Dr. Frederick Schurger discovered a horrible deep drinking game: every time he uses an acronym, take a shot. Don't play this drinking game.
In this eye-opening episode, Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger dive deep into the mysterious world of health issues that are often hidden in plain sight. Join them as they explore two main subjects: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and the invisible web of Electro-magnetic Fields (EMF). POTS is a condition that affects countless individuals, causing symptoms like rapid heart rate, dizziness, and fatigue. Our hosts share stories of patients with POTS, its impact on their lives, and how they have been helping them improve their function, often from disability to being able to walk in the park (Yes, moving a little 2-ounce bone at the neck is involved!) Dr. Bagley and Dr. Schurger also shed light on the often-overlooked role of EMFs—from cell phones, Wi-Fi, and more—in influencing your health in ways you never imagined. Don't let the unseen threats of our digital age compromise your vitality. Tune in now to take the first step toward a healthier, more EMF-aware life.
---
How was your week?
It was great. My wife and I ran down to see Dr. Harshfield in Little Rock. We even stopped to get an upright MRI for her. I have an upright MRI thing for people who are interested in asking questions and they say, “I want to go get an upright MRI.” For whatever reason, have you had any patients that said, “I'm going to go get this upright MRI,” and then they came back? They don't order it through you or ask how to do it right. They then come back with an upright MRI into your office.
Yes.
The results didn't look as good.
It was weird because they did two different MRIs on a section and I just needed one. That was not what I wanted.
Here's the other thing that's not what you wanted. When I told this to the radiologists who taught me a lot about upright MRIs, he was like, “What do you mean they did it that way?” When you take a regular MRI, you're lying on your back. That's how that ends up working. That changes the structures within your body. If you're walking around in gravity like most of us are, you have a different presentation of the stuff inside as well.
Everything is not suspended as cleanly as we would like, especially after a trauma. What they're supposed to do with an upright MRI is, “Have you at 90 degrees so that you are upright in gravity like you are walking around everywhere else?” What they have been doing because of motion issues is they have been taking the MRIs at 45 degrees. You are just as upset about this and dumbfounded about why you even bother with the upright machine.
We might as well take it.
You are not getting enough of gravity impacting on the patient the way that it is impacting on their daily life.
I have a question for one of my patients. I will ask her that next time I see her.
I had a patient who went down there. This is the one in Saint Louis, although I wouldn't be surprised if we have the same issues at other locations. Chicago is the other one that I see a lot of people go to but he went down there and is like, “That's how they always take them at a 45-degree angle.” I'm like, “That's odd.” We go in for my wife's and we're setting her up. She said, “We're going to take you back to 45 degrees.” I'm like, “No.” I’m glad I was there and I wouldn't have been there for hers. She even realized, “That's not what we need.”
“We need to see what it's like when I'm up.”
We have that situation. If you're getting it and they say, “No, we're going to take it at 45 degrees,” they have other ways to immobilize you. What ends up happening is you end up having some motion as you're in this upright MRI because they don't have the materials to strap you in properly. They've got you strapped into a degree but they do have a bar that they can put across your forehead to help you. It’s something that you can lean against.
I would rather a patient have something to lean their head up against and have a non-perfect posture than that bar in their lap. The bar on their lap does no good. The bar here that allows them to lean and hold is going to do far more good for them when they're getting these pictures taken. We did this not only for the regular series but also for the CCJ or Craniocervical Junction series. We can make that a drinking game. Every time I say an acronym, “Don't drink. Alcohol is poison.”
You can drink water.
You should drink water. If you're going to do the flexion-extension ones, also have that bar be the thing you're going to lean into. I need to rewrite the entire protocol.
I would love that and I bet some of the doctors reading might want that too.
It's a double part to it. It's not just a protocol of how the scans are taken but how the patient needs to be positioned. These are little things because the young lady who's running that machine is fantastic. She was very helpful. She's part-time there. She is not always the one working that machine and they're open. A lot of these places are open for long hours.
There can be multiple people working.
If they don't understand the protocols that we're doing, we're not going to get good pictures. We got great pictures. My wife's a mess but hopefully, there are some things we can do and improve. I'm going to have to write a full report for her. That's something interesting.
I'll remark on why, as upper cervicals, we want an upright MRI. We've talked about this on other episodes but in case you've picked those up. If a patient is lying down in an MRI, especially cerebellar tonsils and the brain falls into the cradle of the skull. It comes clunking down there. What it will do is if there is some prolapse of the brain tissue that is going into where it's not supposed to be going into the neck, it might not but it might go away so then you won't see it.
In operating MRI, if you're at 90 degrees, we should see on a person who has something like a Chiari or low-lying tonsils, some protrusion of part of the brain tissue, that Atlas-based skull frame, and magnum, the hole at the bottom of your skull. It will be coming through, which we don't want to be but if it is, we want to be able to see it.
That leads me to a win that we had in the office. We had a patient come in a wheelchair not because she couldn't walk but because she has this disease or a syndrome called POTS or Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. When she moves in certain directions, sits up from lying down, or stands up, she immediately passes out and faints. It was happening to her multiple times a day. It's terribly affected her life.
Honestly, she came into the office for something else. We didn't want to promise her that this was going to get better. We don't fix POTS or anything. We fixed the subluxation of the spine. When she started coming in, we were excited. Future Dr. Lad took her initial intake and everything. I made the initial few adjustments. Dr. Lad has made a few adjustments. This young lady was at the park and was able to take ten steps before she had to sit down in a wheelchair and still didn't pass out. That was a big win.
She was so excited to tell us that she was walking on a beautiful day and was able to get up and move. She's also been getting out of the house more because she feels comfortable doing it. That is amazing. That's one of the people that I'd want to see an upright MRI on because it can be a relationship between what's happening in there. Have you had any patients with POTS in the past?
My wife has POTS. I've had a couple. We were talking about it with Dr. Harshfield when I was down there visiting with him. He was saying that it's pretty common anytime you start having pressure in the way that things are moved. You have pressure on the vagus nerve that prevents normal hypertension-style changes. We're not talking about hypertension but we're talking about the body's normal ability to raise and lower the blood pressure as you change positions.
I'm looking over some stuff here on POTS. They're saying that it's an increase of heart rate above 120 beats a minute in the first minutes of standing in the absence of any other hypotension or Earth ecstatic intolerance, which is fancy words. There's nothing else happening. You've got this vagal tone, a problem with the vagus nerve, not working the way it's supposed to.
That can lead to a bunch of different problems. If we get Jeanne clear, she's got great days. I've seen days when if we get her clear enough, it's like she's a new woman as long as I don't say something crap. I find crap things to say all the time. I've had several who do better. The question becomes, “How much can you promise and how much better will they be consistent?”
That's why we don't promise anything. This is not a cure for POTS but it's very awesome. She was so excited that she saw any change because she hadn't for years. She's on disability. She is a young person who can't have a job and she can't do all these things. She was able to go to the Barbie movie. She was excited to say that she was able to get out and go to a movie. It's incredible.
