EPISODE SUMMARY
Guest: Dr. Tyler Evans
One of the reasons I started “What Pain in the Neck?” is to share conversations as I have experienced them. It is a great privilege to have gotten to spend some time with an awesome Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractor who is is not only a Diplomate and an advanced Blair Techninque instructor, but a leader in the true meaning of the word. Dr. Tyler Evens owns Arete Chiropractic along with his wife Dr. Michael Bebe.
Dr. Evans is the is the ICA Upper Cervical Council 2023 researcher of the year as well as Chiropracotor of the year in 2020.
He serves president of the Blair Chiropractic membership association .
Blair Chiropractor of the year 2019: Dr. Tyler Evans and Dr. Mychal Beebe.
I just love it when the conversation flows freely across a lot of important topics, That is the case in today’s episode.
Among other things we cover:
Dr. Evans background in and how he chose chiropractic over optometry.
The relationship between philosophy and science
The relationship between understanding history and moving progressively into the future.
Cone Beam CT scan technology.
Standards of Upper Cervical Chiropractic.
Breech childbirth.
Treatment for traumatic brain injuries and neurological conditions.
Non-profit organization to help Veterans afford Upper Cervical Care.
To read Dr. Evan’s Published paper on Craniocervical Junction Visualization and Radiation Dose Consideration Utilizing Cone Beam Computed Tomography for Upper Cervical Chiropractic Clinical Application a Literature Review
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9201332/
To contact Dr. Tyler Evans:
https://www.aretechiro.com/contact
To contact Ruth, go to https://www.blairclinic.com
ruth@blairclinic.com
https://www.facebook.com/rutelin
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What Pain in the Neck? I am Ruth Elder, your host, and in this podcast episode, I feel so honored to have one half of a serious power couple within the field of Upper Cervical Specific Chiropractic, Dr. Tyler Evans. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, Ruth. It's good to be here.
So we are here, actually at Sherman College of Chiropractic this weekend, and so that's where we're recording this. And it's been really amazing to get to spend some time with you and just get to know you and just hear you and my husband just nerd out and talk about high level scientific stuff. So thank you for taking time to be with our listeners. Why don't you start by introducing yourself and your family and your practice?
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Dr. Tyler Evans. I live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. My wife is Dr. Mychal Beebe, and we met at Chiropractic College in 2008-2009 in lLife West Chiropractic College in Hayward, California. I actually am from Indiana originally, and I moved there to California because I met a gentleman in my hometown when I was in college who was a chiropractor. He actually went to Life Atlanta, but he said either Life school, you should go to one of those schools. They're great schools. Go check out one of the Life schools. I went out to Life West because I was an Indiana kid and always wanted to live on the West Coast. And so I immediately fell in love with the Bay Area. And I had a bit of a love for surfing from traveling a bit. And so I got to surf when I was out there and do mountain sports climbing and hiking and snowboarding and stuff. And then my wife and I moved up to Seattle after we finished school, and we both associated under Blair doctors. And then we moved over to the East Coast, New Hampshire, because that's where she went to school. She went to school at UNH University of New Hampshire. We live right behind UNH in our hometown now, Lee, New Hampshire, which is super cool.
I have a couple of follow up questions here. Yeah, because it was quick, right? This is years and years worth of your life. So you went to see a chiropractor. And so first of all, why did you go and see him? And then secondly, there's a huge leap. Between going in because you need some Chiropractic care to deciding this is what I want to do with my life, like what happened?
Yeah, no, absolutely. I actually didn't really have a Chiropractic story. I was a pre health profession student at Ball State University where I went to undergrad. And I was just kind of in the time in my life where I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I went to different medical doctors. I went to an optometrist. I shadowed under an optometrist for a while. I had actually even applied to optometry school. And at the last minute, I was in my final year of undergrad and had completed all the sciences and pre med education and got to that point where I really had to make that decision. I was about to go to optometry school, and I pulled back at the last second and it just wasn't what I really wanted to do. I could tell in my soul it wasn't my thing. So I took a semester and I took graduate courses in statistics, biostatistics, and a genetics course, I believe. But those two courses were not necessarily anything that drove me in the Chiropractic profession. But I found a chiropractor in my hometown because somebody said, “yeah you should go check out Chiropractic.”
