Questioning Authority: Q&A with Leading Authorities for Entrepreneurial Excellence
Question and Answer sessions with leading Authorities in health, business and relationships to help service based professional entrepreneurs achieve peak performance in biz and in life.
Authority is a word that has many connotations. For this reason Authority in this context is defined as an expert + influencer= Authority. Someone who has expert knowledge on a particular subject AND has the characteristics to influence others.
Host Dr Scott Vatcher questions Authority figures to help entrepreneurs, business owners and service providers with achieving higher levels of success and fulfilment both in their business life and their personal life.
Exploring unique health challenges that service based entrepreneurs face such as fatigue, burnout, and finding balance between work-life struggles.
Exploring business and financial challenges such as marketing, sales, employees, investments, real estate, hiring and firing, when to scale and when to pivot.
Exploring relationships with self, business partners, romantic partners, your kids and your customers.
Questioning Authority: Q&A with Leading Authorities for Entrepreneurial Excellence
Finding Passion and Meaning in Your Work The Intersection of Philosophy and Science in Chiropractic with Dr. Rob Sinnott
Discover how aligning your work with passion can lead to a more fulfilling life, as we sit down with Dr. Rob Sinnott, a seasoned health professional and author. Through insightful anecdotes and personal experiences, Dr. Sinnott shares his philosophy on meaningful contributions to society and the importance of leaving a lasting legacy. We discuss the dangers of chasing careers purely for financial gain and explore how finding joy in your profession can prevent burnout and enhance overall satisfaction.
Uncover the unique approach of chiropractic care and its foundational philosophy with Dr. Sinnott, as we delve into the body's innate ability to heal itself. Learn how philosophy acts as a guiding compass in decision-making and patient interactions, and compare these perspectives with those of other healthcare providers. Practical advice is shared on effectively communicating these principles to new clients, ensuring they understand the holistic approach of chiropractic care, while also touching on systemic healthcare issues that limit the true potential of medical practice.
Navigate the complexities of the profit-driven healthcare system and its impact on professional intentions with insights from Dr. Sinnott. Hear about systemic constraints and the need for reform to prioritize patient-centered care over symptom treatment. We discuss the significance of integrating health and science philosophies, particularly in chiropractic research, and share groundbreaking clinical insights. From the historical struggles of early chiropractors to the challenges faced by new graduates, this episode offers a comprehensive look at the journey and evolution of chiropractic care.
Takeaways
- Finding passion and meaning in your work can lead to a fulfilling and joyful career.
- The philosophy of chiropractic focuses on restoring health and addressing the underlying cause of health issues.
- The healthcare system is often profit-driven, which can lead to practices that may not be in the best interest of patients.
- The ability to adapt to stress is crucial for maintaining health and well-being.
- The nerve system plays a central role in maintaining health and should be free from interference. Chiropractic adjustments can lead to significant changes in the nervous system and overall health.
- Understanding the philosophy of chiropractic is essential for guiding scientific research.
- Chiropractors should focus on simplifying their explanations and addressing the cause of health issues rather than just treating symptoms.
- There is a need for further research and validation of chiropractic's effectiveness in healthcare.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Overview
03:25 Finding Passion and Leaving a Legacy
07:37 The Importance of the Cause of Health
12:50 Challenges in the Healthcare System
37:16 The Astounding Results of Chiropractic Adjustments
38:43 The Relationship Between Philosophy and Science
40:08 The Need for Research in Chiropractic
42:02 The Importance of the Nervous System in Living Things
43:26 The Difference Between Philosophy and Science
47:16 Learning from Experienced Chiropractors
52:48 The Power of Chiropractic Adjustments
57:27 Contributing to the Chiropractic Profession
01:01:00 Simplifying Explanations for Patients
01:06:19 Addressing Misdiagnoses and Overcomplication
I'm Scott Vatcher, the host of Questioning Authority, where I question authority figures about health, wealth and relationships. This episode is brought to you by TheAuthorityCocom, helping health professionals be seen as the go-to authority in their community. I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to the Questioning Authority podcast. I'm your host, Scott Vatcher, and I'm here to question leading authority figures in health, business and relationships to help you, the listener, achieve more authority, success and fulfillment in both your business and in your life. I've got a super special guest with me today, dr Rob Sinnott. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:It's great to be here, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so super excited to have you on here. I put a post out a few months ago about who's the author of a book. When you piped in and said I'm the author of two textbooks, it really went, wow. This is going to be an awesome conversation Because, as we were saying in the pre-show, if you really want to learn something, you teach, but if you really really want to learn something, write a book about it. So I'm super excited to dive into a lot of different aspects, but what I want you to do first of all is explain to the listener what it is that we're going to talk about for the next 30, 40, 50 minutes. So if somebody's piped in now and said, oh, am I going to give the next numerous minutes of my life to this podcast to try and learn something, what am I going to learn?
Speaker 2:Sure, no, I get that because time is valuable today and, quite honestly, you know, my way of looking at things is what drives me and makes me avoid a lot of those burnout things and things that a lot of people feel in life is doing something that I'm passionate about and that to me is meaningful and something that I feel is a contributing back of value to society. I remember reading a quote years ago that said man I don't remember who it is, I apologize for leaving the author off but it said man ought to be afraid to die until he's contributed something great to humanity. And I know that's like a big, lofty thing to a probably 18 year old kid when I read that, but I thought about that and I thought you know, that's really true what, what's left of us at the end? I mean, how many times have we walked through a cemetery? We see a gravestone from you know the 1800s or something, and we think I wonder what that person was like. We don't know anything about them and probably no one alive knows anything about them now. Um, you know, and I think that if we really want to make our mark on society, we just have to put an effort out and the compass of our philosophy, which is a philosophy of health. It fine-tunes in my direction for me and just seeing what happens in practice over these 35 years makes it not really work for me. I mean, I always tell people I retired 30 years ago. I mean I just to go to work and I just go in every day and enjoy myself and it is. It's a joy and I think, finding a way to be happy at what you do.
Speaker 2:Too often I see especially young people. I had a young man come in my office a few years ago and he said he wanted to go to medical school and I said, well, what specialty? And he said, well, anesthesiology. And I thought, well, that's interesting for a high school student to just pop that out. And I said, why anesthesiology? And he said they make the most money.
Speaker 2:I said, well, they pay the most malpractice here in the United States. It's about $300,000 a year for malpractice for an anesthesiologist. And he was a bit shocked by that and I said I am a riskier driver than I am a chiropractor because I believe my car insurance is right on par with about what my malpractice insurance is. So you know, when you make an identify something you want to do and make it a monetary thing. It never becomes more than that and it's kind of unfortunate. I think we need to see the bigger picture of something we really want to do. You know the old saying find something you're passionate about and figure out how to make a living doing it, and I think that would do well for most people.
