all excited. He got a big old baggy full of bacon to take home.
That lasted more than the morning at the seminar.
In general, talk to your doctor about it. Do your own research. The research is out there. I shared some of it. This is not what people should be doing anymore and the evidence, there's too much harm. Honestly, I don't think people should be taking it as a pain reliever or a fever reducer, either. I think it's not a great medication. There are safer alternatives out there. Sometimes, it's okay to have a little bit of pain. I'm not saying that we should be in chronic awful pain all the time, but pain is our friend. It tells us when something's wrong. It tells us when we need to slow down, calm down or heal. If we don't listen to it then, and we turn off the sensors and inhibit what God gave us was this ability to feel pain and we turn that off, we hurt ourselves worse.
When you read the label, there will be something on the label to paraphrase for acute pain. A campaign means it's brand new, and you're like, you've hit your limit, and you need something to lessen it. It is not designed for you to be taking all the time. If the pain lasts more than about 1 day or 2, and two might be pushing it, you need to do something different because that's not its intent to get rid of that, but yet people pop it like it's candy.
I used to be one of those people. I used to be the person who had chronic headaches and pain. I would go through an industrial-size Sam's Club bottle of Advil over the course of a couple of months. I would take it almost daily and I didn't know any better. Nobody ever told me any different. I hadn't done my own research because I was a kid. I was a kid doing this. Last time, I probably took Advil quite a while ago because I twisted my ankle so badly. It was throbbing.
I was laying there with it throbbing like not crying but wanting to cry. I thought, “This is the time and place.” I didn't want to walk on it, but knew I needed to keep it elevated. I see all the things that you have to do, but that was probably the last time I took it. The point is I'm glad it was there for me when I needed it for that because I was unbearable at that point and it made it bearable. I only took it for like a day.
Back to Aspirin. You mentioned Reye’s syndrome. Did you find anything debunking Reye’s syndrome and Aspirin?
I didn't.
I had come across something years ago. I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole too deep, but I'd come across something suggesting that Reye's syndrome and Aspirin are not as linked as they like to make it out to be. I don't remember all the details other than that it has also been the rise of Tylenol. Tylenol became popular.
We may have touched on that before because this could have been funded by the time we have a manufacturer.
There were some questions as to whether or not Reye’s is tightly tied to Aspirin usage. I don't remember the details. It's one more of those things that people are like, “I don't want to take Aspirin because it's going to give me Reye’s syndrome,” or something like that and there's some back and forth as to whether or not that is the case.
There’s one little thing I looked up and said it can't. They're still saying there is a connection, but it says sometimes children with rare genetic conditions such as Medium-chain acyl-CoA Dehydrogenase Deficiency or MCADD can cause Reye’s syndrome and has nothing to do with Aspirin. There are genetic changes that can happen.
It begs the question of whether or not there's a causation or a correlation. Those two differences make or break some of these claims that are out there.
Number one pain reliever and fix everything in Aspirin.
Reye’s comes along and all of a sudden, it's Tylenol. There was also a scare about something being put in the Aspirin bottles. This was before they had bottles that had double or triple protections to make sure it's sealed and it's never been opened by anybody ever. This is back in the day when the pills are right in the bottle. All these safety precautions that we have. We have on our supplements that you have a special cap. I got some liver supplements and on top of this cap, there was another wrapper. I'm probably going to take this as my Vitamin D. If I take this home and open this up, there's one more safety seal. All of these things are trying to remind us, “I need Vitamin D.” All of these things are because somebody snuck some poison in at one point in time and then Aspirin and Tylenol got tainted.
It's reverse marketing. It's a guerilla warfare of these manufacturers. It worked. I don't know if, in this day and age, it would work. That stuff is still happening.
How do you package anything to be something else that you want it to be?
What I'm seeing in my conspiracy theory brain is that Aspirin was lost on the market when it started to like, “This is bad.” It's good for cardiovascular. Every adult needed to take it, so they remarketed it as a supplement. It was marketed as something healthy and it isn't.
In fact, one metastudy suggests that there is a little bit of benefit if you are in the city-bitty little group as opposed to everyone past 60. Everyone past 60 has a cardiovascular risk. They're saying everybody in that group has no benefit because as we get older, a lot of the collagen matrix and tissues will not hold up strongly. We talk about older people and having thin skin, literally. The question is how much of that thin skin is some of these medications have been screwing with their ability to create good strong skin? How much of it is thin because problems are coming on?
What ends up as we get older, a lot of the collagen matrix and a lot of our tissues just will not hold up as strongly.
It's aging and there's probably a little bit of bull. You do have a good portion of your patients who are Amish and many of them will not take medication. I know they probably would never do studies either, but comparing the health of an 80-year-old Amish woman versus a cohort of 80-year-old women would be cool.
I can tell you right now. They are stronger and healthier. They're still working. They're doing chores and things like that. Do they have their aches and pains or arthritis? Absolutely, but they are not frail or falling apart.
What's the story? Why did you get into Arthur? Why did you start doing that?
There's a two-part to this. The first part was I had a great experience growing up in an Amish community in Monroe, Indiana. I always liked their work ethic. I'm like, “These are good people and salt of the Earth. I would like to help serve them and bring upper cervical to their community.” I set up an office. I had some other patients that helped out that they didn't have to drive to Springfield. It was a shorter drive. I lasted about 3 or 4 months going over. There are no patients. That ended really quickly.
That's too far to drive.
Too far to drive for no return, and then all of a sudden, in 2011, I get this call from a mother whose a couple of the kids were having migraines, but she wanted to get the oldest son in first. She came on over. She is Mennonite. She's driving. She's not Amish directly, but it's cousin religions. She ends up bringing all the kids. They had eight kids. The youngest was a baby at the time. I'm going through the oldest’s case and I'm like, “Yes. Here's how we can help you.”
She asked, “My daughter is also having problems,” after I explained exactly what I was going to do. It happened that I had a free morning. I did at least 2, if not 3, that morning. Within about a week, the entire family was under care, except for dad. Dad needed a Saturday. We found a Saturday for him. For about one year, they came over to Springfield on a regular basis.
They asked, “What would it take to set up a clinic over in Arthur doing what you do because nobody does what you do in Central Illinois?” I said, “I'll give a presentation. I need about 50 people so I can come over once a month.” That quickly became weekly. They would have to come over here and get X-rays. I had a limit of I could see four people in the morning.
I could block off time and get 4 done, maybe 5, but that pushed it for me. We were over there in that first year twice a week with the amount of people that were coming over. We eventually said, “We can whittle this down,” because I was killing my weekend. I didn't have time to recharge. We settled on Tuesday. We started doing Tuesday afternoons every other week. We've pretty much been on that schedule ever since. A lot of it is you almost want to have a community that is ready for you and wants you to come in and do what you do. That's the way that works.
You built that relationship with somebody who was already part of the community. When you did that in Arthur, do you rent a space? What do you do? Is it just a room?
It's a side building. It's a retirement community. They do have a full-on nursing home where you need full care, but you have your own little apartment. You had to be self-service. There was nursing available, but you needed to be mobile. They had extra rooms available. I rented out a room. We moved around a couple of times. I rented out a room from them, and then they said, “We've got people who are going to be in here permanently, but we've got this little old office building next door.” It's probably a little bit more fancy than a garage, but it works.
It's twice a month.
We've got walls in there. We've got a resting area. The only thing I didn't have over there was an X-ray setup. That space doesn't have room.
If they want to start care, they come down to Springfield one time.
Sometimes, they need to come back every couple of years. I've got a couple that need to get back in.
Absolutely, for re-evaluation and stuff like that. To start care, they would come down one time. How long of a drive is that?
It's about 90 minutes.
It's a testament to your dedication, that you would spend that time to see underserved area with upper cervical chiropractic and help the community there. Way to go back. That's awesome.
I love it and it's great people. We were there on Tuesday and we saw 50 people or something like that. A lot of families do great. My only question is, I'll scan them after they get adjusted and the line straightens right out, which we don't always get with our patient base.
We have so much toxicity.
There's a lot of extra toxicity outside of that.
They immediately go build houses.
Milking cows is the easy part. I shouldn't say that. I do have a patient who owns a dairy farm. She's hurt a little bit, but I have another patient who is a farrier. What that is he shoes horses. Sometimes the horses don't want to be shoed. He's been kicked a time or two. He does great when we get his head on straight, but if he takes too long in between, he has seizures and the problem ends up being sometimes he can't get in. He's highly in demand throughout the Midwest. We've been good. I pester him. His wife keeps on top of him as well to make sure that we get him in at least every couple of months at the latest.
I've had a few patients with seizures, but I haven't had a ton. That's one of the populations that would be cool for. At least hear this information as people with seizures, kids with seizures because it could be complicated by an upper cervical subluxation.
I'll be honest. I feel like seizures are a home run almost every time. I had somebody ask me, “I was reading that upper cervical helps with tinnitus,” and I'm like, “I've read that too. My track record with tinnitus is 50%. There could be other things going on with tinnitus other than the upper neck and the atlas of the axis, but I have had more success with seizures consistently.” If we can keep them on a regular care plan, they do great.
I've talked about the one young boy who had heat seizures. He couldn't even play outside. He was only about four. His dad was physically big and a good linebacker-sized kid is what he will end up being. I can't imagine him not being able to play outside and we got him adjusted. I don't think he had another heat seizure. The last time I chatted with them, which had been a while, he was free in a seizure.
My grandfather was a conventional chiropractor. He had a lot of stories of his patients and stuff through the years. He had been out of practice for probably twenty years when he passed away. There were a few patients who showed up at his funeral. One of them was a man at this point, but his story was that he was a kid who had epilepsy or chronic seizures and it was destroying his life. My grandfather started getting adjusted. He was a good adjuster.
He was old-school diversified, but he could set some bones and change this kid's life to the point where he came to the funeral of a chiropractor he hadn't seen in twenty years. That was such a cool experience. I was in high school at the time. To see that even twenty years later, there are patients of my grandfather who still show up to pay their respects to him. It was pretty cool.
Seizures respond great. Over there, I see a lot of a lot of migraines, headaches and some low back pain. They do great and they clear out. They hold for sometimes weeks to months. I've got one family of nine that came in. The oldest daughter just got married. She's got a different schedule. The youngest, his dad owns a sharpening company. They're sharpening all sorts of stuff. He had the bright idea. He wanted to whittle his own little knife for fun. Instead of using an actual knife or a chisel, they took a screwdriver and turned it into a sharp chisel. He could do that.
He's working on this little knife handle. He bent over and it slipped as it might. He felt like his neck was giving him a little bit of grief. I don't think I've had to adjust this young man in at least 2 or 3. He's doing great. Most of his oldest brother has seizure problems. As long as we keep his head on straight, he still needs a little bit of medication for some other problems he's got, but generally, he has not had a major seizure problem in a long time. It's interesting to see these two levels where I've got to adjust the oldest brother regularly, but the youngest brother has been holding since he was a young child. It's neat.
We have the best job in the world.
At the seminar that I was at, I was chatting with a couple of guys. One of them said, “Why don't we get the miracles anymore? Why don't we see those miracles on a regular in our society?” I see him all the time in that community because they are not dealing with all the junk and the technology, but they have their phones.
We don’t talk about that. It's for business purposes.