It is amazing what the body can do to varying degrees as far as how people can heal and how fast they can heal. I had a patient come in. She missed her appointment. First off, it's her husband's fault because somehow she didn't get the message on her phone that he was supposed to bring her in. I don't know what happened there. It's like, “She was supposed to come in.” It's like, “I can't get her in. She didn't want to come in this morning.” “She needs to come on Thursday.”
It is amazing what the body can do and to varying degrees as far as how people can heal and how fast they can heal.
The ex-husband was drinking too much that night and decided to go into an embankment and under a bridge. She went through the windshield and hit her head many years ago. She's doing much better. She can get around. She's like, “I don't feel bad,” when she's in alignment. She didn't come in because Thursdays are bad for her. When she came in, she was like, “Thursdays are so bad. This is miserable. I don't want to rest too long.”
Just getting on the table hurt her to lie down. I get her adjusted. I have her go right to the resting room because I'm confident that she needs some time to rest after her head is back on straight. I could see it in the graph. It was one of those things. When is walking, she’s like, “I think I'm walking better and feeling better. Could it happen that fast?” “It can.”
I had another young lady who was 20 years younger than her come in 1 hour or 2 later. She said the same thing, “I should have been here last week.” I was like, “Sometimes you should have been.” This is the amazing thing about how we can address people in such a simple little thing like moving a 2-ounce bone underneath your skull so you can have profound effects on your overall health and well-being in ways that we don't even understand.
This is the amazing thing about how we can address people's conditions. It's such a simple little thing, like moving a two-ounce bone underneath your skull, and you can have profound effects on your overall health and well-being in ways that we just don't even understand.
From your head to your toes, everything's connected. Do you have an article on POTS that you want to bring up?
There are a couple of things. This was a chiropractic case. Relief of Orthostatic, Hypertension, and Tachycardia with Chiropractic Rehab. As we were discussing your POTS case, we were going over some bits and pieces. This was a 50-year-old female. I can't think of a whole lot of POTS cases I've seen.
I’m sure they exist.
I've seen less of them. She had all the signs of having problems. 46 out of 100 was her dizziness score.
This was general chiropractic. This is not upper cervical.
She was being seen 3 times a week for 3 months. A lot of people are like, “I'm going to see the chiropractor for the rest of my life.” If you've got POTS, you might have to. These are cases that need more things. They were doing a lot of spinal manipulation of the neck here. They did some thermal ultrasound therapy to relieve the stiffness and restore mobility. Sometimes, those therapies are necessary to break down some of the scar tissue that is present there. She was doing great. From the second week on, the patient reported that her pain and dizziness gradually improved and resolved within four weeks.
That's a great case study.
His DHI score was at 46 and reduced to 0. For people who are looking at any of these index scores, something like a dizziness handicap inventory, I like using something like the functional rating index. There's a neck disability index. Clinically significant change is only ten points. We're talking about a big change overall for this case. 10 points out of 110 % is clinically significant.
This is a huge change. She even had scoliosis that was reduced. That's fantastic. In twenty-four months, the patient was symptom-free. No adverse events were associated with treatment. A lot of people say, “You're going to have problems with chiropractic.” Generally, the adverse events are much lower than they are with a lot of traditional therapies in medicine.
The worst thing that usually happens with people is maybe 10% of patients get sore after the first adjustment. I warned them that could happen. It doesn't scare me at all. It makes me excited when they get sore because I know things are changing.
That is a fantastic situation. I didn't see this part of it, “She was treated with psychiatric medications, rehabilitation, exercise, and acupuncture back when this started for her in 2016.” That means she had 3 or almost 4 years of dealing with this debilitating condition. She was under chiropractic care and within four weeks, she was back to functional. That in and of itself is pretty profound when you get right down to it.
Chiropractic is amazing. It's the best job ever. I've said it so many times. Is it exhausting? Yes, but is it worth it? Everyday.
Do you miss working for a chemical conglomerate?
Yes, every day. I was talking about that with somebody because he's a molecular biologist. He works with human stuff. I was like, “I remembered some of the stuff we're talking about. It's been many years.”
It's funny because I was joking about somebody making a comment about my outfit and how I don't need to go to a fashion show because of the way that I dressed. I'm like, “Thank you.” As an aside, my off days are cargo pants and a T-shirt so I can go get dirty. That's the engineer in me. That's what I want to do when I'm not worried about all of that stuff and not taking care of patients. Some days, you can climb out of the rat race as I did. On some days, you are like, “I'm going to go hide in there.” I'm not going to go back into the engineering world directly but we're going to apply some of my electrical engineering knowledge to this interesting subject of electromagnetic fields.
It's called EMFs.
EMF and all of the other stuff. There is another great article that I came across as I was doing some review of Dr. Dan Murphy's site, which we get to see in Vegas. That's going to be fantastic. I'm wondering if my brain has gotten big enough to be able to not explode. We'll see about mine.
Yours is not. Mine will explode.
Who knows? He's always on the cutting edge of science and asking the question, “Is this real or not,” as he digs through all the literature.
How many hours is he going to speak?
We've got the better part of Friday. I'm going to have pages of notes and it's going to be awesome.
EMFs were told that there was no problem with them. There's no relationship between any issues that people have and that it's safe for the general public to be around massive amounts of EMFs all the time.
I would think a generally healthy person will have no problems with EMF. I'll be the first one to say, “If you are in generally good health, you're not going to have a problem.”
A generally healthy person will have no problems with EMF.
It’s like if you're generally in good health and you get COVID, you're not going to die.
Only 99% of people survived when they contracted COVID.
It’s way more than that. It’s 99.7%.
It's a high number I didn't specify as an age group. If you're 90 years old and a man, you're out of your outcomes rapport.
Let's say there's an individual who is suffering from a chronic disease, fatigue, or something. They're in EMFs.
There's all sorts of weird stuff that can go on. She texted me saying that she wanted to get in. She has been through so much. She says, “Can we do Friday at 4:30 or Saturday late lunch?” I'm like, “We'll do Friday.” I don't know how it is down your way but we've been overcast. The question in my mind is, “What else is going on barometrically?” That was another interesting article that I came across that I want to dive into a little bit deeper in the future about barometric pressure. We joked about that. People with arthritis are being able to tell barometric pressure.
This young lady gets what almost looks like a storm front come through. She's out of commission. We started seeing her in ‘18. By ‘19, she was coming out of it. They went down to Disney World and had a great time. Coming into COVID, she was more comfortable and functional. During COVID, they planted a garden. They also got kayaks and went kayaking on the lake down by them.
There are power lines over the lake. She got under the power lines and froze up. She has all these weird jerking motions that she does while they're watching TV. There are a lot of questions as to what is going on. What has changed is we've introduced all of these other things that are transmitting electromagnetic frequencies. When you and I were growing up, we had radio and TV waves. It has slightly different frequencies. That was it.
Microwaves were starting to become a thing in the home but those were only emitting when they were running. I still remember the Malcolm in the Middle episode where she's pregnant with the youngest son. She's got her belly right up against the microwave. We wonder why he was a little bit odd. That's one of those shows that I need to go back and rewatch. We started having cell phones. There were bag phones but to have a bag phone, it was plugged into your car and took a lot of power. The battery life was very short.
You didn't have it in your pocket. It wasn't all over the place but there were fields like the cellular towers we’re putting out there.
