Ready for more Blair chiropractic stories and rabbit holes? In this episode, the docs talk about different cases that they've seen recently including trigeminal neuralgia hydrocephalus and other things. We also get into discussing how you might have received a situation that is completely different than how it was presented to you. This is one of our concerns when we are presenting to a patient to try to keep everything that we share as simple as possible because when we get confused about something, it can really make things worse for all involved. Kudos to you if you're listening to this while walking! And we wrap things up talking about meditation & breathing exercises you can start today.
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Dr. Bagley, how are you this fine day?
I'm fabulous. How are you?
I am good.
This is number 49, which means we're going to have a big bonanza. It's going to be amazing. We don't even know what we're going to talk about next episode, but it's going to be great.
We'll even plan for it and have some extra special something.
We had a good talk with Philip and that was amazing. That opened my eyes to a couple of things I didn't know. I have already talked to another patient about what Philip was going through and what he's doing on top of his upper surgical care, which is cool. I've had a lot of new patients with some interesting symptoms. There are some things that I think we could go over there. How has your week been?
I've been good and not necessarily different symptoms, but certainly some cases that stand out. Let me start with this. This case that came in was a trigeminal neuralgia case. I've spoken on these in the past. I can't say I've had a trigeminal neuralgia case. I had one that didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. I don't know what else was going on that got her down that rabbit hole.
Generally speaking, trigeminal neuralgia cases do great, except she's got a three-hour drive to get here. She's over in Indiana. I'm racking my brain, “How can we make this easier for her?” I've got some people from that area that she's in driving over sometimes to the office and sometimes over to my Arthur office to save an hour.
I'm calling up Dr. Tim Gurrola in La Porte, Indiana. He was a Gonstead full spine practitioner. For those of you who are unfamiliar with all the chiropractic techniques, Gonstead is one of the more popular techniques out there. It's generally taught at most of the chiropractic schools to some degree or other. There's advanced work involved in getting good at it. It's a full spine technique. He'd been doing that for 20 or 30 years when I ran into him at Palmer while his son was at school who's like, “You got to dad, you got to learn this Blair work.” Dad's doing the Blair work. Tim's comment was, “My case fee isn't as high as it used to be because I don't need as many visits as I used to.”
He was happy about that. He made the funny comment as we were chatting that it was a new patient who'd never been to chiropractic before. They're like, “You did the thing. It got better, but I think it was going to get better on its own,” whereas if someone's been to a chiropractor before who's either maybe another upper cervical doctor or even just a regular chiropractor, the funny thing is they're like, “This is very different. I feel a ton better.”
There's one more category that falls into those views that people have. It's this case that came in to see me for trigeminal neuralgia because she has been through the wringer of the medical profession trying to find anything to give her some relief. Sure enough, we get her head on straight. I just adjusted her, so we don't know how well she's going to do.
She's like, “This feels a whole lot different.” It is the experience of the patient, knowing how bad it can get. I don't want people to get to that point, but unfortunately, they find us and they're like, “You tickled behind my ear a little bit. The headpiece dropped. I don't know if you did a whole lot,” not understanding the amount of work that we've put into making it look super easy.
It feels easy. Blair adjustment is so gentle most of the time. Sometimes, it hurts a little bit because something is tender, but it's not like a traditional chiropractic adjustment or, God forbid, one of those adjustments you see on TikTok where they're yanking people's heads. It's so profound. A patient I had came in earlier this week for his CT scan and his exam. He is the nicest guy, but he's been suffering for three years.
Blair adjustment is so gentle most of the time. Sometimes, it hurts a little bit because something is tender but it's not like a traditional chiropractic adjustment.
He played hockey his whole life. He had three different head injuries in a short amount of span where he hit his head on hard surfaces at work, fell back, and hit three different times hit his head. His body started doing weird stuff. One of the things he just started getting is these terrible chronic headaches. He felt that pressure all the time. He did get a CT scan and they found the hydrocephalus. The brain was under normal pressure. They did a puncture to see if he had any pressure in his lumbar spine. There's no extra pressure. I was like, “That's because the pressure is there and not down there.”
For readers, a normal pressure hydrocephalus is a situation where the cerebral spinal fluid is not in a child. Hydrocephalus is an uncommon finding, but it does happen more frequently because the skull is not connected. Not more or less one piece. It's not one piece, but it's more or less one piece. The head will blow up like a balloon, and they will try to shunt that off. In normal pressure hydrocephalus, maybe it's still within the normal range, but it's enough that it's starting to cause pressure into the soft tissue because liquids or fluids are non-compressible.
That means you can't squish them down and they've got to go somewhere. They can't go into the bone and cause that to expand. It goes into the brain's soft tissue and causes all sorts of problems. Often, there's a stop because the upper cervicals are out of place pulling down on the spinal cord, brainstem, and cerebellar tonsils, causing them to stop to work.
This guy is a smart guy. He started doing research, looking at and seeing different things. He does come across the upper cervical. He came across some of Dr. Scott Rose's work. Scott is his first name. he lives in St. Louis, so he found me, which I'm super grateful for because he's a sweet guy. He got his first adjustment. For doctors reading this, he's got a double PI.
If you're looking at me from the side, my atlas bone should be shifted slightly up like this. It should be at an angle that's towards my nose. For his, when I looked at his atlas, it was just this flat. When I looked at his different ankles and everything, we could see on the ProTrac views that he's got posterior misalignment on both sides, which is not super common, but it's a more common thing now.
I see it because we see so many neurologically compromised people. We see it more than an average population would ever see. When I told him, I was like, “This is a pretty compromised position for this atlas bone. It's putting pressure where it shouldn't be pushing. It makes sense that things are as bad as they were and it makes sense to me, too.” His wife didn't come, but she heard from him what I had said on the first day.
She was so excited. She's like, “I just want my husband back.” I don't know how the whole case is going to go, but I'll keep you guys updated as we go. I'm going to guess he's going to probably want to come on the show because he's so funny. He is such a nice guy. I made two adjustments on him, but the second one was the PI adjustment. He felt weird afterward.
I was like, “That's good.” He felt warm. I was like, “I think it's your brain draining. I don't know for sure if that is, but I have had people have that sensation where they're like draining.” That pressure was starting to relieve. He didn't feel like perfect as he was leaving or anything like that. I wasn't expecting that, but I was excited about all the changes he was feeling as he was resting because it's not how we walked in. All we did was move this tiny little two-ounce bone. It's incredible what we do in. In my meeting, we were talking about capacity blocks, like what's blocking the office from getting bigger. We discussed that maybe quarterly and just talk about, “What can we change?”
One of the things we want to do is remodel a room in the back where my X-ray mission used to be. One of the questions is, “Where are we? Do we have sound philosophy?” Not a lot of healthcare practitioners talk about philosophy, but I think chiropractors do more than physical therapists or something. The philosophy of chiropractic is the whole above-down, inside-out thing. If anything, and I know we're talking about the intelligence of our body, but what's profound about that is where I was comparing what this guy is even feeling and even the cerebral spinal fluid above down. The flow of information. I know there's two-way communication, all that stuff. It's pretty incredible to watch someone change like that. I feel so blessed that we get to do that every day.
This is a good point because most people know chiropractics doing something different than a medical doctor. They don't understand that medicine has a philosophy. The medical philosophy believes that something is inherently wrong. They have to figure out if they either have to give you a pill or some sort of medicine to cause that problem to get better or to make it turn on more, make it turn off less or take out something.
Something has broken down and died. That's where surgeries come in place. Sometimes, there are valid reasons to do that, but oftentimes, and I make this joke, there are times when the orthopedic surgeon wants a new boat. It's not even the orthopedic surgeon that wants a new boat. It is the manager of the orthopedic surgeon unit that says, “We need to do this many surgeries because I want my new boat.” I'm not saying any one particular doc doesn't deserve a new boat. Some of them do.
Sometimes, this is the problem. If you are selling a product or a service, you look at every nail. If everything looks like a nail, you're going to use a hammer every time. The difference between that philosophy of doing a thing and chiropractic can be just as guilty of this because if I look at it and say, “I need many bones to make this kind of money to buy my boat,” and I buy all my kettlebells from all my teaching. That is how I buy my kettlebells. Thankfully, I don't need any new ones. It's going to be at least a year.
The difference between the philosophies in chiropractic is that they focus on, “How is the body healed? What drives the body's healing?” Our philosophy says that everything comes from above, down and inside out at or a very superficial level. In simplest terms, the body heals itself. We understand that the body is a self-healing organism as long as we're alive. What is the thing that is interfering with our body's ability to function and heal? We find that it's the nervous system that is not functioning the way it's supposed to because something is out of place in the upper neck that is driving that problem that is preventing the person from healing.
This gets into the other story that I wanted to share about a new patient who's coming in soon. She went to see a newly graduated doctor. I won't say what city she's practicing in. Unfortunately, I will say she graduated from my alma mater, Palmer College. I understand that not every doctor out of my class, certainly not even upper cervical doctors, has even bought into the philosophy that chiropractic facilitates your body's ability to heal and benefits your nervous system. That is an unfortunate problem in the profession, in the education system, that there are enough people, both teaching and people who are trying to accredit doctors, that would rather see all this philosophy go away and become a part of the medical system, give out drugs and surgery.
Quite honestly, you and I would make a ton more money and knowing some of the things, the procedures that I would do, like what Philip is going through, if I decided I wanted to have a medical degree and go and off and do those procedures and those injections, hands down. I'd be all about it. Unfortunately, that's not what I want. I want to get people's heads on straight so they can go out and do everything they're supposed to do. In this case, this patient calls me up. She is freaked out. I have very little information about her other than she's got some back pain and some other problems. They did take an X-ray and I applaud.
You don't see that as much anymore, but I'm glad they did.
From what I saw, I think she's using a torque release technique.
That can be good. There are some aspects of testing and addressing misalignments.
Based upon what she was telling me, this doctor was a radiology intern. I don't know this doc at all. I'm not saying that the patient understood everything the doctor was trying to get across, but certainly, the patient was freaked out and the doctor told her this, that and the other. I'm looking at it. She was part of the pre-med club for a couple of years, and I'm looking at all these other things.
Do you mean an undergrad, she was part of pre-med?
Exactly.
I was probably part of the pre-med club as an undergrad, too.
