Busting the Myths of Chiropractic

[00:00:02] What you want when you want it, where you want it. This is The Mesh.

[00:00:38] And provide you some education about because that's really where most of these myths will come from.

[00:00:45] It's just lack of education. So one of the myths that I usually hear about a lot is

[00:00:52] Chiropractic's Voodoo, switchcraft, it's not real healthcare, it's not really science, I should say.

[00:00:59] And of course, you know, Chiropractic is a preventative healthcare.

[00:01:07] There's a big difference between sickness care and preventative care.

[00:01:13] Sickness care is your traditional medicine based or surgery based healthcare.

[00:01:21] You got the flu, you got some kind of symptom or what, have you, you go to the doctor,

[00:01:26] they either give you prescription medication, they give you a shot, whatever they give you.

[00:01:32] You take it, you go home, you feel better a couple days and then you don't go back into your sick again.

[00:01:38] That's typical sickness care, which is what a lot of people typically end up doing.

[00:01:44] But Chiropractic is much different because we believe that if you take care of yourself, you take care of your body,

[00:01:52] you're going to be less likely to get sick or less likely to have to go to the doctor for certain issues,

[00:02:01] because you're taking care of them.

[00:02:03] And that's why we call it preventative care.

[00:02:05] It's no different than dentistry.

[00:02:07] That's why I called dentistry preventative care.

[00:02:10] I mean, yes, sometimes you have to go in for a root canal or filling or something like that.

[00:02:14] But when you go get your teeth clean, you're doing just that.

[00:02:18] It's preventative. You're trying to prevent your teeth from decaying, so you're getting them clean.

[00:02:23] It's no different than what we do.

[00:02:25] We're trying to prevent a misalignment.

[00:02:28] We're trying to prevent your body from causing miscommunications within itself that can lead to certain problems.

[00:02:36] And that's what Chiropractic is really about. It's preventative care.

[00:02:41] We as Chiropractic believe that the body is very intelligent. It has the ability to heal itself naturally.

[00:02:49] If you cannot heal yourself, you'd be dead.

[00:02:52] That's the whole reason we do when you cut your finger.

[00:02:54] Your finger does doesn't bleed until it falls off.

[00:02:57] I mean, you form a scar, it heals itself.

[00:03:00] That's what the body's designed to do is to heal itself.

[00:03:04] And that's what Chiropractic is designed to do as well as to help the body to make sure it's communicating

[00:03:10] 100% with itself so we can do what it's supposed to do.

[00:03:15] And that's the whole point of preventative care.

[00:03:18] And like I say, there's such a huge difference between treating this symptoms versus adjusting the calls.

[00:03:27] When you take medication, you're doing nothing more than just treating the symptoms.

[00:03:31] If you have a headache, you might take some Tylenol, hadvill, whatever you want to take.

[00:03:36] And you know, that might get rid of your headache and might not.

[00:03:40] Like I said, you're really just treating that pain.

[00:03:43] You're blocking the pain signals.

[00:03:46] You're tricking your brain into shutting down the pain centers until obviously the medication wears off.

[00:03:52] Your body processes it, your kidney processes it.

[00:03:55] And then it comes back because you literally nothing but just take the batteries out of the smoke alarm.

[00:03:59] So what we try to do is figure out, okay, well, what's causing that?

[00:04:05] Let's fix that and then the problem will end up fixing itself, which is usually what happens.

[00:04:11] Like, now in times out of 10, that's what happens.

[00:04:13] Sometimes there are limiting factors, but mostly that's the point that I'm trying to make here.

[00:04:19] Because you know, you can't medicate your way out of a problem that you behaved your way into.

[00:04:26] You know, when a patient comes in my office, I do some posture scans.

[00:04:30] I do some, um, theirography, muscle tension scans to kind of show the patient, give them something visual that they can look at and see how their body actually looks at right now.

[00:04:43] Because you know, most of the time you don't really see yourself, you don't know how you're sitting.

[00:04:47] You don't know how you're standing.

[00:04:48] You just know you have these eggs and pains, but you don't know where they're coming from.

[00:04:52] So I like to sit there and do some posture scans that kind of give you a visual representation of where you're holding all your attention, why you're having headaches.

[00:05:01] And that way you can see that.

[00:05:04] And that's why I tell patients, you know, no matter how much medication you take, that's not going to fix this type of posture.

[00:05:13] You know, text neck is a huge issue nowadays and I'll probably talk about text neck at another podcast episode.