They don't bring it into the house. They've got a little phone booth outside where their phone landlines come in, but they'll also put stuff in there and they'll charge the phones. They'll have a solar charging station for charging it overnight. They disconnect from that properly and that makes all the difference. Sunday is a day of rest for them, which you start hearing what their Sunday is like. It's restful, but somebody is still working because somebody's going to make all those lunches.
If they've got animals, you still have to feed or do chores.
I was chatting with a young man, another doc, who is Jewish. He says he got more religious a few years ago. Part of observing the religion is observing the Sabbath. Sundown Friday until Sundown Saturday, he says it's about 25 hours because of going to the synagogue and things like that. He said it's a 25-hour window where you don't even touch a light switch, “I don't know how you touch a light. Don't touch the light switch when you are in modern technology and you want to go to bed.” It's like, “Didn't you have it on at one point in time?”
That's the level. He was checking his phones before we went out to dinner on Saturday. He was catching up on all his messages. His comment was, “It was hard to do it first.” He is so refreshed. He gets to spend time with his kids and his wife. He says, “It's so much better.” We got to disconnect. We got to make that time for family. I still contend that COVID taught us that we need to take a step back and consider our immediate families and the people around us.
COVID taught us that we need to take a step back and consider our immediate families and our immediate people.
Turn off the news. You can't do anything about that.
There's nothing good. In fact, I've been busy. I’m behind on listening to my normal news sources.
You still made it through the whole week and you're still alive. It’s incredible. How did you do it?
The funny thing is I don't think I'm missing much. In fact, I feel a bunch of stuff on my YouTube feed and then I got busy and I'm like, “I can skip that. I want to watch this because it's a kettlebell training thing. It’s this or that of the other.” It is miraculous stuff we can say, “I don't need that.”
It was good to have this discussion. I'm glad we got through all the stuff we needed on Aspirin. Hopefully, a few of you reading can make some better choices, make some decisions and talk to your doctor about that. Where can they find you?
I am at KeystoneChiroSpi.com.
I'm in St. Louis, Missouri. You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/ in Springfield, Illinois and Arthur.
Make sure you like, subscribe and give us a five-star review. That helps the algorithms. Apple apparently is not necessarily for us because there are only 25 or 30 of you and thank you so much. Give us a review. We will read those. We want to make sure people can find this content so that they can be informed and know how to have the best life possible. I hate being cliché like that.
It's true. That's our goal for our patients. We want you to live vitally and vibrantly.
Thank you so much. We will see you on another episode.
Manage your energy, not just your time, and get your head on straight before you hit the road. As the holiday season approaches, Drs. Beth Bagley and Frederick Schurger share some of the favorite things they do to travel injury-free and fully enjoy their journeys. Whether you're taking to the skies, hopping on a train, or hitting the open road, our chiropractic experts have some valuable tips for you. Drs. Bagley and Schurger share how to make mindful choices to keep your energy levels high, even when facing long travel hours. They also share how an upper cervical chiropractic checkup before your trip can make all the difference. So, before you hit the road this holiday season, join us for some enlightening travel advice that might just change the way you travel. Tune in now!
---
Dr. Bagley, how are you?
I'm doing great. How are you doing, Dr. Frederick?
I'm doing excellent. I'm refreshed. We haven't been doing this like we normally do, and I know we have one more week before we get back to our normal schedule. I take that back. We are still going to have a couple more weeks because I have got a travel schedule coming up between hunting. I just got back from visiting my folks.
Did you get any deer?
They are on my trail cameras. Between traveling in the rain, it was one of those weekends where I had other things I was going to do. I'm not going to go out and sit in the wet muck because the deer don't want to come around in that wet muck. After all, the deer don’t want to come around in that wet muck.
No, they don't. They want to huddle down, too.
I have tried that before in that area. I know better. I got back, and I'm looking at my schedule for the next couple of weeks. Not only I'm going to head back out there in weeks, but then the following week, I have got a seminar. You should be going to it, too, in Chicago, but you are not going to. That's fine. We have a seminar at your office the following weekend.
We do. I know we are going to talk about wins and some awesome testimonials that happen in the office, but that leads us up to traveling and that's what we are going to talk about in this episode how to keep yourself healthy during travel and it's hard.
It is. I have gotten to the point where I can drive five hours without a problem, and that feels comfortable. That's a trip between here and my folk's place up in Fort Wayne, but anything beyond that, I get fatigued. I certainly don't like doing it in the rain. Half the time, I don't remember some of the things that I should be bringing with me, at least going to Dad’s. I'm like, “I can make it here and there.” I don't know about you, but I like traveling with my pillow.
I take my pillow everywhere I go because it's, first of all, my pillow, and I'm going to sleep the best of it. There's going to be something that's going to support my neck. That is my number one travel tip for people. if you can pack it, bring it. Even if it's a pillow. I don't necessarily think It’s a great pillow. As a chiropractor, it's still something. Sleep is so important and you want to have good sleep when you are traveling.
If you can pack it, bring it.
In weeks, I have spent so much talking about pillows. This is not a pillow episode, but just so people know. I have spent hundreds of dollars, probably over $1,000, in trying out different pillows. Again, it's a matter of what works and what you can sleep and rest comfortably on so that it doesn't jack up your neck. I think that's a technical term.
I read it somewhere in the study.
As long as you have a pillow that you are comfortable with using on the regular. You are going to get more benefits out of that. I use a therapeutic pillow now.
That's what I used to do.
My wife has used those in the past, but now she's found a different pillow that she likes better. I couldn't even tell you how great it is.
Speaking of sleep, I have got a quick testimonial. I have a patient who came in to see me. She started to care. She was the type of patient who had her arms crossed, and she goes, "I have tried all this chiropractic stuff, and I don't want to try." I was like, "I don't want to force you to do it, but I do think I can see this giant misalignment on your CBCT. The imaging doesn't lie. There's something going on that nobody's addressed yet." She was like, "Okay, I will try."
She got her first adjustment and felt a little difference for like four hours. It wasn't long before she felt much difference, and she was all mad. She's like, "I came back." I have been up and down. She's needed maybe four adjustments. We have done different things each time. There might be different segments, but she came in late for her appointment. It was first thing in the morning, and she said, "I'm sorry, I'm late. I slept in." She goes, "I never used to have to set an alarm because I hurt so bad when I slept, so I had to get out of bed." I was like, "You are going to have to get an alarm clock."
That is a cool story. I was like, “That's a huge win that you are able to sleep in.” Sleep is when we heal a lot. All of that is great. We see these huge miracles in our office. The recoveries from things people don't think they can recover from, but somebody with some chronic pain being able to sleep through the night. That's phenomenal.
For somebody with some chronic pain, being able to sleep through the night is phenomenal.
It is, and that would allow them to go visit with friends and family that they would never have considered because they are like, “No, this hurts too much. I can't make that trick. I'm not going to get a good night's sleep while I'm there.” If you get a good night's sleep when you are visiting friends and family. Everything is going to be better, especially during the holidays.
Bring your pillow with you.
Sometimes you might bring all your bedding too. You never know.
It depends on how gross the house you are going to.
There are a few things that I like to have with me, but generally, the pillows are the extent of my bedding needs. First off, you are getting a good night's sleep. We are going to joke about this being our planes, trains, and automobiles. A lot of people are going to be flying, and you need to know that when you are flying, you are going to be sitting for a couple of hours.
I know our trip out to Las Vegas is about an hour or two and a half. It's Southwest. Southwest has great airplanes, and generally, the seats are pretty good. It wasn't. I was already hurting, and we had another hour and a half before we got off. A couple of things you can do, we have talked about the neck exercises. That nodding, that yes and the no, coming across the horizon, then the head glides. You don't have to do the full thing while you are on the airplane, but you can do just a little bit. Don't be doing this rotation. That will knock you out of it.
Don't do rotation. That's a good point how we think about the Jane Fonda workouts since the ‘80s. They were like, “Rotate your neck and rotate the other way.” No, don't do that. Your neck is not supposed to do that. Don't do neck rotation. If you are in an exercise class and someone starts doing that. You don't have to raise your hand and say, “My chiropractor said.” You don't have to. You just do normal rotations left and right and ups and downs. You don't have to do what everybody else is doing.
This is why sometimes I tell all my patients, “Don't do the rotation except in the office.” The reason we do that in our offices with our patients is because we know it's going to stress them out. Sometimes, they are in the bubble of needing to be adjusted. Maybe they need to get adjusted, but if we did nothing, they don't need to be adjusted at that moment.
They need to be adjusted five hours later when we have gone home and they are an hour away. Sometimes, you have to force the situation as it needs to be. The other thing is if you are on a long flight and you have problems with blood circulation. You may want to take a look at some compression socks or compression hose to help with that circulation need.
If you are on a long flight and you've got problems with blood circulation, you may want to take a look at some compression socks or compression hose to help with that circulation need.
I even wear them on my long days at the office. On Mondays and Thursdays, I work 10 and sometimes 12 hours. Everyone's like, “You don't work that much.” I was like, “I do. I just don't work on Fridays.”
You don't see the hours of work that I have put in that aren't the hours that I am in the office.
They are not always when I'm seeing patients, but it's long days and not a lot of relaxation or being able to put my feet up. Now, I do move a lot, which is one of the problems when you are not moving or in a plane or train or an automobile and you are sitting for a long period. Your legs are bent. When your legs are bent up, that's going to cut off some of the circulation anyway. If you have poor circulation to begin with, consider compression socks. I like the ones that go up right below the knee.
If you have a preference, you can get higher ones, but those are the best ones. You can buy them on Amazon. They are so easy to find now, and they are cute. You can get cute ones. They are not all ugly-looking, so people don't need to know that you are wearing compression socks. I feel like my energy is better when I wear them. I did wear them on the plane, too, because I wanted to. I wanted to see what it was like wearing them since I recommended them to Vegas. I felt good with them. Now, once we got to Vegas, it was hot, and we were at the Hoover Dam that day. I did, at some point, take them off because I was like, “My legs are hot.”
That is the only problem.
They are warm, so great for the winter. I never used to use them. Now that I do, I am a believer. They are helpful. If you are going to go on an overseas flight, that's helpful too. Also, getting up and moving. I know it's a pain in the butt to get out of your seat. Your nice window seat and go to the bathroom, but you might get up. Even if you don't have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom just to walk for a minute and maybe stretch just a smidge.
One of the things they tell you when you are flying a longer flight overseas is to pop your shoes off so that you can allow your feet to breathe a little bit. Now, please wear clean socks.
One of the things they tell you when you are flying a longer flight overseas is to actually pop your shoes off so that you can actually allow your feet to breathe a little bit.
Please don't put your feet up on somebody else's.
Into the armrest area.
There are pictures and that is nasty. People, don't be nasty.
Again, you do that, and you get up and move around so that you can make sure your blood flow is not pulling in your legs, which can cause other problems down the road. Even if it's not an immediate problem at that time. Getting up and walking around are all big things to keep moving. The other thing is, if you are going to get jet-lagged, just realize you are going to get jet-lagged if you are going to be switching time zones. You may find that you have a bunch of things that you plan on doing, but you are not going to be able to keep track of them. Manage your energy, which we are going to talk about here in a little bit.