So something in you, though, made you want to be a healer of some sort?
Yes. So my father was a carpenter, my mom was a nurse, and as a child heard stories of doctors and nurses helping people all day. And my dad always taught me to use my hands to build things, fix things together. I wanted to use my hands to help. And also I grew up in a household that had a very kind of conservative approach to medicine and healthcare. And so it was more like you do things to help your body work better. My dad ran every day, and everybody knew him as the guy who ran around the block all the they would “there's Joe running down the road” you know. So it was a healthy mindset.
Lifestyle.
Lifestyle, yeah
You said in your soul you knew it wasn't right to be an optometrist, so something in your soul must have connected with Chiropractic. And beyond just the soul, do you have any idea what it was? What was the same? What was different? I'm hoping that maybe there's somebody listening, who's a young person, that's trying to decide what's the right path for me.
I think that it wasn't necessary the philosophy of Chiropractic at the time because I wasn't even really aware of that, other than - I didn't understand that there was actually another gentleman in my town who practiced Chiropractic. And he went to Logan Chiropractic College and he said, anything that has to do with the Palmers, don't get involved with that. And I didn't know the difference. Right. And so that actually kind of turned me off. And then I met this other gentleman and he was like, no, the Palmers are Chiropractic. This is the philosophy. And he kind of mentioned it to me, but I didn't really connect with it at the time. But then there was a pulling in my mind and soul that there had to be a bigger purpose to things and I wanted to be a part of that. And you could tell that this guy just had a purpose. Whereas the other guy, and this is nothing against people that have gone to Logan or people who know focus on the philosophy of Chiropractic, but that passion that he had drew me in. That was what it was, just his passion was enough to pull me in.
So that actually is what I'm taking away from your story. So you have this one guy that's like boo booing someone else and saying, “well, don't do that” and kind of holds a grudge. And then you have this other person that's just exuding
Good energy!
Yes! And purpose. Now that you're this many years, however many years behind that, that you are, can you shed some light on what that purpose and passion really is?
For me?
Yes.
Absolutely, the longer I go through life and the more I practice, the more it becomes defined in me. But I am very thankful for the Chiropractic profession because it stands alone as a healthcare profession that has principles of health from healing from the inside out. And today we kind of take that, - I take that for granted. But in the world, that's a very unique concept. I mean, there might be acupuncture, there might be other massage and other modalities, but Chiropractic has principles laid down that there's books, many, many books written on this. And we have truly a sacred profession that has outlined this science and art and philosophy of Chiropractic that is so unique to the world.
Essentially what I’m hearing you say is you didn’t really understand what you were getting yourself into. Because you hadn’t been to school yet, you hadn’t learned about it yet! You just kinda felt drawn to it. So tell us that journey there. What happened there? And then somewhere along the way in Chiropractic college, you decided to specialize and why and what was that journey like?
It's funny now, like, looking back on it, it all kind of seems like a blur because it did happen fairly quickly. But here we are now, what is it, 2023? I graduated in 2011, I started in 2008. So it's 15 years later and seems like it all made sense to me. But now I'm like, wow, yeah, there definitely was a journey. And I entered school. I had really no idea about the philosophy, and I went to Life West, where Gerry Clum was the president at the time. Big advocate of that guy and the work that he did for our profession. He truly was a pioneer for us. But he built a school that was able to not only protect the profession, but also create good chiropractors who were trained in all the different techniques and were aware of the principles and the philosophy, whereas a lot of other schools don't have that. So my first quarter in school, I had no idea about the philosophy, but I walked in and sat down with Shawn Dill, who had our Chiropractic textbook, one of the green books that we have, and he taught right out of that Philosophy 1, first class. These are the principles of Chiropractic. And that really started the process of awakening me to that. But it took awhile, even though I was in those classes, I still didn't understand the true dichotomy of Chiropractic and other healing professions yet until I really started to encounter it in the outside world. And so, once I got through my first year and we're doing our basic sciences, it was a lot of kind of boring stuff other than the philosophy classes.
Okay. So this is something that I want to grab a hold of because I mentioned at the beginning, you're a true leader in our profession, and you're well known as an expert in the Upper Cervical. And even within the Upper Cervical, you're one of the top leaders. And you're really known for being on the cutting edge of CT scan technology, really research. Your name always comes up. You and your wife both are trailblazers when it comes to research, and yet you're talking about philosophy. So how does that fit together?