Some people know that they're going to do that kind of stuff. My point is the way that they told her, “I can't say every symptom's going to get better.” We can't say that. I'm going to take the patient's word for this. The doctor told her, “This would never get better. The numbness or tingling along the legs is never going to get better.”
What? It's possible it might never get better, but we see that it gets better all the time. I see that it gets better in the afternoon.
This young lady strikes me as a young lady. She doesn't strike me as somebody who's in her 60s or 70s, and situationally, the damage has been done. This is where surgery sometimes comes in.
Sometimes, people need it. Sometimes it's too far gone. There's been too much damage.
This is one of those situations where Dr. Gurrola was talking about where, hopefully, the patient comes in, and we go through all the history. I'm like, “Here's what we're going to do. Here's what it's going to cost,” because that's the other part of it. She doesn't want to start something that's not going to get her better. I'm 100% on board with that. She's freaking out and I'm like, “I got to take a look at stuff,” because something about her experience just scared the heck out of me, but yet I've heard that from other patients before. I'm like, “Maybe this doctor is the best, but she just explained it wrong, and the patient didn't understand because of the white coat.”
You can get freaked out by it. You can mishear things. I feel like if I say something to a patient that freaked them out and then they go to a different doctor who happened to know me or didn't even know me, I almost wish somebody would call me and say, “I want to let you know I've got a patient here that heard that you said this and I want to know what that meant.” He'll be like, “I didn't say that,” or whatever it is.
There's that too. We have to get back to the question of, “How do we communicate to the patients as best as we can and keep it stupid simple or is it simple, stupid.” Sometimes I'm the one who's stupid.
I am, too, sometimes, especially on Thursday nights. The other part of that is that this stuff is serious, though. Subluxation, misalignment or whatever you want to call it is serious. When this happens, your body is moving towards destruction rather than healing. I get telling people that, “You have this going on and that is serious.” To take away someone's hope that they could get better knowing that we are self-healing and are miraculously made and Our bodies can heal. Our job is to help stuck people get unstuck.
Our job is to help stuck people get unstuck.
If you say, “You could get unstuck, but you are never going to get better.” What the heck? I don't even think a medical doctor would say that because it's taking away someone's hope. I don't want to give false hope. Typically, we can see big changes in something like numbness and tingling in a short amount of time and permanent changes in that.
As she was explaining it to me because she didn't understand some of what was going on and the doctor did tell her, “Don't go to somebody who's just going to turn you on on your neck and roll you because that's going to be a problem.” I'm like, “Don't do that.”
Was this a chiropractor who told her that?
This was an actual chiropractor. My concern is, “What else are they doing?” This is the other thing that people should be worried about. We've got some “Influencer” docs in the Blair work. Dr. Drew Hall and Dr. Kevin Pecca are fantastic at doing marketing because they love making TikTok videos. I hate that they love making TikTok videos. I love that they make videos. I hate that it's TikTok.
I try not to consume TikTok. I do make TikTok. Right. You all can find me @DrBethBagley.
If you watch any of Drew Hall’s TikTok, Kevin's are better, in my opinion.
It's all of the same stuff over and over. He is like, “If you're suffering from blah blah blah.” Honestly, he gets a lot of views on that stuff. Between Drew and Kevin Pecca, I have had patients who have started care because they saw one of their TikTok.
Kevin's looks a little bit more nice. Drew is very raw.
The thing about TikTok is people don't necessarily need it to look nice. They just need it to be real. It doesn't have to be full-on production.
This other doctor and I are looking at their website. It feels like they're trying to be an influencer more than they're trying to be a doctor. At the end of the day, Doctors Drew and Kevin are trying to be clinicians who also put out videos as opposed to someone who's trying to be an influencer.
They never want to not be a doctor. They always want to be a doctor.
This is the same for us. We would rather be a doctor all day long. I love doing this and having this conversation with you[MM1] .
I'd rather people just come in and I don't have to market at all. I don't love marketing. I don't hate marketing, but I don't love it. I love seeing people's lives change behind that door over there. To see people's lives change, I have to market. It's a business.
That's part of what we're doing here and we're just getting the word out there so we can share what's going on. This young lady that's coming in once we take a look at her images, I'll be like, “Here are the things that I worry about. If I were your age, these are the big problems. Sometimes we have sunk costs and sometimes things in our body are sunk costs.” We have to work around that. I've got another patient who didn't have any of the jabi jabs, but he still had the heart problems associated with it.
It could have just been from the COVID.
He had COVID about three times. He's got all these health issues.
Does he have a weak weekend immune system before that?
Other than the fact that there were some beverages that he likes and cigars, he was not bad, but there was a lot of stress work-wise. He had several stents put in. There are certain medications you have to take to maintain the patency of those stents so that blood will flow. My dad still regrets getting the one stint put in. They didn't need to do it, but they highly recommended the stent in the widow maker that he had, which was 90% blocked or maybe 70%, whatever it was. It was a big blockage. The upside was, and the reason he didn't have a whole lot of heart damage was because the heart had already made new vessels around the blockage.
Dad is like, “I wish they hadn't done it, but they did it.” I'm not going to fret over it. There are some things that you have to maintain. Otherwise, that thing will block up, which is the unfortunate side effect of getting a stint if the body says, “I don't like this. This shouldn't be here. Let's get rid of it.” It's keeping blood flowing.
Does the body attack it with the immune system?
Yeah. The coating on the outside of it, if I'm not mistaken, prevents it not from being necessarily rejected by the body as much as keeps it from getting stuff clotting it and things like that. That only lasts for so long. Anything in the body that isn't of the body and even stuff of the body will turned over. The body says, “I don't like this and we're going to change this.” That's why there is a medication to deal with the stent.
This young man has been a patient for a couple of years. He's been under upper cervical care for a good long time as well. He's like, “I'm not happy about what happened with the heart attack and everything else, but this is where I am. This is the bare minimum that I have to do to move forward.” He's loving cardio rehab. I think cardio rehab is one of the best things I have ever seen the medical profession figure out.
I honestly wish that every person who is eligible for cardiac rehab could continue it for the rest of their lives because the changes I see in my patients who have had to go through cardiac rehab are so profound, but then it ends. You're rehabbed. First of all, people are afraid that they're going to have another stroke or a heart attack while they're exercising. This puts them in a safe place where if something were to happen, there would be people there who could help.
I wish it were true because these people go through those changes, and most of them don't keep doing it. Most of them don't continue that path. Most of them just go back like, “I'm better.” You can't stop exercising. Many of them are still afraid to go to the gym or even just go for a walk because they're fearful that something bad could happen when that's the opposite.
They need to be out and being active and physically doing things. My dad's heart attack was 2008 or 2009, but he kept on doing the rehab because they offered it and they said, “You can keep on coming in on the regular.” They had it at the hospital. There was a core group that was there all the time. That core group would come in and do some yoga. They would do some other activities at the hospital and then afterward, they'd all sit down and have coffee. When COVID happened, all of that got shut down.
I was listening to someone talking about how we have lost our socializing skills since COVID. COVID puts so much fear into people that we can't interact with others that we don't have. That's a psychological rabbit hole that I don't even want to go down because I know it. We are not islands by any means, and we certainly are not. We are social creatures that need to connect.
This is why, if nothing else, religions have been around in various forms throughout the years to have social interactions. Something that happened during COVID put so much fear in people, and it's not the fear of God. They are not interacting socially as we should. That's a whole other thing. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but I just want to get out, go to a gym, and keep active. My dad's got a 2-hour routine that he does at least 3 days a week at the local gym. Some people do continue.
He's the exception. So many people don't.
Two or three days a week, it's yoga, and then, on other days, he's finally getting into strength training. I haven't gotten him to do kettlebells yet, but he's doing sled pools. Dad's a former judge. A lot of those guys are former cops. I know his brother better than I know him. They both had big egos. They were going back and forth putting, “I did 200 on the sled,” and then they put that on the chalkboard. Dad would come over and he said, “ I did 225.” “I did 250.” “I did 250, then 275 for three laps.” I think they got up to 300 or maybe even 325.
For me, I've never pulled that on a sled.
They got to that point.
Were they pushing the sled or were they pulling it with a rope?
I think they were pulling it.
Were they doing that, that one where they pulled like that? No.
I think they had something around their waist.
They were walking with it. It was usually like their legs. I might be able to do that.
You could do it pushing as well. Dad got up to the 303. He beat the police officer's record and they both sort of said, “We have proven that we are both stupid.” I told Dad, “Back it down to 275 and start walking it backward.”
I love that he had a scary thing happen to him and then he made some changes. If we could just convince people to make the changes before the scary thing happens.
If we could just convince people to make the changes before the scary thing happens.
You're spot on there. Remember going through school and I was not an active kid going through school. I was the pudgy kid who I wished had kettlebells because if someone said, “Do this and you'll be strong,” and I'd be like, “I like that,” because I can race against myself or even just having gotten into a weight room, that would've been good. Having something physical and growing up there was the big Arnold Schwarzenegger National fitness thing.
That’s presidential fitness.
I don't think that stuff exists anymore. We're seeing kids who are less and less physically active. Even my buddy's son, while he plays hockey a lot, is given nothing else to do. He will spend more time sitting in front of a TV playing Minecraft or whatever the new fad game is more than anything else. As you're looking that up, I'm going to bet that the presidential fitness test when you and I were going through school is considerably less than what it was back in the Kennedy years.
I seem to recall that one involved a lot of pull-ups. There was some sort of ring thing that you would do overhead. Mm- there was a rope pull where you would pull, you'd climb a rope. There are two stories, almost the old gyms where they would have those, quite honestly. I'm not going to say that pulling yourself up on a rope is a mandatory thing, but that's a lot of upper-body strength. That's strong.
It’s ended in 2013. It was replaced by some with something else. I agree that it started off probably way harder, like everybody gets a trophy at this point. That's probably why it ended. I remember being a kid in gym class, and I am not a super athletic person. Back then, I couldn't even touch my toes. I can now because you have found out that you can improve your flexibility when you work on it. Nobody ever even explained that to me as a kid. When I played basketball, nobody said, “You could do these exercises and improve your vertical. No one told me that.” I just thought I didn't have a good vertical. I might be 6’2 foot, but I don't have a good vertical. Now I'm like, “I could have had. Nobody explained that to me as a kid.” I never knew when I did the sit and reach. Remember that?
I hated that thing.