You have to take a look at how much time you can put into a thing that you are doing on a vacation. My dad got back. He made it out to be a Mediterranean cruise, but it was a bus and train tour of Switzerland and Italy and a couple of other neat little places. This is less a health thing than a good way to manage what's going on. Use your phone to take a bunch of pictures. The tour guides are doing this now so that they are taking a bunch of pictures, then they will upload them to a central group on your phone.
One of the interesting things they did was so you could keep track of where you were because dad was like, “There was a place here and a place there. There was this one church that had a barbershop quartet singing.” He couldn't remember what days it was, but he had videos of some of these things. They would interspersed the videos with the itineraries for each given day. Now you can go through your phone and start saying, “Which day was this?” Without having to think about it, you can start recreating your event, especially on a tour like that. He didn't have any extra time.
To get to church on Sunday, they asked him first thing in the morning, “What do you normally do on Sundays?” Most of them respond, “We go to church.” They immediately got put on a train, and they didn't get a chance to get to a church until sometime late in the evening, and sure enough, there was a service. These tours are nonstop. A lot of these things, our Blair weekend was a nonstop thing. You did family stuff, but you didn't have any spare downtime to sit at the pool. I kept on trying to get one of these things, but then they wrote me into stuff.
You have to keep doing work.
I do. You only have so much time. One of the things that I have come across in Scott Adams' new book, Reframe Your Brain. This is a great book. This is going to be gifted a lot for this holiday that's coming up. He has managing energy instead of time as an actual chapter here. The normal frame that we think of is we are going to manage our time and get so much done.
He has it flipped where it's managed your energy. This gets back to as we come off of the holidays, and we have been pushing and pushing. Two things are going to happen. We are not going to have the energy that we had when we started the weekend and all the excitement about going off to places. We are going to be done because we have been running so hard and come Monday morning. For a lot of people, come Sunday night.
They are going to be like, “I got to go to bed early,” which is why you should probably add an extra day if you can of travel or at least a buffer so that you are not going right back to work like you did this past time and I did too. I came back a day earlier, but even recognizing that there are only so many hours in the day that your tank can only be so full.
If we don't manage our energy properly, we are not going to get things done. We might have a day where we know, “That's going to be busy,” but I'm not going to do that two days in a row. I'm going to go to bed early. I crashed out last time by 9:00 trying to watch a documentary, then I said, “It's an hour earlier than I normally go to bed, but I'm going to bed now.”
That's a great point. When you are traveling, manage your energy and fatigue because when you are fatigued and stressed, your immune system is going to be lower. Also, when we are on vacation, we tend not to eat like we normally eat. Maybe you went somewhere, and it's amazing. You are eating healthy, good food, but people tend to be like, “It's vacation. I'm going to have that second dessert or dessert with lunch and dinner. Breakfast was a dessert, too, so we are just eating sugar,” which tanks your immune system. People wonder, “Why do I always get sick when I'm on vacation? Why do I get sick after vacation?”
The holidays in general because how big is the entree table compared to the buffet for all the pies?
I don't want it to be any different, but we can manage how much. I like to see it all.
Bear in mind you might need to take a nap while you are running around. I joke, but my dad jokes with my siblings. We go back to our folk's place, and the next thing we know, we are taking naps, and we are sleeping in because that's the only time we can rest. I don't know what that's about, but that was that was me. I'm like, “I'm only going to do this much. It's wet and cold out. That is not the combination I want to play with at 6:00 in the morning trying to climb a tree.”
One of the other injuries that I see in the office is lifting-type injuries from over-packed bags. I get it if you are on a flight and you have your 150-pound bag, but it's also okay to break it into two bags. You got 25 and 25, or bring a carry-on and a smaller bag. First of all, nobody wants to pick those up. Not even the people working at the airport, but you are not used to lifting 50 pounds all the time. People at the airport are. They have worked out those muscles.
You, on the other hand, pull that out of your trunk and set it on the ground and tweak your back at the beginning of your vacation and ruin your vacation. The other issue is when you are lifting something that heavy and not used to it, unlike Dr. Frederick, who lifts 50 pounds in his sleep via kettlebell. You have got to consider how you are standing because if you are standing squared up with your feet planted on the ground in a slightly squat position, you lift in that position. You are a lot less likely to blow out a disc than if you are turned to the side. You twist it, pull it out from the side, and drop it to the ground.
You have to think through those things when you are lifting that weight. The other thing is overhead compartments. If you are a small female, which I'm not. If you are a small female, ask for help. It is okay because you are going to tear up your shoulders, and you can hurt your back, too. Men love to help, too. Do you love to help? If a small female said, “I need help getting this up.” You'd be like, “Sure.”
Even as 6-foot-strong individuals as we are, a 40 or 50-pound bag trying to get into the overhead compartment is one thing. That's not a hard thing, except if you are in the center aisle. It's already a cramped space. There are people on either side of you. You feel rushed. Take the moment. Don't try to say, “I'm going to get it in this spot.” Somebody's going to be more than happy to help you, especially if you are flying Southwest, where you have already packed 2 other bags at 50 pounds a piece that you checked. Plus, the 50-pound bag that you are trying to put overhead was all free, we would love to be sponsored by Southwest, but I don't ever see that happening.
That would be amazing. We’d get some free flights. They don't have to pay us. They pay us for free flights.
I would be very fine with that.
That's a good point with the Southwest. It’s okay to have two bags with them that you check. It's awesome, and they don't have to be 50 pounds each. They could be 25 pounds each, and you can lift them in and out of your rental car then. Lifting into an overhead compartment or taking it down. If the flight is over and you want to pull that item down again, your body isn't prepared to take that force, and you are rushed.
People are like trying to get out. Everybody stood up when the plane landed, and that's dumb. I sit back and sit there. I continue to read my book until there are like two in front of me and try not to think about it because there's nowhere to go. You pull that out of the overhead, trying to rush, and you are twisting. Again, I have seen multiple injuries to the shoulder rotator cuff and also that twisting back injury again. That time, square yourself up or ask for help if you don't feel confident that you can do it.
When pulling out items from the overhead, take that time and square yourself up, or ask for help if you don't feel confident that you can do it.
Those are the big ones. Nothing else comes to mind.
There's one more for planes. When you are taking off and landing, remember that one? Dr. Forrest talks about that one. Do you want to explain it?
No, you go ahead.
Take-off and landing. The plane is vibrating. We have got this jostling happening, and the tendency is you are talking to your friend next to you or looking out the window, so your head's turned. That's going to put your neck and your upper cervical spine in an awkward position, allowing for things to line up that will allow things to slide. The best position for take-off and landing and during times of turbulence, they call it a neck retraction. I call it the double chin.
Give yourself a slight double chin and put your head slightly. You don't have to jam it, but slightly against the headrest. Hold it there straight. It does look like you are a little scared because it's a scary position, but who cares what people think around you? It's about trying to keep that alignment. Even if you are not under care, I recommend that you be under care. If you are not under the care, you can still tweak your neck in a position like that or a position turn during turbulence or take-off and landing. Landing, especially because they put on the brakes or the reverse engine, and you come forward. If you are turned, that lines up your atlas to misalign the opposite side.
All of those things are the things you can do when you are paying attention, but half the time, you are just waking up from a nap, or you are not paying attention.
I don't recommend that either.
It's hard. It is very hard to sleep on a plane.
I find it hard to fall asleep on a plane myself, but I do know people that can do it.
I do it all the time.
The tendency is that people have their heads tilted.
It's not any better when you decide, "I'm going to keep my head straight and rigid like this." You wake up, and you are like, "Those muscles contracted, and they kept my head in that position. Now I hurt and now need to go get adjusted.” That's the other recommendation.
To bring a chiropractor with you on your trip?
There is a reason we go to all these seminars when we travel as opposed to anywhere else so that we can get adjusted by our colleagues. The other thing is, even if you are on a couple of times a week schedule and you make a weekend trip or even a week-long trip, and you are back the following day. That would be ideal, but if you are on a more extended plan where you are getting checked once a month or once every couple of months.
That would be a good time to say, “Doc, I know I would normally have come in a week or two after, but I’m traveling. Do you think I should get in beforehand?” The answer is always yes because there is no modern travel. Even if you are just driving, that can be a stress on your body. My wife does all the driving now, and even though I’m still sitting in the passenger seat, I’m still exhausted. Anything longer than five hours, and I don’t have the energy to take a nap half the time on a trip, anything beyond that.
Getting back to that idea of managing your energy. I want to talk about a couple of ways that relate to our health. When we are in good health, our energy is not going to be as strong as we would like to be. Maybe our tank leaks somewhere down the side of the tank for our energy. Until we get our head on straight, those leaks will not get plugged properly to refuel and replenish.
When we aren't in good health, our energy is not going to be as strong as we would like it to be.
There are two sides to this. I like the idea of managing your time instead of managing your time. Manage your energy. Once we start thinking about managing our energy, we can start asking the questions, what are the things that improve our energy so that we can have a more productive day and accomplish all the things we want to accomplish? Certainly, the top of that list is getting your head on straight with an upper cervical doc like either of us, but other things might be, “I'm not going to eat that sugary snack after the holiday because I know that replenishes my energy. I can't recover as fast.”
Another one and it goes to get good sleep. People talk about melatonin all the time. I'm 50/50. Some people have good responses to melatonin to help them get to sleep. Other people don't. It's a great hormone. There's a lot of good research behind it, but as a supplement, it's questionable. Instead, magnesium is a supplement. It seems to be a much better choice for helping you reset your sleep cycle get your body working the way it's supposed to, and considering it feels like we are in such an epidemic of magnesium depletion in our food supply that taking magnesium on the regular is a smart thing to do.
Again, I'm just saying, “I'm going to take a nap. I am tired. I have every intention to.” There are two big bucks out on my folks' property. They walk by at about 8:00 in the morning, which is prime time. It's perfect. I could get up in a tree early enough not to disturb them walking by, but no, I was too tired. At 6:00, when the alarm started going off, which was 5:00 our time. My brain was like, “No, I have not recovered. Yesterday was a little bit. Saturday was rough.” It was wet and damp, and we didn't want to do anything.
It’s not laziness. There's a difference between taking time for yourself and saying, “No, I'm going to take care of myself,” versus sitting on the couch all day, day after day, and being depressed and giving yourself a, it's okay, like permission to rest or take a nap or sleep in. Now, we can't do that every day. I get it because we have work. On a day off when you are on a trip and sleeping until 7:30 or whatever it ended up being, versus getting out into a tree scene. That's legitimate. Is there anything in the book, or have you considered the energy choosing who we give our energy to, which is like people and who we allow in our energy and our space?
There's some content that talks about that later on. It's a different area. I was reading about that, and again, it's what are the things in your life that when you are looking at a situation, you are looking at a job prospect and a job opportunity. Which one has a better energy that you are drawn to? That's the same thing. There are going to be people that you are more drawn to and that you are energetically and excited about. That was for me with chiropractic.
I look back at certain moments in my life that were immediate. I'm going to go do that because the energy was right, and everything just clicked. Getting into chiropractic was one of those things, even though the sensible engineer in me said, "I could either go down this law route or this business route.” Neither of which was exciting enough for me to say, "I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to fill out this application." When chiropractic became an option, I was like, "I'm going to do these 17 things that seemed hard for the other 17 things that were super easy because the energy felt right."