I've had some conversations with some colleagues. When I was in engineering school, there was a lot of back and forth between analog and digital technologies going on. You needed less power in your pocket, so with the analog stuff and the bag phones, as it were, you needed more power. The wavelength was a little bit more friendly. Now that we've gone more digital, they flipped it so they can have more towers. You don't need nearly as much power. You have all these high frequencies that are bathing everything.
That's not even including your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that is everywhere as well. You're the same way as I am. I've got Wi-Fi in my office. That's for convenience so we didn't have to dump a bunch of money into hardwiring the office. That takes time and there's an expense there. However, I have gotten to the point where I'm doing more hardwiring of everything. We're trying to move away from Wi-Fi. The only downside is I've got three other offices that are in this building.
You can't get away from it. In my house, I can get five different Wi-Fi signals from my neighbors. They're locked but I can see them when I open up my Wi-Fi. There is a place you can get away from it. Do you know about it?
You go out into the woods far enough away.
It still gets a cell phone. There's a place called Green Bank, West Virginia. Have you heard of this place?
No.
This is a place where electro-sensitive people can go to live. It's a National Radio Quiet Zone. They have pretty much no Wi-Fi. There are even police who go around looking for Wi-Fi signals. If you get caught with it, you get taken away. The reason is it's not for electro-sensitive people but they are trying to find radio waves from space. This quiet zone is around that so that they can pick up space stuff, which is cool.
I don't know what they find. That scares me because the aliens scare me. That's a whole other subject. They're scary. I don't trust anyone. I don't trust aliens. This place is cool for a patient. If it got to the point where she couldn't live, this was affecting every aspect of life. People move there so that they can live without frequencies or EMFs in their lives.
This is a big question. How many people don't even realize that they are sensitive to this? We figured this out along the way with this patient. She was having all these spasmodic episodes. She had a little bit of POTS and dystonia, where everything was in spasm. She can't move. It becomes very tonic. She looked like she had some dystonia going on to varying degrees. How much of it was all the EMFs that keep on getting layered upon layered? On top of that, the other thing that most people don't realize is the smart meters that you have on your house to measure your electricity also have a big field.
We put a Faraday cage around ours and it got taken off. I don't know if a storm or the electric company took it off but we need to buy another one. Jason said he put it on there well and it was gone. We couldn't find it around it. They're not that expensive. You can find them on Amazon.
It's a thought that I've had in my mind, especially with some of the problems my wife has. There's so much EMF fog that's giving her a bunch of trouble and she's not able to function. We run over to my folk's place. We are out in the woods enough that it's low or a little bit of Wi-Fi. My dad's Wi-Fi barely works. It's almost as good as dial-up modems. It is a little bit better. The thought in my mind is, “How long does she need to be in that environment away from all the stuff but we still have cell towers and everything else?” The question is, how much is blanketed on top?
We need to take a vacation to West Virginia. It's beautiful.
We may need to do that. Let me pull up this electrosmog study here because it's fascinating.
It's a type of pollution that you can't see. It's invisible.
We don't know who is sensitive to what. That is the harder part.
That's the same thing. You think, “That's impossible.” I was like, “This person can be allergic to peanuts and this person could be allergic to nothing. What's the difference? They're different people.”
There was a comedian who was talking about taking Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to school. All the kids were freaking out. How sad is that?
I get it. If your kids are going to die, that's scary as hell. We could talk about that.
I've got to get a bunch of all this.
We should start uploading these to Rumble.
It's on my agenda. This is out of immunology research in the EMF spectrum. As far as what are the different frequencies of these waves that are coming through, there's ionizing radiation. That’s X-rays and CTs. It has a number of different uses. We're not talking about ionizing radiation. We're talking about general frequencies, what they are doing to the body, and how the body reacts to various things in the environment. Did I talk about the low-level frequencies last time?
I don’t remember.
There is a low-level frequency. Ultrasound is what they call it. This is getting below 20 hertz. There are weird things that happen to human beings when these ultrasounds come across. What's curious is they figured out what may be perceived. You start getting a frequency under 20 hertz. Your eyeball has a resonant frequency in those low frequencies between 15 to 18 hertz. When it happens, your eyeball starts shaking. You won't hear it. You might not feel it but your eye will perceive it as a shadow in the corner.
That's like the devil.
A ghost or something else. It's funny. The scientists figured this out. They installed a new piece of equipment or an air conditioner. It was producing a low-level frequency in his lab. He's looking around. He thinks they're shadow people because he is perceiving this. He's a scientist. He's trying to figure out what's going on.
He's like, “This isn't shadow people. What is it?”
He was able to measure that. Don't ask who's figured out the resonant frequencies of the heart, the eyeballs in your ears, and some parts of your brain. It was probably either the Nazis or the Russians.
The CIA.
We can go down rabbit holes all day long because there is stuff going on there, whether or not they're going to tell us anything about it.
People randomly drop dead.
That's another story.
There are weapons and all sorts of things.
The visible range between 400 and 700 nanometers is our visible light. There's stuff way outside this and then as we start getting into higher frequencies, we start seeing other things. FM radio stations, Wi-Fi, radar detectors, cellphones, and DirecTV are all megahertz. AM radio stations are in kilohertz that we kept around for a while and were generally too bad. We start getting into gigahertz, which is some of what the anti-collision vehicle radars are doing.
I didn't even think about that. That's a whole other technology. They're shooting out radar in the front of the cars.
Here's something that's crazy. One of the things they did for Tesla X, whichever is the SUV, is it has those gullwing doors that come up. When the engineers were designing this, Elon did not want that little sensor with that little round nub on the outside poking through the door. He wanted to smooth the door. He tasked them with creating a sound that would penetrate through the sheet metal of the door and then come back to be red. The crazy thing is they had to ramp up the volume effectively or the intensity up.
Maybe the volume on that thing is only about a three, unlike your car bumper to tell you that something's back there. On those doors, it was up to eleven. They cranked it. The volume effectively went up to eleven. You're shooting this sound through and screaming to see if there's anything on the other side of that door to make sure it doesn't hit anything over there. He didn’t want to have the thing on the outside because they wanted to look pretty. I do respect that because he said, “How do we solve this problem?”
He has solved a lot of those things. It is incredible. He employs incredible people too.
Let's talk about wavelengths and what they do. Shorter wavelengths have more energy and higher frequencies, do not penetrate as deep, and do not generate heat. That's what short wavelengths do. Longer wavelengths have less energy and lower frequencies but they penetrate deeper which is a longer wavelength that would be something in the 20 or 18 hertz that might penetrate the eye and increase molecular motion and thus generate heat.
Longer wavelengths have less energy and lower frequencies but they penetrate deeper.
Back up a little bit. It says, “Microwaves heat anything with moisture in water like food and people.” If I put a piece of paper and it has no water, it doesn't heat it. “Microwave penetrates the interior of food and people. Don't go inside your microwave. Cellular phones use radiation in the microwave spectrum.” Isn't that interesting?
I don't know if there's any validity to some of those early cell phone videos. This is pre-TikTok for people who watch that stuff. They put four cell phones around a couple of kernels of popcorn and then ran it.
Everybody gets to phone call each other.