Speaker 1:And I think that would do well for most people. And I think, from my understanding of you so far and we'll dive deeper into it in this conversation is that you have really found that, you've found that passion and how to make a living from it. And I think you really hit the nail on the head with this idea of legacy, because I just listened to a podcast yesterday by this guy, alex H alex hormosi. I don't know if you've heard of him. He's a sort of a business guru in today's world and, um, he's got a mission of creating a billion dollar company and it wasn't about the money for him, but the idea behind legacy was really important for him and it was interesting because his I believe it was great grandfather was like the uh, like king of egypt or something, not quite that, but like some super high prince or king of his country, perusia. He was perusian persia, uh, some super high prince or something. And he said this guy had 400 children.
Speaker 1:Um, and you know, yeah, I know, and in that process, obviously numerous wives and things like that, and that's the way their culture worked. But the idea behind was is he was that rich, that he could do that because he could support that and he was this high up dude. He's like it's only like three generations ago and I don't even know who he is.
Speaker 1:And he was my great great grandfather, and so the idea of legacy is they probably won't know who you are, but if you can lay a big enough legacy. You know writing textbooks and finding your passion and continuing to practice for so long. So thanks, Thank you from the profession.
Speaker 2:That's kind of you to say, but I had great mentors, one of my, my last really close friends from the previous generation that he passed away a year it would be actually two years ago this month and he retired the December before his wife pushed him to retire and he was still doing mornings and evening shifts in his office and he finally retired and he died four months later, and I know a lot of people would say well, you know, you lose the thing that drives you.
Speaker 2:I can't really fully credit that for his passing, though, because he practiced 72 and a half years as a chiropractor. I want to live to 72 and a half years and, uh, it just amazes me that I'm a I'm not quite halfway through that practice that this man put together. It's amazing to me, but he didn't want to quit because he saw the changes that happened under care and the difference he made in people's lives. And how do you walk away and say, well, I'm sorry, everyone else figured out on your own. It's a difficult thing, so it's something I truly enjoy doing and it's, you know, understandable if you, if you practice in a, you know a model that that just allows you to make a difference for other people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess that saying. What came to my mind was standing on the shoulders of giants. And you know, if we can be some kind of a quote unquote giant for the people that are coming up behind us, then I think that's a pretty good place to be. And so let's dive into what you do, like your passion in life, and really my understanding is it's all about philosophy. So in chiropractic we talk about the triad, the science, the art, the philosophy what does philosophy mean to you? And so we'll talk about it within the chiropractic context. But a lot of our listeners aren't chiropractors, so let's talk about it in the broader sense as well.
Speaker 2:But with that question it's always in the broader sense in that, in that meaning anyway, I mean to me my philosophy uh, I shouldn't say my philosophy our chiropractic philosophy, in that sense is really it's. It helps tune that compass to magnetic Norths. You know where true North is, you know where, um, you know how to make. It helps you make the decisions you make in practice. It helps you answer questions when the patients you see every day or the people you take care of, they ask you questions and everything gets filtered through our philosophy. When someone sits down like twice yesterday evening when someone new came in I sit in a lower chair than they sit in and we just have a conversation because I want to, I want to get rid of that high and mighty me nonsense right away and I sit in a lower elevation than they do and we just have a nice conversation for a little bit and, um, you get to know what um other people's needs are. But every question, everything I ask what other people's needs are, but every question, everything I ask is to help answer questions for what I need to do in my role as a healthcare provider, and what I mean by that is you know, I need to know certain things to practice the chiropractic work that we do, where a medical doctor would ask a question in a different way, and it's necessity, because to do what they need to do they have to know different things than what we need to do sometimes.
Speaker 2:So the philosophy we use in our practices is that filter, that everything goes through in both directions to us and if you know, as a chiropractor, you know we look at, we talk about the one cause and one cure. And the one cause of of all you know, failed health is the body's inability to relate to its internal and its external environment. It's, it's an awareness and response problem. So that's the awareness we have to have. Our bodies, our brains have to have an awareness of our internal and external environment. It's an awareness and response problem, so that's the awareness we have to have. Our bodies, our brains have to have an awareness of our internal and external environment, and the one cure is the body's ability to heal itself. You know it's not what I do as a chiropractor. It's not what a medical doctor does is, you know, giving a patient a medication? Or a surgeon does with a scalpel, or a psychologist does with suggestive therapy, it's all the same thing. We're trying to make a change so that the body can better relate to its internal and external environment and respond properly. We just look at it differently. You know the outcome, the way we drive towards that is different.
Speaker 2:But that idea that the body heals itself, that's not universal to us, that's universal to every healing art that exists. And the idea that the body has to have, there has to be an innate awareness of everything that's going on inside of us and around us so that we can respond to it properly. That's nothing I mean, that's. That's not a chiropractic thought. That's just what, what you know, what we look at as chiropractors. But there's no doctor of any kind on the planet that would disagree with any of that.
Speaker 2:So you know, it's just that filter, that filtering process we use. You know those, those the color of the lenses we look through and we look at a film compared to a. You and I, as a chiropractor, when we look at a film and we see a scoliosis, that may or may not be an issue. There may be a spine that is textbook pretty you know this beautiful straight spine and it could look like melted ice cream balls with giant spurs all over it. Which person is healthier? The person who's adapted to the stresses that they're under to form that scoliosis, or the person who's got this textbook straight spine? That that uh, you know from, from the front view anyway, that has all these spurs, that's not a healthy uh state per se. You know it's uh, it's a, it's someone under a great deal of stress.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would fully agree with that and I love your concept of this one cause, one cure and being I guess you'd call it like an irrefutable truth, Like there isn't any doctors out there that would disagree with that. It's just the way that we get there chiropractors.
Speaker 1:we have a much different perspective than what a surgeon would have. As an example you mentioned around, you had, I assume, a couple of new clients in yesterday and you had a chat with them. Is there anything like say for people listening now, if they're a chiropractor, I wonder, does he say anything in particular to these new clients to try and get some of this across, because philosophy is a more difficult one, potentially to explain to clients. What would you say to that?
Speaker 2:It is, and you know I use a lot of analogies One thing I try to drive home in that first discussion and there's a lot of things, but one of the things I try to drive home is the idea that cause matters. In the health care community at large, cause isn't even really that big of an issue goes off in the night and oh, it's driving me crazy. So I go in and see someone and they give me a. You know, they give me a prescribed a set of headphones so I wear them at night and it doesn't bother me as much, but it's still annoying. So this isn't working. Do you have anything else? And they prescribe, maybe a ceiling fan, or they prescribe one of those little shower cap things that go over when they're building a home. They put those on so they don't go off while they're building, and that helps, but they're not hermetically sealed around it. So it's still going off and you know you've got to do something else. So they might send send a surgeon to my home to go up in the ceiling and cut the nerves to the, the nerves to the, to the smoke detector. And now I can sleep. You know, I mean, that's not the problem, the, the noise there. Well, the noise is there because the smoke. Why is the smoke there? Well, the smoke is there because somewhere there's something generating smoke and that's the cause.