The philosophy and the science, I mean, they're all parts of the puzzle, right? And so I think initially, that just plain science that I was getting in school was kind of boring to me, even though I do love science. I grew up watching PBS with my dad, and he taught me things all the time. He loved physics and stuff like that. But once you start to understand the principles and the philosophy of Chiropractic, the science makes sense, right? And so it's making sense out of the things that we see in the world. Chiropractic does that in a way that is unique. And that's one of the things that really turned me on to Chiropractic.
Okay. So it's unique how?
Just in its perspective on health and how the body functions, rather than having an outside in perspective, having a perspective of treatment and diagnosis, it's more of a let the body heal. Given these very basic tenets of health, which are a free nervous system, free of interference from the brain to the body. And that is unique in the Chiropractic profession.
You were telling a story last night. We had a little party, and you were talking about your daughter that was born three months ago. Avery. And she's clearly the apple of your eye, and she's got your heart I can tell. But you were saying something about how amazing it was that she came out as this little, frail little thing and how much she's changed, right? And you said, now she's bigger and better.
Watching her grow, it's incredible. Watching - it's the innate intelligence that is in us, and that's the term that we use for it in Chiropractic.
So that’s part that made her like, you and your wife did your thing, and then all of a sudden, now you have this person, and she had some trauma. She's healing, and now she's
She's strong.
She's strong. She's getting more beautiful all the time. She's getting bigger all the time. And you're not just her daddy, but you're her doctor, but you're not making that happen.
And that is an interesting thing. As a chiropractor, as someone who's actively checking people all the time, I want to help her, because when she came out, she had some challenges. She was breached. She had torticollis, meaning her neck was a little tilted over to one side. Her head was tilted over, and so that created some issues for her right away. Her legs were kind of bent up, and her heart rate was really -or her heart rate was okay, that was a little challenged. But her breathing was really not deep enough, and it was shallow and fast, and so she had challenges right away, and that was scary to witness. And we wanted to help. And immediately, I went over, and the doctors let me just do a very gentle little atlas work on her upper neck work.
So that meant that you found that her top bone was out of alignment?
Yes.
And you just gave it a gentle tap to put it back?
Gentle. It was just even a rub.
Okay, so you told me, actually, what happened. Would you be okay with telling our listeners? You know what happened in that little - because a lot of people don't know that babies can benefit from this. Can you tell us the story of what happened?
Yeah, well, like I was saying, my wife was nine months pregnant. We were going through the processes of trying to do a home birth and in New Hampshire. I believe there are some states where you can do breach birth at home. I don't know that that is the safest thing, because oftentimes breach children are challenged quite a bit when they come out, if they come out vaginally. And so my wife did a breach unmedicated vaginal birth.
That's incredible.
Yeah, she's a warrior. The OBs in the hospital were saying she's the lioness.
There are reasons why she's one of the top doctors in this country.
Yeah, she gets things done. She puts her mind to things and gets them done. But we tried to turn Avery beforehand with - I think it's called a cephalic version, and that's where the doctors try to turn, from the outside, the baby. And we tried that twice. Once without anesthetic and then once with a spinal block. We went into the ER. First time was with the midwife, and the second time was with the OBs in the ER. And they tried to turn Avery. So Mychal was completely numbed up. My wife was numbed up from the shoulders down. But what was incredible was that Avery didn't want to turn for a reason, because she was positioned the way she was, and it wasn't safe for her to turn in there. So her little innate intelligence knew where she needed to be to get out, which was interesting. Because we kept thinking, Dang won't she just turn so we can have a head down and do a home birth? But she was the way she was, and that's the way that is. So it's another lesson, right? Like the whole birth process this and watching her grow is a lesson in kind of a hands off approach to health and letting the body heal and do its own thing, and it will. Innate intelligence is powerful. D. D. Palmer used to say, why does one person get sick and they're sitting next to another person that doesn't? And it's just one person's innate intelligence is weaker at that time because, for whatever reason, a lot of times they're subluxated and they're misaligned and nervous system interference.
Okay, so I want to hear you finish the story.