The popcorn would start to pop. There was a microwave underneath the phone. You have to understand that it's different intensities. You have a different power from a microwave than you do from a cell phone. You have a much stronger power comparatively. You have even more energy from that. As an aside, it’s a great use for your microwave. Unplug it and put it in your basement or any electronic device that you want to protect from any electromagnetic pulse. It is a solar flare. It's a Faraday cage. There are some benefits to it. We have too much stuff around us. Does any one of these pieces cause a problem? Probably not. Do we have a level of pollution that we can't see and we're not feeling very well? Probably.
For some people, maybe it's like, “I'm tired all the time.” Your body's constantly having to fight some of this stuff.
The question becomes, at what point in time do we start saying, “We've done too much and we need to start getting back?” How many people go off for a vacation camping in the woods, ditch their cell, they're away from their Wi-Fi and they come back fully recharged? That is the root of where we've been for most of our civilization.
All of a sudden, in the past many years, we have had this significant increase in what these folks are calling electrosmog. This one was interesting. This is the vitamin D receptor. If you don't have enough vitamin D, you have problems with inflammatory issues and autoimmune diseases. This receptor exhibits stability to electrosmog. You have things in your body that don't like a bunch of electronic gobbledygook, especially if you already have low vitamin D. It is a compounding problem with your overall health.
Vitamin D is so important. In wintertime, talk to your doctor about getting on vitamin D.
Vitamin D is so important. Everybody, it's wintertime. Talk to your doctor about getting on vitamin D.
The only reason I haven't uploaded episode 26 is to make sure that I'm talking about vitamin D and saying, “Talk to your doctor about vitamin D. You need to take more. The upper limit is questionable as to what is an upper safe dose.” I don't think we know of an overdose in the literature. I take 30,000 a day. That might be too much for you.
I take 10,000.
You need to talk to your doctor and say, “How can I start?” Get your levels checked. Another article I came across was suggesting 60 nanograms per deciliter. It was a bare minimum for women not to get breast cancer. People are in their 40s and 50s and saying, “That's fine.” Lots of stuff. Lots of questions. I've got a couple of other articles that we may revisit another time but the take-home message is we have to find times to unplug.
If you're not using your Wi-Fi router at night, unplug it. Turn it off. You don't need it on all night. Get your phone ring from your head when you're sleeping. It does not need to be on your nightstand. You need it first in the basement.
I'm getting to the point where I'm going to get a Faraday cage to throw my cell phone in at night so that it's away from me. I had hair until I got my first Apple 3G phone. I like Apple phones.
I love Apple products.
It is a curious question in my mind, “Did my hair start falling out?” There was a car accident, complications, and other things but the timing is so close.
It could be because of the autoimmunity. We're talking about it.
That's like a pigment starting back up.
We like pigment, hair, and all the things. I would share some of mine with you if I got a lot.
Thank you.
That wraps it up.
It's a different topic for what we like talking about but sometimes, these fun, off-the-wall things need to be discussed.
I wonder if there are any chiropractors in that West Virginia Town. I'm going to look that up because if there is, that might be a fun person to talk to. If not, maybe we need to get a chiropractor out there.
That wouldn't be a bad place. Compare notes and see what's going on in that area. Dr. Bagley, where they're going to find you?
You can find me in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm on the Westside. You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/.
I am in Springfield, Illinois at KeystoneChiroSPI.com. Please like and subscribe. Give us a five-star review. That's how people find this. Word of mouth is the way that people get more information about all these shows. They're not going to find it on Google. The algorithms are already changing. They do not like alternative ideas to what the mainstream is talking about. Isn't that horrible? We're not saying that we have the end-all and be-all answers. We're just presenting the facts as we understand them. You will be the judge. Make sure you share with your friends, family, and anyone who might not realize that getting their head on straight is going to help them out. Until the next episode.
Multiple sclerosis is a lifelong condition that may lead to a serious disability. Today, Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger explore the promising role of upper cervical care in supporting individuals with multiple sclerosis. They dive deep into some case studies that have shown the efficacy of upper cervical care for not only multiple sclerosis but also Parkinson's. Plus, they talk about how people can help their immune health with vitamin D. As with all things health-related, consult with your doctor on Vitamin D dosing and get your levels checked. Tune in to this episode to learn more!
---
Welcome to the show. I'm Dr. Frederick Schurger.
I'm Dr. Beth Bagley. Welcome.
How have you been?
It is a holiday week. I know this is going to come out some weeks later, but this was the 4th of July. Trying to pile all of the patients into two days in my office was quite fun.
I am in the same boat except I lost power this past weekend.
I forgot.
Everyone who does math will appreciate this joke. I decided I was going to see patients for about an hour starting at 9:00 on Thursday morning because that would mean I could leave the office by noon. Do the math. Have some fun with that. That's when the storm came in. We were going to head out of town for the weekend.
The storm comes in like a derecho, and it's a full-on derecho in Springfield. I was driving back to meet up with a patient who never made it. She's like, “I'm going home to check on the kids.” I make it back to the office. I got drenched walking in by the time I got here, but I almost couldn't make it. I was worried that there was a tornado coming through here. It was bad.
You don't have a basement in your office, do you?
We do.
We don’t here.
I looked and I had questions. Honestly, by the time I got to the office, the worst of it was over, but we lost power. We were out of power until Monday.
In the office or at home?
At home. The office had power.
I would have slept at the office.
I thought about seeing patients. I was so exhausted that I was like, “I need this time to decompress so that I'm ready for patients.” I ended up with three new patients in two days and got them all adjusted today. It was a very good day. We may talk about these cases at another time. It's nice to camp at home.
I can see that, except I like air conditioning a lot.
Yes and yes. I get much better sleep and I can do harder workouts when I've had some air conditioning.
We're so spoiled. If you think about our parents and our grandparents, they grew up with no air conditioning.
I was chatting with my dad. When I was in my twenties, I didn't run the air conditioner. Oftentimes, I'd get a little studio apartment, turn off the air conditioner, and open up the windows wherever I was because I wanted the fresh air. I enjoyed the heat. I gave my dad a brief about how we were weak in enjoying the air conditioning. When I told him we didn't have air conditioning, he said, "Weren't you complaining about that when you were growing up?" I'm like, "Yeah. I can still tolerate the heat as long as I don't have to wear anything but a pair of shorts." Most of my patients appreciate me in a bow tie. I'm just saying.
I have a great segue to that. Heat is one of the triggers that a lot of patients have who have multiple sclerosis.
Exactly. I was surprised. I'm going through symptoms and conditions that we haven't covered yet. We haven't covered multiple sclerosis. A lot of people are going to be surprised that we have probably one of the best non-invasive and non-medicated solutions for multiple sclerosis.
You're right.
Solution is a strong word, but many of my patients would agree that it's probably one of the best ways to manage. The reason that you end up managing multiple sclerosis is because we think it's an autoimmune disease. I put an asterisk there next to think because based on what we're going to share here, I don't think it falls in a direct autoimmune situation.
I agree because of the way it reacts, especially with what we do here.