That's like following your passion, is what I'm hearing. I get it. Sometimes, we have to have a job that we don't like. I fortunately have a job I love, which is amazing, but I get that some people have to do things. We can choose to complain, and that will continue to deplete our energy, or we can choose joy and happiness and figure out where it's the situation here that was a win. What co-worker can I compliment to bring the energy up?
You can elevate your energy just by having an attitude that is conducive to that. You can also suck the energy out of a place. I know you know somebody. Does anybody reading know someone who is the energy drain? That energy drain is also, I would say, you can pray for them and try to talk to them about this stuff, but sometimes, that's also someone you need to cut out of your life.
The joke is an energy vampire.
It's not even a joke. That's a good way to say it if they stick your energy and don't give you energy.
Folks, if you don't know what an energy vampire is, what we do in the Shadows. It’s a TV show. It's on Hulu now. I can't remember, but there is a character on that who plays an energy vampire. I don't want to meet this man because he's an actor. I don't want to meet him in real life because he does this job so well, and I have met these people. I don't need to ever interact with him as an actor outside of the acting because he might do it for fun. Sometimes, these people are doing it for fun.
We can run into that as chiropractors from our patients sometimes. What I love and what gives me joy is when I meet one of these people who is, I would call, a drain energy vampire-type personality. Through getting their head on straight and, sometimes, they become the most amazing people that I fall in love with. It doesn’t happen to everyone now because some people choose to be miserable.
This is true, but how many of these people who are falling into that category? This probably is the better way to think. Your energy is well within you. Sometimes, that well is not running, and as soon as you get your head on straight, that well can start pumping into that reservoir if you are between the pump running and all the leaks in the tank being filled up. You are going to do so much better. You are going to feel so much better, and the things that you thought were insurmountable are now easy, and you can figure out how to achieve those goals.
I had a young lady that came over. Her sister was saying all sorts of great stuff about us because her sister had been in months earlier and was having a lot of health issues and got better. She came over in her late ‘40s and early ‘50s. Up until about 4 or 5 years ago, she was still teaching and doing gymnastics at high level. She didn't remember any falls except for the fact that she did mention that she jumped off a 2 or 3-story that they practiced outside and landed on her feet. That was fine outside, but when they took it into the gym, she broke her legs.
All of these injuries and accidents. She's already said, “I'm hurting all the time. I got all these problems.” What happens after she gets adjusted? Things start getting better. Unfortunately, she's hours away, so she can't make it in as regularly as she needs, but it's in the back of her mind. I was chatting with her, and she's like, “I need to get in because I'm starting to hurt again,” and she gets it. She's got that internal reservoir. The other part was that she was like, “I don't know who else to go to. You are my last hope.” I don't need to be Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I know. That does put a lot of pressure on us, but I'm used to it at this place.
It's like, “You are not the first person to say this.”
I tell them the only thing I fix is a structural shift in your spine. That's the only thing I do.
You don't have the force as Obi-Wan did.
No, but when people say, “Doc, you fixed me. This is so great.” I always said, “I couldn't have done it without you,” because I couldn't. I don't have any of that power. All I can do is visualize this terrible misalignment on people that is affecting their health and it's making their well dry up. Remove that misalignment, put it back where it's supposed to be and restore normal motion. It's amazing what we get to see. That's why I have trouble not accepting everyone for care. Now, there are some people that we can't accept for care, but if I see a misalignment, it's possible that we can help. I'm going to try.
I need to have Pam and Jerry on the show at some point in time because Pam is doing great. We are concerned because Jerry is not as in good health as he would like to be and as she would like him to be, but there was a traumatic injury to his neck. It's healed, but it's not healed. I don't know if I will ever be able to adjust him again. Time will tell, but the short answer is I'm not touching his neck until we see it look a little bit more stable. That might be a while, and yet his energy, again, is not as robust as it was, especially when we were working on him.
All of these factors play in. When a patient comes in who's not supposed to be in our office because they have some injury that is not a neck problem, it's a surgical problem, or cancer would be the other one, which I fall into the surgery, but it's a full-on medical problem. If that's the case, we are going to make sure you get to the medical doctors first, and once you have been cleared by them, everything looks stable and your ultimate good spot. We can start talking again about what we can do to help, but we are not going to do that right off the bat.
We are not the doctors that you hear about that sneak up on the person in the gym because they are a friend and they were tired of looking at their neck weirdly. No, we don't do that. You got to come into our office and get pictures taken first. That's the bare minimum. Anything else? That wraps it up now.
Planes, trains, and automobiles are safe places to stop. The last thing I will say about being in an automobile. If you have a long-distance journey, like ten hours. When you do stop for gas, do some stretches. Move. Get out and do some things while the gas is pumping because that's going to save you.
It's a good time if you pick up a cup of coffee to drink on the way. It's too hot. Don't try to drink it immediately. Put it in the cup holder and walk around. Stretch your legs a little bit. We have dogs. They got to be walked, so we got to be walked. I at least get things moving for all the possible things that extended sitting is going to give a problem.
Where do they find you, doctor?
I am at KeystoneChiroSPI.com and all the socials, Facebook and Instagram. Technically, I'm on Twitter, but I'm not looking at it very much.
I don't load anything on Twitter. I am in St. Louis, Missouri. We are PrecisionChiroSTL.com. You can find me on all the socials also except for Twitter. I don't think I even have a Twitter handle that's related to my business.
It's not Twitter anymore. It's X.
Sorry, Elon. Elon is going to come and get me.
I like Twix. Halloween is coming up, and I need to avoid Twix.
It's not good for you, but those are good.
They are. Caramel, but not the peanut butter ones.
I don't do the peanut butter. Gross.
The only peanut butter you do is Reese's Pieces.
I don't even do that anymore. Ever since COVID, my peanut butter tastes like a butt.
That is the problem with the sinus issues, but you are not wrong. A lot of things taste different since COVID, so I get that. Anyway, folks, like, subscribe, and give us a five-star review. Tell people about it.
Especially for the butt comment. I want like a six-star review.
There was a five-star review. Everybody needs to know. She did fix it. When you learn about upper cervical chiropractic, experience the benefits and see the life-changing impacts it makes in many lives. You can't help but share how amazing it is. I'm the best example of this because I was first a patient, then decided to pursue chiropractic because of the Blair technique. I love that this show is getting the word out about a significant aspect of healthcare that many do not even know about.
These discussions bring light to some of the conditions that upper cervical care can help, but there is so much more because it has such an impact on the nervous system. I highly recommend reading and learning more about how important this type of care is to your well-being. Seek local upper cervical care, especially Blair chiropractors, to get your head on straight and improve how you function on a daily basis. She started with a one-star review, and I'm like, "What?" I read it, and I'm like, "No, it's a five-star review." She must have hit one, and she fixed it since, but in any case. Get those five-star reviews up there for us because that's how people find us, and that's what's important.
Dr. Frederick Schurger discovered a horrible deep drinking game: every time he uses an acronym, take a shot. Don't play this drinking game.
In this eye-opening episode, Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger dive deep into the mysterious world of health issues that are often hidden in plain sight. Join them as they explore two main subjects: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and the invisible web of Electro-magnetic Fields (EMF). POTS is a condition that affects countless individuals, causing symptoms like rapid heart rate, dizziness, and fatigue. Our hosts share stories of patients with POTS, its impact on their lives, and how they have been helping them improve their function, often from disability to being able to walk in the park (Yes, moving a little 2-ounce bone at the neck is involved!) Dr. Bagley and Dr. Schurger also shed light on the often-overlooked role of EMFs—from cell phones, Wi-Fi, and more—in influencing your health in ways you never imagined. Don't let the unseen threats of our digital age compromise your vitality. Tune in now to take the first step toward a healthier, more EMF-aware life.
---
How was your week?
It was great. My wife and I ran down to see Dr. Harshfield in Little Rock. We even stopped to get an upright MRI for her. I have an upright MRI thing for people who are interested in asking questions and they say, “I want to go get an upright MRI.” For whatever reason, have you had any patients that said, “I'm going to go get this upright MRI,” and then they came back? They don't order it through you or ask how to do it right. They then come back with an upright MRI into your office.
Yes.
The results didn't look as good.
It was weird because they did two different MRIs on a section and I just needed one. That was not what I wanted.
Here's the other thing that's not what you wanted. When I told this to the radiologists who taught me a lot about upright MRIs, he was like, “What do you mean they did it that way?” When you take a regular MRI, you're lying on your back. That's how that ends up working. That changes the structures within your body. If you're walking around in gravity like most of us are, you have a different presentation of the stuff inside as well.
Everything is not suspended as cleanly as we would like, especially after a trauma. What they're supposed to do with an upright MRI is, “Have you at 90 degrees so that you are upright in gravity like you are walking around everywhere else?” What they have been doing because of motion issues is they have been taking the MRIs at 45 degrees. You are just as upset about this and dumbfounded about why you even bother with the upright machine.
We might as well take it.
You are not getting enough of gravity impacting on the patient the way that it is impacting on their daily life.
I have a question for one of my patients. I will ask her that next time I see her.
I had a patient who went down there. This is the one in Saint Louis, although I wouldn't be surprised if we have the same issues at other locations. Chicago is the other one that I see a lot of people go to but he went down there and is like, “That's how they always take them at a 45-degree angle.” I'm like, “That's odd.” We go in for my wife's and we're setting her up. She said, “We're going to take you back to 45 degrees.” I'm like, “No.” I’m glad I was there and I wouldn't have been there for hers. She even realized, “That's not what we need.”
“We need to see what it's like when I'm up.”
We have that situation. If you're getting it and they say, “No, we're going to take it at 45 degrees,” they have other ways to immobilize you. What ends up happening is you end up having some motion as you're in this upright MRI because they don't have the materials to strap you in properly. They've got you strapped into a degree but they do have a bar that they can put across your forehead to help you. It’s something that you can lean against.
I would rather a patient have something to lean their head up against and have a non-perfect posture than that bar in their lap. The bar on their lap does no good. The bar here that allows them to lean and hold is going to do far more good for them when they're getting these pictures taken. We did this not only for the regular series but also for the CCJ or Craniocervical Junction series. We can make that a drinking game. Every time I say an acronym, “Don't drink. Alcohol is poison.”
You can drink water.
You should drink water. If you're going to do the flexion-extension ones, also have that bar be the thing you're going to lean into. I need to rewrite the entire protocol.
I would love that and I bet some of the doctors reading might want that too.
It's a double part to it. It's not just a protocol of how the scans are taken but how the patient needs to be positioned. These are little things because the young lady who's running that machine is fantastic. She was very helpful. She's part-time there. She is not always the one working that machine and they're open. A lot of these places are open for long hours.
There can be multiple people working.
If they don't understand the protocols that we're doing, we're not going to get good pictures. We got great pictures. My wife's a mess but hopefully, there are some things we can do and improve. I'm going to have to write a full report for her. That's something interesting.
I'll remark on why, as upper cervicals, we want an upright MRI. We've talked about this on other episodes but in case you've picked those up. If a patient is lying down in an MRI, especially cerebellar tonsils and the brain falls into the cradle of the skull. It comes clunking down there. What it will do is if there is some prolapse of the brain tissue that is going into where it's not supposed to be going into the neck, it might not but it might go away so then you won't see it.