Yes, sorry ADD
You said she came out, she was a little blue, and limp.
Which was scary, right? As a doctor, as somebody, I've taken care of a lot of newborns in our office right?
Now you're the dad.
Now I'm the dad. And she came out and they kind of whisked her away and said, “this baby is in distress.” And we wanted to do a delayed cord clamping. They wouldn't let us do that, so they cut the cord and whisked her away, put her in the incubator, and started running tests on her immediately and putting air in her nostrils, which was important. But initially I was in a bit of shock, and my wife and I were excited, but a little, what do we do? And our midwife actually looked at us. She e's 30 or 35 years in practice from, I believe, Norway, I believe, or Finland. Somewhere in Northern Europe. But just a very calm, well educated woman. She's been through the paces with this stuff. She says, “Tyler, your daughter can hear you. Go over to her and talk to her.” And she said she had to say it twice. The first time, I was like, “okay.” And then I just kind of stared at Celia, our midwife, and she was like, “Go over to her.” And so I did. So the doctors were there, kind of crowded around her, and I said, “excuse me, can I just check her neck very quickly?” So I did and gave her a little correction and a very gentle massage. It's almost like a massage. And as her neck went back in, her breathing immediately became less shallow. It wasn't perfect, and it didn't make the immediate change that she was better, but it started the process of her body coming back into a better place. And you could tell that over the period of the next hour or two, her Apgar score went from a two out of ten, which is very low, up to a ten, which is great. And that's what they expected. And that was good. Boy, that was a roller coaster ride, though.
Yes. So I think those experiences come into our life. You said you're already checking babies, you're already seeing mothers. But now that it's happened to you, you're already a fantastic doctor. One of the best. I would personally go and see you if I needed to or send my mother or anyone I loved or my kids. But I know that when we have those challenges, we're even better. So why don't you talk a little bit about your practice? And you're practicing with your wife, and you have some associate doctors. What's your favorite things about your practice? Like, what kind of things do you see day in and day out? What keeps you going? What makes you happy with what you're doing?
I mean, so many things, and I think that it changes all the time. But, we moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 2015. In the end of 2015, we finished our Diplomate program. We can talk about that more, but my wife and I did a three year course in the upper neck, which Dr. Elder has done. Just graduated.
That's really important. I'm actually glad you mentioned that. And I have some episodes about that. The diplomate is super important. Just to sum it up, I'll link in the show notes to some of those other episodes that talks about what that is.
Perfect.
Just otherwise, we'll need more time than we have.
We’ll need two hours, yeah.
We've been all over the place. We started in school, and then we left with recent events with your daughter being born. But after you went to school, both you and your now wife went and practiced with someone else. So you had intense mentorship, and then you took this intense, scientific three year program, and then you went and started your own practice together.
Yeah. We went to this town that I had never been to, and I was from Indiana, lived on the West Coast, Bay Area, and then Seattle and then over to the East Coast and had no friends over there, no real connection. But my wife was like, “you're going to love it here. It's got mountains and ocean and Boston's an hour away and it's just a cool place.” And so I was like, “yeah, great, okay, that sounds good.” I looked it up and there was actually a surf movie called Granite Stoke. And I was like, “great, they have surfing. I can go. I can be there.” And then now, you know, the White Mountains in New Hampshire are amazing. I have a group of gentlemen that we do a snow winter hike, an ice hike every year in some of those bigger mountains out there. So I've really grown to love New Hampshire and the seacoast in that area. Initially we opened in March of 2016, and we tried to do it on a shoestring budget with the highest touch quality care that we could do on a budget. We referred out for imaging and we had just gone through the Diplomate program, so we were aware of Conebeam CT.
Okay, so why don't. Well, you can tell the story, and then after that, go in and talk about Cone Beam CT, what it is and why it's important.