Speaker 2:And in our healthcare system largely it's not as focused on cause as it needs to be. There is a movement across the world right now that actually there's an educator and a medical doctor and an educator at the New South Wales Medical School there who's leading a movement to change health care, to change medical education from fighting disease to focusing on restoring health, which to us as chiropractors sounds like. Well, that's kind of our view and it's interesting to see. And they're doing great research work where they're finding fascinating information. You know, here in America the head mathematician for the US Army is involved in Georgetown. You know, university is their medical people are involved and they're trying to change education. But they're finding that there's a lot of resistance and they don't understand why. But that's because there's such a profit motive behind it.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the doctors I talked to. I met with a cardiologist and we had a discussion a few weeks ago and and he said you know, I'm really jealous of the way you practice and I met with a cardiologist and we had a discussion a few weeks ago and he said you know, I'm really jealous of the way you practice. And I said I don't understand. We're licensed in Illinois, the state I'm in. We're licensed under the same Medical Practice Act is what they call it here and here in our state we don't have a chiropractic law. We practice under the. We're the only place in the United States like this, but we don't have a law. We're under the Medical Practice Act, so we're licensed under the same thing.
Speaker 2:Do what I do, what's so hard. And he said I can't because if I practice the way I really want to practice, I'll lose my hospital privileges. And what good is a cardiologist that can't walk into a hospital? And they feel trapped and I get that and it's frustrating and the system does need to change. It's hugely profit-driven and an internist who's a terrific guy and we refer people back and forth that need some. People do need that type of care, obviously, and I would rather they go talk to him because he's a little more, a little more thoughtful in what he does than just the knee jerk. This is your thing. Take that type of thing. He talks through people in any way and there had just been a massive cholesterol study done probably 10, 12 years ago and it was the largest cholesterol study at the time that had ever been done.
Speaker 2:And they went through and they looked at people who were who had high cholesterol and they said we'll take a number of these people and a number of who took the medication and a number of people who didn't take the medication and let's compare their outcomes over time. And what they found is there was a 1% difference in the rate of heart disease and a heart disease but heart attacks. And they and the conclusion of the study was and it it was, it was a massive study and they said, given the, given the side effects associated with cholesterol medications, they may not be worth taking. They didn't say they're not worth taking because they probably want to get sued, but they did say they may not be worth taking and I thought, well, that's good, maybe they'll prescribe less.
Speaker 2:And this man had just come into our office and I was taking his, his films, and I said, just as a point of conversation, I said do you find yourself giving fewer cholesterol medications because of that study? And he said I had heard about that study. I said when did you find yourself giving fewer medications. And he said no, I said I don't understand. What do you mean? And he said let me tell you how this works. He said our practice isn't run by us, it's run by pencil pushers and they look at the numbers and they don't care about anything else, it's all about the numbers. And he said we have a pharmacy in our clinic and if I don't give you five prescriptions when you walk out that door, when you have high cholesterol and heart issues, you have to leave with five prescriptions. If you don't, they call me into a room and they chew me out. And quite honestly, I'm tired of it.
Speaker 2:And I felt bad for him because I thought what a terrible way to go through life. You have this passion to do something good for society and for the people in your community and you get out and you find that you're handcuffed from doing what you really want to do. And I'm I just feel bad for the, for these people. I mean, you know medical doctors traditionally. You know years ago they they were kind of abrasive to the chiropractic profession. I understand that, but today I don't see that as much as, as you know, years ago.
Speaker 2:And, um, I feel bad because I think a lot of people get into health care of all kinds because they want to make a difference, they want to help people and they want to make a decent living at the same time. You know, those things aren't mutually exclusive and they find that to even maintain their hospital privileges, they have to do things that they personally know aren't the best thing for that person and it's frustrating for them. So I'm just, I'm glad that is. In our profession, um, we really have a lot more autonomy than than they do in the uh, you know, a lot of other fields. So, uh, you know, we selected pretty well, I think, for ourselves and you know, but everybody has a different passion.
Speaker 1:So I agree, I was this close to becoming a medical doctor and it was a fork in the road and I chose left instead of right at the time. It was for a number of reasons, but as I look back I go whoo, I made the right choice there. I definitely do not regret the decision I've made.
Speaker 2:And I know the medical doctors we had as kids. You know, in the neighborhood there was one, two houses away from me and his, his office, was the front half of his house and it was a nice place and he was a nice older guy and most of the time he'd pat somebody on the head and go, you're fine, and just send you out the door and that was the end of it. And you know you don't get a lot of that anymore. You know he, he, he was his own, he did his own thing.
Speaker 2:And you just don't see that even dental offices today I mean, it's hard to go into a dental office without you know a lot of them, where I'm at, are owned by companies buy them from the dentists and now they have to do what that company tells them to do you have to sell whitening, you're not doing enough of uh, you're not putting enough posts and you're not doing enough of this or that, and they're always about the numbers and statistics. And now it's getting to the point where dentists aren't as happy as they used to be either, and it's, you know, I hope it doesn't get to us, but I I'm sure one way, one way, one day, one way it will start to affect our profession as well, if it hasn't already, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're. We're kind of the rebels in that case, aren't we? Cause there have been some bigger groups, um, of chiropractic offices, like I believe one in America is the joint, and there's I don't know my understanding is there's hundreds of those guys. But, with that said, I don't think that that ended up being owned by a big company but by a chiropractor who just wanted to expand chiropractic or whatever it is. Even though it may not be a model that I choose to use it's not a. You need to do this and I think it's a little bit different. But you're right, it could very likely be going that way.
Speaker 1:Back to what we were saying, I think we would both agree in that the medical model overall is a bit broken. It's a bit more of a sick care than a health care, and that you know. It's very interesting that you were saying that they're going down this health route. But the other side to it is I have a few medical doctors that I know personally and they said it can be quite difficult as well, and I'm curious to hear your perspective putting on your philosophy hat. A lot of patients come in and demand medications. I thought that's where you were going with what you'd said where people will come in and they got high cholesterol and they're like well, I want those meds because they don't know any different. They think that's what's going to fix them, and how could you not give me these meds? What do you think? Yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it's probably close to 30 years ago, there was a study done and they found that the majority of doctors would give you a prescription if you asked for it and that no more than came out in every commercial now on television ends with ask your doctor, because they know that you can pressure people. There used to be a drawing and you may have seen it, and it says on the bottom drug free America. And there was a picture of a baby and underneath it it said amoxicillin and a little bit older child and it was something else, and a teenager and it's appetite depressants and you know. And then it ended with someone in a wheelchair throwing handfuls of medic, of pills up in the air. Try to catch them in their mouth. It was just, and you know, when I was new in practice and uh, I had it it on the counter one week, just because I thought it was an interesting picture. I wanted to make people think and I don't do a lot of that kind of thing anymore because I'm not antagonistic to medicine we don't do the same thing.
Speaker 2:People talk about how, in our country, the, you know, the practice of medicine is the third leading cause of preventable death, what they call iatrogenic disease doctor caused. And you know I don't like to hear that and I speak a lot and a lot of times somewhere in the day someone will bring up one of those statistics and mention it. You hear the grumble go through, go through the room where everybody's like those people you know. You hear the grumble go through the room where everybody's like those people you know. And I'll usually get up later and say something like, yeah, 186,000 people a year, that's terrible. And you hear it go across the room and I'll say you know, do you know what would kill way more people? Give me a prescription pad and a scalpel. I'll kill everybody. I don't know what I'm doing. It's a dangerous field they're in. You know they've made a choice to get into something that's. You know it's, it's, it's the flying will end, is walking a tightrope. You know eventually something's going to happen. I mean, it just doesn't, uh, it doesn't bode well. But you know we just look at things so differently. Uh, you know, we look for that restoration of health because, as DD Palmer, the founder of our profession, said in his first postulate was disease is not an entity. What he meant by that is health is the thing. Disease isn't a thing. We get sick because our ability to adapt properly has diminished. Properly has diminished they do.