In operating MRI, if you're at 90 degrees, we should see on a person who has something like a Chiari or low-lying tonsils, some protrusion of part of the brain tissue, that Atlas-based skull frame, and magnum, the hole at the bottom of your skull. It will be coming through, which we don't want to be but if it is, we want to be able to see it.
That leads me to a win that we had in the office. We had a patient come in a wheelchair not because she couldn't walk but because she has this disease or a syndrome called POTS or Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. When she moves in certain directions, sits up from lying down, or stands up, she immediately passes out and faints. It was happening to her multiple times a day. It's terribly affected her life.
Honestly, she came into the office for something else. We didn't want to promise her that this was going to get better. We don't fix POTS or anything. We fixed the subluxation of the spine. When she started coming in, we were excited. Future Dr. Lad took her initial intake and everything. I made the initial few adjustments. Dr. Lad has made a few adjustments. This young lady was at the park and was able to take ten steps before she had to sit down in a wheelchair and still didn't pass out. That was a big win.
She was so excited to tell us that she was walking on a beautiful day and was able to get up and move. She's also been getting out of the house more because she feels comfortable doing it. That is amazing. That's one of the people that I'd want to see an upright MRI on because it can be a relationship between what's happening in there. Have you had any patients with POTS in the past?
My wife has POTS. I've had a couple. We were talking about it with Dr. Harshfield when I was down there visiting with him. He was saying that it's pretty common anytime you start having pressure in the way that things are moved. You have pressure on the vagus nerve that prevents normal hypertension-style changes. We're not talking about hypertension but we're talking about the body's normal ability to raise and lower the blood pressure as you change positions.
I'm looking over some stuff here on POTS. They're saying that it's an increase of heart rate above 120 beats a minute in the first minutes of standing in the absence of any other hypotension or Earth ecstatic intolerance, which is fancy words. There's nothing else happening. You've got this vagal tone, a problem with the vagus nerve, not working the way it's supposed to.
That can lead to a bunch of different problems. If we get Jeanne clear, she's got great days. I've seen days when if we get her clear enough, it's like she's a new woman as long as I don't say something crap. I find crap things to say all the time. I've had several who do better. The question becomes, “How much can you promise and how much better will they be consistent?”
That's why we don't promise anything. This is not a cure for POTS but it's very awesome. She was so excited that she saw any change because she hadn't for years. She's on disability. She is a young person who can't have a job and she can't do all these things. She was able to go to the Barbie movie. She was excited to say that she was able to get out and go to a movie. It's incredible.
It is amazing what the body can do to varying degrees as far as how people can heal and how fast they can heal. I had a patient come in. She missed her appointment. First off, it's her husband's fault because somehow she didn't get the message on her phone that he was supposed to bring her in. I don't know what happened there. It's like, “She was supposed to come in.” It's like, “I can't get her in. She didn't want to come in this morning.” “She needs to come on Thursday.”
It is amazing what the body can do and to varying degrees as far as how people can heal and how fast they can heal.
The ex-husband was drinking too much that night and decided to go into an embankment and under a bridge. She went through the windshield and hit her head many years ago. She's doing much better. She can get around. She's like, “I don't feel bad,” when she's in alignment. She didn't come in because Thursdays are bad for her. When she came in, she was like, “Thursdays are so bad. This is miserable. I don't want to rest too long.”
Just getting on the table hurt her to lie down. I get her adjusted. I have her go right to the resting room because I'm confident that she needs some time to rest after her head is back on straight. I could see it in the graph. It was one of those things. When is walking, she’s like, “I think I'm walking better and feeling better. Could it happen that fast?” “It can.”
I had another young lady who was 20 years younger than her come in 1 hour or 2 later. She said the same thing, “I should have been here last week.” I was like, “Sometimes you should have been.” This is the amazing thing about how we can address people in such a simple little thing like moving a 2-ounce bone underneath your skull so you can have profound effects on your overall health and well-being in ways that we don't even understand.
This is the amazing thing about how we can address people's conditions. It's such a simple little thing, like moving a two-ounce bone underneath your skull, and you can have profound effects on your overall health and well-being in ways that we just don't even understand.
From your head to your toes, everything's connected. Do you have an article on POTS that you want to bring up?
There are a couple of things. This was a chiropractic case. Relief of Orthostatic, Hypertension, and Tachycardia with Chiropractic Rehab. As we were discussing your POTS case, we were going over some bits and pieces. This was a 50-year-old female. I can't think of a whole lot of POTS cases I've seen.
I’m sure they exist.
I've seen less of them. She had all the signs of having problems. 46 out of 100 was her dizziness score.
This was general chiropractic. This is not upper cervical.
She was being seen 3 times a week for 3 months. A lot of people are like, “I'm going to see the chiropractor for the rest of my life.” If you've got POTS, you might have to. These are cases that need more things. They were doing a lot of spinal manipulation of the neck here. They did some thermal ultrasound therapy to relieve the stiffness and restore mobility. Sometimes, those therapies are necessary to break down some of the scar tissue that is present there. She was doing great. From the second week on, the patient reported that her pain and dizziness gradually improved and resolved within four weeks.
That's a great case study.
His DHI score was at 46 and reduced to 0. For people who are looking at any of these index scores, something like a dizziness handicap inventory, I like using something like the functional rating index. There's a neck disability index. Clinically significant change is only ten points. We're talking about a big change overall for this case. 10 points out of 110 % is clinically significant.
This is a huge change. She even had scoliosis that was reduced. That's fantastic. In twenty-four months, the patient was symptom-free. No adverse events were associated with treatment. A lot of people say, “You're going to have problems with chiropractic.” Generally, the adverse events are much lower than they are with a lot of traditional therapies in medicine.
The worst thing that usually happens with people is maybe 10% of patients get sore after the first adjustment. I warned them that could happen. It doesn't scare me at all. It makes me excited when they get sore because I know things are changing.
That is a fantastic situation. I didn't see this part of it, “She was treated with psychiatric medications, rehabilitation, exercise, and acupuncture back when this started for her in 2016.” That means she had 3 or almost 4 years of dealing with this debilitating condition. She was under chiropractic care and within four weeks, she was back to functional. That in and of itself is pretty profound when you get right down to it.
Chiropractic is amazing. It's the best job ever. I've said it so many times. Is it exhausting? Yes, but is it worth it? Everyday.
Do you miss working for a chemical conglomerate?
Yes, every day. I was talking about that with somebody because he's a molecular biologist. He works with human stuff. I was like, “I remembered some of the stuff we're talking about. It's been many years.”
It's funny because I was joking about somebody making a comment about my outfit and how I don't need to go to a fashion show because of the way that I dressed. I'm like, “Thank you.” As an aside, my off days are cargo pants and a T-shirt so I can go get dirty. That's the engineer in me. That's what I want to do when I'm not worried about all of that stuff and not taking care of patients. Some days, you can climb out of the rat race as I did. On some days, you are like, “I'm going to go hide in there.” I'm not going to go back into the engineering world directly but we're going to apply some of my electrical engineering knowledge to this interesting subject of electromagnetic fields.
It's called EMFs.
EMF and all of the other stuff. There is another great article that I came across as I was doing some review of Dr. Dan Murphy's site, which we get to see in Vegas. That's going to be fantastic. I'm wondering if my brain has gotten big enough to be able to not explode. We'll see about mine.
Yours is not. Mine will explode.
Who knows? He's always on the cutting edge of science and asking the question, “Is this real or not,” as he digs through all the literature.
How many hours is he going to speak?
We've got the better part of Friday. I'm going to have pages of notes and it's going to be awesome.
EMFs were told that there was no problem with them. There's no relationship between any issues that people have and that it's safe for the general public to be around massive amounts of EMFs all the time.
I would think a generally healthy person will have no problems with EMF. I'll be the first one to say, “If you are in generally good health, you're not going to have a problem.”
A generally healthy person will have no problems with EMF.
It’s like if you're generally in good health and you get COVID, you're not going to die.
Only 99% of people survived when they contracted COVID.
It’s way more than that. It’s 99.7%.
It's a high number I didn't specify as an age group. If you're 90 years old and a man, you're out of your outcomes rapport.
Let's say there's an individual who is suffering from a chronic disease, fatigue, or something. They're in EMFs.
There's all sorts of weird stuff that can go on. She texted me saying that she wanted to get in. She has been through so much. She says, “Can we do Friday at 4:30 or Saturday late lunch?” I'm like, “We'll do Friday.” I don't know how it is down your way but we've been overcast. The question in my mind is, “What else is going on barometrically?” That was another interesting article that I came across that I want to dive into a little bit deeper in the future about barometric pressure. We joked about that. People with arthritis are being able to tell barometric pressure.
This young lady gets what almost looks like a storm front come through. She's out of commission. We started seeing her in ‘18. By ‘19, she was coming out of it. They went down to Disney World and had a great time. Coming into COVID, she was more comfortable and functional. During COVID, they planted a garden. They also got kayaks and went kayaking on the lake down by them.
There are power lines over the lake. She got under the power lines and froze up. She has all these weird jerking motions that she does while they're watching TV. There are a lot of questions as to what is going on. What has changed is we've introduced all of these other things that are transmitting electromagnetic frequencies. When you and I were growing up, we had radio and TV waves. It has slightly different frequencies. That was it.
Microwaves were starting to become a thing in the home but those were only emitting when they were running. I still remember the Malcolm in the Middle episode where she's pregnant with the youngest son. She's got her belly right up against the microwave. We wonder why he was a little bit odd. That's one of those shows that I need to go back and rewatch. We started having cell phones. There were bag phones but to have a bag phone, it was plugged into your car and took a lot of power. The battery life was very short.
You didn't have it in your pocket. It wasn't all over the place but there were fields like the cellular towers we’re putting out there.
I've had some conversations with some colleagues. When I was in engineering school, there was a lot of back and forth between analog and digital technologies going on. You needed less power in your pocket, so with the analog stuff and the bag phones, as it were, you needed more power. The wavelength was a little bit more friendly. Now that we've gone more digital, they flipped it so they can have more towers. You don't need nearly as much power. You have all these high frequencies that are bathing everything.
That's not even including your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that is everywhere as well. You're the same way as I am. I've got Wi-Fi in my office. That's for convenience so we didn't have to dump a bunch of money into hardwiring the office. That takes time and there's an expense there. However, I have gotten to the point where I'm doing more hardwiring of everything. We're trying to move away from Wi-Fi. The only downside is I've got three other offices that are in this building.
You can't get away from it. In my house, I can get five different Wi-Fi signals from my neighbors. They're locked but I can see them when I open up my Wi-Fi. There is a place you can get away from it. Do you know about it?
You go out into the woods far enough away.
It still gets a cell phone. There's a place called Green Bank, West Virginia. Have you heard of this place?
No.
This is a place where electro-sensitive people can go to live. It's a National Radio Quiet Zone. They have pretty much no Wi-Fi. There are even police who go around looking for Wi-Fi signals. If you get caught with it, you get taken away. The reason is it's not for electro-sensitive people but they are trying to find radio waves from space. This quiet zone is around that so that they can pick up space stuff, which is cool.
I don't know what they find. That scares me because the aliens scare me. That's a whole other subject. They're scary. I don't trust anyone. I don't trust aliens. This place is cool for a patient. If it got to the point where she couldn't live, this was affecting every aspect of life. People move there so that they can live without frequencies or EMFs in their lives.