Sure, yes. This 3D imaging technology, low dose that you can get generally, dentists started it in the early 2000s. Now we have kind of brought it into the Chiropractic profession. Your office has it. We have it. A lot of the Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractors have it in their office, and now it's making its way into other up cervical techniques. We brought it in into our office in 2017. Once, we had been referring out to a dentist for a year and a half because we were able to save money. We were able to save money, not have to buy a machine. And the dentists in our hometown, he was very open to it, and it gives us tons of good information. So our initial mission and vision in our office was to really bring powerful Upper Cervical care to the seacoast of New Hampshire in a way that wasn't being done or hadn't been done, where we were doing good 3D imaging and working with healthcare professionals in the area with concussions and balance disorders and challenging complex neurological cases. That was kind of our goal, is like, “hey, we want to help these people.” And so we had to get connected to those doctors in our area that were doing that work, and we did. My wife is a tremendous networker and communicator and educator, and she became friends with a lot of the best docs in our area, whether that be Orthopedic Surgeons or Neuroptometrists. Dr. Amy Pracinski, she's a wonder in our hometown, and she refers us patients very frequently that have had severe trauma, head and neck. Doing upper neck work, we don't do any twisting or popping. It's very gentle, specific side lying, neutral posture. With Upper Cervical work.
So neutral, that means you're normal.
Yeah. You're laying flat on your side and you're not turned. And that's important because a lot of these neurological conditions are very sensitive.
So when you say neurological conditions, what do you mean?
I mean,Post Concussion Syndr ome, that's a very common one that we mean we see some Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We're in New Hampshire, where we have one of the highest rates of opioid overdose of veterans. Our VA hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire, has actually been tagged as really not great for vets. And so we actually opened a 501C3 for veterans that are disabled. That was kind of our mission is to help these really challenging cases. People with Post Concussion, people that have had head trauma, people that have Parkinson's, MS, and we see great results with a lot of these issues. And then also family care. It's fun to just see the a normal, healthy individual that's just looking to optimize their health. It's a much easier case. But it's also important that we take care of these people that are really challenged too. And the 3D imaging really lends itself to that because if you're going to be taking care of people, you really want to have good imaging so that you can see what you're doing before you apply a force to the upper neck.
You and your wife are known in the Upper Cervical community to have great success in your practice. And the takeaway that I have from that is you started off really applying yourself all the way through school, getting great mentors, like we talked about. You started out being smart about your budgeting without compromising care. And you're getting great results, and you have this caring heart that you're doing more, such as starting a nonprofit. Do you want to elaborate how you've built your practice and how you're helping people?
One of the things that is very important is communication. Communication is key. So talking with medical professionals about what we do is very different than talking with a patient. And so we change the terminology when we're talking to a medical doctor. We talk about the Cranio Cervical Junction. We talk about trauma. We talk about misalignment rather than when we're talking as chiropractors, we talk about subluxation language.
And then when you're talking to patients, you use different words.
We use different words, we talk more understandable language. So it's having that communication down so that people can understand your mission and your vision, and then they buy in, and everybody wants the best for their patients and for themselves. So if we're working together as a team, and that's one of the things that I think is really fun, too, is we've created really, a community of people. And I credit this to my wife and our associates, Dr. Luiza Castro, who graduated in 2019 from Sherman Chiropractic College, which is where we are right now, teaching the Blair elective, and Dr. Castro's ability to kind of get into our system, as well as Dr. Tiffany Dauphinais and Dr. Robert Pratt. All three of them graduated from Sherman, and they're just solid docs. They came out of school well educated and understood the Blair work that we do, and they've integrated into our team great. But my wife built the team, and she built the system and the communication. And we have friendships, like, even Dr. Castro, she just picked it up, and she's friends with the head concussion doc in our area, where Dr. Beebe had created that relationship with another doc that was in the same practice but moved on. And then this other doc moved in and became friends with Dr. Castro. And so it's just cool that we're all working together to get the best results.
That is such a key. I've met a lot of doctors and heard a lot of conversations that have been spoken in confidence. And what I see as a pattern is all the best doctors hold what they have with an open hand and offer it more freely and more positively and are not afraid of competition, but rather figure out, if we collaborate, we can help people more to a bigger extent, and that helps everybody. And I would say it's contributing to your success. It's not taking it away, like looking at other professionals as your competition, then it becomes very narrow and negative. So that's one thing that I've really, through the years, been inspired by with you and your wife. And I've seen that way back since well before you decided to be a chiropractor. I've seen that.
