Why Chiropractic Should Be Part of Your New Year’s Health Plan

The New Year is when people recommit to their health — but most don’t know where to start. In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains why chiropractors are non-medical primary health care providers and how chiropractic care helps guide long-term health improvement. If your goal is to move better, feel better, and stay healthier all year, this episode is a must-listen.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. thanks for tuning in for another episode of Ask the Chiropractor. Today I want to discuss New Year's resolutions. You see when I'm recording this, it's that week between Christmas and New Year's, and this is usually where people start to talk about New Year's resolutions. I'm gonna be a healthier, better version of myself this time next year, and although we don't always accomplish those goals for those who are serious about it. I want to give a couple tips and maybe help you find a guide along your journey. What a lot of people don't realize is that chiropractors in the state of Illinois and majority of the country. I live in Illinois, so I'm gonna discuss what happens in Illinois more than the rest of the world. But in Illinois, we are primary healthcare providers. What does that mean? That means a couple things. One, you don't have to have a referral to come see us. You can just walk in the door and come see us. And that includes Medicare. So that's Medicare that includes everywhere in the country. So you don't need a referral to go to a chiropractor, you can just walk in. So we're primary healthcare providers. Now, it used to be in Illinois, if you wanted to see a physical therapist, you had to have an A prescription from a doctor first. That's not entirely true anymore, but that's the difference between being a primary and nine primary. So you can walk in and see a chiropractor. So what's the benefit of that? If you wanted to go see a doctor that's maybe. Not gonna prescribe you more medicine and help you achieve your New Year's resolution. Healthy goals. A chiropractor's a perfect person for that. because you see, we don't prescribe medicine. We're all natural. And so if you wanted to start getting yourself better and healthier, who's a better person to be your gateway than a chiropractor? Because we're all natural healthcare providers and we study how your body functions. We know how to look for things when things aren't working properly, and we know your nervous system very good. We spend a lot of classroom hours learning about the nervous system. A lot more than a lot of my medical colleagues are know that we do. They're quite surprised when we actually get to talk and discuss it one-on-one. So if you want to start target getting healthier and better, there are a lot of different things you can do. And one, you can start a new diet program and your chiropractor is able to read your blood work and come up with solutions other than pills and medicine. See, medical doctors are really good at giving medicine. That's how they got their name, medical doctors and I'm really glad we have them and there's times we really need them. But if you just wanna start eating better, maybe a pill or a shot isn't the answer. Maybe new dietary habits are, and as chiropractors we study that and maybe. Maybe we wanna refer you to somebody who could do it better than us, like a local nutritionist that we work with. Again, as a primary healthcare provider, we can refer you to that nutritionist to get you the better information that you need. Number two, maybe you want to start exercising, maybe you wanna start getting better. As a chiropractor, we are really good at looking at your bodily structure and your frame and see how it works. And maybe we've noticed you've had sciatica down your right leg for too late two years too long, and maybe the right leg circumference is small. In the left leg circumference because the sciatica cause what they call muscle atrophy, where you lose some of the muscle tone on your leg. And maybe if you really want to start exercising and getting. And better. Maybe we need to address that first and your chiropractor could help you. One, help with a sciatica for sure. We'll get back to that in a minute, but two, we're also able to send you to a physical therapist if we think we need to rebuild that strength. And we work closely with physical therapists here in my office. If I send you to a physical therapist or if you're going to a physical therapist, we could pair notes all the time and email each other so everyone's working the best page for you. But your primary doesn't have to be the only person to send you to physical therapy. In most states, your chiropractor can do it too. So we send people there all the time. And also we can also send you out for MRIs and CAT scans. Anything else? We think you might need CT scans because as a primary healthcare provider, we have the ability to do that. Now, not every insurance company agrees with what I'm saying, but the law says we can, and a majority of them do play nice and we're able to do those things for you. So if you think you need a physical therapist, we continue to one, maybe you're just gonna be with these people that's gonna start a new exercise program. I'm gonna go start exercising. Maybe you walk into the gym and you don't have an any idea where to start. If you were to come to me, I can send you to somebody that could work with you one on one and teach you what you need to know. I could teach you a little bit, but there's people who know better than me here in my town in Rockford, Illinois. I work at a place called Movement Fitness quite a bit. So I could call them and say, Hey, I'm sitting over so and let me tell you my clinical findings on this person so they can give them the best exercise program for them. Not a generic exercise program, but a program specifically designed for their strengths and weaknesses in order to eliminate those weaknesses and make more strengths. So we do that here all the time. I actually meet with them. Quite a few times a month, we go over everyone that is seeing me and going there to exercise so they can get the