This is a big question. How many people don't even realize that they are sensitive to this? We figured this out along the way with this patient. She was having all these spasmodic episodes. She had a little bit of POTS and dystonia, where everything was in spasm. She can't move. It becomes very tonic. She looked like she had some dystonia going on to varying degrees. How much of it was all the EMFs that keep on getting layered upon layered? On top of that, the other thing that most people don't realize is the smart meters that you have on your house to measure your electricity also have a big field.
We put a Faraday cage around ours and it got taken off. I don't know if a storm or the electric company took it off but we need to buy another one. Jason said he put it on there well and it was gone. We couldn't find it around it. They're not that expensive. You can find them on Amazon.
It's a thought that I've had in my mind, especially with some of the problems my wife has. There's so much EMF fog that's giving her a bunch of trouble and she's not able to function. We run over to my folk's place. We are out in the woods enough that it's low or a little bit of Wi-Fi. My dad's Wi-Fi barely works. It's almost as good as dial-up modems. It is a little bit better. The thought in my mind is, “How long does she need to be in that environment away from all the stuff but we still have cell towers and everything else?” The question is, how much is blanketed on top?
We need to take a vacation to West Virginia. It's beautiful.
We may need to do that. Let me pull up this electrosmog study here because it's fascinating.
It's a type of pollution that you can't see. It's invisible.
We don't know who is sensitive to what. That is the harder part.
That's the same thing. You think, “That's impossible.” I was like, “This person can be allergic to peanuts and this person could be allergic to nothing. What's the difference? They're different people.”
There was a comedian who was talking about taking Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to school. All the kids were freaking out. How sad is that?
I get it. If your kids are going to die, that's scary as hell. We could talk about that.
I've got to get a bunch of all this.
We should start uploading these to Rumble.
It's on my agenda. This is out of immunology research in the EMF spectrum. As far as what are the different frequencies of these waves that are coming through, there's ionizing radiation. That’s X-rays and CTs. It has a number of different uses. We're not talking about ionizing radiation. We're talking about general frequencies, what they are doing to the body, and how the body reacts to various things in the environment. Did I talk about the low-level frequencies last time?
I don’t remember.
There is a low-level frequency. Ultrasound is what they call it. This is getting below 20 hertz. There are weird things that happen to human beings when these ultrasounds come across. What's curious is they figured out what may be perceived. You start getting a frequency under 20 hertz. Your eyeball has a resonant frequency in those low frequencies between 15 to 18 hertz. When it happens, your eyeball starts shaking. You won't hear it. You might not feel it but your eye will perceive it as a shadow in the corner.
That's like the devil.
A ghost or something else. It's funny. The scientists figured this out. They installed a new piece of equipment or an air conditioner. It was producing a low-level frequency in his lab. He's looking around. He thinks they're shadow people because he is perceiving this. He's a scientist. He's trying to figure out what's going on.
He's like, “This isn't shadow people. What is it?”
He was able to measure that. Don't ask who's figured out the resonant frequencies of the heart, the eyeballs in your ears, and some parts of your brain. It was probably either the Nazis or the Russians.
The CIA.
We can go down rabbit holes all day long because there is stuff going on there, whether or not they're going to tell us anything about it.
People randomly drop dead.
That's another story.
There are weapons and all sorts of things.
The visible range between 400 and 700 nanometers is our visible light. There's stuff way outside this and then as we start getting into higher frequencies, we start seeing other things. FM radio stations, Wi-Fi, radar detectors, cellphones, and DirecTV are all megahertz. AM radio stations are in kilohertz that we kept around for a while and were generally too bad. We start getting into gigahertz, which is some of what the anti-collision vehicle radars are doing.
I didn't even think about that. That's a whole other technology. They're shooting out radar in the front of the cars.
Here's something that's crazy. One of the things they did for Tesla X, whichever is the SUV, is it has those gullwing doors that come up. When the engineers were designing this, Elon did not want that little sensor with that little round nub on the outside poking through the door. He wanted to smooth the door. He tasked them with creating a sound that would penetrate through the sheet metal of the door and then come back to be red. The crazy thing is they had to ramp up the volume effectively or the intensity up.
Maybe the volume on that thing is only about a three, unlike your car bumper to tell you that something's back there. On those doors, it was up to eleven. They cranked it. The volume effectively went up to eleven. You're shooting this sound through and screaming to see if there's anything on the other side of that door to make sure it doesn't hit anything over there. He didn’t want to have the thing on the outside because they wanted to look pretty. I do respect that because he said, “How do we solve this problem?”
He has solved a lot of those things. It is incredible. He employs incredible people too.
Let's talk about wavelengths and what they do. Shorter wavelengths have more energy and higher frequencies, do not penetrate as deep, and do not generate heat. That's what short wavelengths do. Longer wavelengths have less energy and lower frequencies but they penetrate deeper which is a longer wavelength that would be something in the 20 or 18 hertz that might penetrate the eye and increase molecular motion and thus generate heat.
Longer wavelengths have less energy and lower frequencies but they penetrate deeper.
Back up a little bit. It says, “Microwaves heat anything with moisture in water like food and people.” If I put a piece of paper and it has no water, it doesn't heat it. “Microwave penetrates the interior of food and people. Don't go inside your microwave. Cellular phones use radiation in the microwave spectrum.” Isn't that interesting?
I don't know if there's any validity to some of those early cell phone videos. This is pre-TikTok for people who watch that stuff. They put four cell phones around a couple of kernels of popcorn and then ran it.
Everybody gets to phone call each other.
The popcorn would start to pop. There was a microwave underneath the phone. You have to understand that it's different intensities. You have a different power from a microwave than you do from a cell phone. You have a much stronger power comparatively. You have even more energy from that. As an aside, it’s a great use for your microwave. Unplug it and put it in your basement or any electronic device that you want to protect from any electromagnetic pulse. It is a solar flare. It's a Faraday cage. There are some benefits to it. We have too much stuff around us. Does any one of these pieces cause a problem? Probably not. Do we have a level of pollution that we can't see and we're not feeling very well? Probably.
For some people, maybe it's like, “I'm tired all the time.” Your body's constantly having to fight some of this stuff.
The question becomes, at what point in time do we start saying, “We've done too much and we need to start getting back?” How many people go off for a vacation camping in the woods, ditch their cell, they're away from their Wi-Fi and they come back fully recharged? That is the root of where we've been for most of our civilization.
All of a sudden, in the past many years, we have had this significant increase in what these folks are calling electrosmog. This one was interesting. This is the vitamin D receptor. If you don't have enough vitamin D, you have problems with inflammatory issues and autoimmune diseases. This receptor exhibits stability to electrosmog. You have things in your body that don't like a bunch of electronic gobbledygook, especially if you already have low vitamin D. It is a compounding problem with your overall health.
Vitamin D is so important. In wintertime, talk to your doctor about getting on vitamin D.
Vitamin D is so important. Everybody, it's wintertime. Talk to your doctor about getting on vitamin D.
The only reason I haven't uploaded episode 26 is to make sure that I'm talking about vitamin D and saying, “Talk to your doctor about vitamin D. You need to take more. The upper limit is questionable as to what is an upper safe dose.” I don't think we know of an overdose in the literature. I take 30,000 a day. That might be too much for you.
I take 10,000.
You need to talk to your doctor and say, “How can I start?” Get your levels checked. Another article I came across was suggesting 60 nanograms per deciliter. It was a bare minimum for women not to get breast cancer. People are in their 40s and 50s and saying, “That's fine.” Lots of stuff. Lots of questions. I've got a couple of other articles that we may revisit another time but the take-home message is we have to find times to unplug.
If you're not using your Wi-Fi router at night, unplug it. Turn it off. You don't need it on all night. Get your phone ring from your head when you're sleeping. It does not need to be on your nightstand. You need it first in the basement.
I'm getting to the point where I'm going to get a Faraday cage to throw my cell phone in at night so that it's away from me. I had hair until I got my first Apple 3G phone. I like Apple phones.
I love Apple products.
It is a curious question in my mind, “Did my hair start falling out?” There was a car accident, complications, and other things but the timing is so close.
It could be because of the autoimmunity. We're talking about it.
That's like a pigment starting back up.
We like pigment, hair, and all the things. I would share some of mine with you if I got a lot.
Thank you.
That wraps it up.
It's a different topic for what we like talking about but sometimes, these fun, off-the-wall things need to be discussed.
I wonder if there are any chiropractors in that West Virginia Town. I'm going to look that up because if there is, that might be a fun person to talk to. If not, maybe we need to get a chiropractor out there.
That wouldn't be a bad place. Compare notes and see what's going on in that area. Dr. Bagley, where they're going to find you?
You can find me in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm on the Westside. You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/.
I am in Springfield, Illinois at KeystoneChiroSPI.com. Please like and subscribe. Give us a five-star review. That's how people find this. Word of mouth is the way that people get more information about all these shows. They're not going to find it on Google. The algorithms are already changing. They do not like alternative ideas to what the mainstream is talking about. Isn't that horrible? We're not saying that we have the end-all and be-all answers. We're just presenting the facts as we understand them. You will be the judge. Make sure you share with your friends, family, and anyone who might not realize that getting their head on straight is going to help them out. Until the next episode.
Chiropractic care: where skepticism meets miracles, and spouses become believers in wellness journeys. Join Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley in this delightfully random episode, diving deep into a diverse range of topics. From low back pain to migraines and even space-occupying lesions in the brain, these two chiropractors explore it all. But the real gem of this conversation? The intriguing tales of spouses who find themselves unexpectedly in the chiropractic office, often at the gentle urging of their partners. Then, of course, the miraculous results that follow – results that even the most skeptical spouses can't deny, leading them to claim it was their idea all along. Join us for an entertaining discussion that touches on the mysteries of the human body, the power of chiropractic care, and the unexpected twists and turns of life's journey. Tune in now!
Listen and read the full blog post here
Have you ever wondered if you should get your child adjusted? If you've ever pondered whether chiropractic adjustments are suitable for your little ones, this is the definitive discussion you've been waiting for. Today, Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger delve into the wonders of Chiropractic, with a special focus on the life-changing benefits of upper cervical care for children. This episode is a journey into unlocking your child's health potential without resorting to drugs or surgery. You'll be amazed to learn how even seemingly unrelated health issues in adulthood can often be traced back to untreated childhood traumas. Don't we all wish we could turn back time and have those issues addressed sooner? Whether your child is facing specific health challenges, or you simply want to ensure their well-being, this episode is your gateway to nurturing your child's health potential from the early years. Join us now!
---
Dr. Bagley, how are you doing?
I'm great. How are you doing, Dr. Schurger?
I'm doing excellent. Welcome to The Blonde & The Bald, Episode 25. We've got to this point very quickly and easily probably because we like to talk, we like to talk to each other, and we've got great stories or at least you do and I sometimes have a good story that I can interject.
When we were discussing what we wanted to talk about, what came to mind is kids under chiropractic care. A lot of times people are surprised when I have a baby, a toddler, or children in the office and they're getting checked. They're like, "Are they here with their parents?" They get checked too. We get questions like that. I wanted to bring up common things that happen to kids that could cause subluxation or a misalignment in the neck.