Speaker 2:Here in the United States there's several and it's starting to grow several big teaching hospitals where they use and then neonatal intensive care units with premature children. When they're born they're very susceptible to sepsis, which is, you know, a full body infection, and by the time they identify it, because these children are so weak, a lot of them don't survive. So what they found is they can use that EKG. They have hooked up to them and run it through heart rate variability software and when they watch that that heart rate variability, when it decreases, they're not adapting as well when. So when it decreases, they jump in and start treating that newborn or that premature child with probably antibiotics or whatever. They use their field, not mine and they have saved many more of those children. They're starting to see that when you step away from that health process and it starts to diminish, we're now susceptible. We've gone from being resilient to being susceptible.
Speaker 2:So you know, in my office I use skin temperature and you know which is for chiropractors, that's something that's pretty common. But you know any other professions listening, we use bilateral temperature along the spine and we're looking for that dermatome change because each level of the spine has certain areas of skin that it supplies. So what I'm looking for is a quick deflection that tells me, boy, right here, at this level, something isn't happening equally proper on both sides. There's a massive difference. And we look at that on our films and determine what the position of that vertebra might be and, you know, through other testing, determine whether we need to make an intervention and put a force into that spine to make a change. And it's just such a different concept looking at that loss of health.
Speaker 2:And so when I tell people, when they sit down and I'm going to check them, I say let's see how we're adapting today, and you know. Or I'll ask them how are you adapting today? We're adapting today, and you know, or I'll ask them how are you adapting today? And they don't know. They know they don't know that answer. But if you say, well, let's see how your spine's doing, in their mind they're thinking my spine's fine, I feel good. Or let's see how your nerve system's doing, Well, I feel good, and they think that's the same thing. It's not, it's how we adapt and how we function in life.
Speaker 2:Because if we're not adapting to those internal and external environmental understanding that we internally have, we innately have, if that response isn't being delivered to those tissue cells of the body properly because something is interfering with that process, then that's interfering with the process of health. So we remove an interference the same way a surgeon might remove an interference by changing the anatomy with a scalpel. It's the same principle in the broad picture of it. It's the same concept. You know we're not terrifically different in some of those things, but when DD Palmer asked the question in his first large textbook he mentioned you know why are two men working in the same shop, working at the same bench, eating in the same you know surroundings, breathing the same air? Why is one man sick and the other remain healthy? He wasn't asking why that man was sick. He was asking why is this man healthy? Because health is the thing. And that's what a lot of these medical doctors that are trying to change their system are seeing, are seeing that health is the thing.
Speaker 2:When we step away from health, we become susceptible. Properly, you're stress, vulnerable. We need to make a change. We need to check you to see if you're subluxated, to see if that spine needs to have something changed. If everything is fine, then you're stress resilient, you're ready to meet the day. I mean, that's a fantastic thing too, and it's a simple change in our verbiage that, quite honestly, is the most honest thing we can say to people, because it actually reflects reality. There's such simple ways to get our points across philosophically.
Speaker 2:I use the sunflower a lot. I talk about how, you know, I like the sunflower. I think they're a neat looking thing. So I have one on my windowsill in my office and I just mentioned this to someone last night. I said so here on this windowsill I'll put a sunflower because I like to. You know, I like to look at it while I'm in this room and I'll see six, seven people say whatever it is through the morning and I'll glance over at it. And one of those sneaky people went over and turned it to face the window. So I walk over and I turn that thing back because I want to look at it. So I walk over and I turn that thing back because I want to look at it and I finish my morning and I go to lunch and I come back. And I'm sure I locked that damn door. But while I was gone. Someone came in and moved my flower again and I ask people, when does that quit, when does it stop?
Speaker 2:And they always say the same thing when it dies because it's not adapting anymore. It adapts to the external environment because it needs that photosynthesis, it needs that sunlight to survive, and once that living thing is no longer adapting, that's the moment of death. And last weekend, two weekends ago, I did an hour Sunday morning at 7.30 on death, the philosophy of death, which isn't really a great Sunday morning at 7.30 topic. But I I thought since I have a sense of humor and I'm half Irish and death to us is a little funnier I thought I was a perfect person for the job and we really kind of talked about what a lot of the ways they look at death. And now they're starting to look at that in a sense how, when the moment we're no longer adapting, is that moment of death. I mean, they're getting there.
Speaker 2:The tests aren't really precise yet for determining death, but it's a fascinating. It's a poor subject for us right now because it's not exactly what we're all here in healthcare for, but we're avoiding that. But it's how we adapt and there's so many great ways to get these points across what we're all here in healthcare for. But we're avoiding that. But it's how we adapt and there's so many great ways to get these points across. And no matter what our profession is, I mean, shouldn't we all want people to adapt better, you know, and function through life better, so that their bodies can meet the stresses of our life? There have never been the levels of stress in my lifetime of almost 60 years now that we have today, and as a society, everything is stressful Today. I just mentioned to someone today. I said, you know, when I grew up on the very street where my office is now and I said my neighbor down the street could have had Congressman X sign in his yard and we could have had Congressman Y and we still liked each other. It was fine.
Speaker 2:But now people find every little thing they can to divide and hate the other person for and it's getting crazy. You know, as a, as a, as a world, it's getting a little nuts. And parents have to be it. You know their kid, you know, has a practice for, I don't know, frisbee, whatever club they belong to. And if you're a bad, you're not a, you're bad parent if you don't go and show up and videotape everything.
Speaker 2:There's just so much pressure on parents today than there used to be. I avoided that. I went straight to grandkids, which I highly recommend, because my wife had kids years ago and her kids were grown. We met and got married, but grandson's fantastic and he's a teenager and he still likes me, which you know. Sorry dads, I know that it isn't always the case out there, but uh, you know I'll be damned if I'm going to have a teenager living in my house that hates me and I still have to feed it. So you know I avoided the children thing, but uh, you know it's, it's, it's anyway. I'm getting off subject, but how we adapt to that stress is what we're all about.
Speaker 1:And that's that was. That's what health is. It's adapting to stressors of life. Yeah, that brings up a great point. I tell my clients all the time I ask the question is do you know the only time you don't have stress?