[00:05:21] But text, things like text neck sitting behind a desk all day long.

[00:05:24] There are those, those occupational hazards what I call them, you know, medications and they're going to fix those because that's not the, that's not their pulse, the calls as posture.

[00:05:34] You fix the posture and the symptoms go away.

[00:05:36] That's, that's this clears, that's the clear, so it could be.

[00:05:39] But like I say, there's a little bit more to it than that, but that's, that's one of the myths that I, that I usually hear a lot that we're just food to which doctors and out there practicing magic.

[00:05:48] And then this is real and it's fake and and whatnot. And that's, you know, that's completely incorrect.

[00:05:55] There's a lot that people do not realize about their body that they really, really need to know.

[00:06:04] Most people don't know how their body works. They don't know the signals.

[00:06:07] I don't know why they have these ex-infans.

[00:06:09] I don't know how their body works unless you have a pretty good college education.

[00:06:14] And you probably don't know the details about certain things, but you should have a pretty good knowledge of it.

[00:06:21] Hope of the general aspects of how your body works, but you be surprised.

[00:06:26] Another stigma and myth that I hear a lot that really irritates me.

[00:06:31] This one's probably one of the biggest one that irritates me a lot that I hear is that kind of practitioners are not real doctors.

[00:06:38] That one really gets under my skin. And I know it like I say a lot of that just comes from lack of education, ignorance, things like that.

[00:06:47] But if those people that say that or believe that really knew the extent that chiropractors have to go through to just become a chiropractor,

[00:06:57] I think they would have a different opinion.

[00:07:00] First of all, as far as the education requirements go for chiropractic first, you got to have at least a four-year undergraduate degree.

[00:07:08] Usually in biology, chemistry, something like that, that didn't have to be.

[00:07:13] But obviously you're going to be dealing with the human body, so you kind of need to have a little background knowledge and some kind of biology.

[00:07:19] But you get your four-year degree, and undergraduate level.

[00:07:23] Then you go to a chiropractic school where you choose to do that.

[00:07:27] And most of them are private, they're not public schools.

[00:07:31] And that's another three and a half to four years of some really intense study work.

[00:07:39] I mean, I went to life university down in Mary and Georgia, and that's on a quarter system.

[00:07:43] So between my first quarter and my last quarter, it was about 14 quarters.

[00:07:48] So that's about 11 weeks where there's 10 weeks that you're studying, you're taking exams, you have one week off for spring break,

[00:07:57] fall break, whatever, and then you go back and do another 11 weeks.

[00:08:01] And it's a very intense, very grueling process, a lot of studying.

[00:08:07] And then obviously once you get through most of the book work, I should say, then you actually get to the clinical aspect where,

[00:08:13] you know, we've got to have so many adjustments under our belt before we can move into outpatient clinic.

[00:08:20] We start in student clinic where we're working on each other, then we get through that work into a different kind of clinic,

[00:08:25] where we're working on actual people, actual patients outside of the school.

[00:08:31] And then you do a residency program with a doctor for a few months or six months or so.

[00:08:37] I think it's usually six months, that's what we had to do.

[00:08:39] And that is real life world experience.

[00:08:44] And then once you graduate, once you have all the requirements met, then you have the option to either go work for yourself or go work for another career project or go work for a company.

[00:08:53] So it's a lot of painstaking hours of studying at a lot of money.

[00:08:58] Let me tell you that, any time I hear somebody say,

[00:09:01] I'm a career project or not real doctors, I really want to transfer all my student debt to that person.

[00:09:07] I would gladly let that person pay the quarter of a billion dollars that I have right now for just a career practice school.

[00:09:15] Like I say, it is a very painstaking process.

[00:09:19] It's very easy to get into it, but it's very hard to graduate.

[00:09:22] Let me just tell you that I had a few friends among that went through some of the program they went through about a year.

[00:09:30] I didn't decide this is something one that wanted to do, they dropped out.

[00:09:35] A lot of the graduating class that I started with, I did not end with.

[00:09:39] Let me just tell you that.

[00:09:41] But, career practice, medical doctors, you know, were old doctors.

[00:09:45] We all have a doctor degree.

[00:09:47] The difference though, is that medical doctors usually have more training in pharmacology, chemistry, things like that obviously because they're a prescribing medication.

[00:10:00] We don't prescribe medication.

[00:10:02] We're not, we're that's outside our scope of practice.

[00:10:05] We don't, not that we don't believe in medication, but we don't believe that's the answer.