Yeah. Cool. Thank you
So thank you. You've talked about your wife's strength as a networker. You have your own superpower, and you've kind of been known as the expert in CBCT technology, the Cone Beam CT scans. And you describe that as the 3D low dose, well, X ray, for lack of a better word. But why don't you talk to our listeners, let's say there's a sick person and they figure, okay, well, I tried everything, but why might they be interested in going to see an Upper Cervical doctor that's using the cone beam specifically? And then we'll take it into if you're a chiropractor wanting to know about that second, but let's just talk to the mom and pop or sister or brother that's suffering. Why would the CT scan make a difference?
Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's kind of a similar conversation, but if you have had a head or neck injury, if you have headaches, neck pain, multiple sclerosis, if you have a challenge that you're dealing with and you're trying to get better, you need a roadmap. And the cone beam CT is the best roadmap that we have available in the Chiropractic profession for upper neck work.
Why is it the best?
There's a couple of components. One is that it allows you to have what we call MPR Multiplanear Reconstruction. So it allows you to slice three different directions through a data field that is your head and neck.
So it means that you can look at it from different directions?
You can look at it in three different directions, from the top down, from side to side, and then from front to back. We can literally pan through and just go through every detailed joint in your spine from the inside out or from the outside in, rather than compressing 3D object into a 2D image and trying to extrapolate, okay, what's going on here with this joint versus that joint? It's behind this joint. So we're trying to see it through this shadow of this thing. We can actually see it.
You can see it, and then if it's hiding, then you just move it.
You can just move it. So that you can turn it and look at the thing that you want to see behind the other object. So that part of it is truly a leap in our profession that if the founders of our profession knew about this, they would be leaping over themselves, because it allows us to do what they dreamed of.
Which is?
Really the dream, is to release the body's ability to heal itself with the least amount of work, the safest way possible. And what we find is that with the upper neck, it is a clog point, it's a choking point for the communication between the brain and the body. Even in the medical profession, their standard of care for imaging is 3D for the head and the neck. If you've had trauma, their standard of care is you take a CT scan. This isn't a medical CT. A medical CT is about ten times the dose of these dental cone beam CTS.
So that's another benefit.
A very important piece.
Low radiation. Low, low, low radiation.
At a minimum you're getting a quarter to a 10th of the dose that you would on a standard medical CT and for a Chiropractic analysis, you're getting far better data. And that allows us to do a better job so that you get better faster.
So, Dr. Evans? What are you working on these days?
Lots of things. I think right now what's important is that we not only advance our profession and continue to integrate with healthcare professionals through our Diplomate program, through the Blair Society and through the other Upper Cervical organizations. Because I'm not necessarily - I love the Blair technique, but I'm not dogmatic about Blair is the only way. I mean, there are many, many good things about the Blair technique. There are other techniques out there and that's great. So I'm a big fan of all of the Upper Cervical techniques, but I love -
You have to choose one basically if you’re going to be an expert you have to narrow your focus a little bit.
You have to choose one, yeah. I think advancing the Blair work as far as we can and understanding where we came from. So I'm doing a lot of work on the history of the Blair Society right now and Dr. Blair himself, but also just helping the society grow more doctors because that's one of the things I see all the time as a problem is we don't have enough doctors out there.
We have people that travel 5-6 hours to see us.
It's crazy and it's not great for that, that's not a good thing. We want more doctors because we don't want people to have to travel 6 hours to see us.
Thus we are here teaching at Sherman College.
Exactly. I know you guys are too. We're passionate about that in the Blair Society and we are growing. We have about 110 members right now and we'd like to see that doubled in the next five to ten years.
If you're a chiropractor and you want more, contact (Dr. Evans) or contact my husband, Dr. Gordon Elder, or just the Blair Chiropractic Society and find out more information.
That’s it
Shameless plug.
Shameless plug.
Okay, so that was the Blair Society and then I know you have several projects you're working on.
Within the Upper Cervical Diplomate, the council, I'm working on a standards document with Dr. Bill Lordan.
Okay, so why does that matter?
Yeah, why does that matter? Again, we're developing things at a fast pace these days. There's a lot of development because the science is starting to catch up with what the guys that developed this work back in the early 19 hundreds were saying, and now we're actually catching up and then blowing right past what they thought even possible and what we even thought possible in our lifetimes. With the imaging advances, with understanding of the neurology. We have a neurodiplomate now that we're kind of beginning to integrate into our Upper Cervical diplomates. So there's these components of neurology that can be corrected via the eyes and via the vestibular apparatus in the ear. So how our head balances on our spine. Has a lot to do with equilibrium.