I couldn't touch my toes worth crap, but I could do it now because I realized that you can improve upon flexibility and you can improve upon your fitness.
A lot of the rehab that I'm teaching patients now after they've been in care for a little bit is all about regaining basically flexibility in the legs and the hips. I was chatting with a patient who was having a lot of hamstring pain. Something was cramping up, and sure enough, she was out of adjustment. I'm showing her a hip hinge and saying, “Add some weight to this.”
It's the reverse deadlift form that I'm recommending. If you want to go find some reverse deadlift forms, I think Ethylene X did a wonderful video talking about it. All you're doing is you're trying to load up and stretch the hamstrings in the quads in this process. This was over in my Arthur office, which was a concrete slab that I'm standing on.
I'm always tight over there. I went to touch my toes as a demonstration. I could touch the floor. I was shocked because I had a workout that morning and everything else, but I'm constantly doing flexibility stuff. About five days a week, I'm good at that, and seven if I have the extra time. Some things you have to do daily to maintain and function the way you're supposed to, like the one young man who needs to take his medications.
His wife is certainly in the healthcare. I don't know if she was a full-on nurse or where she's at in that, but she's like, “Here's your meds and don't say no.” He's like, “I don't say no. I do my rehab at least five days a week.” Sometimes, I'm doing the rehab here in the office, showing people so that I can get my minutes in for the day.
You're not wrong. It's amazing. I will oftentimes show patients with their arms back. I call it the Angels because that's strengthening between the shoulder blades and turning some muscles on that get turned off when you're sitting on your butt in front of a computer screen all day. People don't realize that that's a trauma in itself. This is the first time I've sat. I sat for twenty minutes to eat lunch. This is the second time I've sat. I am blessed. I am so excited to stand all day and bend, twist, and move because the long run of my body is so good for me. I'm not complaining at all.
Whenever we're in seminars, when we're at the Blair conference, it kills me to sit that long. My body doesn't even understand what that is. I get all antsy. I don't know how people do it, but I do know that you can do things daily to help eliminate that stress on your body, which some of the rehab things you're talking about, Wall Angels, there's that thing called the Bruger Stretch. You guys can look at all that. You can comment or shoot us an email and I'll send you all the stretches that we do.
You can do things daily to help eliminate stress from your body.
The sitting is rough. It's a trauma in itself and it's like a repetitive trauma rather than like a car accident, which is an instant trauma. This is a repetitive trauma where you're doing the same thing over and over. If you grabbed your phone and you held it with your shoulder, don't do that. You could do it for like a minute or two. If you're doing it for a minute or two, let me tell you, every time you grab your phone you're doing it. How you do one thing is how you do everything.
Right before we started this, I watched a video, The Godfather Of Kettlebell Stuff, Pavel Tsatsouline, who has been doing some research. One of the things that they found that helps improve cardiac performance is doing effectively a bodyweight lunge uphill. You're not doing a full lunge as much as you are just taking long strides on a hill, climbing up the hill multiple times and apparently, that increases your cardiac output volume while you're doing it. That way, you've got a stronger, more robust heart down the line.
If you're sitting all the time, the heart will not have the demand on it. They're basically saying sitting is the new smoking. At least when people were smoking all the time, they were walking around. They were going outside. I had one buddy who said, “Let's go play some basketball. Hold on a second. I got to light up first.” He's playing basketball with a cigarette.
At least he's moving. He’s probably getting a little Vitamin D. You got the sun hit your face while you're smoking your cigarette.
John Daly does all the golfing with a cigarette and a whiskey and he just pummels everybody else.
My friend Ginger, who used to smoke, was talking about what she misses about smoking. One of them was getting up and getting outside once every hour or two. We should institute movement breaks or sunshine breaks where it might only be five minutes, but getting up from your desk and going outside for five minutes.
First of all, I think it'd make your brain better. Second of all, your body suffers in these positions in front of a computer screen all day. Especially now with people who are mostly still working from home, and I don't have a problem with it. I think it's amazing for lots of people, and it's a resurgence in small towns because you can live in a small town now, have an amazing job, and not have to leave your room.
You can also shop and keep these small towns going because I love small towns. One more thing is that the implementation of that is nothing you can't do by just setting a phone alarm. All you have to do is set an alarm for 90 minutes and it beeps at you. Once you're done with that email or meeting, the next thing you do is get up and walk away from your computer for five minutes.
I think they do this in either Japan or South Korea where they'll be sitting at a computer screen at their desk and all of a sudden, there's a mandatory it's going to shut off. There's nothing you can do for five minutes. You've got to get up 5, 10 minutes or whatever it is. Go for a walk before the computer will let you back in. It improves productivity. There's a whole Pomodoro theory that you take these frequent breaks every so many minutes of working. There's something to it. You get up, go for a walk and go do things. Don't go play on Instagram or TikTok.
Don't take your phone with you.
Don't just get away from things. This goes to the same patient I was talking about earlier, who has a heart condition. He has improved his mindfulness of being in the moment. The more that he is in the moment, the more calm he has been. He said it was a Sikh doctor, but I can't remember what the doctor said exactly was profound. It was about living in the moment and not living for the next moment.
I learned that lesson from when I was doing my kung fu. Shifu would count out in Chinese the next motion that we were going to do or the next rep. Not to anticipate the rep and just wait for the count and then go because that is being in the moment. Meditation for me was like that because I could sit for 20 minutes and sometimes I wanted to sit for 30, but if I had 20 minutes, I set the timer for 20 minutes, knowing that I could always go longer.
I can't go shorter because I've already allocated that time. I can relax and say, “I'm just going to be here. I'm going to try to calm my mind. I'm going to just be aware of what is going around in my breath,” and then that alarm will go off. I said, “I've got this 20 minutes, 10 or 15 or whatever I set the timer for to do nothing more than breathe.” That just helps clean up my head. I'm more aware. I'm more in the moment. I need to do it more. I don't do it as much as I'd like to.
That's the time management. I honestly have sucked at time management. In a good way, I'm busy. I love that I have patience and all the things, but being a business owner, a doctor, and a mentor, I told my team I apologized to them during the meeting. I was like, “I have not been a good leader.” They were all like, “You're fine.” They're all trying to be nice.
I was like, “I appreciate you guys, but I know I'm not living up to my potential.” One of the things I need to do is exactly what you talked about. I need to set aside time every day to breathe, meditate and pray. I need to set aside two hours a week to just do management, and that's just the business end of things. What's happening is I'm trying to do it in between things and I get called. My door is closed. It is a day when I'm not seeing patients or a time I'm not seeing patients. I need no one to bother me for an hour or two so I can get that stuff done because I have list after list of lists and it's like, “Oh my gosh.” I'm going to let you guys know the next episode because I'm going to be better about it. I'm going to do ten minutes because I think that's all my brain can take.
I've been bent over all day adjusting patients and I did get adjusted so everyone calmed down. I'll be fine. My body's working some stuff out. I am going to do a better job. I'm going to set ten-minute times where I breathe, pray, and take that time for myself. I might turn on music because I'm going to be honest, me being alone with my thoughts for ten minutes is scary to me at this point in time because I don't know where my brain's going to go.
That's half the fun of just being quiet and in the moment. You get to find out where your brain's going and you're like, “Come back over here, butterfly.”
I'm so distracted.
This is the biggest problem, and I think this is the bigger problem that we have as a society, is we have so many distractions and so many literal dopamine hits throughout our day. Honestly, I challenge everybody reading this to after you're done reading this, think about the last Instagram post you had from a friend. I've got about 3 or 5 friends who regularly send me posts. Some of them are political. Some of them are funny. Some of them stick with me, but not most of them.
Even when you're watching with something like that, it's minute, but can you be mindful of it to say, “This was worthwhile.” Some things are a funny joke. You need to learn how to tell that joke. Take a moment. No offense, Dr. Bagley, but I was learning blonde jokes because they're funny, and so are the brunette and the redhead ones and the bald ones because they're jokes.
This is fake, so it's okay.
I made it a point. My uncle gave me this sheet of jokes and I read through them multiple times and then I had to learn how to speak them because I was not a good speaker back in high school when he gave me this list of jokes. Even now, if I'm going to practice a speech, there's some stuff that I can do that is extemporaneous, like quite honestly having a conversation like this, but there's a lot of stuff you have to practice.
If you see something good on Instagram, especially something that is uplifting, take a moment and repeat it a couple of times. My favorite, I can't quote it word for word, but the man in the arena comes to mind regularly. That was a Theodore Roosevelt speech. I don't know if that was the speech that he gave as he was bleeding after having been shot by somebody.
That's a great story.
That's for a different episode. It's fun stuff. I challenge people to be more in the moment. Be aware of your surroundings and get your head on straight.
I'm going to do it right now, and I challenge everyone reading to do the same thing. Pick a time on your phone to set a timer that says breathe, pray or meditate. Set a timer and make it go off every day, like 8:00 PM or whatever time that you're done eating and the kids are done. All the things are out of you. You might be sitting there going through Instagram or doing something. When that goes off, you're like, “I’m turning this off. Now is my time to pray.” Whatever you want to do, I'm going to pray. Thank you. I'm going to do that right now.
This is a perfect time to do it as we wrap up and nobody's expecting you at home for a little bit yet.
I'll do that before we leave. My alarm is going to go off at 9:15. That's going to be my time. What a great episode. We were like, “Let's talk about this.” I was like, “Let's just chat because we have good chats,” and you guys don't always get to read them. Now you got to read it and you got to read about some cool new patients. I can't wait to keep you updated with a few of these guys. I'm excited to get some updates about how your new patients are doing.
I need one update from you. How are you doing with the boron?
What boron? I don't have it. I didn't buy it yet because I'm afraid.
Get it. Break down. Don’t let me buy it for you.
I like it when you buy me stuff, but what should I buy again?
Get a pharmaceutical-grade boron.
I'll order it tonight because I want Jason to start taking it, too. Thanks for asking.
We even keep ourselves accountable on the show.
You all do, too.
Now that we've got that taken care of, where are they going to find you?
You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/, TikTok at @DrBethBagley, Instagram and Facebook.
I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com, Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois. @KeystoneChiro on Instagram. Send me funny stuff if you find me on there. Thanks for joining us for another episode. We'll be back with our 50th episode. Bye.
