Why I am an Upper Cervical Chiropractor:

Dr. Gordon Elder , the Director of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX tells the story of how and why he became an Upper Cervical Doctor.

I didn’t grow up thinking that I was going to be a Chiropractor. In fact, I had lots of other dreams and plans. It wasn’t until I was in college, studying for business, that I realized that I needed to change my major and that it would be good for me.

When I was four, I was in a car accident and as I grew up, I didn’t think much about it but, when I was ten, I started getting sinus infections that wouldn’t go away unless I was actually on drugs. As soon as I would get off the drugs, the sinus infection would come back. That’d occur three or four times. My mother, who had been seeing a Chiropractor, mentioned it to him. The Chiropractor asked to check me, and sure enough, it was a bone in the top of my neck that had moved and was putting pressure on some nerves and was affecting my immune system.

So, he didn’t treat my sinus infection but, he put that bone back into place and it allowed my body to restore itself and to heal.

Didn’t make a big impression on me at the time; I was only ten. My mom had been seeing this Chiropractor for a little while because of migraine headaches. In that same accident, when I was four, she started getting migraines after that, every day, all day. Now, she’d had migraines before, since junior high, but they weren’t all day, every day. So, they got significantly worse after this accident, and she saw a

Chiropractor and it got better. A friend referred her to a Blair Chiropractor and suddenly she started improving. In her case, it was a slow process but, instead of just pain relief or pain management, it became her body attempting to heal itself and progressively doing so.

I grew up with that. I didn’t really think about it. We had occasional chiropractic appointments to make sure that I was still in alignment. I didn’t have to be adjusted very often; maybe after a wrestling bout or match occasionally. I went through high school aiming for the air force academy. And when I didn’t make it into the air force academy, thinking maybe Business?

And I started studying business and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t really exciting. I don’t know, it just wasn’t a really great fit.

Now, as it happens, I married a beautiful young lady who had a lot of health problems and I told her that she should see my

Chiropractor. She was a little resistant because she had had a bad experience, like so many people have. But this Chiropractor ran a few tests before asking her any questions about what her problem was. And he pointed to her neck and said,

“You’re carrying pressure on your brain stem and nerves right up here.”

And she started crying a little bit, I think. I remember that I was pretty close to tears because that had been something that we had been suffering with or going through. This was after the first year of marriage so, one year of marriage and she had been suffering from childhood with back pain and headaches and neck pain, and it seemed to be getting worse every year. And the interesting thing is that she had this idea that there was some kind of a tumor or some kind of pressure on the brain stem up here but, all the MRI’s and imaging, doctors said, “That can’t happen. There’s nothing there.” And so, she just felt doomed to slowly getting worse every year. Well, this Chiropractor convinced her to let him adjust her neck and he did. She started sleeping better, she started feeling better, it was a very slow, kind of like my mother, a very slow gradual process.
Meanwhile, I was in business school and realized that this wasn’t so interesting, and my wife ended up working for this Chiropractor and then coming home and telling me all of these cool stories about people who were getting well from things that I didn’t even know that chiropractic could help. I thought,

“Wow! This is pretty awesome!”

Also, I knew that my wife was a pretty severe case, and she may need care for the rest of her life just to make sure that she stays in alignment. I thought, “Man, now I have to live next to a Blair chiropractor for the rest of my married life.” Okay, we can do that, but I got a good idea. I thought, “Well look, I’m good with my hands, I like helping people, and... maybe I should be a Chiropractor?” So, I talked to the Chiropractor, and he convinced me that this was probably a pretty good idea.

And immediately I re-found my joy for school. I enjoyed my pre-chiropractic studies, I enjoyed chiropractic college, I enjoyed learning this very specialized technique that wasn’t even taught at the college that I went to. In fact, at the time, I don’t think it was taught at any college. But as I started going to these seminars and learning this technique and learning chiropractic,

I found real joy and excitement in thinking that I can use my hands and I can relieve suffering and I can help people get well.

And that’s really my story of how I got into Chiropractic. It wasn’t a story of me, personally, being sick and getting well, although that did happen. It was more, watching my wife get well and then thinking back about my mother and how she got well.

Schedule of care at Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX.

One of the most frequently asked questions we get is: “How often do I need to come?”

The goal is to not see you because you are well. Dr. Gordon elder explains the process to get you there.

Once the spine has been injured and it’s affecting the central nervous system, the brain, or the brain stem spinal cord, it takes a while for it to heal. Now, different tissues in the body heal at different rates. Ligaments heal at a different rate than muscles. Nerves, blood vessels, they all have different rates of healing. We have observed that people tend to heal in cycles. And sometimes one thing has to heal before another thing can heal.

So as a chiropractor, once somebody has injured themselves, and I correct the problem that’s keeping them from healing themselves, then I want to check more often in the beginning. Usually, we start out at twice a week. Now, that’s not necessarily a treatment twice a week. I hope it isn’t, but it’s a check to make sure that things are still progressing. And then, we go down to once a week, and then once every other week, and then once a month. My goal is to get you to the point where I’m checking you, if possible, once every six months again without finding anything, in the same way, that a dentist would be looking at your teeth, not wanting to find a cavity.