So it has to do with equilibrium, which side and up and down and all of that.
Yes, and our eyes and our ears and our neck talk together is a whole new - in science, in medicine, that is a whole new field that is really growing right now. Being at the cutting edge of that is very important. But also maintaining our principles and the foundation that got us to where we are, I think is very important. And so that's where the standards document comes in handy.
You were talking about doing a lot of work with history. So what I'm hearing you say is the history is really important to understand the foundation, so that you have a solid foundation to build the future on.
Boom.
Does that sum it up?
That's it.
And so that's what you're working. So I was at the Upper Cervical Forum in Dallas, and it was all about research, and your name, even though you weren't there, came up over and over, and you and your wife both won some prestigious awards. Do you want to tell our listeners about that?
Yeah, yeah. Dr. Beebe got the Upper Cervical Chiropractor of the year award.
So when I'm saying top leader, I'm not making that up.
Nope.
And then you won a great award too.
I got the researcher - Upper Cervical researcher of the year. Which the paper that we published the previous year on cone beam CT. So I forget the exact it's a really long sentence, but it says Craniosurical Junction and Cone Beam CT in a Low Dose Setting in an Upper Cervical Clinic, something like that. You can look it up. It's in dose response, and we can link that. I can't remember the exact name of it, but I started that paper in 2017, and so it took about five years to get that paper published.
Yeah. I think that's kind of a problem for chiropractors. People see amazing things in their practice, and then it takes a lot of work to prove it.
Yeah. So the point with that paper was to get it in PubMed and get it in a place where it can be in a link that can be shared very quickly and easily to everyone. And it's in a journal that's not a Chiropractic journal. Dose Response is a journal that is about radiation dose, or dose in general. I think it was toxicology originally, but now it's about radiation dose.
So you're talking about the safety…
The safety of what we do. And to have that be easily read by a medical doctor or a patient.
Yeah. So I'm kind of coming from a patient point of view myself. I'm not a doctor, so if I'm worried about radiation but I have an injury, and I want to get help. So what are the risks of getting a CT scan, but also what is the risk of not getting one?
I think informed consent is a very important thing. And so understanding - some people have a bit of fear around radiation, which is understandable. I believe that the science has gotten a lot better around radiation and where it comes from and the type of dose it is and how it affects our bodies. Back in the 1940s, we didn't understand it very well, and we didn't have dosimeters like we have today to measure the actual dose. And the machines that we were using to take pictures were very primitive. They were big doses, and we weren't able to measure them very easily.
Bottom line is it used to be risky.
Yes.
And the CT scan is not.
That right. And so we've developed things to a point now where we can measure doses within microseverts or even smaller. And these images that we take are around 100 microseverts, which is roughly ten days of background radiation. If you live in the United States. If you live in Colorado, your background radiation is much higher.
Because you’re up on the higher elevation?
Because you're up in the higher elevation, and so there's less atmosphere to protect you.
So one CT scan is a week's vacation in the mountains.
Exactly.
Okay. Yeah. Right. Or a plane flight.. It's important for people to understand that the benefit of getting your neck corrected is so high compared to the tiny, tiny risk of dose with these low dose technologies, with cone beam CT.
Excellent. I have a bazillion questions still. Maybe I'll hit you up in the future.
Yes, we can always do more.
What is one thing that you wish I had asked you, and what is the answer to that?
What's really important for someone coming from a patient perspective, to understand and for doctors to remember is that hope is what we give. And I see people that come into our office all the time, and they are desperate. It's not for a lack of information. It's for a lack of knowing where to get the right information. And we're trying to do better at that. That's why you're doing this podcast. That's why I'm working on starting a podcast in the midst of all the things. But there's information out there. There is hope, and you can get better. Your body is designed to function optimally, and a lot of times, there's just a little thing that's holding it back. And if you start putting together little things, it will snowball and health will return.
Yeah. So seek help and don't give up.
Yeah.
Dr. Evans, thank you so much for your time, and this has been really fascinating.
Awesome. Thank you, Ruth.