Speaker 1:And most of my clients think about it for a second and like when you sleep, but it's always answered like that, like a question, like they kind of know it's not true, but they don't know what else to say. I say, well, no, there's tons of stress when you sleep, still, but the only time you don't have stress is when you're dead. So it's not about getting rid of stress, it's about your body's ability to handle that stress, and in today's world I fully agree. Particularly I would not want to be a kid growing up in today's world. What are your thoughts on what we can do to help teach everybody, but particularly the kids that are growing up in today's world, about that concept of being able to adapt to stress better so that they can handle their life better?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean really all the research that's out there is really pointing to the supremacy of the nerve system. There was a doctor by the name of Toner at the London Hospital. They were seeking to figure out why are these people coming to us in their later decades of life with, you know they're on oxygen and they can't get off and they're having you know they have diabetes and they have, you know, liver problems and they have, you know, different organ failures and heart disease and all of these problems through all of their systems. What is going on? That we could have done something about 30, 40 years ago that didn't happen for these people that they're in our emergency rooms and our critical care units and what they found through their research is that we have that shift in our what we would refer to as chiropractors. Our mental impulse supply routes through that, you know, through that fight or flight. It just shifts so dramatically towards fight or flight in this stressful world that we're in and it's run through the nerve system that when there's an interference to that nerve system we see that same shift towards fight or flight. It's very common. I do a lot of heart rate variability and impedance, cardiography and different types of research work in my office and there's thousands of studies that support the same work, that show that when the nerve system isn't functioning the way it's supposed to and something's interfering with it, it's going to depress that ability to maintain things the way they should be. And I want to say a balance, because they can both go up. Parasympathetic, sympathetics can both go up, both go down. They're independent. But when you see that shift towards fight or flight, that's what they found drives this, what they call this motor of disease and they said it was interesting because they referenced it being in what was the word they used that it's basically an unapproachable and something you couldn't change. This, this cycle of of disrepair and breakdown until it kills you.
Speaker 2:And as chiropractors, you know we read this and go. What do you mean? You can't do anything about it. This is what we do, this is our. Our role is to is to remove and interference to the function of that nerve system so that that it can be a proper supply route, a proper conduit for the information that the that is trying to be delivered to the tissue cells, you know, through the nerve system. And that's what we do. And I have hundreds of pre and post. You know pre and post adjustment. You know work I do with patients in my office and it's it's night and day. The changes you see. I mean we see three 400% shifts in in uh nerve system change. I mean.
Speaker 2:And the outside, and when they did a study with me in uh at the, the Ohio state university, uh, which is really one of the leading institutions in the world on on this work of us, what they would call probably call psychoneuroimmunology.
Speaker 2:They study how our psychology and how our nervous system affects our psychology. But they used me as a subject and they did a pre and post. They did the work to test everything and I was hooked up to all of these things. They did a pre and post adjustment on me and when they saw about a 25 to 30% change in a matter of six minutes posted when they rechecked it, they were astounded. And the head of the department, who's been doing this work since the early seventies, he leaned over to me and he said that is a massive change and I thought 30, 40%, I've seen 300. I was kind of disappointed that it was 30, 40% change. And uh, you know it's exciting to be a chiropractor today because now we can see a future where this type of work is going to be done out there in the research world by our researchers. That's going to help bring us to that uh conclusion in our place in society is going to shift dramatically because people are going to be looking for this type of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you bring up a great point there, because some people who are listening, whether inside or outside the chiropractic profession, when they hear the word philosophy, they tend to think that philosophy and science are polar opposites. Guys and the science-based guys, and they were like sitting on opposite sides of the classroom and they meet at the bridge to fight it out after school, and all right, but what I'm hearing from you, you know, literally being the man who wrote the book, the two books, you know what? Not the two, but two books on philosophy that you are very well, uh, into. You know, diving down that rabbit hole of research.
Speaker 1:And I love that because I think philosophy runs research, because research is asking questions.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And what are the questions that's? Where the philosophy comes into it.
Speaker 2:Yes. Well, you know, in the scientific method the way it was designed to work is philosophy asks a question. Dd Palmer said why is this man remaining healthy? And so in our profession, a few years ago, during the COVID issue, the WFC, which is a World Federation of Chiropractic they're a self-appointed overseer in a lot of ways they sent a letter out that April of 20, telling people in the field you are not allowed to talk about immune response changes with chiropractics, we don't have the research to support that. And to me that was a letter of confession because they're saying for 30 or 40 years you've been funding us and we haven't done a damn thing. We haven't answered the very first question Dr Palmer asked over a hundred years ago. We have fifth lumbar studies. We don't have any fourth lumbar studies. We don't have any third lumbar studies, we have fifth lumbar studies. That's it. I mean, when you really, if we really are going to hold that kind of a line where we say, oh, unless we have this volume of research, we can't, we can't discuss it, that's absolutely absurd.
Speaker 2:And not only that, but I have COVID pre and post adjustment work that I've done in my office and I can show you massive changes that. That happened, um, and not only that, but there's a website called entropycalccom and it's a website I put up. Um, it was funded actually the center for chiropractic progress heard I was doing it and they paid for the work to be done. Heard I was doing it and they paid for the work to be done. And there's three algorithms there and you can run this EKG data through it and it will determine if pre and post intervention, if a person's functioning at a higher level, if they're more coordinated than they were before. And even though it's looking at cardiovagal response, this is through the vagus nerve to the heart it actually is talking about. You can run it through these algorithms and it extrapolates that information to talk about the entirety of the whole body. So every single system of the body is included in this calculation.
Speaker 2:So, yes, it does mean the neuroimmune function has improved, the neuro-respiratory function has improved, the neuro-digestive function has improved because we don't have a digestive system. A corpse has a digestive system. We have a neuro digestive system, living things. You cannot separate the nerve system because it's not a system anymore. The system is about the control and what it does. It doesn't do anything. You know a corpse, a brain and a nerve system, don't run anything. Because a corpse has a brain and a nerve system, it's not running anywhere.
Speaker 2:So when you think about that, it's the intelligence that's within us as living things. And I don't mean I'm not talking about some spiritual woo woo thing, I'm talking about that plant on my windowsill. At the moment that plant dies, it no longer turns to face that. Now if you want to talk about the plant having a soul, that's your discussion. I don't really know what to say about that one way or the other. But all I can say is, from a scientific perspective, we can see something's dramatically different and something that's not living, and that ability to adapt and regulate itself is gone. And that's what living things would strive to do.
Speaker 2:And that's where our philosophy is so important. As chiropractors, you know, in philosophy we thought about philosophy, science and art, and the reality is philosophy encompasses science and art, it's part of philosophy. So you can't really understand the philosophy of our profession unless you understand how it applies, how it applies to science and art, how that, how that function works together. It's one thing, it's not three separate things. So in the scientific method, philosophy asks the question why is this man.
Speaker 2:Healthy Science looks at that question and says well, we can look at it this way. And they design studies and they derive data from those studies and they present the data. Philosophy, then, is supposed to take the data and determine how it is to be used, what changes it might make, because philosophy weighs the morality of the answer. Where science doesn't do that, you know there's a. Is this the right thing to do? Is a philosophical question. It's not a scientific question, which is why we butt heads with a lot of the science so-called science in our field, because what we do in our profession is and in most professions, a researcher says what would I like to prove? And then they design a study that will prove what they want to prove, and then they publish it and there it is. So look what I did. And that's not the way the scientific method is supposed to work, and it's revolting to science to work that way and it's unfortunate.