We don’t rely on symptoms to tell us when to treat you. When something needs to be fixed because as the body starts to go back to its normal position sometimes things will hurt, muscles will get stretched.

So, we do not rely primarily on how you feel to know what you need. We use objective tests for that and that’s what those tests are for.

We know that in the beginning, the bones are more likely to go back out of alignment, and so we check more often. You’re not necessarily going to know, at that time, whether it’s in or out. It may feel like it’s out and it’s not. Or it may feel great, and it’s actually just gone out of alignment and needs to be fixed before you do feel something. So that’s why we design each treatment plan for the patient. But also based on the scientific knowledge we have of how fast things heal and what cycles people go through in that healing process.

About 50% of my patients don’t need another upper neck adjustment during the first three months, but I don’t know which 50% you’re going to fall into. I want to catch it almost as soon as it happens.

In the beginning, if you go back out of alignment relatively quickly, you tend to lose progress or regress relatively quickly. As time goes on you could go out of alignment and the body is stronger. And so you don’t regress quite so quickly so, we don’t need to catch it quite as quickly.

It’s best to keep to the recommended schedule.

There are two common mistakes people make:

1. They start feeling better right away and they stop coming in.

2. The other one is that it takes a while for them to start feeling better, so they get discouraged and stop coming in.

We found that the first three months is the most critical time period. If we can make it through the first three months or three month period without having to readjust the spine, we know that it’s getting pretty stable. So in the beginning you may feel real good, but it’s not stable. So we need to keep checking it to make sure that it stays in alignment long enough to get stable.

On the other end I’ve had patients come in where it’s taken almost three months before they really started feeling better. Just the process that the body had to take to get to that point.

And so I encourage people: Go through the schedule that I recommend at least for the first three months. Once you commit to that and we get through that, then we will discuss what the next step is.

I try not to check you more than I really need to,

and so we will space those off but, based on particular times where we know, okay, things are going to be about this stable at this point. And as we go on, you’re going to become more stable and there are certain mileposts, that once we hit, we know that we can safely go on to the next level. 

Asthma

Dr. Elder briefly discusses the connection between asthma and a neck injury.

“Ive helped a lot of people with asthma”

I’ve helped a lot of people with asthma.

I have not helped every single one of my patients that has asthma. Asthma can come from a lot of different conditions, immune problems, or allergies. What I’ve noticed, though, is that generally speaking, people with asthma, when they are in alignment and the nerves are working properly, they can breathe better and manage the asthma better. For some of them, it goes away entirely. For most of them, they can live a higher quality of life.

Neurocalometer, and other $40 words

By Gordon Elder, D.C. and Philip Kennedy, D.C.

Skin temperature has played an important role in analyzing disease from ancient times. Hippocrates would put mud on a patient’s back and would note where it dried first, indicating higher temperatures and therefore disruption of normal physiological function.

In the early part of the 1900’s chiropractors, in much the same way, would move the back of the hand up a patient’s spine to locate “hot boxes,” areas of increased temperature. The increased temperature indicated to them, as to Hippocrates, an area of dysfunction and therefore possibly an area in need of a chiropractic adjustment.

As the century and technology progressed, chiropractic analysis became more refined. In 1922 the Neurocalometer (meaning nerve-heat-meter) was invented.

Dossa Evins, an engineer, contracted tuberculosis which then caused kidney failure. The effect that this had on Evins was that, since waste could not leave the body via urine, he excreted it through his sweat glands (called uremic frost) – which didn’t exactly provide a pleasant body odor. In his search for health he got under the care of a chiropractor in San Antonio, Texas. Evins noted that when his spine was in alignment his kidney function improved and he didn’t have the uremic frost. He also noted that the chiropractor analyzed his spine by using the above described method of sensing hot boxes with the back of his hand. Being an engineer, and figuring that if he could help the chiropractor do his job better he would benefit as well, Evins began working on a thermocouple device that would measure and compare skin temperature on either side of the spine. At the same time (1920) he enrolled in the Palmer School of Chiropractic. By 1922 the Neurocalometer was finished and in 1924 it had been tested and retested and was submitted to the chiropractic profession.

Our modern heat-sensing instruments are similar to the one developed by Dossa Evins and our understanding of the meaning of temperature imbalances has advanced since the 1920’s. Chiropractors of that era thought they were detecting the heat of an inflamed nerve, but we now know that the real story is more complex. Abnormal signals generated by spinal misalignments travel into the spinal cord along nerve fibers which connect directly to the part of the nervous system that controls blood flow in the skin. These abnormal signals disrupt the ability of the nervous system to keep the skin temperature even and balanced. The resulting temperature imbalance can be detected using the Neurocalometer or a similar device.

Incidentally, the same part of the nervous system that controls skin temperature also controls many of the major organs and systems of the body. This is why many patients who seek chiropractic care because of back or neck pain also end up noticing improvement of other health problems as well – digestive disorders, asthma, or abnormal heart rhythms, for example.

While many in our profession have abandoned the use of heat-sensing instruments, we at Muncy Chiropractic feel that they have an important place in any program of precise, specific spinal care.

Posted in Chiropractic Clinic and tagged alignment, inflamed nerve, spinal care, temperature