We've covered a lot of supplements in the past, and we wanted to do a dedicated episode to why we are using Fullscript and what protocols we have posted at this time. Supplements are a secondary priority in our practices because so much healing starts with your head on straight. But there are some things you need during the entire year (like Vitamin D in the winter) that you must have in supplement form.
If you buy supplements, we want to make sure you get the best ones that you can. We've done the hard work putting together these lists to make your ordering easier. This is also a great way to support the podcast as any sales help us keep the show going.
Listen and read the full blog post here
Dr. Bagley’s patient experiences periodic headaches thinking it is normal. It was not! Phillip shares his harrowing story about recovering from Trigeminal Neuralgia. Then Dr. Schurger goes full-on nerd on the trigeminal nucleus, with Dr. Bagley reigning him in. Then they wrap up by sharing about a couple of patients who improved their quality of life from care. Tune in to this episode now!
https://linktr.ee/theblondeandthebald
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In this episode, we got a special guest with us. His name is Philip. He is one of my patients that I love and care about so much. He said he would share his story or pieces of his story with us. I'm excited to hear about it. I'm going to start by asking him some questions. Is that all right, Doctor?
It sounds good. Let's go for it.
Philip, you started chiropractic care quite a long time ago but you are dealing with something called trigeminal neuralgia and some other things that happened to you. Upper cervical has been an integral part of helping keep you out of the hospital, which is awesome. Tell us your story of how things began and how you arrived at where you are.
After nearly twenty years in construction and heavy equipment, that may not be 100% of the culvert but that was a lot of heavy equipment rides, rough and 2 or 3 car wrecks being rear-ended the whiplash and 3 other circumstances that could have brought it on the whole combination. One day I woke up with a headache. I would get periodic headaches. We thought they were normal but they weren't.
What brought attention was when I woke up in such pain. I could not physically lie down for over 40 days. I could not physically lay down in any position, not even on my stomach. It was severe. My wife even thought I might be going into shock. When I would sleep, I would have to sleep sitting up, propped up in a corner from exhaustion.
My dear 84-year-old mother took me to a doctor that did upper cervical care that she had heard about in Springfield, Missouri, which is where we were based. Slowly, I started getting better. I will back up a little bit. I was to the point that the trigeminal neuralgia would come and go on top of the pain that was stopping me from lying down. It would increase dramatically. I could not lie down. I was ready to have all my teeth pulled. The oral surgeon called my primary. He thought I had trigeminal neuralgia. There is a sports medicine doctor. I went to him also. He verified it along with a couple of other doctors. With that trouble, I went to several different doctors of different care specialties.
Dr. Curtis Horgen in Springfield was the man that got me started on this. It took several years. The trigeminal neuralgia would last about 40 minutes. There were no short verses, nearly times 40 minutes of it. They checked me for a stroke because the pain was severe. I started coming up here to visit grandchildren. Dr. Fortune notified Dr. Bagley, who is my permanent doctor.
I'm much better. There are no more hospital visits. The trigeminal neurology, I have not had a true one in several months. I have not had what I was going through at that time. Sometimes I will get a little pain, which may be coming but it doesn't. Evidently, the trouble that I had with C1 and C2 was severe. I could have had surgery. However, I was not a big believer in that. They said, “It was challenging.” To me, “That sounds dangerous.” I also did not want to wake up with a permanent headache like what I had before. This care has given me my life back and I can visit with my grandkids.
Sometimes you get a little trouble where they roughhouse and he has to come back.
My neck still is vulnerable, on going out.
He is one of the patients that has the most trouble holding an adjustment. One of our goals, as upper chiropractors, is to get people to hold their adjustments and hold them for the long-term. That isn't the case for you. I want that for you but it doesn't hold long.
With Dr. Bagley's care of my quality of life, I would say it is 90%. In the beginning, it was zero. I could not function. I had to sleep sitting up from exhaustion.
I can't imagine that. How did you function at all, trying to sleep like that?
I had no choice. It was survival. At that time, we didn't know if it was C1 or C2. Every day, you would think, “Tomorrow, it will be better.” That is how I ran on that for several something days. We have two children. They both live out of town. They even came home because they did not know if I was going to be there.
It was severe and I didn't even want to think about how awful it was. I can’t jumble for 40-something minutes. I went through the shots of the neck under a live camera. I went to a neurologist. I went to headache care centers. Nothing has helped except the upper cervical care. I went through neck braces. I could keep on going. This is where it is at. This is what saved me.
We hear that commonly, especially with trigeminal cases and some migraine cases. Nothing is touching it. Nothing is getting better. Nothing is getting your quality of life back. We get you adjusted and things start working out better. I do have a question. How often do you need to get adjusted as things are going?
Once or twice a week. When I feel good, sometimes I will overdo it and do something at home that I should not be doing. We have to take that into accountability also.
How worried are you about doing something over the top sometimes, knowing that Dr. Bagley is available?
Knowing she is available, I'm not worried about it at all. If I know the lady is out of town, I behave myself.
That is why I don't want to tell him I'm in town so he takes better care of himself.
It has been a long struggle since that started. There is a nerve surgeon here in St. Louis. My primary care sent me to him. He also diagnosed the C1 and C2 problems as hitting the trigeminal nerve. He was good because we thought it might be a nerve problem in my head that needed operating on. He said I could use surgery but I chose not to because I'm much better than I was.
Surgery is great as a last resort because everything else is failed. The problem with surgery is the one-directional thing. You do it and there is no undoing it.
Surgery is great as a last resort because everything else has failed. But the problem with surgery is it's a one-directional thing. You do it, and there's no undoing it.
If the surgery had not worked, I didn't want to wake up with a permanent headache, which they said, “It would be possible but highly unlikely.” If it didn't fix the problem, I could not be treated by chiropractic again. I'm not even contemplating that anymore. That was somewhere in that last several years' timeframe. I am able to function. Even when my neck is out, there are always special circumstances but it is not as bad as it used to be. I'm getting better slowly. That may be humorous after several years.
One of the things that we've done differently is that, since Dr. Horton has retired, he comes up here for care. Sometimes he goes to Dr. Rustici in Kansas City because it is the same amount of distance. It depends. He has other families up in Kansas City. We have gotten his Blair CBCT done. It is a lot more specific to him than what we call an HIO doctor. He did the Palmer stuff, which is still a great technique. It has been updated. That is what Blair is. I'm so glad that you had Dr. Horton in your life and that he was able to get to where you are. I can't wait to see him over the next couple of years and see how much better you can get because I think you can.
I would like to add for anyone else that is going through this. They might rule it out because of an MRI. The surgeon operates on the nerves in your head. I wish I had known the precise professional name for him. He said, “The laydown MRIs were hiding this C1 and C2 problem.” I had multiple MRIs and CAT scans. It hid the problem. I can't tell you why. If there is someone out there that thinks this might be their trouble but the MRI shows it is okay, at least get a standup MRI if nothing else and go further.
We agree with that. We talk a lot about upright MRIs.
There is no sense in losing one’s lifestyle or life if one gets depressed enough in such pain when the care is here.
In the Midwest, Dr. Schurger and I are the places to go. If you go to the Blair Chiropractic website, you can find doctors across the country and in the world. There are some across the world, which is cool.
If you go to the Blair Chiropractic website, you can find doctors across countries.
I thank the good lord for my doctors, this lady right here and Dr. Warden.
We will let you get back to your family. Thanks for coming out and I appreciate you telling your story.
Thanks so much, Philip.
Thank you, Doctors.
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That was a great testimonial by Philip.
He has been through a lot. He is a solid man. He is grateful for the chiropractic care he has gotten with Dr. Horton. If you are out there and are a praying person, say some prayers for Dr. Horton because he is battling cancer. The care he got through him and able to find us up here and thank goodness, he got family up here. There is a reason other than to come to see me come up here and visit his family and somewhere to stay the night when he is up here.
One thing I want to say to anyone out there who has a family member battling trigeminal neuralgia or if you are battling it and are suffering is there is hope out there. Upper cervical care is an answer for many people. You need to find an upper cervical doctor. The Blair website is a great resource but if you can't find a Blair doctor in your area, know that there are other upper cervical techniques. They have good results too. Do some Google searches. If you find an upper cervical doctor 600 miles from you, call there to the office.
Call our offices. We know the people are.
You might not know how to find them. We would be happy to find those people for you someone to help you close by.
Oftentimes, we have these people on speed dial on our phones because they are close friends. The trigeminal neuralgia was a problem for Philip. He got to get propped up into a corner. I can barely imagine how they put the cushions around him so he can sleep at night because he can't get comfortable.
My patients joke about it after they get adjusted. I have got these zero-gravity chairs. They make a comment, “Doc, let me stay here all night long. Don't worry about me. Come in the morning and let me out.” The funny thing is I got one of these zero-gravity chairs. I have fallen asleep in it many a time. It is a nice nap.
What is curious is even after maybe a couple of hours of sleeping in that, if I'm still trying to sleep the night through, I need to go into a bed and lay flat. I don't know what the biological mechanism is. Probably a sleep expert can explain this. I need to be able to stretch out. I need to lay on my side to let some things, whatever processes my body is trying to relax. As soon as he said it was 44 days that he could not lay in any position, I felt for him. I can't imagine that. I have had my fair share of my back hurting. Certain positions were no good. That is horrible.
In episode thirteen, we touched on some trigeminal stuff with my sister. She did not have the severity or the length of severity that Philip had because she was much younger and didn't have much damage. You got some neurology stuff to talk about. That is important if you are going through this, know someone or are interested in science and a science geek, which we love. The neurology of the trigeminal nucleus and the trigeminal nerve coming out of the brain stem is cool. I know a neurology expert and his name is Dr. Schurger.
One of the biggest things that I hear from my trigeminal neuralgia patients from their doctors, not always their neurologist but oftentimes from their doctor, is, “The trigeminal nerve comes out in the head, not in the neck.” Why is the neck having such a profound effect? The problem ended up being what resource they were taught and how much science they taught as far as neurology goes.
When we are studying the spinal cord itself, we are not looking at some of these odd spots. They show us a general shape. They say, “This applies to most of the cord because, for 90%, these things apply.” This is a cross-section of the cord about C5 areas. That is down here. I have been looking at a couple of people's necks.
If you want to get a good sense of where your C5 or your fifth cervical is, it is about that little crease in your neck. That is about where C5 is. This is what that looks like. It is an actual slice of it. This is much larger. Front to back, we are no more than a centimeter. It is the same with side to side. It is a little bit wider than it is front to back but it is not wide.