Speaker 2:So that's where we are, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think a big part of it, like you'd said earlier, is it'll come back to the money. You know, follow the money. I mean, when you ask the right question, I think back to that cholesterol study. I don't know if it was a different study or not, but when the people who were testing the cholesterol meds to get them on the market asked the question do cholesterol meds lower blood cholesterol? The answer to that is absolutely they do. But maybe the better question is do these medications help patient outcomes? You know that's a completely different question and would would would have changed the whole cholesterol market.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, the questions you ask basically guide you in your science. I love it, and you mentioned that you are now looking outside of the profession with a lot of your research. You mentioned about maybe being a little fiery. I might this might be the question that that might, that might be a little fiery here. So I'm very curious to see why is it you've reached outside the profession to try and get some of these questions answered?
Speaker 2:Well, I've, I have tried. I have tried several times. I've taken funded studies to chiropractic schools on several occasions where there was an outside entity willing to pay for functional MRI studies to watch brain activity pre and post. Adjustment. No-transcript values of you know they're less than what is it? 0.05 is what we're looking for, a 5% chance that it's coincidence. These are 0.01 times 10 to the minus 11th. Nothing in our profession has ever been done at this level of certainty and it frustrates me that I could get nowhere. One school was quite excited and they had to run it through a person who had nothing to do with this, who was one of these people who doesn't want this type of conclusion made. He doesn't want to find out if it's true, and so it never went anywhere. In the other school, I flew across the country to sit down with their researchers and the door was locked. I thought, okay, I'm done, I can't do this anymore. And so I started talking with researchers outside of our field, outside of chiropractic, know nothing about chiropractic and, what's amazing to me, I will ask them questions about their research that they hadn't thought of in the perspective that we as chiropractors. We look at that differently, our mentality is a little different. So I look at something and say they're talking about an innate intelligence, they're talking about something in there doing this. When they talk about tissue cells being loosely yoked biooscillators, I asked that researcher, who's the head of a major university here research in the East Coast of the United States. I said to him, I said what drives the yoke? What do you mean? I said well, you called them loosely yoked biooscillators. So if there's a yoke, what do you mean? I said, well, you called them, you, loosely yoked bio oscillator. So if there's a yoke, what's driving the oxen? What's, what's on that yoke, what's behind it that's steering it. And he said you know, I never thought about that. And I said, well, you use the terminology. And he said there's a reason for it, but I wasn't sure what it was and I still don't know. And that opened the door and we have great conversations about these things.
Speaker 2:And when I talk to them about the vertebral subluxation and the four components of the subluxation, you know the, the, the. You know the malposition of the vertebra, the, the occlusion of a frame, and you know the, you know nerve interference and the idea that that there's an interference with the mental impulse supply, then the purpose of the mental impulse, philosophically in our profession, is to cause that tissue cell to adapt for this moment in time and so if we can measure how we're adapting, that's mental impulse supply. Now we don't directly measure blood pressure. When they do blood pressure studies. Baccarus, who was here in Chicago, was the number one blood pressure researcher in the world and he did a study with chiropractic and they put cuffs on people to measure it. No one said, whoa, you're measuring arm distension, you're not measuring blood pressure. No one did that. You're not measuring blood pressure, measuring arm distension. But we can extrapolate that from that information. It's widely accepted and fine. There's no difference between doing that and measuring the effects of the mental impulse and how we adapt.
Speaker 2:So when I sit down and explain the four components to these researchers, not one has ever said to me I don't know. Every one of them said oh, yeah, we can quantify that. Every one of them. And in our profession we have to change the definition of the subluxation. I just, I just shake my head and think won't you please understand it first? And that's where we're throwing the, the baby out with the bath water in our profession, trying to do something we don't understand. And these researchers and it shocks me, but I've heard it so many times now One of the major cancer researchers in Europe. The first time we talked, by the time we got off the phone, she said to me I want to do research with you and I thought I'm just a guy in Chicago that practices. I'm not a researcher, I don't want to be a researcher, but I want this work done Before I go. I would love to see the things I see in practice, given the validation from science that it deserves Not that it matters to me in that sense, but science deserves to see these conclusions that I see every day, for them more than for me.
Speaker 2:My patients don't need to see it. I've seen, I've had kids from two years old to 14 years old walk after their first adjustment. How do I retire? How do you do this? I just don't get it when I see people say, well, I retired at 40, I just think think of all the people that didn't get help by you. I don't understand how you do that and it's okay that they do that. I'm not angry with people, but I can't do it. I look at our society and think, boy, they need what we do. Someone is not going to get the care they need. There's some child that's sitting at home watching other kids play outside because they're sick all the time and they have all these ear problems they have.
Speaker 2:Whatever it is, why does my kid have this left ear infection over and over and over again? I had one in yesterday and I said to the parent is it so it's both ears? Well, no, it's the left ear. And I said okay, is it always the left ear? Well, yeah, I said so. Is it a left-eared kidney bacteria? Now you know, is it a left-handed kidney bacteria that can only get into the left ear? Do you believe that makes sense? Well, no, I said why is the right ear healthy? That's a better question. What's the right ear doing? The left ear is not. Do you think that there might be something interfering with the neuroimmune function in that ear? I said, scientifically, what they call this in this kind of case is an immune paralysis.
Speaker 2:I said this is a problem. We need to address what's behind it, because cause matters. You know, oh, my ear's red here. Take this, your ear won't be red. I mean, that's not solving the problem. If it is, then why do people continue to take blood pressure medication. I take blood pressure medication, okay, so are you done with it? Well, no, well, why not? Is it taking care of the problem? Yeah, well, then why do you have to keep taking it? Do you know what I mean? What's been done for you medically to this point when you've come in to see me in my office? That's done you the most permanent good for this problem? And the answer is nothing. And I'm not picking on medicine. They have a role. But I'm saying we look at it differently. We're looking for that cause. We're looking for dominoes back in that chain, trying to resolve the issue, trying to find something that makes sense to remove interference so that their body can do what it was meant to do, the way it's supposed to work.
Speaker 2:I had a man, probably about 10 years ago, that came into me and he was walking down the hallway in front of me and I always like to watch people walk and I'll say he was walking to the room we were going to ahead of me and he was limping pretty terrifically with his right leg and we got in the room. We talked, never mentioned his right leg, never mentioned anything to do with his right leg, and I thought I got to ask. I said I noticed you have quite a limp. What's going on with that? And he said, oh, that. He said I've had that. He was in his eighties. He said I've had that since I was seven. I said that's over 70 years. Why, what happened? And he said well, when I was a kid I had polio and both my legs were paralyzed. That one just never came back.
Speaker 2:I've limped my whole life and do you know, within two weeks, that man never limped again 70 years? This man limped for no reason. Now I didn't go out. My thought wasn't oh, I have to figure out why he's limping. My thought was well, the man's got nerve interference because you know he's limping. My thought was well, the man's got nerve interference because you know he's he, he. You know the tests I do show he does. That's my goal. I want to. I want, when I check him, to show that he's clear and that he no longer has the problems he has. So, as far as function, you know, function of the nerve system, that's what I'm interested in function through the nerve system. So if we remove that interference, hey, what happens? Happens If you have a rubber band wrapped six times around your finger and we leave it there for a while, it starts to hurt.
