https://vimeo.com/331991251
Transcript:
Hey guys. It is Dr. John with Friends & Family Health Centers in Birmingham, Alabama. Today, I'm going to be talking about the mechanism of healing and how the body actually gets better. The first problem that we have to address to get people better is usually symptoms. We live in America, so that is our culture is that we're symptom-based. That what I'm trying to change. What that goes into, it goes into headaches, migraines, low back pain, arm pain. You know what I'm talking about, everyone experiences it. Then you have organ issues. So how we look at the organ systems is we do blood work in our office. We look at the body biomechanically and we look at it metabolically and so we put those together and we begin to help people through chiropractic, we do muscle work, we do blood analysis, we have some other therapies that are really fantastic in the office.
I typically want to see a pretty good result with our patients pretty fast so I want to see them get better quicker. I want to see us be better at our craft and help people faster but ultimately get them through the symptomatology or that symptomatic state and then get them beyond that so they can get back to their life that they want to live. If they decide to continue care beyond that, awesome, which that's what we encourage. If they decide to come back after symptoms come back, that's great too. I like for people to continue to make improvement in their life because the symptoms are always gonna come back. The symptoms truly don't mean anything other than warning signals telling you there's a problem. If they're ignored long enough, they turn into bigger, badder problems so take care of them right now and then moving forward.
If someone has a problem, what I want to do is I want to number one, assess it. I want to say, "Okay, what do I need to do when a patient comes in?" I need to assess what the problem is, where did it come from, how long it's been there, and what we need to do to move forward. If it is a shorter term problem, if it is more of an acute issue, it's not been around that long, we typically can make a full recovery pretty quickly. If it is a chronic issue, you can still help the patient in the sense of getting that symptomatology to decrease, but depending on the condition of their spine and some other aspects of their health, that might be a managed issue. If you have an older adult that has more problems, typically it's not just one issue at that point. You get a single issue and as you trek through life, you have one that turns into two that turns into three that turns into four issues and they all meld into the mixture of that.
That's one of the reasons why I always people continually take care of yourself. Continually what we call is our 5 Foundations. You can check out those videos. I follow those myself. If you follow those throughout your life, you will have less problems, and so when someone goes to figure out what's going on with you, it will be a lot more simple. If you just manage things with outside-in mechanisms like medicine, surgery, all those other guys that are man-made. I'm not talking bad about medicine, I'm just saying that you should try and use it as little as possible. Your goal in taking care of yourself should be that you never get to medical care. Thank God we have it because it's absolutely necessary. If I get into a car accident, I absolutely want to have medicine. My whole point in that is saying if you can go throughout your life without outside-in interference, then you're gonna have a better fruitful life, especially if you have foundations, values that you follow that are health-centered that can get you from birth to death in the best shape as possible.
Okay, so what I'm going to talk about is the beginning. Let's say someone comes in with a problem, we're gonna just say it's a very simple issue with low back pain. Typically when someone comes in, we're gonna figure out what's going on with them and then we're going to go ahead and start treatment of some kind. I personally love manipulation. The reason I love manipulation of the spine and of the body is because the research shows that you truly… You activate the brain, you activate the cerebellum, you activate… You truly activate the brain and getting the body better when you get it to move. Usually whenever there's an area in your body that's not moving, that's where symptomatology comes from, so low back pain, numbness, tingling, burning. All those things, all those symptoms that people experience, they're warning signs saying there's a problem, you have to pay attention to it. Those warning signs need to slowly begin to downgrade with each session or each adjustment that you have, and so what I mean by that is you get the low back to move and you have a window that you get better. It's 12 to 36 hours. Honestly, it's around 24 hours.
I would say that's what the average is that we see in our clinic is that the symptoms will reduce. Those symptoms don't go away because there's no way that one adjustment is going to completely get rid of whatever problem that anyone comes in with because it is one adjustment. Even though it's really powerful, it's still one adjustment. You'll get about 24 hours and you feel better. There has to be some time that takes place. If someone comes in on like a Monday for instance, we do an assessment, we do a treatment. We want to see them roughly… Not too far away, but not too close either. About two days is a good time frame so a time frame of Wednesday if they came in on a Monday, is we are able to then interrupt that dysfunction of area of mobility and get it to move again through that manipulation. Once again, getting that area to move better, that sensation is able to understand in the body what's going on in that area, healing mechanism takes place. The brain, you literally with every adjustment, you're literally turning on your cerebellum and when you turn on your cerebellum you ramp up the other areas in a good way of the brain and that mechanism takes place.
That's the other reason why when someone does get an adjustment or they get a treatment session here is that we want to encourage them to move. We want to encourage them to hydrate. We want to encourage them to make sure they don't put anything inflammatory into their body so we can actually give them what they need and the reason why they came to us, we want that to happen as fast as possible.
The second session, second adjustment, I can tell what worked, what didn't. We pick up on that second visit where we left off on the first and we typically will see that that patient gets better from anywhere from 24 to 36 hours. It's a little bit different. This pattern continues to grow. Once again, it's also dependent on is the patient moving. Are you guys making sure that you're eating clean foods? Are you taking supplements that actually decrease inflammation? As they continue down that, through about 12 visits, about 12 visits you should see that incrementally, this patient is getting better, you're getting better. The one or two times this will happen between visit 12 and 18 is that you'll see that they will regress.
Typically when people regress, they're not really regressing. It could be that they're fighting something. They could have a cold, they could be dehydrated, they could be under a high amount of stress. They may have went and worked out because they felt good enough to actually do that and they did more than they were supposed to and they said, "Okay, well, the body just let them know that's a problem. You need to slow down." The whole thing is that I want you guys to know and understand is that it's not always a linear process. It's truly like you can take three steps forward, two steps back, three steps forward, four steps back. It does, and you should see a forward progress but just know that it takes time. Changes in the body take time and it's usually slow. It's usually not very fast. 1% change I would take any day of the year over 50% change because the slower that you actually incrementally build, you're building stability. The faster you build change, you're actually creating instability and it's not very strong. It's not a very strong structure. What you want to do is build health slowly. If you build health slowly, you're going to be rewarded a lot more efficiently later on down the road.
One thing that I want you guys to understand is that just getting rid of your symptoms is not really necessarily health. They're truly the last thing to show up, so if you have them go away, then you have to make sure that you have a plan after to make sure that they don't come back. That is the exact reason why we have talked about the 5 Foundations of Health. If you begin to learn about those and you begin to follow those, then we can actually have a medium for you to move forward beyond that and begin to have a true increase in energy, increase in sleep or efficiency of sleep, and begin to implement good behaviors in your life so you actually not only are asymptomatic or don't have headaches or don't have low back pain or don't have indigestion problems or digestive issues, you truly are living a life of optimal function. That should be the goal. The goal should be that you make it through your life with less health issues than health issues. The goal should be that you're not a statistic of the American healthcare system. The goal should be that you live your life to the fullest every day.
I was thinking about this the other day is that health is the only thing that you have control of. No one's ever going to be able to give you your health. You have to pay attention to it. If you have symptoms showing up, you have to make sure that you pay attention to them. If you ignore them for whatever reason, you use natural methods or unnatural methods, if you ignore them that way, they're only going to get worse. Symptoms are actually pretty intelligent. Actually, they're fantastically intelligent and you have to say, "Okay, I have to pay attention to those. I have to get them to go away." Once you get them to go away, you then move forward even beyond that in taking care of yourself so you can live the fullest life of health and function and whatever that is to you, you live that life to the fullest. Hopefully, you've learned something from this today. Thank you so much.
https://www.homewoodfriendsandfamily.com/blog/2019/04/18/what-is-health/