It is bigger here and a little bit further down than it is like C3 or T1 because a whole bunch of nerves starts coming out as C5 that go down the arms.
Things go back and forth along the way here. When we come to the actual labels, they say, “These are the parts and the pieces that are involved here.” We come around, “This is the lateral cortical spinal tract.” What I don't have is a breakout of this low back or they would consider sacral or lumbar and cross here. It doesn't cut in towards the spinal cord but it goes parallel to this outer surface here.
Low back, lumbar, thoracic, cervical and lateral cortical spinal tract are going to be part and parcel to some of the stuff going on in your lower back, which is where you are going to feel stuff first. That is why we start seeing those effects. This is lower in the spinal cord than the C1 and C2 we are dealing with here. I bought this book for this page. The only reason I bought this book was because it had this slice in color. This is a slice at C1. It looks very different than this.
I didn't pull up a brainstem picture but it looks more like the brainstem than it does look like the spinal cord. If you are trying to figure out what the difference is between as it changes from the brainstem to the spinal cord, what's the difference? It is like driving down a road that has one name. You crossed an intersection and it has another name. Up here, we got Jefferson and another part of town is Clear Lake Avenue here in Springfield.
In St. Louis, we have Lindbergh Road. That changes name to Kirkwood Road and back to Lindbergh Road. St. Louis is covered with roads that change names.
It is the same road as you have gone past an imaginary line in St. Louis and up here. Sometimes it was a township line or a city line. Who knows what it is? In our neurology, the difference between the brainstem and spinal cord is an imaginary line that somebody said, “It is outside of the skull. Therefore, it is a spinal cord instead of being brainstem.” It looks the same. When we come down to this next picture, we got that lateral cortical spinal tract that is sitting in here that we were looking at that was sitting more out this way but we have the trigeminal nucleus.
Explain what a nucleus is for somebody who doesn't know.
A nucleus is your CPU. If you think about your nucleus, for lack of a better way to describe it, the nucleus is interfacing and sending signals back and forth. It is very much like a CPU. We would have multiple little CPUs. Think about a modern computer. It doesn't have one CPU. Sometimes you got quad-core or 16-core and a video card on top of your processor. We could almost look at every one of these nuclei as an individual processor doing things. In the case of the spinal trigeminal nucleus part portions, which are these pieces right in here, these are pain centers for your trigeminal nerves. This is at C1.
Does it stop there? Does it go further?
It drops down to at least 2 or 3.
Those little shots elongate down.
Here is Atlas. I’m pointing right underneath my ear. It drops down to about C3. If you think about the upper portion that goes up into the brainstem, it is right about the center of your ear. If you were going to put your finger in your ear, don't put your finger in your ear. We don't need to do that. If you did, that is the upper part of that spinal trigeminal nucleus. It drops down into the neck. More importantly, the upper part is going to be a lot of sensation. You could almost break them into two parts or processors. One processor is for pain and another processor is for sensation. You got these two pieces. The spinal portion is where the pain ends up being more pronounced.
You can see where this curves around to the outside edge here. You can see almost to a point. This outer edge right about here is where the dentate ligament comes in to help stabilize your spinal cord in the center of the canal. The problem ends up happening when we have shifted the atlas out of place. We have still tethered above in similar spots.
You can imagine you got a spot here and a spot underneath where my thumbs are. This is the atlas. The atlas has twisted. You are exposing and potentially causing pressure on that spinal trigeminal nucleus, which can lead to that whole horrible trigeminal neuralgia in that presentation. Why does an upper cervical adjustment almost always be the thing that clears these people out? It is because that is where the nerve is most pronounced. That is where the pain centers are most turned on.
Do you use my misalignment to show people their misalignments?
I show it a little bit.
The dentate ligaments are in the wrong spot on C1 but it could explain it to somebody if they are looking at it. This is a rudimentary look at the atlas. One of the ways that we explained it to patients is that the atlas shifts and it shifts back to where it is supposed to be with an adjustment, which is what we want. I like this one because it's showing the shift from above down. We can see how the pulling of those dentate ligaments is. What Dr. Schurger was saying is, “Up here, they come out from the side.”
My criticism of this is, who put this together? It was an artist's rendition.
In general, if we are teaching a patient this, we can say that there are these little ligaments that hold the spinal cord in the center of this area. It doesn't bounce around because we don't want it bouncing around. We don't want your brainstem bouncing around.
It looks like there are four ligaments holding it in place. There are two at each level. You got one on either side. If my head is the spinal cord, you got one coming out here. You got a set coming out here at the occiput. You have a set coming out here at C1. You have another set coming out here at C2, all horizontal.
At each level, there is another set. They start changing angles.
Instead of being horizontal and tight, trying to keep everything stable at that spot, they start coming out this way because what do we do? We move, flex and extend. We need a little bit of ability for that spinal cord to go back and forth. In this area, it wants to stay fairly straight and stable because what is attached immediately above it? The brain. We don't want the brain pulling down outside of the skull, which ends up happening, as we find on a lot of those upright MRIs that Philip mentioned.
It was cool that he knew about that. I do not talk to him about that much. That is cool that he has done the research on that. When there is a shift in the upper cervical spine, it is going to pull the dentate ligaments. That is one of the hypotheses of how the upper cervical is effective. There are multiple reasons.
When there's a shift in the upper cervical spine, it will pull the dentate ligaments. That's one of the hypotheses of how an upper cervical is so effective.
You have a vascular component to this.
You have cerebral spinal fluid.
You have three different fluids going into the brain, as we have discussed in our previous episodes but you got oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood. It is your artery flow and venous flow. You also have cerebral spinal fluid. To get to my hand, I have two things. I have the artery flow going in and the venous flow going out. You add a third component to that. This is why the brain and why neuroscience is neuroscience.
You were talking about the lateral corticospinal tracts. It could affect the trigeminal nerve for some people, which is unfortunate and terrible. What affects almost everyone I have seen, if not everyone, is when atlas is out, that lateral corticospinal tract is affected and it causes a shift in how these muscles work. It pulls one leg shorter than the other when someone is lying down. When they are standing, what we end up seeing is one hip will be higher. This person is almost lying down because you can't stand on a floaty leg. If this person were standing, the left leg would be shorter or touching the ground and down.
If they were lying down, we would see this leg pulling up short. When we do an adjustment, which is within seconds of the adjustment, we can flip someone on their back real quick and see that this has occurred, where their leg lengths are even. That is why somebody who has low back pain can get an upper cervical adjustment turnover and be like, “How did you do that, Doc? Are you magic?” I was like, “No, we are not magic.” We created balance within that brainstem and atlas area. Your back isn't getting pulled on anymore, which is cool.
I had a young man in his 70s. His wife has been coming to see me forever. She has been coming to see me for several years. She started knowing she was out of adjustment when her foot would hurt. It was the weirdest thing. She was suffering from migraines but her foot would hurt.
That was her warning.
She was like, “I got something going on.” She doesn't have that problem anymore. Her husband always brings her over because they live over in Decatur, which is about an hour out. He is an engineer. He is one of those guys. I either have the easiest time or the hardest time with my engineers because they would be like, “You got that diploma on your wall. How did you get into this?” We start talking. They were like, “I need to come see you.”
I had another guy who had started. He was like, “My back feels better, Doc. I think you got something going here.” This older gentleman has been in bed for the past several weeks. His wife is beside herself, trying to figure out what to do. He comes over for the drive. Imagine he has been in bed for several weeks and he has been hurting badly. He is finally saying, “I will try it.” His color looks off.
This is a man who built his own house. He is that kind of engineer. He has done all the things. He is not looking like his normal self. All of a sudden, he was like, “Doc, I will try it.” I wasn't letting him leave my office without getting adjusted. I took the picture. I said, “You guys sit back in my imaging room. I'm going to take care of a couple of people. We are going to figure this out.” 1 in 2 counter rotation. I get them both adjusted and immediately, he stands up. His wife can see that he is standing up straighter. He was like, “This is better.” We have him rest.
I have had to adjust him once more on Wednesday. It was bad. He was in again. I had to do some work on his low back because it has been 30 years that he has been having this problem. He noticed his knee was better. He was like, “I don't understand how the knee is connected to this.” I'm like, “They are all connected.” What was the analogy that I used for him? I don't want to use the one analogy. You would love it but I'm not.
It is probably bad. You are going to scare people away with it.
I'm not going to use it but it is a radio station.
That one is not scary.
If you think about a radio station, people are like, “Doc, I don't know how something up here takes care of something down there because it is so far away.” I respond, “Did the music come out of your radio because it was always on your radio? Where did that radio station come from? How many hundreds of miles away sometimes did that radio station or that signal on your TV come from?”
This was Dr. Palmer's argument about what it is that we do and how we are connected to a higher energy source, a higher power and God that he called it. For those of you who are young who don't understand how radio devices used to require you to turn the dial back and forth and tune in, you had to go back and forth a little bit. It wasn't the 97.3 that you would dial.
You think tuning it might even help you get a better signal.
I can't get the jazz station coming out of St. Louis or down in Edwardsville up here because of where I'm at. I can't dial that. Dr. B.J. Palmer, who is our forefront and our developer of the upper cervical work, called it radio station God. If we did not have our atlas on straight, we could not be properly tuned into that source to allow our body and life force to function the way it is supposed to. It is profound. When you see people's lives go from 0% quality of life to 90% quality of life in no time, that is a miracle.
There is this gentleman who started seeing me. He is 80. I don't honestly know how he found us. One of his kids that lives out of town did internet searching and found us. He was getting driven from North County St. Louis. It was a good 30-minute drive in traffic if it was traffic time. He walked in, hunched over and not healthy looking.
He was very nice. He wasn't mean or anything but hard to even have a conversation with him. He wasn't connected. He was an old man. I felt for him. He and his family knew that wasn't him. That is not how he has been. He has been a hard worker. He worked at McDonnell Douglas. He built things. This is a strong-working guy.
He walked out with a pep in his step. He has been driving short distances. He didn't drive down to us but he has been driving again. He went and played the Lato. I was like, “Remember the little people when you win.” It was incredible. Is that one of those miracles where the person wasn't walking when they walked in but he was dizzy, disoriented and wasn't making sense? His family knew something was wrong. His daughter did some research, got him in here and paid for him to come in, which is sweet. It is a great family. All are taking care of him. This man is changed.