Also, the way that people respond to the upper cervical work does not suggest that it is a purely autoimmune condition. Let's talk a little bit about MS for people who are unfamiliar. I was going through a couple of different places, refreshing my brain mostly more than anything else. It's a lot of neurological stuff like pain, muscle spasms, bladder and bowel problems for a lot of them, and cognitive symptoms. Balance is another big one.
Muscle weakness.
Tingling and numbness with visual disturbances. I have a short list of signs and symptoms associated with multiple sclerosis. How do you get diagnosed with multiple sclerosis? You go see a neurologist. They have some very specific tests including an MRI that starts showing white spots on your brain matter and your white matter. That's the big stuff. Heat is not a favorite condition or situation for people with multiple sclerosis, especially in summer. It often makes all these symptoms worse.
People will call that a trigger. It makes them fearful of the summers a lot of times.
I have a couple of MS patients. I have several, but one in particular, she likes working in her basement during this time of the year.
That makes sense.
She and her husband moved down to Florida. She's down there all summer long.
In the summer?
All summer long in the heat.
They don't have basements in Florida.
They don’t but she does great. I've adjusted her. Dr. Julie Mayer Hunt has adjusted her. She is with Dr. Lee Angle. He has been taking great care of her. She’s like, “I'm walking well.” She has to use a walker, one of these rollator-type things. She gets along very well with that. As long as we keep her in alignment, she does great. It's not debilitating for her life, which is the best part.
If you have a medical diagnosis of MS, what are they looking for?
They're going to take an MRI of your brain, and they're going to be specifically looking for white spots. The autoimmune theory associated with multiple sclerosis is that the body is attacking the white matter. I don't know why I want to say white matter, but that seems right. If I'm wrong, please somebody correct me. I'm more than happy to be correct on that.
Since you say that, my brain goes, “Hmm.” Does anybody tuning in truly care? Maybe you do.
There are going to be five of them out there, five people who are going to say, “You're wrong,” and I'm going to be like, “I was.”
At least you admitted it.
It’s the central nervous system. What they're finding are these lesions in the brain tissue that are leading to all these other problems. Before we started the recording, you mentioned that latitude makes a difference.
Which is interesting. The theory behind that is latitude, if you're thinking about why we are talking about maps here, in the United States, the higher up you are, the more likely or the faster you will get symptoms of MS if you are prone to or going to get MS. The study I looked at was two years difference. The reason according to this study was that there is a correlation between vitamin D levels and symptoms of MS. It is interesting because we saw that during the pandemic too. People who didn't get a lot of sunshine would have lower vitamin D naturally, like in New York. It did a lot worse than big cities like Florida per se. It’s not like, “What’s the difference there?” In my mind, I'm like, “It's that sunshine.”
I had a patient come in and she was like, "Why do you think I need more vitamin D?" We took a new X-ray and I told her she needed more vitamin D and more Omega-3s. We all need more Omega-3s largely if we're carrying extra body weight along. That's going to help tamp down the inflammation response that we're having.
Her X-ray didn't look as dense as previous ones or her cone beam. My brain says, “Let's put you on a little bit of extra vitamin D.” Vitamin D is not a vitamin. It's a hormone. It's a prohormone for all the other hormones, so it is a basis and basic starting block for everything else. You want to make sure your vitamin Ds are at least over 50, but there is some speculation that vitamin D levels that are even higher than that, getting into the low hundreds, are even more neuroprotective and more immunoprotective. It is a basis for everything else in your nervous system in your body. The higher levels you have, the better off you're going to be.
There is a chance people could overdo it on vitamin D though.
Maybe. If you are getting a food-based or a lanolin-based vitamin D, you're going to be okay. There is some discussion about whether or not you can push it too high. The question is, what is too high? A lot of doctors will be like, “You're over 50. You should cut back.”
Fifty is still good. You could go higher.
The upper limit of vitamin D is suggested to be up into the 170s. That was from the lab testing that I got a couple of years back. Here's the thing. Has anybody tested an upper limit of vitamin D consumption to a toxic level? The interesting thing is the body will self-regulate the vitamin D. If it has too much, it will start flushing it out because it is so readily used. Even though it is an oil, it's still readily used. Your body will be able to self-regulate it pretty well.
What is a symptom that you should be concerned about? It's constipation. If you're constipated, first, drink some water, then if that doesn't help within a couple of days, back off on the vitamin D. Generally speaking, most people are going to have a hard time getting enough vitamin D. These higher levels are unstudied at this point. Most people aren't going to be taking 30,000 IU of vitamin D as I do on a regular basis. I'm taking it for some autoimmune stuff because it is helping those factors. For someone with MS, especially if you've got a lot of neurological factors, maybe some more vitamin D is a good idea.
I’m just going to read off, “Getting too much Vitamin D can be harmful. High levels of vitamin D in your blood greater than 375 nanomoles per liter or 150 nanograms per milliliter can cause nausea, vomiting, muscle weakness, confusion, pain, loss of appetite, dehydration, excessive urination, thirst, and kidney stones.”
How do you get to that level? You have to work to it. One of the supplement reps that I've worked with over the years and I were talking back and forth for several decades. They would use one vitamin D where every drop was 2,000 IU from one brand. As soon as you stop taking it, the levels will drop. You'd see this increase right off the bat. As soon as you stop taking it, it will immediately decrease.
He had suggested that the standard process for vitamin D, Cataplex D, would help stabilize that over the long term. It has other co-factors. That's one aspect of it. There was one other that was on the tip of my tongue as I was talking about this. Your body knows how to regulate vitamin D. I was taking the study that looked at both psoriasis and vitiligo. It was vitiligo, not versicolor. Down in Brazil, they were giving something like 50,000 on a regular basis for over six months.
Daily or weekly?
Daily.
I know a lot of people, if they are at their medical doctors and they happen to do a vitamin D test, which you have to fight for, they'll do 50,000 weekly to help get people up.
That was the other thought that I had. Thank you for refreshing my brain. They were taking 50,000 daily if I'm not mistaken. It might've been 35,000 IU.
No matter what, it is way more than most people take.
It was way more, which is why I take 30,000 and don't worry about it. They did that over the course of six months. They had no adverse effects from taking vitamin D. Seventy percent of the psoriasis folks got better and about half of the vitiligo folks got better, which is still fantastic. The interesting thing about uptake is when you take that mega-dose once a week, that 50,000 IU that they often prescribe, that 50,000 doesn't hit the bloodstream properly because the body doesn't know how to deal with it. You're better off taking 10,000 every day.
I agree.
You're working yourself up to it. Over time, your body can work up a store to get into that nanograms per deciliter. When I took mine, it had been three years. I need to get new blood work. When I did mine, it was something like 110 or 111, somewhere in that range. I'd been taking that for a couple of years at that point in time. It takes a long time to get up to the chronic “I'm going to have problems” range. Your body says, “I see 50,000 IU,” and it doesn't absorb it properly. That's what the literature is suggesting. You're better off with a smaller high dose and work your way up to more.
In general, what the studies have shown with vitamin D is higher vitamin D levels could possibly stop people from getting multiple sclerosis.
They are certainly protective of symptoms. That's the better way to think about it more than anything else. You don't see the cases of MS further south as you do further north. The same thing flips around in the southern hemisphere as you get further south. There is less vitamin D. There is a protective benefit that seems to be present with vitamin D dosing.
