A recent discussion delved into the benefits of chiropractic care, particularly addressing why it’s not often promoted for its broader health advantages. Contrary to misconceptions, chiropractic adjustments don’t claim to cure major illnesses but can offer significant relief for issues like ear infections and musculoskeletal pain. By relieving nerve, lymphatic, and blood vessel compression, chiropractic care supports the body’s natural healing processes, making it especially beneficial for athletes or anyone engaged in regular physical activity.

Chiropractic adjustments help alleviate tension, improve circulation, and restore proper nerve communication between the brain and body. For example, adjustments to areas like the pelvis, neck, and joints can ease chronic pain, enhance mobility, and aid in injury prevention. Regular adjustments promote overall health by reducing inflammation and optimizing body function, ultimately empowering the body’s own capacity to heal.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:03 - Why Talk About Chiropractic?

01:17 - Chiropractic for Ear Infections

04:41 - Chiropractic’s Core Principle

06:54 - Practical Example: Adjustments for Pain Relief

09:35 - Chiropractic for Athletes

13:32 - Find a Technique That Works for You

16:41 - Long-term Health Benefits

17:53 - Encouragement to Try Chiropractic

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:03] So I got a question actually two days ago that I thought was. Pretty solid question. It was, Why don't I talk about chiropractic more? I don't know. So I will start doing that. Some of the questions I've gotten over the course of the 17, 18 years I've been doing this about chiropractic are. You know, people say that I don't know who these people are. I've heard this from medical doctors. I've heard this from in seminars. I've heard this from, you know, all sorts of people other than chiropractors. I've never heard of. Chiropractors say that adjustments will cure cancer. I've never heard of any chiro ever. Somebody or, you know, the other major illnesses. I. So I can't speak to somebody saying that. I think that's. Silly, but it can help with lots and lots and lots of things. So, you know, for instance, my my favorite one is the number one thing that chiropractic helps with, like it is miraculous form is ear. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:17] Quote unquote ear infections. We've got people who've come in with like nasty ear infections, like just like the whole side of their head is red and they can't hear and they can't even act like they're going to touch their ear. It hurts so bad. And the other doctors are like, if you don't start taking antibiotics the second you're going to die or go deaf or whatever, and you adjust the neck and then you adjust the ear and when it's bad, it does not feel good, I'll just throw that out. But then it drains because ear infections are actually ear inflammations. And so if you can get if you can open the pathway and let the actual stuff drain out, it gets better. And there's been got I can't think of a time where the justice some of his ear and it didn't get better like soon like I had a patient who they were leaving like like packed car packed up leaving that day to go to California. And son six year old son comes in, you know, whole savers heads red, you know, you can't hear the whole deal. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:17] And they're like, what are we going to do? And it was funny because I was like, I can help that, but it's going to hurt. And the 16 year old, he's a tough kid. Like, I love this tough kid. He is like, all right. And so I just this is Alison's ox. But he was like, I mean, I didn't feel good, but I mean, it didn't hurt. And I was like, that wasn't what I was talking about. He was like, so we're we're in a pretty decent sized room. His parents about ten feet away. And I adjusted his ear and it was loud. Like they could hear there was what you would have moved. And that is your search shaking because it hurts. Like it's like when it's bad, bad. Like you didn't want to touch the ear and obviously it hurts. And he just starts kind of shaken and drops ones here and he's like, okay, I'm okay now. I was like, Cool. And so they leave. So I was wasn't a nurse for like 20 years. And so she ends up calling me like 45 minutes later and she's like, I have never in my life seen anything that works like that. She was like, He can hear again. He can chew, he can talk, he can touch his ear. She's like, It's 90% better. The redness is all gone. She's like, I don't understand. And I was like, look, it's not an infection. It's doesn't have infectious stuff in it. It's just backed up the drainage path. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:36] The lymphatic drainage path gets blocked from, you know, muscle tension. You know, there's all sorts of different reasons, but it gets blocked with it backs up and your lymphatics are carrying all the waste in your body. So of course it can be inflammatory. Of course it's me irritating. And so it is. And so when you open up the pathway and little lots of drain again and all the sinuses start to drain and everything starts draining, it gets better. And so, you know, that's one of those things I have a lot of patients who come in and every time I adjustment I do my ears do my ears and so do their ears so they they can feel their whole sinuses drain when you open up that pathway. So it's a fantastic path. And there's so many things, you know, I've got I've got a guy who came in yesterday and he was in he goes, I haven't been in long enough and now my back hurts. And I was like, All right, news. And I could tell why my back hurt because my gait was altered. So because he hadn't been adjusted while his ankle was a little bit out, his knee was a little bit out. It changed the way he was walking because, you know, he was not really limping, but he wasn't walking the way that he normally walks. And because of that, it messed up his back. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:41] So he had just his back all the way down to his ankles and got everything moving and everything was fine. So the big premise in chiropractic, the thing that makes chiropractic actually functionally work, is the nerve functionality. So it's it's the idea that compression of the nerve or compression of lymphatics or blood vessels from muscle spasms are what's causing a lot of the problems in the body. And if you can relax the musculature, if you can relax the pressure on the nerve pressure on the lymphatics, pressure on the blood vessels, things get better. And that is, you know, 100% proven all the way across the board. There's no arguing about it. Regardless, you know, the medical research is ten millimeters of mercury, which is the weight of a dime. Compression on the nerve will start to interfere with nerve function, which means any organ that should think they were nervous, like the wire that carries information from point A to point B, if you start messing with the nerve here, anything from here forward, from the pressure towards the in organ muscle, whatever isn't going to be communicated properly. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:47] So when is it happening? Is that we have we have altered communication from the brain to an organ to a muscle to whatever. And so it's it's more difficult to see with organs and explaining the organs. It's much easier to see with muscles because everybody's noticed this. You bang your elbow, right. And you get that funny elbow feeling. That's a tendon thing and it makes your whole hand feel weird. You know, you fall asleep on your hand crying and the whole thing goes numb. That type of stuff, you know, that type of vascular stuff. So compression of these things, definitely. We all know this, you know, just from I've lived in this body for X amount of years. I've noticed that if I compress things, it doesn't always go well for me. So when these muscles get a message from the brain that they either think is contract or they get a lack of information from the brain, and so they just go into guard mode and say, lock up. They spasm up where they increase their tension or their tone around a joint, a ligament, know anything and it compresses it and alters the way it and work normally works. We're going to have abnormal function. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:54] That's that's literally the definition. When it's no longer normal, it's abnormal. And so abnormal things are pathophysiological a pathology. So whenever we have compression of something, we're going to end up by definition with pathology. Now, how bad is that pathology? Depends. You know, it can be I have pain that goes down my leg. It can be you know, I have weakness in my arm and it can be, you know, my sinuses aren't draining any of those type of things. So getting everything, adjusting everything put back together properly helps the body to function and move without these excess excess compressions of nerves, blood vessels and lymphatics. So I usually get adjusted. 2 or 3 times a week. And so it's funny because like there's like right now I was walking down the stairs this morning. I was like, I getting my ankle adjusted because it's not moving, Right. It's really a lot more important for. Athletes to get adjusted because you're asking 100% of your body function. And so what ends up happening is if you're lifting, if you're running, if you're playing pickleball, like I'm not talking about pro athletes, I'm talking about if you exercise at all, it's really important for you to just sit. One of the easiest ways to explain this, especially for female athletes, is if your pelvis gets out a little bit, which, by the way, when you when a woman has a menstrual cycle, her pelvis moves around and it gets your puffs up from like, together. If it doesn't come back together just right. If you sleep on your side, things like that, the pelvis gets out of position just a little bit. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:23] And very few women have really high pelvic floor musculature or core function strength. And so that pelvis hurts. Move the femurs that attached to it also start to move. Well, the biggest thing for women is that you're cueing all the angles from your hip to your knee is 30% larger than it is in men. What that means is the forces on your knees are substantially higher than it is for men. And so that's why female athletes blow their knees out ten times more often than men when they're doing cutting move motions and things like that, because the forces are actually substantially greater on their knees. Well, the force of that knee is dependent upon where the femur and the tibia are. So the hip, the bone that's at your hip that goes all the way down your leg to your knee and then from your knee down, that's that's your femur, right? Your knee down is your tibia. And so as those two things aren't meshing together properly because one starts pitching out a little bit more. What ends up happening is that there's more stress on the ligament. And so as you cut that extra stress pops and Brexit. And so that's what's going on. So you can reset the pelvis, reset the angulation and the rotation of the femur onto the knee and makes it a substantially safer for the entire function. So getting those adjusted is really, really important. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:35] Now, once you get them adjusted, you can start designing exercises and things to increase the muscular strength and tone and that type of thing around the area to secure the joints so that we don't have further damage. But getting it put back together where it's supposed to be is really, really important. Now the popping sound, which is completely irrelevant to the actual therapy. But I personally love and I can tell you that there was no popping sound. I wouldn't do this because like, I'll adjust people and I won't make a lot of noise and they'll be like, That feels so much better to make. Yeah, it wasn't very fun for me though. And then I'll adjust people and like, there's all sorts of sound and. And you seem kind of twitch like, that's. That's what's fun for me. And then they get in there, my gosh, it's so much better. Or we'll do ribs. Like, I don't think I have any women. When I reset the ribs, they don't go, that's so much better because they can finally breathe again because a lot of them are hunched forward all the time on laptops or whatever. But yeah, so the adjusting the piping sound makes no difference to the actual therapy. What we're actually trying to do is there's little receptors, little brain receptors, neural receptors in the muscles, ligaments and tendons called Golgi tendon organs and muscle spindle fibers. If we excite those and make them fire, they send information to the brain and the brain goes, Whoa, Like I haven't heard from you guys in a while. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:53] Or, you know, well, it's way more information. And so it sends a message back down and says, Hey, reset at your last default setting. Go back to where original design was and starts kind of calming the area down, loosening up the musculature, allowing blood flow to come in. You bring in nutrients, allow blood flow to come out easier. So we move the waste out. So that soreness that that a type of thing comes out easier and takes pressure off the ligaments and off of the nerves and lymphatics and the whole deal. So now that whole area starts kind of going back to where it was supposed to be to its default setting. That's how it gets better. And so this is the big premise behind chiropractic, is that we're not fixing anything. We're just taking it back to original design. Like it's allowing the body to go back to its original functional purpose. And so that's why we tell you that chiropractic doesn't fix anything. We just allow the body to heal itself, which is by definition, how everything happens. Just like you can take a drug and all the drug does is help hope to put you in a position where the body has a better functional ability to restore health the way that the body naturally does it. That's that's how it always happens. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:02] There is no drug that fixes things. There's drugs that, you know, drugs can kill stuff like an antibiotic, which is has a good side and a bad side to it. But the the thing about chiropractic is that it allows the body to function the way it was designed. And so that's why we say, you know, you know, the power that made the body heals the body. You know, that's the whole premise. And, you know, as someone who gets adjusted on a regular basis, I guess I don't talk about it enough. And I will say now that that's been brought to my attention, I will start talking about it more, the chemistry things, more fun for me. But the chiropractic thing is the neurology thing is probably the biggest thing we do. If you're not getting adjusted, get in and get adjusted by somebody who knows what they're doing. And here's the fun thing. The way I adjust works for a lot of people, but it doesn't work for everybody. The way that Dr. Bethany adjusts works for a lot of people, but doesn't work for everybody. So you got to find the doc who gets the adjustment done the way it works best for you. We've got some people who are real big an activator and that works for people and that's fantastic. Upper Cervical works for people. We do. I do a diversified Thompson neuro adjusting technique where I've amalgamated a lot of things. So I've taken I learned a lot from our pregnancy docs about how the pelvis works, especially in female athletes. You know, during the whole 100 and something 200 hour narrow course, you know, from the muscular function and tone. I've learned a lot of that stuff. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:13:32] So I use a lot of that. I like diversified and I love Thompson, especially for pelvis. So that's the table where it drops. And then they also put people on their side and do diversified stuff. So there's lots of different techniques that Individual Kairos will do. Find the one that works best for you. Some of them are scary. It's always funny. People come in and they see me because I'm huge and they're like, I'm scared that you're going to hurt me. And I was like, Do you believe I could drink out of a teacup NyQuil? Yeah. I'm like, Just because I have the force to break it doesn't mean I always do. In fact, what I have found is that having the mass and the size makes it easier to be gentle and get things done. Cause I can use body weight where other people can't. So I can just lean on you and give little tiny impulses and get things to move a lot easier