[00:10:10] So we don't prescribe medication and I think that some people's determining factors as far as a doctor is concerned as well.

[00:10:17] You're not a doctor because you don't prescribe medication.

[00:10:19] If that's your theology behind who's a doctor and who's not, then you got some other problems that you need to work through, I believe.

[00:10:27] But, yeah, medical doctors have more education and pharmacology.

[00:10:32] But we still had our classes that we had to take, we had to take toxicology classes, we had to take public health,

[00:10:38] we had to take all these other classes.

[00:10:40] So we have knowledge, we just don't delve in that realm.

[00:10:44] So we as career practice have more knowledge in the anatomy and the physiology, the diagnosis,

[00:10:52] X-ray radiology, things like that because that is what we delve in.

[00:10:57] I've said before, car practice are the mechanics and the electricians for the human body.

[00:11:03] So we have a really good extensive knowledge of how the body works and how functions because that's how we view the body as a machine.

[00:11:11] If you're having neck pain or low back pain, we want to figure out, well, what could be the cause of it?

[00:11:17] What's not working? What's not plugged in, so to speak?

[00:11:21] That's the difference between the doctors, I think.

[00:11:24] But most people encounter a medical doctor or a DO or a nurse practitioner, something like that,

[00:11:30] that delve in, okay, you're sick, let's see what's wrong, let's see if we can get you feeling better by giving you something to fight the symptoms.

[00:11:39] I should say, versus, well, what's causing this? What's causing your high blood pressure, versus what is your symptoms of your high blood pressure?

[00:11:48] That's the big difference.

[00:11:50] Another myth and stigma that I hear, well, I hear, this is what I get. This is quite a bit.

[00:11:56] Is car practice give people strokes? It's so dangerous.

[00:12:00] I can't believe you let anybody crack your neck the way they do.

[00:12:05] You know, I actually had some like come up to me one day and said, are you a car practitioner?

[00:12:10] And they say, don't you have a kill people?

[00:12:14] And I'm just like, yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to school for.

[00:12:18] I'm not trying to become an assassin. That's exactly what I did.

[00:12:21] That's why I'm always looking for new patients.

[00:12:24] But no, that one, that would crack spi up sometimes.

[00:12:28] But no, we do not kill people.

[00:12:30] Car practice is not a did it for that.

[00:12:33] It would not be around very long if we were in the habit of killing people.

[00:12:36] We wouldn't have to be under the mentality of the carnival that packs up the next day,

[00:12:41] that they do in the TV shows and stuff like that.

[00:12:46] But car practice is one of the safest forms of healthcare out there.

[00:12:51] And that's not just my opinion, I mean, that's facts.

[00:12:55] I mean, if you want to do some of the research,

[00:12:57] like I say, the malpractice insurance is one of the lowest available for car

[00:13:02] practice. I pay malpractice insurance once a month, and it's about $100 a month.

[00:13:12] That's what I pay for malpractice. Now that might sound like a lot to some people

[00:13:15] that don't really know the numbers, but that is the lowest that I know of any doctor.

[00:13:21] Just for an example, an orthopedic surgeon in the state of North Carolina can pay anywhere

[00:13:28] from up to $4,000 a month in malpractice insurance.

[00:13:33] And you would say, well, of course they're doing surgery. It's very risky.

[00:13:36] Of course surgery is very risky and yet thousands of people everyday do it.

[00:13:42] And they don't think twice about it.

[00:13:44] They have to have high malpractice insurance because they're cutting the body open.

[00:13:49] A lot of things can happen if you do that.

[00:13:52] We are trying to work with the body to let it heal itself, let it fix itself

[00:13:56] without having to do all that expensive and risky stuff.

[00:14:01] Which is why arm malpractice insurance is so much lower because we don't use it that much.

[00:14:07] But, and yet you hear this stories about, oh, I had a friend that got adjusted and she got paralyzed

[00:14:12] or she had a stroke or whatever.

[00:14:15] You know, sometimes things do happen and we can't control it,

[00:14:19] but I mean, there are obviously cases of those happening.

[00:14:23] But most of the time, those are due to extinguating circumstances.

[00:14:27] If you really read into those cases that do happen, which they're very rare,

[00:14:33] that those do happen, it's usually because either the patient wasn't aware of a condition that they had

[00:14:40] or the doctor did not take enough time to do enough research into that patient's concerns.

[00:14:46] Like in school, they're really good about helping the future doctors learn certain red flags,

[00:14:55] where certain signs that a patient might present with that dictate something more serious.