Some studies have shown that trauma, especially to the neck or back, or whiplash, is somewhat related to MS diagnosis. That is the case with what I've seen in my office, especially whiplash-type injuries or concussion-type injuries. It's not like I get whiplash and the next day, I get MS. It is more like over the course of years. It is like, "Fifteen years ago, I had a terrible whiplash and now I've been diagnosed with MS."
Some studies have shown that trauma, especially to the neck or back, is somewhat related to MS diagnosis.
People don't put that together because it's so far apart. What we do is when we have our history and consultation with a patient, we find out what happened to them before. Can we say for sure that's connected? No. I see a relationship with Meniere's. We see whiplash in Meniere's. With the upper cervical subluxation, and the cerebral spinal fluid dynamics, do you think that's where it's happening?
I think that’s what's happening. Dr. Scott Rosa is up in Albany, New York.
We've talked about him before.
It was in the last episode where were talking about the hydrocephalus book. We were getting into what he was looking at there. I've got a nice little article here talking about that. The cine study here is great. A cine study of cerebral spinal fluid flow is a motion study MRI, which is cool. What they'll do is they'll take a slice and then they'll record over time to see all the cerebral spinal fluid flow. What they were finding here is that in these MS cases, there was a decreased cerebral spinal fluid flow in certain areas or certain parts. Dr. Rosa has been doing these cine studies for many weekends. He has his own neuroimaging center.
Let's break it down real quick, and I'll let you continue to go. I'm confused. Cine study, what is that?
A cine study is you go into an MRI machine. What they do is they set you up. They're going to look at this narrow spot coming this way.
It’s a thin slice down the center.
It’s a thin slice down the middle is what they're looking at. They're going to record that over a period of time.
Cine is cinematic.
It is exactly cinematic.
That's where that's coming from. It's a movie of your brain.
It's a short movie. Instead of taking a number of slices across to get a 3D image, we're taking a very narrow slice in the middle. That way, we can see the cerebral spinal fluid flowing as it's supposed to. It's supposed to drop down the back of your spinal cord and then come back up the front.
Cerebral spinal fluid is the fluid that is inside part of the brain but also around the brain. The brain sits in a cushion of fluid. There's no air in there. Even though you get called an airhead, you are not an airhead. It's floating in this fluid, which is why in shaken baby syndrome, when you shake a baby, their brain is getting smashed.
It is something like that.
There's other stuff too.
It's bad. Don't do it. Don’t shake a baby.
It's terrible. It breaks the blood vessels. The babies will never be the same or die. A terrible car accident or a fall can do similar things. Liam Neeson's wife got into a skiing accident. That's one of the things that happened to her. She had broken blood vessels in the brain because of the brain smashing around in the head. The brain is supposed to smash around because it's protecting it. The problem, which is what we're talking about here, is that flow, the way that the body moves that fluid, it doesn't have a heart. It’s not pumping blood, but the blood will increase the pressure of the brain when it pumps. It decreases when it goes out. Our brain is constantly swelling and getting smaller. It is like a pumping mechanism itself because of the blood.
It’s a pumping mechanism, but it’s not pumping with a heart. Cerebral spinal fluid is more than just the water holding the brain in place. It is nourishing the brain the way it's supposed to, but it is very viscous much like water. It is supposed to flow around. These cine studies allow us to see these pulsating pictures. It's supposed to flow around. What they were finding in these MS patients compared to people who are normal was there were spots where the cerebral spinal fluid didn't flow and didn't pulse the way it's supposed to. They found that much more common in MS patients compared to a regular patient.
There are spots where the cerebral spinal fluid didn't flow and didn't pulse the way it's supposed to. That is more common in multiple sclerosis patients compared to regular patients.
Just to bring this out there, we'll also see similar things with Parkinson's patients and people who have dementia, ALS, and migraine patients.
There are variations of this. This is why the autoimmune response of MS might not hold up. The suspicion is maybe what's happening is the cerebral spinal fluid, because it has nowhere to go, and the pressure builds up. When you have a non-compressible liquid, which is cerebral spinal fluid, blood, or water, you can't compress it. You start putting pressure on it. It's got to go somewhere. It will end up going into an area that’s the weakest. You’re not going to go up against bone. If you try to push liquid into a bone, it's not going to happen. Where is it going to go? It's going to go into that soft tissue of the brain. This is where it ends up having infiltration of the cerebral spinal fluid. We start to see these white spots.
Dr. Rosa takes pre and post-MRIs. He'll do these cine studies after adjusting a patient, and he'll do another one almost immediately after. Bear in mind that this is 30 minutes of a patient sitting in an MRI. They get adjusted, and then they're back into the MRI for another 30 minutes of imaging. It can take a very long time. It's very taxing on the patient. What Dr. Rosa found within 30 minutes of an adjustment is those spots, those lesions, or that infiltration of the cerebral spinal fluid into these various spots in the brain are gone.
He is very specific and meticulous about making sure that they are positioned exactly the same way they went into the machine the first time as they did the second time. As best as possible, we are seeing something that suggests that these brain infarcts from cerebral spinal fluid disappear. The same lesions that we would consider an MS lesion are gone within 30 minutes after an adjustment.
I'm not saying this is the only causative thing going on with multiple sclerosis, but it does suggest that there is an improvement in the tissue that is allowing the body to heal. Maybe it's simply a matter of getting the pressure off of those individual spots and then the body can work the way it's supposed to. In the case of vitamin D, we know vitamin D has some neuroprotective benefits, as well as some immune benefits. If you have a better vitamin D level, maybe you aren't as prone to the spots hitting or to the cerebral spinal fluid pushing into that tissue as severely in some cases.
Your body doesn't react as badly to it. If we could psychically know that this person was going to get MS but they have good vitamin D and good health. They work out and they do all the right things. We knew that they were going to get it and we took an MRI, I bet we would still see some of that stuff. It's just not causing symptoms yet. It’s what I’ve said on other things. Upper cervical is so successful with this if we catch it early or someone has just started getting the symptoms of MS.
I have seen many patients who have had advanced MS, but I don't see the miraculous type of results that I do with someone who only had it for a year or has only been diagnosed for a year. We know that this has been going on long-term. I can think of one of my patients who wasn't flared up when I met her, but she came in and knew that she wanted care. She knew that every summer she flared up.
We got her started. It was the end of fall or winter when we got her started in her care. We got through the initial phase of care. She was holding adjustments relatively well. We were seeing her on a monthly basis. We got all the way through the summer into the fall again. She did not have one flare-up over the summer. I hadn't realized how much of a big deal that was to her. She had not had that for many years.
Come now 3, 4, or 5 years later, she still has not had a flare-over. She moved on me. I think something happened. She has gotten a new upper cerebral doctor in Indiana. At least under my care, she didn't have a flare, which is good. She did get back under care, which is good. One of the other things I wanted to bring up is about why 50% more women than men get MS. I don't know why. Do you have any ideas of why that would happen?
50% more women than men get Multiple Sclerosis.
It would come down to the structural strength of the ligament tissue or the density of the ligament tissue in the neck. I’ve got up the cine study, for those who are watching it at home.