than some people who are smaller because they have to. They have to jump up and down and try to use force or, you know, that they don't just have. And so the other thing is that it's not strength. Bethany is maybe a third my size, and she's great. It's about speed and it's about direction. It's about it's about, you know, technique, the way you get it done. And so there's a lot of big guys who can adjust really well. And there's a lot of little tiny girls who can adjust really, really well. So one of the best adjustments I've gotten in a long, long time I got from, you know, when I was when I was in school, I was able to be adjusted by all sorts of docs who've been in the field for a long time and students the whole deal. And one of the best adjusters I knew was this little tiny girl named Nicole leader, Dr. Nicole Lederman. And she was fantastic. She was she's also she was a pediatric special. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:15:16] She taught me a lot about the pelvis that, you know, get in and get adjusted more often. Like there's a lot of the things we deal with when we're 40, 50 and 60. We could have started to prevent when we were 20 and 30 had to be just gone and gotten adjusted and started changing the monitor heights started doing special exercises and stretches like the maintenance on the body could have prevented a lot of the problems that we see when we're older. A lot of them balance coordination issues, you know, a lot of different, you know, sinus issues. Yeah, there's a bunch of bunch of stuff that letting that stagnant stuff set creates all such problems. But if you're not getting adjusted, you need to start getting adjusted. The more stress you have, the more adjustments you need. If you know your life is awesome and you don't have any problems and everything's just super great and you can just, you know, breeze through life, you might not need it very much because one of the number one things that we see, especially with women, is the stress creates all sorts of problems. So women like you guys wear your shoulders as earrings all the time because this is how you sit around all the time. You just let your stress build up like this. And when that happens, it gives you neck issues, Joshua's teeth issues, upper shoulder issues, back issues, you know, so we've got lots of that. And then a lot of the guys, because we're sitting so much, but we still have to move the ice chests full of ice and drinks and stuff like that. We've still got to, you know, forget the case of water from Samsung. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:16:41] It's with stuff for Costco, you know, and we're lugging and moving things around that maybe we shouldn't. Maybe that's more weight than we should we should deal with, but we don't care. We do it anyway. We go get that supper back together before it creates herniated disk and stuff like that. So, you know, a lot of you guys and you probably adjusted more often than you are for your long term health. I'm not trying to say that it's going to, you know, fix cancer. Like I think that the argument that it's going to allow blood flow to move and oxygen to move and waste to be moved out. And so that's great. That will decrease the reactive oxidative stress pooling that leads to cancer. I think that's a decent argument. And once you have cancer, getting a justice of the things where flows of the the stagnant stuff that's causing all the irritation and stuff like that, moving that. So that will be highly beneficial. But I wouldn't say it's going to cure cancer, but I would tell you that it is one of the most important things that you can do as part of your physical health, whether you're exercising or whatever. You can just as me, one of the most important things you can do. So I will start talking about. More. I realize that. I don't think I've talked about it much this entire year. Lots of chemistry and lots of exercise and lots of neuro, but not a lot of adjusting. 

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:17:53] So we'll sort of talk about that more. But if you guys are not getting adjusted, getting it adjusted, especially now, like it's the end of October, most of you guys have, you know, your deductibles been met. Go find a Cairo and get adjusted for the next six weeks and see if you feel better. Like it's not going to cost you much, your deductibles and that. So just go in, get adjusted and be like, Do I feel better after I go to just go twice a week for a while and be like, okay. So I went twice a week for a month. Deductible paid for all. That's like, what? It's eight, ten times. If you're going to go all your insurance is like over that and just go see how you feel. I feel like I do feel better. Maybe you should make that part of your routine if you don't feel better. All right. Maybe find another chiro. Or maybe just see, your office is like mine. We have the therapies, too, so that's under insurance. So if you want to get a massage, get adjusted and see if that helps your overall outlook and physical pain and just the way you feel, check it out. Because again, the same year it's going to cost you a whole lot less and it might make you feel a lot better. And so you're talking about, you know, what am I do find New Year's resolution. Start now and see if this helps because again. You got you pay for all that insurance, go ahead and use it. So check it out if you guys have any questions, is questions and comments one second or jump in the comments. You guys have a good day. Thanks for your time. 

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