Some people are like, “I am. That is what I'm paying for.” It is funny because I'm like, “This is a miracle. You are a walking miracle. Your body was designed to heal. The interference was keeping it from healing. We are getting you back on track. You are healing again. Your body is doing phenomenally.” I have such appreciation for that and it makes my heart happy. I know it makes your heart happy but we get to see this every day. How lucky are we? Sometimes it is hard to be here because we put so much effort and love into our patients. It is exhausting but is it worth it?
I had a day on Monday. I started at 5:30 because that was the way my brain was starting to function and everyone was calling in. The better part was when you were on point. Mondays are my fasting days. I don't eat from dinner Sunday night to dinner Monday night. I just go. I was out by 9:00 and it was a great sleep. It is amazing what we can go through and how we can help people. People need to realize that there is something bigger and greater for them. Sometimes getting their head on straight is what is holding them back from being able to achieve those things.
Your life force is being squeezed off. You have vitality in you that is beyond what you can even comprehend. You need to turn the light switch back on and bring the dimmer switch back to where it is supposed to be. That is a good place to end.
We can't move up from that. Where are they going to find you?
I am in St. Louis, Missouri. We are on the West Side. We are at PrecisionChiroSTL.com and you can find us on all the socials too. I'm Dr. Beth Bagley.
I'm Dr. Frederick Schurger, Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois. We are on a lot of socials. I'm not going to get on TikTok but that's another story. I do monitor all the socials for the show. If you got some questions and five-star reviews, I would love to have people share this. You don't have to say a lot. Say, “They are not stupid and boring but make sure you subscribe.” Make sure you are doing reviews and sharing this with your friends and family, especially this episode here. Philip's story is not uncommon. It is the sad part.
Sometimes, it ends badly. That is what we want to stop. We don't want these people to suffer anymore.
Make sure you like, subscribe and share. We will be back next episode. You guys all have a great day.
Living with trigeminal neuralgia can be very difficult. It impacts our life, resulting in problems like, weight loss, isolation, and depression. Today, Frederick Schurger and Beth Bagley welcome a guest close to Beth's heart. Beth Bagley’s sister, Sarah, shares her experience dealing with trigeminal neuralgia and why people should seek care and try it. Beth chimes in with how our body is built to protect, but sometimes that protection mechanism is what holds us back. Frederick and Beth also touch on fasting and its benefits. Tune in to this insightful episode today.
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We have got a special guest. This is Sarah and she’s my sister. I brought her on because she has a story about a little-known problem that has happened to people called Trigeminal Neuralgia. She had it very early onset in college and she’s got a great story about how she had her life turnaround and now lives pain-free from trigeminal neuralgia symptoms and some headache stuff too. We will talk all about that. Sarah, when I was in chiropractic school, I discovered this thing called upper cervical and we had been under some chiropractic care most of our lives, correct?
Yes.
Our grandfather was a chiropractor and then through the years we would get chiropractic care, but it was more of conventional chiropractic care. What was your experience with conventional chiropractic care?
I’m going to be honest, it scared me. Grandpa was a wonderful man, but he did a lot of surprise attack chiropractic care where he would jump behind me so I would cry and try to crack my neck, and then I would cry.
It didn’t feel good to you.
No, I was never relaxed when he did it. I was always tense and so it scared me growing up. I still continued with it. Through high school and college and found other chiropractors that didn’t scare me but, at first, it scared me.
Coming into college, you were having a lot of headaches. One of the things I remember is an industrial-sized bottle of Advil or something from Sam’s Club. How much were you going through of that you think?
I’m sure within a week, I would say maybe 4 of the 7 days I was taking Advil pretty regularly.
That was when you were 19 to 20 years old then something happened and what did it feel like?
Towards the end of my college career, I was up in Kirksville and I did have a chiropractor that I saw up here and there. I remember calling our mom and saying that something in my jaw hurt and my mouth. I was like, “Who do I go to? Is this a chiropractor thing? Is this a dentist thing? Is this a doctor thing?” It came and went and it was a pulsing pain down in my jaw area. It would go away for a little bit and it would come back. I didn’t know what was wrong and who to see. It happened at a time where I was coming back to St. Louis anyway because I was going to start my student teaching.
I remember it being super uncomfortable and painful. It would go away and then it would come back and I talked to you about it. I talked to Dr. Bagley about it because I wasn’t sure what to do and then it got more and more intense. It didn’t go away anymore and was keeping me up at night. The only thing that would help is if I would drink water. I remember repeatedly.
You’d have ice in your mouth too.
I needed something. I don’t know what it did or why that helped, but all of a sudden, it was keeping me up at night. I couldn’t sleep, eat, or do anything and I didn’t know what was wrong.
I was in chiropractic school at that time. I didn’t know a lot yet because I was in school, but I had discovered upper cervical already. There was a chiropractor I was seeing, Dr. Adam Tanase, and he had already changed my life with the chiropractic care that I’d received there. In school, I had learned about trigeminal neuralgia and it was super rare. You are probably not going to see it a lot but this is what it is. When she was describing this to me, I thought this is trigeminal neuralgia. I think you got maybe tested. Did they do an MRI? I can’t even remember.
Trigeminal neuralgia is super rare.
I don’t remember.
I remember you hearing that, “You are too young for that. There’s no way you could have that.” That’s what people would say.
I was calling my doctors and they didn’t think I had it. They were trying painkillers, which worked here or there, but not completely. I was living with it. I remember being at Mom’s house in the middle of the night sitting in the bathtub. I couldn’t sleep or do anything. I remember the nights being the worst because nobody was around, nobody was awake, and I was awake and I couldn’t sleep. I was getting freaked out.
I got a question about that. When you say in the bathtub, you are talking like a hot bath trying to get warm enough because I have had something. I don’t know if I want to call it trigeminal neuralgia but the only thing that would give me enough relief to get myself ready for the day or to go down to get adjusted was sitting under the hot shower.
It was the only thing that calmed my mind and my body. I felt like I could make it another hour or do something else. That’s a great way to put it. I had never thought about that. It was the only thing that was giving me any relief at all.
Again, I don’t even remember the whole story because this was years and years ago. I wanted to bring you on because this confirmed my belief that I was doing the right thing by leaving conventional chiropractic behind and exploring upper cervical as my career. It is because I brought you to my chiropractor.
You did. I had Dr. Tanase.
He had X-rays taken of you and what did they discover on your X-rays?
They discovered that I have a weird bone and for my entire life, even Grandpa was adjusting me wrong. You can tell them what bone it is. They always thought that I was out on that side so they kept adjusting me on that side and I can feel it over and over again and nobody knew.
There’s the skull, the top bone, one side of her is bigger than the other side by a lot. It’s a big chunk. It’s called The Transverse Process. A conventional chiropractor that doesn’t take X-rays would feel that. With a side X-ray of that, you are not going to see it but with a specialized X-ray called The Base Posterior, he was able to see that, “You have got a honk inside to one of your atlas bones.” Chiropractors had been adjusting you wrong since you were a kid. No wonder it hurt so bad for you because it was wrong.
No wonder it never was right. I would feel after an adjustment maybe some relief immediately, but nothing ever worked. Nothing stuck. Thankfully, Dr. Tanase took me on and I remember the first time I was adjusted. I remember laying there and I felt my whole body relax. I was hearing my stomach start gurgling and I was like, “That’s weird.”
We started going there and it took some time. It took twice-a-week adjustments. It wasn’t immediate, but little by little, it stopped hurting. Going back to student teaching, I remember doing that and I don’t remember exactly when it stopped, but knock on wood. Having been under Dr. Bagley and my sister’s care now, I haven’t had a relapse of it. I was telling our mom on the way home I don’t remember when it stopped and I don’t remember a lot of it. I think I have blocked it out.
It’s scary when you are going through something like that. The thing that your brain goes to is, “What if I have to live like this for the rest of my life?
I had that thought in the bathtub. I remember, “I can’t do this. I can’t go to work like this. I can’t sleep like this.” My sister knows me. Sleep is my favorite thing in the entire world and it was awful.
Someone reading this might be going through that right now. That’s why I wanted to bring you on because they might type in trigeminal neuralgia and then find our show. I want them to know that there’s life after this. One of the problems with trigeminal neuralgia is it’s so unrelenting for some people that they end up taking their lives.
That’s painful for me to even think about because there is an answer to this and it is upper cervical chiropractic care, especially Blair Care. If Blair Care is not available in your area, there might be an upper cervical doctor that’s awesome too. We love all of our friends that do upper cervical. Since then, you have been under care. I know you still get headaches sometimes, but not very often anymore, right?
I can tell that when I have a headache, I’m out. I know what immediately, and I need to come and see you. Right now, I had a headache at school but we will take care of that. I don’t know if it’s because I have that weird bone but I can feel it down my ear. I can feel it when I start getting out. It’s almost a tingling sensation that I need to come in and see you. Going back to what you said. I was googling trigeminal neuralgia. I remember it coming up as such a suicide disease. I read those words and I was like, “I won’t do anything.” I completely agree with you. People need to seek out care and they need to try it.
Dr. Frederick, we got her under care relatively quickly after her symptoms started. Do you notice a difference when someone with a big neurological complaint if they get in sooner versus if they have had it chronically for a long time?
With any chronic neurological issue like this, one of the interesting things about nerves is if a nerve starts firing and firing a lot, it starts to develop a memory of that problem. We are going to call it trigeminal neuralgia for sake of this conversation. When I had that, I knew that I immediately needed to get it addressed.
One of our good friends who has now passed, the late great James Tamasi, had TN for twenty years before he got his head on straight. Something that he had told me it was at least a decade since he had been under care. Maybe a little bit longer, but he had a hard time. He would talk about it. He would give talks to people describing how he had bought the gun and how he was about to commit suicide when he had a moment of relief.
He shared with me that just telling that story would bring that pain back on across his face. He was at this point, a decade or more out, not having that pain come on as he tells the story, which is pretty profound. We hear this phrase, “Nerves that fire together, wire together.” Those pain fibers, if they are always firing and you do not get any relief, for some people, they have to be cut because the nerve fibers will not turn off otherwise. Hopefully, we don’t let people get to that point, but that is a reality for these pain fibers and these pain generating nerves. I think most people, before they get to that point, decide that they are done and they are checking out unfortunately.