If you're seeing this on YouTube or video form, what I'm seeing is the center of the patient. It's a tiny slice down the center of the patient through the nose to the back of the head. It looks like on the right side, I'm seeing the flow of cerebral spinal fluid. Every time it pumps, it's going down like it's supposed to.
There's a pulse you see on the right. It's all the way around this cord.
Both sides.
I don't like the fact that it's got white noise static in the background, but that's whatever they decided to do. You can see on the one on the right, which is our normal healthy volunteer, you've got this nice pulsing all the way through. With the MS case on the left, you don’t.
There is some. It's not like this person's head is about to explode.
Yeah, but it's very irregular comparatively.
Is it hydrocephalus? I’d say subclinical hydrocephalus. It's not to the point where this person needs a stent.
No. Going back to what is going on in the brain as far as fluid dynamics, you have three fluids that are playing back and forth. You have oxygenated blood, which is arterial blood. You have the venous blood, which is deoxygenated, and then you have the cerebral spinal fluid flow. The two drive the other to create a pulse for the cerebral spinal fluid, but all three of them have to move in their coordinated efforts.
If something isn't sitting where it's supposed to be, you have an increased cerebral spinal fluid and other problems. Getting to the point that we were making earlier about where it hits in the neuro tissue if it hits more in the spinal cord, we call that Lou Gehrig's disease. If it hits more in the brainstem around the pons, that might be Parkinson's hitting around the red nucleus. Is it a red nucleus for Parkinson's?
It’s substantia nigra.
That's it. I knew it was one of those two. If it’s in the brain tissue higher up, it's multiple sclerosis. It's all a matter of where the pressure problem and where the pressure gradient imbalance are that might be leading to the symptom profile that the patient is experiencing. It may all be the same thing. Getting back to putting a stent in, there was a study several years ago. Back in 2011, an Italian researcher by the name of Zamboni had this grand idea. He was saying that there was an insufficiency of cerebral spinal venous flow. He found that MS patients had an increased cerebral spinal fluid venous flow insufficiency.
What are those words meaning?
It's a mouthful, but it's the venous flow out of the brain.
It’s the flow of the blood that's already been used, going out of the brain.
He had this grand idea that he was going to put a stent in to help improve the venous outflow of the brain. The problem is twofold. One, the venous flow is always a low-pressure flow all the way up into the brain. The question is where does that stent need to be? Does the stent need to be in the brain or does it need to be further down? He ended up putting his stent down towards the lower neck when he was doing these studies and doing his research.
Was he doing these on humans?
I believe he had some human volunteers. A stent in a vein, as studies go, is probably one of the lower risks. Still, people are desperate. Sometimes, you need to have some human volunteers. He was putting it way down low in an area where it wasn't making the effect. Some of his colleagues got together with some of our upper cervical colleagues over there. Dr. Sandro Mandolesi and Marceca here were working with upper cervical doctors and were looking at the same cerebral spinal venous insufficiency. They found that many of them were related to where the atlas is causing stress and pressure on the jugular vein coming out of the skull. It is much higher up. It is right at the atlas.
There's another syndrome called the Eagle Syndrome. It's when we got the styloid, which is right behind your ear, there's a little bone that pops down and it connects to the front of your neck. It shouldn't be a bone, but what happens with Eagle Syndrome is it's turned to bone. I wonder if there's a correlation between those people. They may have an elongated process because that could put pressure because the two are right next to each other.
It shouldn't because the jugular sits more along the spine.
That's more in the carotid?
It's more anterior. Even the carotid is sitting against the spine.
We'll have to look that up.
We'll have to double-check on that. There are a lot of questions as to how much calcification is there. We see a lot of them.
Sometimes, they're really big.
In any case, I don't think that's what's going on.
That's not it. It's not theirs.
The two docs working with one of our upper cervical docs were finding that the rotation of the atlas, which is how the atlas and the axis were turned, which sometimes is a little bit of motion back and forth, would cause enough pressure to suggest that a misalignment of the C1 and C2 vertebrae might be causing stress on that jugular vein, preventing normal flow. This is something we see oftentimes on MRIs as we're looking at them that suggests that something is causing pressure on a jugular vein.
The jugular is low pressure. You can push on an artery and you can feel some pushback on a vein. There's that nice little artery right there that tends to pop on a lot of people. You can oftentimes feel that one. On a vein, you push on it, and you will start cutting off blood flow pretty quickly because it doesn’t take a lot of pressure.
They're thinner walls.
They don't have the same pressure as an artery does. That was one of their theories. They started testing that with other cases, both with improvements by getting an upper cervical adjustment and seeing how patients did. They were seeing lots of great improvements. We saw a statistical significance with some sort of rotation of the X-rays in these MS cases. They found encouraging information to suggest that correcting of atlas or axis adjustment would lead to an improvement in these cerebral spinal fluid venous insufficiency. It’s the cerebral spinal venous insufficiency. I said fluid earlier.
Correcting the atlas or axis would lead to an improvement in this cerebrospinal venous insufficiency.
It's not the CSF. That is part of it too. What we're saying is there could be multiple things happening when there's an upper cervical subluxation. It's not just cerebral spinal fluid flow, which is important, but there could be actual pressures that are happening within the neck, outside of the nervous system. The brain isn't pushing the blood or able to push the blood as fast as it should out, so it's getting a backup.
They're pointing to the internal jugular veins having some sort of compression that causes a backup. It's pieces and parts. It's not all one thing that leads to a case of multiple sclerosis. As you have all these pieces and parts and you are the person who has that perfect situation, you may end up with your cerebral spinal fluid not working the way it's supposed to, and then you have a backlog. You can't flush out all the garbage.
If the garbage collectors go on strike for a month, you're going to have a bunch of junk. You're going to have stuff that you don't want like rats after a short period of time. That's what I've got. We've seen good results with MS cases. This is not my favorite study, but I'll share it real quick. This was a study that Dr. Erin Elster had published several years ago. This was back in 2004. She was looking at a batch of multiple sclerosis patients and a batch of Parkinson's patients.
I remember this one.
She found good symptomatic improvement and decreased progression for both. The MS patients are at 91% and 92% for the Parkinson's patients. The reason this isn't my favorite study is because this should be two studies, in my opinion. I don't know why she put it all together as one.
If we think about it though, they are connected. There is a connection.
Quite honestly, this would be better as two studies. One that says they could be identical completely, one that says Parkinson's, and one that says multiple sclerosis. Studies like this happened to be in a chiropractic journal so this is a great rah-rah for chiropractors. If I were going to publish something like this, and I had this cohort, I would want to publish it in a public PubMed journal so that medical doctors can see it if they're searching for it. The ones who are looking for multiple sclerosis see it and the ones who are looking for Parkinson's see it separately. Those are two different neurologists. I hate to say it.
I get it. It's been almost twenty years since this study was done. It’s time for us to do it again.
It's got a lot of great data. She's got tons of stuff as far as what the injury or trauma was. It goes down the list of symptoms that they were having. We need to do another study very much like this. At the end of the day, we see these MS patients and we see these Parkinson's patients. I'm sad to say I have not had a Lou Gehrig patient come in yet, but I'd love to see one and see if I can help them out.