[00:15:01] So if a patient's coming in with a really bad headache, this is the worst headache of my life

[00:15:06] I've never had something like this and dizzy like that.

[00:15:09] That right there, I would probably not adjust that patient.

[00:15:13] I would probably call the ambulance and them to the ER because that usually indicates something really serious.

[00:15:20] But some chiropractors, they get busy, they don't think about it.

[00:15:24] And then I, oh, well, we'll just adjust you and then things like that can happen.

[00:15:27] Those are the instances those happen when the chiropractors not really being smart

[00:15:31] and not taking time to recognize the symptoms and the signs that some patients present with.

[00:15:37] But most of the time it's just the patient either doesn't realize that something's going on

[00:15:43] or the doctor is not taking enough time to evaluate, but either way it's very rare that any of that happens.

[00:15:50] And that's why I say, yeah, it's not what you think it is.

[00:15:54] Chiropractics is one of the most safest form of healthcare out there.

[00:15:58] Now, the last stigma myth that I want to talk about here is I've heard people say,

[00:16:06] you know, once you start chiropractics, you can't really stop.

[00:16:10] And I mean, you are the decision maker for your health.

[00:16:14] I can't be the decision maker for your health.

[00:16:18] You have to do that.

[00:16:20] I tell patients all the time, you know, you can most certainly stop chiropractics here any time you want to.

[00:16:28] But why would you stop taking care of yourself just because you don't want to do it?

[00:16:33] Does that make sense?

[00:16:36] Chiropractic care is self-care.

[00:16:39] And that's what's wrong.

[00:16:40] I think a lot with society today is most people are not doing enough self-care,

[00:16:47] which is really you're the only person they can do self-care.

[00:16:50] You cannot, anybody else do self-care for you.

[00:16:53] And depending on what your definition of self-care is,

[00:16:57] my definition of self-care is anything that's going to help your body be healthier,

[00:17:03] physically, mentally and help you be the person that you're meant to be.

[00:17:09] You know, brushing your teeth, things like that, that is self-care.

[00:17:14] Chiropractic massage therapy.

[00:17:18] Seeing a therapist for mental health issues, that is self-care.

[00:17:22] Something that's going to help you down the road be a better version of you.

[00:17:25] That is considered true self-care.

[00:17:28] And you shouldn't stop doing that.

[00:17:30] Now, I'm probably going to get an hot water for this, but I do tell patients that,

[00:17:35] you know, things like getting your nails done, getting your hair done,

[00:17:40] going to target or and walking around shopping,

[00:17:43] that's not self-care in my opinion.

[00:17:46] Now, to me, that's considered mental health care, which is a big difference,

[00:17:52] and definitely need that.

[00:17:54] But getting your hair done, you're nail's done, that make you feel better,

[00:17:58] make you have more confidence, things like that.

[00:18:01] That's more mental health care in my opinion.

[00:18:04] That doesn't physiologically help you be better down the road.

[00:18:09] Getting your nails done is not going to help your headaches.

[00:18:13] I should say, I mean it might.

[00:18:14] I don't know, but that is the difference that I tell patients.

[00:18:19] Something that physiologically helps you be a better version of yourself is true self-care.

[00:18:24] And I think that's what's wrong with most people who are like I said,

[00:18:26] they don't do enough self-care.

[00:18:29] So that's why I say once you start chiropractic care, you can't stop.

[00:18:33] You know, most certainly can, but why would you?

[00:18:35] You can stop brushing your teeth, you don't have to brush your teeth,

[00:18:39] but if you don't, I mean, you're probably going to risk getting a cavity

[00:18:42] or maybe something worse having a filling and a root canal.

[00:18:46] And that's just because you stop taking care of yourself.

[00:18:49] And that's what I try to tell patients.

[00:18:52] Just make sure you're taking care of yourself.

[00:18:54] Take the time to do the self-care.

[00:18:58] Your future self will thank you for it.

[00:19:00] Make it your goal every day to be a better version of you than yesterday.

[00:19:06] And if you need to take one step of time, I promise you that you will see a difference

[00:19:11] if you just stick to that and take the time to take care of yourself.

[00:19:16] If you'd like to learn more about something you just heard

[00:19:18] or are interested to see how care practicure can help you.

[00:19:21] You can visit our website, schedule of appointment at new directions,

[00:19:24] carapractic-inc.com.

[00:19:26] Be sure to follow our social media accounts for more tips and information on how to be a better year.

[00:19:31] Thanks for listening.

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