Let's go back one step. Even before that, I was asked a similar question. I've got a patient. He and his wife have seven kids. He said three are adopted. He said, "How young can we start them?" I'm like, "Let them be born first and bring them on over as soon as mom feels leaving the house." That's usually how we like to start, because where is that first trauma? It's oftentimes birth. One of the arguments is about women have a higher pain tolerance and that's why women give birth and not men because we would be like, "What comes out from what?"
"We want to push out of what?"
Anyways, I saw a picture of what 10 centimeters dilated is.
It's unbelievable what the human body can do when properly aligned.
That makes a difference, doesn't it?
We talk about the first trauma. Even on a so-called normal birth. We're talking about a vaginal birth where the mom's pushing the baby. There's no intervention on the baby. The baby just comes out. There's still stress on the neck. This is natural stress. A baby's body is meant to take some of these compressive forces. What a baby's body isn't meant to do is the distracted forces. That's when we get into the interventions that happen. Again, interventions are necessary. I thank God for C-sections and these interventions. We've saved babies' and mothers' lives doing these.
A lot of times, what we're missing is who's checking this child afterward. Their Apgar score is okay after twenty minutes. Great, glad about it. Two days later, when the baby can't turn their head or tilt to the side, we have something called torticollis. The baby doesn't latch correctly, or three months down the line, this baby keeps getting ear infections. People aren't checking what happened with the destructive, pulled-apart forces that happened to the baby when an intervention like vacuum suction, assisted birth, or forceps, which they occasionally still do, and C-section births.
Let's start with a C-section birth because that's one I know a lot about because I was a C-section baby. I don't remember it. I don't know if that's pretty common but I do know what a C-section looks like. If you've never seen what a C-section looks like, I highly recommend not to look because it's awful. If you're interested, you can find videos on the internet.
Again, they put the sheet up because it's pretty awful. They're doing it fast. They're cutting the smallest hole possible, unless it's an emergency, on the mom, and then they're reaching inside to the baby's head if that's what they can grab, which usually it is. They're distracting the head up pulling out of mom. Typically, the OB's fingers are around the occiput of the baby's head. They're around the head.
Those destructive forces are not what the baby was meant to hold. Typically, they pull the baby out until they can usually get an arm, and then they'll pull by the arm. Sometimes I've seen them where they pull the whole baby out by their head. Babies are resilient and maybe that baby's fine, but for a lot of people, that is their first misalignment. I think that was mine.
That's very well possible. This sounds very gruesome, so we're not advocating for this. There was a doctor that did a study looking at a bunch of stillborn babies. Again, this is gruesome. Here's your trigger warning. The question in mind was, "How much force does it take to either decapitate a baby's head from the body?" They did this test on stillborn children probably back in the 40s and 50s before some of the rules and regulations that exist now came about. That would either cause a decapitation of the baby, which would be the extreme case, or at the very least, a tearing of the spinal cord.
We would call it internal decapitation.
Either way, you're not coming back from either one of those situations. You've got these spring force pulls. Again, I'm sorry because I'm quoting this off the top of my head. It's been years since I've looked at that stat in particular. They were saying that the force was around 110 pounds of pulling pressure to create that kind of decapitation situation. The doctor figures this out in the morgue, and then goes around to all of the OB-GYN docs who are delivering babies and said, "Here, pull it 110 just to get a feel of what it was." He then asks them, "Compared to that, how much more are you pulling to deliver a baby?" It was commonly said that they were pulling much more. How much, they didn't test that out.
They could potentially, but still, the question becomes, "Where is that dividing point?" This is why natural birth is ideal. There are two categories, a normal non-traumatic birth, and a traumatic birth type situation. We need to come back and revisit Apgar because it's been a long time since I've looked at that number. I think it's a 15-point number and you want a higher Apgar score if I'm not mistaken.
The Apgar score is based on a total score of 1 to 10. The higher the score, the better the baby is doing. After birth, a score of 7, 8, or 9 is normal and it's a sign that the newborn is in good health.
That's what we're looking for. Do you have a description of what are some of the things they're looking for? I know a cyanotic baby or blue baby would be something.
Respiration, crying, reflexes, irritability, pulse, heart rate, skin color, and muscle tone.
You want to see all of those things. Skin color would be an indication of cyanotic, blue, or not getting enough oxygen. What constitutes a normal birth and when does it become a traumatic situation where there's been a lot of stress on baby and mama, to be quite honest? A C-section is automatically a traumatic birth.
A C-section is automatically a traumatic birth.
This might trigger people too. When we use the word normal, just know we're not saying that you're abnormal because you had a C-section. I was born with a C-section. For many people, that's a route they take, it's a choice, and sometimes it's not a choice.
I'm the oldest of my family and my mom did not want to have a C-section, and I was breached the week before. I'm right here, casual because I like gravity. I already knew where gravity was. I didn't want to be upside down. She walked for the entire week until I turned. She had six of us and she didn't have to have any surgical interventions for us kids. I wasn't even the biggest one. My brother Joe, who's number five, was big.
For my mom, this was 1981. She was an old mom. She was 33 years old. That was considered an old mom back then. Just because she was old, they wouldn't let her have a vaginal birth. They didn't give her a choice. They said, "You have to have a C-section." We've come a long way since then, maybe not far enough, but still.
There are mothers in their 40s and 50s that are giving birth sometimes for the first time, which is crazy, but it is a different world than it was back in the ‘80s, that's for sure. I don’t know about your mom in your delivery, but for mine, Mom and I were in the hospital for about five days. By the time my brother Joe came out in '86, it was like, "You're okay? Nothing's wrong? Go home." She fought for an overnight for one of them. Either Joe or Jim, one of the last two, she's like, "No, I'm staying."
"I need a moment to rest."
There were 4 or 5 of us at home.
If you've had a C-section birth or you were born that way, you're not abnormal. When we say normal, we're talking about vaginal, how the body was meant to do its thing. I do agree every C-section birth is a trauma to the baby and the mom because it's cutting on the mom. It's something that we need to talk about. We need to check these babies that were born that way. They might be fine.
Honestly, most babies I check are fine, but when they're not, we check to see how their body is functioning because they can't tell us that they hurt. They might be upset or something, but they can't tell us that they're hurt. We can see symmetry or asymmetries in their face and we can check leg lengths on babies, which is pretty cool.
Sometimes it's leg lengths. I was taught at one point in time to check the muscles in their lower back. If they're tight on one side, usually that's the side that's drawing up that would normally be a short leg for people. You can then see. You can turn their head left and right like we would do for an adult, and we can feel that melt as they turn their head from one side to the other. That dials us into which side we need to be looking at, at the very least, as a starting point. Oftentimes, especially as a baby, that first adjustment is a push.
It's so gentle.
All of a sudden, they relax because that's all they needed.
They relax and poop.
One of my favorite stories is this. I don't know who told me this because I didn't hear it from the doctor himself who shared this story. This was Virgil Strang who used to teach at Palmer College for a while. He was president up there and he would always wear a three-piece suit all the time, even throughout the office when he was practicing. He was a Toggle HIO Upper Cervical guy in his practice, but he said, "If you want to practice with children, you have to understand that they are going to burp on you and puke up. They're going to poop on you and they're probably going to pee on you." Sure enough, he adjusts the baby and the baby does all three on his three-piece suit. I understand why a lot of docs like to wear scrubs or very simple clothes.
Why do we adjust or check babies? If we catch a child before their body has processing problems with the misalignment that has occurred, you'll start seeing, "My baby crawls weird. She just uses one leg. That's super cute." No. A chiropractor looks at that and goes, "Why is that baby just pushing off with one leg? Something's not right."
That's 6 or 7 months down the line. I could say even sooner when they're not sleeping right, they're not latching to mom for nursing, or they are not pooping right. My buddy's son didn't latch for seven months. That seems right, so she never let down. That never happened. What was the next thing? He wouldn't sleep. He was colicky to the nth degree. Mom and Dad weren't sleeping either, and they had to drive him around the block until he would calm down. I've told this story before in the show. If they stopped or something stopped them on the way back, he'd be back up and up all night. They figured out a system to do it. "Quite honestly, tonight by 9:30, I'm going to be tired. I don't want to leave the house."
Parents shouldn't have to do that.
They were doing this at 10:30 or 11:00 at night.
Honestly, most babies should be asleep by 8:30.
If not, 7:30.
They sleep a long time or they're supposed to. Some of them will get up to feed once.
These are the early things. It shouldn't be thought that these are a problem, to begin with, but then, later on, they start crawling weirdly, "Isn't that cute?"
Every picture you take of this child, they're so cute with their head turned, but they're always turning the same way.
It's always stuck.
That's not cute.
I've got a lot of Amish patients. The first thing I ask the mother is, "How are they nursing on both sides?" Oftentimes, this can be a bigger problem.
They like one side only.
Mom doesn't like that because Mom needs a break.
That's because they'll have problems turning their head. On one side, it's uncomfortable, so the baby's like, "I'm uncomfortable on this side. I don't want to eat like this.”
Also, indigestion and the list goes on. The immune system stuff starts kicking in as early as a couple of months because ear infections will have the potential to plague a child for their entire life. Not to say that any intervention is going to get an ear infection away. Let's talk facts here as far as ear infections go. When a child has an ear infection, it doesn't matter if you give them the best chiropractic adjustment ever, antibiotics that don't work because most of your infections are viral, to begin with, or an antiviral. It's going to take about 2 to 3 days, usually maybe 4, the offset for the inflammation to die down on its own.
What a lot of the literature is suggesting is, any intervention is not going to solve the problem. It's going to make the parents feel better when they can give the child an antibiotic. The problem, the research shows that a child who's given an antibiotic for the ear infection will have monthly ear infections or at least more frequent ear infections right off the bat. Whereas a child that is adjusted, and the one study, they had over 1,000 participants that were looking at these two situations. The children that only got adjusted had very few. They still had them from time to time. There are still bugs and viruses.
Research shows that a child who's given an antibiotic for the ear infection will have monthly ear or at least more frequent ear infections.
Kids get viruses. Kids get ear infections sometimes, but it shouldn't be to the point where we're considering putting tubes in this child's ears.
Generally, when they're under good chiropractic care, that starts to reduce significantly. Whereas even the kids who are just under antibiotic care tend to have them very frequently. Even the kids who had antibiotics early on, and then chiropractic still have a little bit of frequency because something in that antibiotic has wiped out some protective mechanism that would have kept that virus at bay.
It begs questions. It gets back to the hygiene hypothesis as to whether or not there are some bugs in our system that we should be having and trying to proliferate, which is why probiotics are so popular these days. The Ortho Molecular has sixteen different probiotic mixes. Lots of stuff going on in those early days and that's just immune function going on.
If we fast forward, I want to get to some older kid's stuff because we could talk about babies for the entire show, but let's move forward.
Quite honestly, some people won't realize this until their kids are about 5, 6, 7, 9, or 10, and then you start seeing, "Why can't Johnny sit still in school?"
A lot of times, adults will be like, "I have back pain. I have neck pain." As a chiropractor, I help people with back pain and neck pain. I remove a subluxation, their body can function well, and the pain tends to go away. Love that, great. Parents will be like, "My kid's fine. He doesn't have any pain." Why is he below reading level? Your kid's not dumb. Your kid just can't concentrate."