benefits of both worlds, the maximum benefits. So as chiropractors, we're really good at working with other healthcare providers. We also can answer questions about your diet supplementation, how much sleep they really need. What's my mobility and my flexibility? What should I be doing after I exercise and recover? These are all things that chiropractors know really good inside and out that we can help guide you and coach you with, so that way you have good success. And lastly, as chiropractors, we can get rid of some of the limitations that might be limiting your ability to hit the goals that you want to achieve. What do I mean by this? If your spine's misaligned, we call that a subluxation. One or two of your bones in your spine are under stress, and therefore the stress response gets altered coming off from the nerves in that part of your spine, and therefore your bodily functions go into the wrong state, whether it's fight and fight or not. Fight and fight when they're supposed to. And it'll limits your body's ability to heal, grow, and repair itself. So as a chiropractor, we can check you to see if you have subluxations, remove those as a first step into removing any obstacles or barriers that would limit you to your maximum potential of hitting these resolutions, of getting better. My dad used to talk about a garden all the time. He said, if you have a beautiful garden and somebody came by and put a rock on the garden hose, now the water's not gonna get out to the garden. Does it matter how much fertilizer you put on that garden? Does it matter how much sunshine that garden gets? As long as that rock's on the garden hose, the garden can't get better. No matter what kind of things you treat the garden with. You gotta get rid of the interference. And so as chiropractors, we adjust the subluxation, kinda like the analogy of removing the rock from the garden hose so the water can get there. Now once the water's getting there and it hasn't been there for a while, will that fertilizer help quite a bit. Absolutely. But the more sunshine help. Absolutely. With the right PH balance and everything else matter. Absolutely. So as chiropractors today, in today's world, we're really good at removing the rock and then figuring out all the things the garden needs to get back to its fullest potential. Now that the main interference or the main problems have been removed, limiting its potential. And so we are uniquely trained to find these things. Only chiropractors know how to look at x-rays to find subluxations. Everyone knows how to look at an x-ray for a tumor or a fracture or something scary, but only chiropractors are trained to tell you whether your spine's in alignment or not. A lot of radiologists are put down the spines and not, there's no misalignments in the spine, and we put up the x-ray. We all start laughing like. Look at the hip, it's like an inch and a half higher than the other hip. Look at the look at how far that spine is rotated. What is this radiologist thinking? If somebody told you your spine's a normal alignment from a RAD report from a radiologist, I would never put money on that. I would definitely want a chiropractor to look at it, or at least a chiropractic radiologist. And that's a real thing. We have chiropractic radiologists. So if you really want to get your New Year's resolutions, get up and going. The chiropractor's gonna help you with this. It's gonna come up with some safe exercise programs for you. That's what everybody wants to do. I want to exercise more. They're gonna give you guidelines and limitations of where you should start and how you should progress along the way, and hopefully find your strength coach to work with too. They're gonna know a lot about injury prevention. Hey, your left hip flexor, the way your back rotates is really weak. I want you to avoid the exer exercise and we swap it with this one. We talk to you a strength coach. We give those ideas. Also, a lot of people are totally naive about recovery, so I go exercise and afterwards I get all sort achy and cramps. I'm not gonna keep exercise, and that keeps happening. Your chiropractor's gonna help you overcome some of those recovery. Issues. Maybe it's because your back's misaligned the nerve on your arm's not good. And that's why I get pain on this arm and not this arm, even though I did the same exercises on both arms. The recovery should be the same, but if there's a subluxation, it might not be. We're gonna talk to you about your posture, your ergonomics. We're gonna tell you about balance exercises, stabilization exercises, and help you get your posture back. A lot of people say your posture is a key to your window, to your overall health. So we can talk to you about posture stuff and things to work on. And lastly, chemical, physical, and emotional stress. We say that's the number one reason why people's backs go out. It's one of those three. So we can talk to you about those three and find other healthcare providers should you need them along the way and refer you to them as a primary healthcare provider. So as chiropractors, we always say we're the doctors of health. Health. We specialize in health. We don't specialize in sickness. We don't specialize in medicine. We specialize in ways to find ways to give people healthy, and most importantly, keep them healthy. It's easier to stay healthy than it is to get healthy. So if you had some New Year's resolutions and maybe in previous years you've tried and they were unsuccessful and you got frustrated and you quit, you wanna do something different this year, a key stop is at your chiropractor. What's your chiropractor guide you? On this journey and this path, they get you the goals and the results that you need to be a better, healthier version of you. This time next year, hey, if you have question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one person qualified to answer that, and that would be a chiropractor. If you like me to answer your question, wherever you're watching, reading or listening to this, go ahead and leave a comment. They come back to me, I see those, and maybe next week you'll be the question that weekend. Ask the chiropractor. Thank you.