Speaker 2:It gets a little swollen. So, you know, let's massage it. So you work that finger a minute. All of a sudden it feels a little better, better, yeah, great, Leave it on there A minute or two. Later it's hurting again. Well, let's exercise it. So we do this for a minute or two. It feels a little better. Okay, great, we solved the problem. Well, we can give you something so you won't feel the pain anymore.
Speaker 2:What do you think of that? Well, no, I don't want that. Well, how about? My job is to remove the rubber band. But what if I take the rubber band off and it doesn't solve the problem? You want me to put it back on? Well, no, it out.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's, it's not, it's not hard to explain to people. Kids get it. I have rubber bands. I'll put them right on their finger and we have a discussion and I ignore their finger for a minute until they're kind of showing it to me, like going like this. So you know, I want them to think it through and realize how their bodies work. It's, it's a simple, simple thing in our profession. And you know, one of the things I'm doing this year actually for the first time is with my best friend and I. We graduated together. We decided that we want to help make a difference in that direction. So we're doing eight hours in Europe in August, but just to kind of go over this stuff and talk about how we explain these things to people and what the core concepts of our philosophy are, how to get the points across, because it's important to do.
Speaker 2:We have a responsibility as chiropractors, I think, to make sure that it's better for the future chiropractors than it was for us and I think each generation has that. My great uncle graduated from Palmer School of Chiropractic 100 years ago. So my family's been in chiropractic for 100 years. His grandson became a chiropractor when he was still in practice and his wife and I became a chiropractor, you know, shortly after he passed and then my cousin's son has become. There's five of us now that are chiropractors in my family or four still left, and you know to me when you graduate. I mean he graduated in 1924. And in Illinois, where I practice, if you graduated in 1952, it was still illegal In Louisiana. It was still illegal until 1974. They were still arresting people in 1973 in Louisiana and it sounds crazy to me that you'd be arrested for being a chiropractor and we owe history to do our responsibility.
Speaker 2:The Crusader class of June 1923 had over 800 students in it, which was typical back then. And that June class of 1923, dr Barge, who wasa famous chiropractor in our profession, his father was in that class, clarence Gonstead was in that class, there were a lot of John Q Thaxton was in that, a lot of famous people in that class, and within six months half that class had been arrested. Over 400 of those people had been arrested within six months because there was such a sense of urgency in medicine. They were panicked by the presence of chiropractors in their community because they didn't understand us. And it's unfortunate and it's water under the bridge and I don't hold any ill will towards the practice of medicine over it or anything. But those people didn't graduate and accidentally get arrested. If you read what they wrote, which I've been doing lately, you see that what they wanted was to graduate and go get arrested so they could get chiropractic legalized.
Speaker 2:And what they did is so much more than what you or I could ever do with our lifetime in chiropractic for the future of the profession that I think it's my responsibility and I view it as a responsibility. So to me, you know, I don't get burnout because to me it's, it's the passion of, of making things better, uh, for not just um, the future of my profession, for the people in my community. And you know, I, I feel it's my responsibility. It's not my, you know, it's not my. Um, you know, nest egg, you know I don't look at it as like, oh, this is what I'm doing so I can fortify my finances. I do this so that I can make a difference for the community Because, as I said in the beginning, man ought to be afraid to die until he's contributed something great to humanity.
Speaker 2:And what we have no one else can do, no one else can do. There's no healthcare profession out there that does what we do. And the reason these researchers are so interested in what we, what I do because they think it's me they don't realize it's a whole profession of us, that that they would love to do some of their work and show that, wow, this can be better, and they're blown away by that. So I pontificate, sorry.
Speaker 1:I pontificate, sorry, no, no, I think you know what I'm getting out of this conversation.
Speaker 1:For me, to sort of summarize it from my perspective, is, like I said earlier, when I was in school, there was the two schools, the philosophy and the science, and what you're doing is really melding the two together, which I believe is the most important thing to do right now to drive our profession forward, because I think there's still that and there's a drive within our chiropractic schools, not only here in Australia but in America, to remove the subluxation, remove the quote, unquote philosophy.
Speaker 1:But when you look at it, through the conversation we just had, it just makes so much sense to use the philosophy of what we do and all of the stuff that we don't understand yet, to drive the science so that we can, like you said not for you, not for me, we believe in it, already believe whatever you want to call it. But for the young ones, for the people who are graduating now, um, who might need to see a little bit more because they haven't seen it in practice yet, they, they are not being given the philosophy that we did graduating decades ago. So I'd like to sort of end it with a maybe a question, maybe a question that would be interesting to you. So if you had a couple of pieces of advice for you 35 years ago when you first graduated, or, if you want to take it into today's world, some advice for either the students or the new graduates, what would you say?
Speaker 2:Well, probably one thing is that I was very nervous. I remember when I graduated from Palmer in December of 89, the coldest day of the entire winter was about 5,000 degrees below zero. It was so cold. And I remember they handed me to my diploma, took my picture and I walked to the corner of the stage and I can remember vividly that I reached for the first stair with my right foot and before it hit, I thought I don't feel smarter because I thought like this lightning bolt was going to hit me and make me a chiropractor. You know, I was like, ah, now I got it and I'll never forget that feeling like, oh my God, I don't know if I'm really ready. Do I know what? Everything I need to understand? Can I put the pieces together? Can I explain this to people? And I was very nervous about it.
Speaker 2:So I worked with someone else for two years and we had different philosophies, let's just say, and he used to tell me all the time he said you used to say you're too smart to be a chiropractor. You should go to school and be an MD. I'm thinking what in the hell are you talking about? We should be proud to be what we do. And it was just. It was just a difficult for me to be in those two years of practice with this man. And one day I said to myself I can drown with this guy wrapped around my neck or I can swim out on my own and drown on my own. I'd rather have that than have help. I don't need help to drown. And boy, it was so much easier than I thought it would be to start my own practice and I wish I had done that sooner for me.
Speaker 2:But I think I would have worked harder earlier to come up with simpler analogies and simpler ways of explaining what I do for people, because I overcomplicated things as a new graduate, because I want to impress people with what I learned. You know, I know stuff and I want to show you stuff, and they don't care, they care very little about any of that stuff. And the other thing that I actually did do that, I think, was probably the smartest thing I did I found the oldest, most brilliant chiropractors I could find. I would hunt them down, I would save everything I could until I could afford a plane ticket and I would go and I would spend a few days in their office watching them do what they do, and I worked with people that graduated all the way back to the 1920s and watched them and I learned that, man, they don't explain things very well. No, they explain things perfectly. They made it so simple that people could absorb it and understand it.
Speaker 2:And don't overcomplicate what we do. Don't overcomplicate, you know the explanations you give people. Keep it simple, you know. Focus on the cause. Get to the idea that causes matter, because nothing gets to the cause in healthcare. And that's the frustration people have and what they're looking for. They're looking for a different way to look at it, and the cause is the body's inability to relate to its internal and external environment and the neurosystems of the body, which is everything. That is how that relationship happens. It happens through the nerve system and that's what we do as chiropractors.