Why can this kid not concentrate? Maybe when he was born, his head was ripped to the side or maybe some other things have happened. One of the common things that I see in my office is trampoline entries. Trampolines are super fun. Kids love them. You get two kids going and they smack each other's head, or they hit the side of the trampoline.
Now, you have trampoline parks where they do all sorts of stupid things. There was one mother. Her son was playing with some of his older cousins. He's fearless. He was up on the trampoline and his mom heard about some of the stuff that they were doing because he's 1 and they're 4 or 5. They're getting him to bounce higher. Mom's like, " I don't think you're going to be allowed to play a trampoline with the boys anymore without me there because there's a certain point where you will find ways to go over that fence."
If there is one.
There are all sorts of problems. There are lots of fun. I'm not eager to try to hop on a trampoline anytime soon.
As adults, our bodies can't handle that. Kids are resilient. They're fabulous. Some kid could smack another kid's head and be fine, but another kid just because of how they're made their genetics, the way they hit the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time with the exact wrong head tilt. Now we have a structural shift. That kid maybe cries, and then, "Rub some dirt in it. They're fine." Maybe they're not. Kids can have injuries that can cause problems later in life, even if they don't have pain right now.
We have to remember that size of a child's head is 75% of what the adult head will be.
It's a big old melon head.
Their body has not gone into the adult full adult size yet.
It's a watermelon on a stick.
If they're going to have some trauma to the head or even to the body, it could potentially cause a pseudo whiplash that is going to cause all sorts of other problems. I'm thinking off the top of my head. One boy, when he came in, was 7 then. He's in his 20s this 2023. He had a reverse cervical curve. His head was so far forward. I took a new set of X-rays maybe about 3 or 4 months out, but his curve went back to a normal curve afterward. His grades went up. He was better focused. He's a boy. Let's be honest.
Boys are never going to be super focused like that. That's not how young men are made. They're not meant to sit still.
One of the arguments about the modern school is well-suited for young ladies and not for young men. It's a different paradigm shift. There are different needs. We start seeing things. I had another young boy who was big. This is the other thing we have to remember. What constitutes traumatic birth? Long birth. Anything past 4 to 6 hours is a long birth. That's a lot of pushing on a baby. A petite mother with a big baby, that's also going to be rough because you're pushing a melon out.
You don't notice it until several years later. The next day, Mom kept him home because he still wasn't feeling great. He says, "Mom, why aren't the letters blurry anymore?" His adjustment helped his eyes get back to where it's supposed to be. They were starting to read together. There are so many weird little things that can go on that make childhood miserable.
There are so many weird little things that can go on that just make childhood miserable.
They don't have the words to express it yet. If they've always seen double or something like that, it's normal for them.
If this blue pen looked orange to you your entire life, you'd have a hard time believing that this was anything but orange or you'd start thinking that everything that is orange looks this color until something got reclassified in your brain. Your entire experience of the world as your neurons are forming and creating your body, we lose more neurons in the first four years of life than we end up keeping long term.
Your body is trying to utilize all of this stuff and it's setting up your entire body. Your body's able to function so that you can be a strong contributor to society. People like being around you and you survive childhood. If problems like these don't get checked and addressed certainly by chiropractic, they're going to get addressed in other fashions and it's going to be some medication. What's the common number of medications given to an adult? I don't even know. I haven't looked at the statistics lately.
It's not uncommon for people who have at least three medications going into early adulthood. Certainly, into the high school years or teenage years. Many people are on multiple medications already. That's causing other problems. I'm jumping, I'm trying to create a path from early childhood into adulthood because I heard a statistic that suggested that young men are at a significantly high level of contemplating suicide. If not, having it. They aren't able to make connections with friends. I can't say what particular thing is causing that, but I'm going, to be honest, they're medications are not helping that.
Almost 25% of people under 18 are on medication. The last statistic goes through 2018. That's been a little bit under 25%, but that's been pretty tip.
Is that one or is that multiple?
It doesn't give us. It's just on a prescription drug. I'm sure there are other ones, the stats. If we go 18 to 44, it looks around 30%. 45 to 64, we're at 70%. 65-plus, we're in the 80% of people that are on at least one prescription drug.
The question in that under-18 group, I would think birth control would be considered part of that. The question is, 1) Birth control is considered a prescription drug. 2) How many of those people don't report birth control prescription drugs in that age category? Who's reporting this statistic is the people who are looking at the medications directly.
I'm looking at asthma medications. That's another thing. Asthma can be related to a structural shift in the spine too. The point of this conversation in general is why do we want to check kids when there's seemingly nothing going on with them? The reason I have a passion for it is because we call June, Kid's Month. Kids get out of school. We promote that we will check kids for free this June 2023. What that means is if a kid hasn't come in before or if they have, we do a leg length check, do a scan up the back of their neck, and tell the parent, "Yes, I see something going on," or, "No, I don't see anything going on."
Out of the kids that have never started chiropractic care, the majority of them I check is okay. I'll be like, "Let's check them in a year again. This kid does not need an adjustment. The kid looks good." 1 or 2 out of 6 that I check have a huge structural shift and the parent has no idea. I show the parent the leg links. I show the parent the scan, and I say, "I am so glad you let me check your child because this is where they're at and this is where they're going to. We can intervene right now and make an impact."
Honestly, unlike adults, because we are all broken for many years, kids don't need as much care as an adult. I might only need to adjust them a couple of times in the first couple of months, and I love that. That's why I'm so passionate because if we check them now, they won't have to suffer like I suffered. You suffered. I don’t want that for them.
For many years, kids don't need as much care as an adult.
The one I didn't bring up was bedwetting.
That's a big one.
That's a common one. I suffered from that growing up. When I had my concussion in my snowmobiling accident, this prescription, which is almost the identical prescription that I had 6 to 9 months after that concussion. Who knows? I'm still waiting for my vision to revert back to normal, but maybe I should stay off my phone for that one. I agree. With adults, a couple of times a week to make sure they're working right. With kids, we need to check them once a month sometimes unless there's something wrong. Unless there's something more neurologically significant. The asthma kids and the seizure kids.
I'm going to say this in case somebody's tuning in like, "What about this?" It was paroxysmal fever disorder. Is that what it is?
That rings a bell.
It was this kid who would get these random fevers. He's probably in high school or even college now, but he would not be sick. There would be no virus or anything, but he would get this giant fever and the only way he would get out of it is to start taking prednisone. Somewhere on the internet, someone posted something about how their kid was helped by an upper cervical doctor. She found me. This was years ago. The kid went from being out of school 2 or 3 times a month to this happening in the hospital sometimes. After one adjustment, this kid stopped having the fever. We kept checking him and he was holding. I was like, "Finally."
You’re doing good.
We're doing good. I was like, "Maybe in six months, let's check him again or if we notice symptoms coming back." I've been in this location for years. He's come in once or twice to get checked. He holds his adjustment well, which is awesome. That's the cool part about it. Where would he have been if his mom wouldn't have done that research? It's called periodic fever syndrome, by the way.
I had a young man bring his son in who was probably 2 or 3. The son couldn't play outside. Can you imagine being 2 or 3 years old and not being allowed to play outside? If you get too hot, you're going to break down in a seizure. I adjusted this boy. He didn't have any problems, especially as it got hot. About three weeks later, he had no problems playing outside in the sun. He didn't have the seizures anymore.
I checked up with the dad maybe about five years later. We'd lost contact along the way. They moved out of the area for a bit. I checked up with the dad and he said, "I haven't had a problem since. Thanks." There's more going on than just saying, "They're not sick." No. Losing childhoods. Losing years. This is something that we all have to realize as we come out of 2020 and everything that's been going on in the past years. Children have lost time. They have significantly lost time.
This is something that we all have to realize as we come out of 2020 and everything that's been going on the past couple of years: children have lost time. They have significantly lost time.
There's some developmental stuff that's going to be weird over the next few years. My brother was telling me about his kindergarten class and they were all bad. Any individual one, they're going to be fine. As a whole, they were all bad. He had a hard time with them because their paradigm and what they understand about how to interact with the world is weird. Certainly, some of that is the nature of the lockdowns, the masks, and that kind of stuff. How much of it is other health issues that are going on?
Just the chronic stress of what was happening, especially at the beginning of 2020, the kids felt it too. As adults, we tried to keep our kids safe from that feeling and that stress, but it went right into them. Chronic and repeated stress will affect neurologically how a kid is. Add a subluxation to that or maybe that causes a subluxation, that misalignment. These kids have a rough time.
To take any time away from a child, quite honestly, a cardinal sin is what comes to mind.
It's disgusting.
We need to let children have every opportunity to have the best possible lives they can have. That's why we're here. That's why we do what we do. That's why we love seeing kids. Like I said, I like to get them in as soon as possible, and then make sure mom's doing good too.
If somebody's like, "Who's the youngest patient you ever adjusted?" I was like, "About four hours old."
I've had a couple of days old. Most of them have been a couple of days old because it's a matter of, how soon does Mom want to get out of the house?
Some of us will go to them. I'm not against that. I don't do a lot of house calls. I have for people that have been stuck in places, but I will do that for a baby.
Yes. I don't disagree with that. They're a whole lot easier to figure out than an adult.
We don't need a special table to adjust them. We both utilize a side posture toggle table that has a little clicking headpiece on it. It's pretty necessary. We have ones that we can take with us places, like headpieces, but that's not great. Our tables are very necessary for the type of adjusting we do. For babies, not so much because we just use a little finger touch and we can get it into place.
Babies are easier. Young kids are easy. My only problem is kids love me between 0 and 6 months, then something flips from 6 months to about 2 years. I've got one young man. He is just over two and he is not happy to see me. I check him as quickly as possible with Mom and Dad helping out. Last time, I'm like, "You're good." His tears are still coming, "I'm good? I'm good. Goodbye."
You never know. That's just their age. Sometimes when we poke at something, it's not comfortable for them.
It's so painful.
They relate that as, "Last time, that doctor poked me. It hurt a little bit. I don't want to get poked again." I get it. They don't understand that we're trying to help them. There's a little stranger danger, not a fun time in the toddler years when we see patients. I love the babies. I still love those little kids too, but they sometimes don't want to be there. Right around 2 and a half to 3, for me, those kids start loving me again. I know that we go into a little cycle.
For me, that 6 months to 24 months, they want nothing to do with me. Afterward, I remember one boy, who holds like a champ. I don't think I've had to adjust him for years. Early on, it was pulling teeth. He did not like me. He's been holding for years.
He doesn't like you so much that his atlas is holding in place.
Sometimes I'm okay with that obstinate attitude. In any case, that's a great place for us to wrap up. Dr. Bagley, where can they find you?
They can find me in St. Louis, Missouri. We're on the West Side. You can find our website at PrecisionChiroSTL.com.
I am at Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois, KeystoneChiroSPI.com. We're on all the socials as well. We will be back. We might have a slight hiccup in our weekly publications here. For those people who are like, "Where did you go?"
We'll call it summer break.
It might not be that long, but just so you're aware that is sort of a game plan we might take 1 week or 2 off before we get back on the road, but I suspect we're going to have several episodes coming out. As I said, this should come out in July 2023, I believe, and then we're going to be back in late July, or early August if we're not back within a week. We'll figure that out. Don't worry about it. Enjoy.
Don't miss us too much.
Do not. We'll see you soon.
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.