Last thing, unless Dr. Schurger has any other questions. When I look at my story of how I found upper cervical chiropractic and relief from my own problems, which we have talked about in previous episodes, your story comes into my mind too because of that confirmation. I know there’s a higher power at work and all of that stuff, but what would you say to someone who is in despair with a neurological condition? What would you tell them about the upper cervical?
First, I would say, “Why not? Just do it.” When you were in that moment, when you are in that bathtub and there is nothing else that’s working, just do it. Try it and get under care. Give it a chance because you don’t know but it could change your life the next day. Chiropractic care in general, I have talked to you and a lot of people about this because we grew up with it. There’s a big group of people in the United States that have never tried it and their family never tried it.
I encourage people to try. There are so many medications out there that people take that I believe that if they would try upper cervical care and give it a chance, it could change the way their body functions, works and heals. Lean into it. It’s not going to hurt because it doesn’t hurt when you get adjusted. It’s not going to hurt to give it a try because it could change something that you thought would never be without ringing in your ears, pain, or headaches. What you can be, it can happen.
Dr. Schurger, do you have any other questions for her?
I have one quick question. Have you had any symptoms since, for other TN, that’s even close to what that used to be?
It’s funny because you were saying that you think about it. Right now, I’m gritting my teeth. I’m worried about it because we are talking about it. I would say the closest I get to it is I get tingly. As I said, I know when I need an adjustment because I get a headache or I feel tingles. It’s never a pain again but it’s almost like tingles. I can tell something is trying, not working, not connecting, or something is happening, but thankfully since then, I have not.
It’s interesting how so many people have a little bit of a tell, but after years and years, that tell becomes less and less that you don’t notice it as much and that gets you in trouble. The upside is your sister is right there.
She’s literally closer to my office than I am in my house.
Not just right there, but literally in the neighborhood.
We could walk to your house right now. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate you telling your story and opening up about it. I know that this is going to go places and help a lot of people, so thank you.
I hope it does. Thank you too for having me on. I appreciate it.
We are going to continue on, but Sarah, you can sign off.
I am leaving. You guys have a great evening. Thank you so much.
You too. Bye, Sarah.
That was such a great story, wasn’t it?
That is.
I knew you would like it. I don’t think you have heard that whole story before. You have heard bits and pieces of it.
I don’t think I have. Her saying that she was in the tub clicked with me. As I said, I didn’t want to say that I have had trigeminal neuralgia. I had bad facial pain but I’d never wanted to go to that point. After her describing that was what got her better, I remember I turned on the hot water until it was cold. If you are suffering from this and it takes you a little bit of time to get in or you need something to make it feel better in between even while you are getting adjusted and your body is healing, I highly recommend these spa shower heads.
They are so nice because it’s a lot of little spots. It’s probably one of the most relaxing shower heads I have ever had. I will buy one of these going forward. You need one. The upstairs shower needs a better showerhead when I visit, but that’s another story. I would get underneath it. The trick is I’d sit in the bottom of my shower stall. I’d have to stand up, adjust it a little bit, sit back down, stand up, and adjust it until I got it so it hit all my head and water would run down. I might put my hands like this over my eyes so that I could breathe with the heat coming down. As soon as she said that, I’m like, “That’s probably what this was a couple of years ago.”
The other interesting thing she mentioned and you have mentioned as well, and I have seen this on X-ray was that one side of the atlas was honking big and the other side was itty bitty comparatively. If they were both the same size, we would say, “That’s a normal atlas,” but for her, that’s a major problem. I saw another patient several years ago with bad migraines seeing a good chiropractor here in town, but he didn’t take an X-ray.
Traditional X-rays aren’t going to necessarily show an enlarged part of the atlas because you are taking it straight across and straightforward. You don’t see that it’s shaped like this.
It’s two parts and this is why the Blair work that we do is so critical. I wouldn’t change it for the world. If someone comes up with something better, I’m going to be like, “I’m interested,” but this little bit is key. Looking at, “That one is bigger and this one is smaller. It looks like it’s off to the right and isn’t accurate enough because the joint biomechanics don’t go straight left or right.” They are more forward and backwards and you have to do special views, which we do in our office so we can look straight down the joint to see this millimeter misalignment. Sometimes half a millimeter that you will never see on a conventional X-ray.
As we are talking about this, I will bring Philip on at some point in time in the future because he has such an interesting story. He’s been having such problems with the VA. All he wants is for them to help get a better sense because he knows what we are doing here is great. He wants better diagnostic imaging so we can show what’s effectively screwed up with him. He goes to these orthopedic guys and they are saying, “Everything is fine,” because it’s stuff that they can’t fix. I don’t want to say it’s an old understanding because it’s probably as new as can be, but let’s be honest, the science that you and I were taught in school is based on research from several years ago. The unfortunate part of any healthcare field is the information.
Unless you are into the cutting-edge stuff like you and I are because we are looking at this stuff all the time. I then come down, I teach, and you are picking my brain so that you don’t have to dig into it. I know you. You are much happier that I do the digging. I teach you but that works out fine. You ask me, “Now that you have said that, explain that in plain English and I have to think about it for a second.”
I think that’s relevant because then if you wanted to explain it to a patient, you could or just explain it to me.
To the point, as far as finding some of these ligaments for him that have been damaged in a work-related accident that happened to be VA time, some of these ligaments are so small that traditional imaging isn’t going to find them. You need very specialized imaging which we will get lined up for him. He’s trying to go through the system. I’m not understanding why the system is not conducive to what he’s looking for.
It’s not built for this. I wish it was, but it’s just not.
For the imaging and for what we are looking at, we are at least years ahead of what your average orthopedist is looking at. Nothing against what they are doing but they also don’t have a solution for it because we are looking at very small ligaments. The blessing is the muscles that hold that upper neck. Put that open-neck picture model back up and show me the muscles on the back. There are little muscles that are supposed to be back there. Those are largely not torn but those muscles will hold until the ligaments can heal.
They are trying to protect. Your body is built to protect you. Sometimes that protection mechanism is what’s holding you back. Speaking of rebuilding my body, I have been doing a fast.
How are you doing that? Are you doing it quick or slow?
Very quick. I’m going to show my app here. I am 70 hours into a 72-hour fast. I’m doing well with it. I have been hungry. Right now, I’m not hungry, which is incredible because I know I’m going to eat in two hours. I decided to do this for my health. My church is doing 21 days of prayer and fasting. That kicked my butt a little bit saying, “I have done a three-day fast before and afterwards, I’m going to continue to fast but One Meal A Day also called OMAD. Through the 21 days, I might do another three-day fast in there.” As my church has been going through the Bible, there are lots of fasting in the Bible, which is incredible.
Every religious tradition has a fasting tradition to it.
I wish I had it with me but there was this cool passage that was talking about fasting so that your body consumes itself. My jaw dropped because this is written thousand years ago. That might have even been in the Old Testament. I don’t even know how that old passage was. Somebody can look it up and let me know.
That sounds like Old Testament to me.
The process that now we have discovered is called Autophagy. One of the main reasons that I like to do a three-day fast is it gets your immune system refreshed because your body consumes the old cruddy parts of the immune system itself.
A three-day fast will refresh your immune system because your body consumes the old cruddy parts of the immune system.
I like the word detritus, which is all the old cruddy junk, all the crap, and all the dead tissues. It allows older cells to clean themselves out. We are not the same matter that we were a week ago and it’s changed a little bit. They say seven years. I don’t know. Maybe.
Every seven years, you have a new body or something.
Something to that effect, which may or may not be accurate to all pieces and parts, but the cells will go through their cell division. Old cells die off and new cells replace that and that’s how we are. That’s the process. We don’t have a good measure for it yet, but we do know that we can start to see in these 3 to 5-day fasts lots of benefits very quickly.
A couple of things that I have noticed already. I was testing my blood sugars beforehand to see where they were at. They weren’t super high but I did have a day or two when I was waking up in the morning in a fasted state before eating anything. That was over 100.
That’s a little high.
If you’re fasting, you should be under 100.
Even just an overnight fast, the big question is how late. You and I have run the same problem because we will run a long day especially now. We will get a meal and we won’t have a full twelve-hour fast by the time we wake up the next morning and we should have been at least twelve hours.
That’s true. I get home late and then I will eat. That’s not always the best thing and it’s not always the best food sometimes. I was noticing that was creeping up. Since the last few days, my blood sugars have been steady in the 80s, which is fine. Seventies would be a little bit better, but I’m happy where I’m at right now.
When I got out of bed, I got ready and everything, and then I walked down the stairs. I had been in the last week or two, maybe longer, and every time I took those first steps down the stairs, I was like, “Ouch.” My feet and my knee were hurting. I was in inflammation pain because my body was inflamed. I hopped right down the stairs and I even noticed it when I looked at my face. My face looked fresher and it looked not as poofy.
You look skinnier.
It’s just been three days. I think that’s incredible. I’m going to continue the OMAD. I do think I will probably do it because the church is doing 21 days of fasting in prayer. Sometime towards the end, I will pick another 3 days and do another 3-day fast. I know not everyone is religious but fasting is part of a lot of religions. The one thing I can say that’s been better, I have done 2 other 3-day fasts in the past but I never did them prayerfully and gratefully. I have been praying on this fast and it has helped me. If that is something that you want to try, know that when you are doing a fast, it can help to pray. If you are not a praying person, have a moment of meditation and gratefulness.
We are starting to see the science come out that is backing up why fasting is great. A lot of people are like, “I’m not crazy about religion,” except it kept society together for thousands of years. Let’s not pretend that there aren’t aspects of religion that have serious problems.
There’s been lots of problems and lots of religions and still are.
There are, but there are tenets that we should take a look at and say, “Is this good? Why was this practice? Why is this a thing?” It’s a recognition that we have got to clean out the body from time to time. I’m not saying that all of these things should be accepted blindly, but maybe we should revisit them in a manner that is at least intellectual and say, “Why does this stack up the way it does?”
We have to clean out the body from time to time.
If you wanted to sit down and learn some other interesting fasting facts, Dr. Mindy Pelz on YouTube has tons of great information. It’s wonderful. My sister-in-law is going through her book as she tries to get herself healthier so that they can get pregnant. That’s the end goal there. Fingers cross. All of these things, there are so many benefits. Here’s my next question. You are going to go to OMAD, which meal are you going to eat?