Speaker 2:We make sure there's nothing interfering with that, and I think that if I could have understood that sooner, it would have made my first few years less stressful, because there's those stressful days and we all have them and you know anyone, any chiropractor I've been doing this 35 years and for anyone to sit in front of a crowd and say I'm thrilled to death every day and I never have a moment where I'm like you know, and we all have those moments, I don't care who it is. There's no chiropractor on earth that doesn't once in a while just have an hour. Or you know a day where you see the last patient of the day on the list is like, oh my God, this guy's an energy sucker. He just wants to talk about, you know, all the medical things he's had done. Every time he comes in and I'm thinking, why do we need to keep going over this stuff? And it's meaningless now because he doesn't have any of these problems. But man, he's going to suck the energy out of me.
Speaker 2:And I spend more stressful moments when I see one of those names at the end of the day because all I can think of is I'm going to go home with this in my head after this great day today. And you know whose fault that is. It's mine, because I made it that way, you know, and I don't do that every time, but every once in a while, you know, you kind of go ah, really, can't we find somebody else to put at the end end of the day because I don't want to go home with this. But you know, it's just being honest. That's all. I'm trying to be honest with the way practice really is and uh. But you know, the biggest thing I see is the joy, uh, that people have when they find that. I had a gentleman last night for his first visit and he said well, I know, my, my low back issues are all because my spine I have. What do they call that?
Speaker 1:What do?
Speaker 2:they call that. It's all the rage today the narrowing of the spinal stenosis.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, yep.
Speaker 2:I have spinal stenosis and I'm thinking you and everybody else that comes in my door has spinal stenosis. Well, and I told him. I said I went over his after we took his films. I went over him with him and I said here, if you, if this problem is really all about spinal stenosis, I honestly can't help you. But what I see here is this and I explained to him the positioning of the vertebra, what I'm seeing on this spinograph, this film, and I talked to him about what I found and I put I put like a, it's like a large BB, they're stainless steel balls and I taped them on the spine where I find those temperature breaks, and so they're on the film and so I can go over those with the film and he knows where they were because he knows where I put them, and so I go over those with him and explain what I'm, what I'm seeing and why we found those in the area and they happen to be right where the problem seems to be on that film. It makes a lot of sense. So everything's fitting together and I said so I'm going to adjust this vertebra and I'm going to provide an adjustment and I get him on his side and I go over to those films and I center myself and I focus, I focus on that, that. That spot I need to locate, not here, here and I know that direction. I need to put that force and to rotate that vertebra, bring it forward exactly the way. I really see that thing in three dimensions. And I go back to him again and I make that contact and I set that vertebra, I put that force into the fine, innate intelligence. That's the vertebra. You want to be technical, of course, that's true.
Speaker 2:But he gets up off the table and I said, ok, we're done for today. And I didn't ask him how he feels, I didn't ask anything. I walked over and I shut the view boxes off and I know he's pacing back and forth behind me trying it on, seeing how these shoes fit, so to speak. And he said to me I don't feel it anymore. And I said I'll be damned it wasn't stenosis then, I guess, because if the room around your spinal cord is shrunken, like they tell you, then I can't change that. That's right and that's the thing I want them to understand. They're not getting to the cause, they don't care about cause, and I think spinal stenosis is a catch-all that we can just throw that at something and it's in my outbox off my desk.
Speaker 2:Now, when I graduated, everyone came in I have bursitis and I'd go get Gray's Anatomy out and I'd show them a picture of the bursa where they're at and I'd show them. You don't have any bursa anywhere near where you have your problem. How can you have bursitis? I don't understand that well why they say that. I don't know. That's Well why they say that. I don't know. That's a question for them. But you know, when you, when we have our philosophy helps us answer those questions for people and not having that anchor of philosophy, you really search for things like like spinal stenosis and you know stenosis, and you know, and that that's you know, sometimes when we find ourselves going too far down the rabbit hole of quote-unquote science.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know the medical profession. I find sometimes their description is if I can find any problem, I'll say that that is causing that. You know, I I use the study that shows around disc herniation and how 80% of people over the age of 40 have a disc herniation and 80% of those people don't even know they have a disc herniation because it's not hurting. But you find one and automatically all of your aches and pains are because of a disc herniation. That probably is not the case.
Speaker 2:Right, right, that's true, well, and and you know, from a, from an the perspective of what science does, there's never been nothing scientifically has ever been proven. Science doesn't prove, it doesn't find fact. It finds probability, and that's fine, but it doesn't find fact. So when people say, well, you can't prove the philosophy, well, that's actually not true, because proof and fact come through formal logic, which deduction is a form of formal logic and our philosophy is through deduction. So, yes, we can prove it, yes, it's fact. You may not like it as science, but you don't even have probability. Give me some probability. That's what you do, and they're not doing it. So you know it's the difficulty we're in. We're in today is just trying to get the two sides to to stop throwing tomatoes at each other long enough to sit down and have an honest conversation about what we each know and what we don't know.
Speaker 1:So and I think that's a a great way to finish things off let's try and use less tomatoes, Absolutely so. I know you've got a website, chiropracticbookscom, where we can get your books and others around the philosophy. So I do hope that our conversation today has sparked some more interest in our profession and outside our profession about learning more about philosophy, and that is going to be a great place to start. Do you have a link or something I can't remember if you mentioned it for your discussion that you're going to have around simplifying these philosophical concepts? Did you say it was over in Europe somewhere? That?
Speaker 2:you're going to do. I can provide that it's going to be in Dublin August 31st Fantastic. So I'll put that link. We've been talking about my best friend and I. We've been doing this for 35 years and we practice very similarly and he is also um, he is a. We both received our our philosophy diplomates and we both have become fellows of chiropractic philosophy as well and we talk constantly and we're very frustrated that things get overcomplicated in our profession and we just want to make it easier for people and I'm not out to get into practice management. I don't want to do any of that. That's not my thing. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not what I want to do. I just want to give people the information I can, to do the best that I can, to give what people gave to me and move it forward. So, but I'll provide you a link. I didn't think of it before, sorry.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's okay. I'll put it in the show notes for anyone who's looking for it. Highly recommend it because I've learned so much from this conversation. So thank you so much. I can just imagine people earlier on in their practice their minds are going rampant right now with ideas and thoughts of things to make it simple for people, because I think that's really going to be the key. Well, two keys that I take away is the meshing together of philosophy and science and how they're so intertwined together, but then also simplifying our message to people, because the message is there. It just just like we talk about with the spine and the nerve block and the message not getting from brain to body or body to brain. If we can't get the message to the people, then they're not going to get it either and therefore our profession is not going to grow the way that it should. So, yeah, thank you so much for being on the show. Super appreciate it. Love the conversation. I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 2:It was a privilege, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. We'll talk to you again soon on Questioning Authority. Thanks for listening to this episode of Questioning Authority. I hope you enjoyed the show. Stay tuned for the next one coming out soon. This episode has been brought to you by the Authority Co. Helping service providers increase authority and revenue. Check out theauthoritycocom for more info.