The mechanism is consistent that there's something wrong in the upper cervical that is preventing either venous flow to work properly or cerebral spinal fluid flow from working properly, or that there's some other combination of stressors in and around the brainstem that's preventing the body from functioning.
It’s the same thing with ALS. I have had two patients with ALS come in. They always find me last. They're already in a wheelchair. They already have a BiPAP machine.
Why do we have to be the last one?
That's why we're doing this show. It is to share this information so that when they're desperate to search for answers for a loved one or for themselves, they find this first rather than last. It breaks my heart that it's already so far gone when we see a lot of people.
Of the two new patients I had, one had three different MRIs. Two were recent and one was an old upright. I quickly scanned over the reports to see if what I saw that was sticking out like a sore thumb was in any of the reports. It wasn't. There was a Chiari at 5 millimeters, which is a Chiari 1, on at least one of her MRIs. I didn't go digging further.
Did they see it on the MRI?
No. There was no mention of it. No one looked at it.
That MRI was done lying down then. It's probably much worse if she was doing an upright MRI.
Potentially. I've seen it switch a little bit but it’s not helpful. If you can get an upright as well, oftentimes, you see it more severely. She was 5 millimeters lying down and nobody made a note of it. I saw it immediately. My brain goes right to that. With her symptom profile, she's got some Meniere’s. She's got some weird neurological stuff. I'm like, “You are a perfect candidate for upper cervical work,” aside from the fact that she decided when she was three years old to jump off the monkey bars into a frozen sand pit at three years old. Maybe it started back then and then she's had all these problems. Twenty months ago, she started having Meniere’s severe.
This other gentleman fell off a mountain. He was training in the Military. He takes one step incorrectly and rolls down the entire hill. He's at the top of the ridge. The next thing he knows, he has broken ribs. He's got cactus and has hit boulders. He is a mess. He's been feeling like this for almost 30 years. All of a sudden, in January 2023, he started having Meniere’s symptoms full on. He gets a medical doctor down the road or a neurologist who says, “There's nothing we can do for Meniere’s. You're going to have to cut back on your salt. If that doesn't help, I'm going to give you a dietary pill.” Meclizine wasn't touching stuff.
He comes in like this. His left eye is open, but it's not open. I adjust him and sit him up. His eyes are as wide as mine. Both eyes were open. I'm like, “We're on the right path. I'm confident.” Some patients are going to respond fast. Some people are going to take a little bit of time. In my TN case, she's been dealing with this for a bit.
It's going to take some time. Those nerves are on fire.
They haven't had proper nutrition coming through the spinal fluid because it goes to every nerve. Not only is it bathing the brainstem of the spinal cord, but it goes out to every nerve in the body all the way down to our fingers and our toes, and then it goes back. It takes time. These healing processes do not happen overnight as much as I wish they did because then, I’d have hair.
These healing processes do not happen overnight.
I feel like we would have more patients, but fewer patients at the same time. They would get one adjustment and they'd be like, “We're good.”
We charge more.
That's true. I had a patient. I happened to answer the phone. My front desk was busy with another phone call. I was sitting at my desk. He called. He's not a patient yet, but he broke his neck in 1980. I was like, “How long has this been going on?” He is like, “I broke my neck in 1980.” I was like, “That’s a little while.” He has been to multiple chiropractors. The last chiropractor he was at was rough. It was the conventional type of adjustment.
He said, “The first time, it was good. After that, it hurt me.” I was like, “You called the right place. We are very gentle and precise.” He didn't make an appointment because he wanted to get adjusted today. I have one appointment available at 5:00, and I never have an appointment at 5:00. I was like, “You could get in today, but you will not get adjusted until the next week.” The reason we do that is because it takes us so long to look at the images and put everything together. It's not like, “I see it right away. Let's get it adjusted.” We don't eat lunch. We don't take lunches. We are sitting in front of computer screens looking at your images.
If people are like, “Dr. Schurger sounds off and he's repeating words,” I did not eat lunch. I only had coffee and a couple of meat sticks. The last time, I was purposely fasting. I hope my wife thought something out for dinner because I forgot to.
You can eat eggs.
I'm out of eggs. I ran out because I didn't know how long they were going to last in the coolers when we lost power. I do have some beef liver. I might eat a pound of beef liver.
In general, why most of us can't give you an adjustment on the first day you come in is because it takes time. It's not, “Whack them and crack them. We're going to move some bones.” We are very precisely moving bones. When you schedule with us, we set time aside to, first of all, get your imaging done and get everything looked at. That second appointment is really important too so we can show you what we found and get you your first adjustment done. We can't rush the process. Hopefully, he'll call later because it sounds like he needs us.
The other part of rushing the process is you need to have that rest after that adjustment because you don't know what the body is going to go through. You need to take it easy. Even if you felt 100% better after your first adjustment, you might want to take the next weekend or week easy because your body has not fully healed from all of those symptoms.
I still remember a patient of Dr. Hall’s. He had torticollis, so he had his head stuck to his shoulder. He gets one adjustment. In standing up straight, there were no problems. Dr. Hall told him to take it easy. He goes out. They're out. It’s LA. They hop on a boat. It was one of these double-decker boats. He jumps off the upper deck into the ocean.
As he's getting out of the water, his head is stuck to his shoulder again with the torticollis. He's like, “That's all right. Dr. Hall will put me back in place. I've been dealing with this for twenty years.” Dr. Hall can never get him as clear as that first time because something else got damaged that wasn't able to come back. Take it easy.
It’s important. It's not the time to start a new workout after your first adjustment.
Another new patient started not too long ago. Her mom has been a patient forever. The daughter is finally like, “I don't want surgery for my TMJ. I need to do something. Dr. Schurger is going to fix me.” We sit and talk. She likes me. She's like, “You're going to be my doc. I'm good with that.” She comes in with the worst pain. She feels as bad or worse than when she came in earlier. She's pulling in an inch short. Half an inch is plenty off. You don't have to come in at an inch short.
He's talking about leg lengths.
An inch off for her legs. If she is 5’4”, I'd be surprised. She comes in with lots of pain. I get her adjusted and she's feeling better. The next day, I got a call from her mom saying, “What did you do to my daughter? She decided to take a day off work. She never takes days off work.” She said, “I'm too tired. I need the time to heal.” We chatted and joked about it here. She’s like, “I needed that day. I feel so much better.” She was holding her adjustment today. That's exactly what we want to hear.
Holding is healing. That's what we want. We don't want to have to adjust you every time you come in, so don't screw up your adjustments.
One of the things that your parasympathetic nervous system or the side of your nervous system that does all the healing will also do is it will put you to sleep.
It’s some of the best sleep after getting an adjustment. It's so good.
We are approaching our sleep time because I'm old.
Let's wrap it up here.
Dr. Bagley, where do they find you?
I am in St. Louis, Missouri. You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/.
That’s wonderful. I'm in Springfield, Illinois. Find me at KeystoneChiroSPI.com and all the socials as well.
Share our show and write good reviews, please.
I need to get some food. We have both hit that slap-happy stage where we are past where we should be. We look forward to another great episode of the show. We will be back in a week. Have a good one.
Bye.