The only way I can successfully do OMAD is if I plan it day by day. Sometimes I will eat lunch and sometimes I will eat dinner. Sometimes there’s a get-together and if I can skip lunch that day and do dinner, I’d prefer to do lunch. I think OMAD is better at lunch because eating late at night isn’t the best thing for our bodies no matter what, and it’s part of sometimes what I have to do.
I do think I’m going to switch it. In a 24-hour period, I’m going to have a 2-hour eating window. Some days, it might be an 18-hour fast, sometimes it might be a 28-hour fast depending on what’s happening. That’s what I’m going to try to do. Again, the best way to do it is to pick the meal and keep it consistent through, but I’m going to be honest, I’m not going to be that person. I’m not going to be a psycho about it.
It can be because between your schedule, keeping up with the girls, and everything you have got going on there, you are going to have weeks where everything is topsy-turvy like you said. For me, this week was a non-Arthur week. I didn’t drive over to Arthur, Illinois to see patients over there on a Tuesday night.
When I do, I don’t get back until 9:00 PM. At 9:00 PM, I make my eggs and bacon on Tuesday night, and that’s what I’m doing. Whereas now, it will be 8:00 PM by the time I get home. Again, I’m not going to do that consistently. I would rather try to get that meal in earlier. The more that I look at intermittent fasting, I realize this. Everyone is now coming around to this without me even saying anything. Breakfast and lunch are probably your best choices when you are doing intermittent fasting. Eat a morning meal, eat a noon meal, and skip dinner. Everyone has been very adamant about doing a skip breakfast and eat lunch and dinner. Dinner ends up getting pushed late.
It might be better not to eat it then. Breaking the fast. We need to talk about that too.
We will get to that here in a second. There are a couple of big pieces of research out there. One being with women, they were looking at breast cancer markers or whether or not they were elevated in these women. There were two groups. Both were doing intermittent fasting but one group made sure they were eating their meals during daylight hours.
We are short on daylight. We are done by 5:00 and int comes up at 7:30. They would eat all their meals in daylight versus another group that would have noon and maybe 8:00 PM or 7:00 PM in darkness. The group that ate that second meal or had some of their meals in that darkness or in that evening time had higher incidences of breast cancer indicators.
There is something to our circadian rhythm driving when we are eating. Whatever that might be for you or somebody else who’s reading, it’s something to think about and try to focus on getting those meals in earlier in the day. We have our schedules and we have our lives. Sometimes food and our meals have to be put in around our work. Restricting that eating cycle has shown to be very beneficial across the board. What are you breaking your fast with now?
My refeeding will consist of a soup that’s in the freezer right now. I got to defrost it. It’s a vegetable and it has some chicken in it, a brothy soup. The tendency for some people is then they go like, “Let’s go to the Chinese buffet.”
I’m tempted to come on down to go to the Chinese buffet with you.
No. Maybe if it’s in my eating window. Pretty much that’s what I’m going to eat. I’m going to eat that and then let my body absorb it. I’m not going to continue to eat through the night and stuff. After that, I got to decide what time I want to eat again. I know I will be hungry in the morning, but I think I’m going to wait until late afternoon to eat again. Refeeding is important. A lot of people will start with a bone broth. I don’t want to stop at the store. If I had some or if I made some, I would do that, but I don’t.
I got to read this comment that my wife Jean sent me because we are going to do some bone broth. She says, “I saw bones in the freezer. This idea has been brewing for about a day or so.” She’s got the best jokes. Bone broth is easy to make, but it takes about a day. It takes a day to 48 hours. It smells so good. It’s hard to maintain a fast. It smells awesome.
I bet it would be. I wouldn’t want to smell it.
It makes the house smell awesome, but you have got to know how to make it. It’s not very difficult because it is bones. I have got a bunch of bones. I was eating bones. It’s a T-bone that goes in a bag after I’m done eating it. If it’s some short ribs, that goes in the bag. What I will do with that if it’s been cooked previously, I will throw that right into the stockpot, fill it up with water, and add some salt.
I might add some seasoning. Something like a robust herb that won’t burn in the first eight hours or so, but I will let that soak at a simmer for 8 to 12 hours. You could probably push it to 24 without a problem if you have got some heating element that you are not worried about like fire and open flame. Don’t do an overnight if you don’t trust your stove and have open flames. That’s all it takes, and then you start scooping that off and drink it straight. A couple of cups two times a day.
Sometimes there’s some stuff that floats on the top. I have heard you need to scoop off the top. Is that true?
Some of the stuff that’s scooping off the top is going to be straight fat. At that point in time, I take the fat off and I reserve that because that’s my beef tallow. I will throw that in with my bacon so I have a little bit extra fat because most pork is too lean for my liking. It ends up being a leaner animal. Anyways, that’s another story if we want to go down the ketone rabbit hole. I will reserve that. I will use that for cooking. I’m making popcorn with beef tallow right now and it is awesome. It’s like, “I have had enough popcorn.”
You are saying you fill up faster because it’s cooked with the correct oil?
The itty bitty little thing of McDonald’s French fries satisfies most people.
Did we talk about that?
We have touched on it, but we didn’t necessarily go into the entire supersize-me-world. I use it as a skin conditioner. When I use it regularly on my hands, especially where my calluses are, I make sure I keep my hands well moisturized with the beef tallow.
You then smell beefy.
I don’t. I will bring some down. I do use some essential oil.
What’s that smell? It’s beefy.
When I do my kettlebell workouts, I don’t rip up my calluses.
You used to do that a lot.
I did and I did a couple of weeks ago and my hands hadn’t been conditioned for a couple of days. Sure enough, it got them back to where they are supposed to be and they heal and stay better that way.
The last thing I’m going to talk about with the bone broths because that’s a great way to refeed after a fast is collagen. That’s part of bone broth, but there’s a huge collagen fad right now where you can buy collagen powder and that stuff. I do have some of that in my house because it’s a good supplement. Where do you think the collagen is coming from? People, it is coming from bone broth and they are separating it out. A lot of it is coming from beef.
A lot of it is coming from cow hides. There’s a company out of Chicago. I don’t know if that’s subsidiary or if they are selling too. Great Lakes Collagen or maybe it’s Great Lakes Gelatin. Either way, they have collagen. They get their hides from Brazil, I believe, and they have a process of breaking down the hides and turning that into collagen substrate. Some of it is coming from bone broth, but I’d say the majority of it is coming from hides. It’s still edible. It’s the collagen protein. I think there are other benefits. There’s a young lady by the name of Mary Ruddick who did broths to heal her autoimmune problems. I’m certain if we got her head on straight in the process.
It would have been helpful. These are pieces to the puzzle.
It would have happened faster, but it took her a year of doing chicken bone broth.
No other food. That’s all she was eating.
That’s all she could eat. She couldn’t keep food down. She was a young college student who could not function. She ended up moving back in with her mom living upstairs. For a year, all she did was chicken bone broth. The story is funny because she didn’t realize that she could switch over to beef because she felt so good on chicken. When she switched over to beef after about a year, she was like, “This is so good. It was amazing.” Since you are having broth soup, one more thing that you might want to try. I know it’s going to get late and that’s the problem.
I stay up late, so I will be okay.
I meant more for the digestion in your blood sugar in the morning. I was watching Thomas DeLauer talking about five mistakes he made breaking his fast. What he recommended and certainly bone broth is to break the fast with. About 90 minutes after the bone broth, this is where it’s going to get to be a little late. He would add protein.
I’m going to cut out. I’m going to be honest, I’m going to be eating protein anyway. I’m going to straight in but I’m not going to eat a hamburger. It is what I’m not going to do.
No. That sounds good though.
That does sound good. Everything sounds good right now because I get to eat in 1 hour and 39 minutes. That’s what I get to eat again.
The last time I did a long fast, it’s been 2019. The last day I went to a Christmas party, I was dry fasting and I’m like, “This looks all nice.” I’m a little lightheaded. I don’t recommend dry fasting and operating heavy machinery.
For people reading, dry fasting means you are not even drinking water.
Also, not taking a shower or brushing your teeth with water.
It’s like nothing is entering your body. No water and no food. Other than breath. You can breathe. You are allowed to do that. We would not recommend that for most people, and we would not recommend that long-term.
You need to talk to somebody. Talk to your doctor. Do your research. They are coming around to it. In ‘19 when I looked at it, this was one of those, “Be careful. Maybe not. Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” and now they are coming around. It’s like, “We can do this under good controlled circumstances.” If you understand your limits, go talk to a doctor or talk to somebody who will help guide you through that process.
What’s the maximum amount of time you would tell one of your patients?
For a dry fast, I wouldn’t do more than 24 hours personally. Anything longer than that gets into weirdness.
I think you might even have heart problems and stuff after three days.
As I said, I started Friday morning, the party was Friday night, and I walked down there about 9:00 or 9:30. I probably stuck around for 45 minutes or so just visiting with friends for the Christmas holiday party, and I was lightheaded the whole time. It was a thing where I sat the entire day. I was doing a lot of reading and research. I found myself a corner to stay away from everything else. The only thing I needed was the bathroom because I was going all the time. I was surprised by how much I needed to go to the bathroom. In any case, that’s what it was. It was a good experience, but I also haven’t done any fasting other than intermittent fasting for a few years.
We should do a three-day fast together.
Probably not. I’m training pretty heavy right now.
Don’t be cool like me.
I’m not going to be cool like you.
It’s impossible.
Very much so. I got to be cool like me.
We will talk to people in the next episode. I will let you know how everything can continue to go OMAD. Is there anything else you want to cover on this episode? I wanted to tell people in case they were wondering what app that is. It’s called the Zero App. You can choose how long you want to do your fast. If you are doing intermittent fasting, it has pre-programmed ones too.
They are good. It’s a nice little program. It gets a little annoying when you haven’t done 1 in 4 years. It says, “Shouldn’t you do a fast?”
It’s like, “How are you doing?” You can turn that off, but it will ask you.
Do we even want to be asked when was the last time?
They will tell you, “It’s 756 days since your last fast.”
Something like that. I did some intermittent fast. It’s only been 432 days since my last fast.
Look at you. It’s not been 700.
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We will see everyone next episode, and you have a grand old day. Dr. Bagley, enjoy your soup.
Bye, guys.