EPISODE SUMMARY
Guest: Dr. Gordon Elder
Upper Cervical Chiropractic deals with the brainstem. It is the most basic part of the brainstem is what we call the lizard brain or the most primitive part that deals with staying alive; our breathing, our pulse, blood pressure, and things like that. And the brainstem is affected by the alignment of bones and nerves, and tissues at the very top of our neck, right underneath the head.
The mouth plays a more intimate and intricate role than I had realized in the health of the upper cervical spine.
The neck and the jaw affect each other anatomically and neurologically.
Both neck and jaw issues can cause posture problems that affect the whole body.
Sometimes the Upper Cervical Chiropractor and the Dentist need to work together for the best results.
This is at the very forefront right now of treatment, of therapy, of science. Not many people do work that works together with an upper cervical chiropractic specialist and a dentist. Most doctors don't even know how important the relationship between the mouth and the brain stem, and the upper cervical spine is. It is outside the mindset of most Doctors.
At the Blair Chiropractic Clinic, Craniocervical Junction Specialists the future will be working with Dentists.
The best resource for this kind of cooperation is Dr. Chris Chapman in Salt Lake City at
To contact Ruth, go to https://www.blairclinic.com
ruth@blairclinic.com
https://www.facebook.com/rutelin
TRANSCRIPT
Today is Monday, June 6. I'm here with Dr. Gordon Elder who just came home from a diplomate weekend in Salt Lake City. Can you tell us a little bit about the theme this weekend, some of the things you learned? And we'll just see where this takes us while it's fresh on your mind.
Great. Fresh but not totally organized. I learned so much more material. I need some time to study through it again more and kind of settle it in my mind. But off the top of my head, this is a great way to just get my initial impression. So as you know, Upper Cervical Chiropractic deals with the brainstem and the most basic part of the brainstem is what we call the lizard brain or the most primitive part that really just deals with staying alive. So our breathing, our pulse, blood pressure, things like that. And that is located in our brainstem. And the brainstem is affected by the alignment of bones and nerves and tissues in the very top of our neck, right underneath the head.
So that's what Upper Cervical doctors specialize in, right?
That’s what I specialize in. Now. Something that I didn't fully realize before this weekend is that the mouth plays a more intimate and intricate role than I had realized in the health of the upper cervical spine. And it does it in a couple of different ways. Number one is just its posture, how you hold your jaw, how your teeth come together, will affect the muscles and bones and tissues of the upper neck. They're just very closely related in that way. So just from a purely anatomical standpoint, it is very important to the health of the upper cervical spine. So if I adjust somebody, if I find a misalignment in the upper neck and I adjust them and put them back into place, it can have a big effect on how soon that comes back out of place unless it's properly aligned as well.
Can you describe that a little bit closer in detail for those of us who haven't taken that course?
Well, your teeth are hard. They don't move very much. So when the neck is out of alignment, your head tilts a little bit and your posture changes to kind of take some pressure off the brain stem, off the nerves as much as possible, as well as the posture being affected because of the problem. So your head tilts a little bit, which affects your jaw, which then affects where your teeth are, and over time your teeth will move, your teeth will grind together sometimes in order to open up the airway that is closed down because of the misalignment in the neck. And so, just from an anatomical standpoint, just from a structural standpoint, there's a lot of stresses. So I can put the neck back into alignment, but it can take a long time for teeth to change place, and especially if a patient has had some dental work done, especially extensive dental work, whether crowns or bridges or braces, to manually move the teeth to make the smile perfect. But if the smile is made well, or the mouth or the teeth fit together really well, but the head isn't on straight. Then when I put the head back on straight now, the teeth and the jaw are going to try to pull it back out because they were fit for a wrong position. So that's just from the structural standpoint, we're not even talking nerves yet. We're just talking structure.
So what I hear you saying is when you put the neck back in place, that responds quicker than the jaw.
Yes. And so then the jaw, because it takes a longer amount of time, if there's some significant problems there or changes or asymmetries or just not fitting together quite right, can then put stress in the upper neck and pull the upper neck back out, which then affects the brain stem and the breathing and the posture and overall health. Then we have a problem. We have a cycle that we need to break somehow. And most of my patients hold well, but I have some that just don't hold well. And now I'm starting to think probably the major reason for many of them, maybe most of them, might be a mouth issue that I need to work with a dentist with.
Okay, so how do we break that cycle?
Well, we talked about the anatomical. We didn't talk about the neurological. Let's back up a little bit. The function of a tooth is to grind up your food, right? I mean, that's kind of the basic, but it also is like a receptor. It's like a little nerve ending in a sense. It actually attaches to the trigeminal nerve, which helps you feel your face, the top of your face, the middle of your face, the bottom of your face. All the nerves from the teeth on the upper and lower part of your mouth go to the trigeminal nerve, which goes into the brain stem. The teeth act like sensors in it, and we're finding that kind of like in acupuncture or acupressure, it can affect different parts of your body. But one of the more interesting things that we talked about this weekend was that if the teeth are not fitting together properly, if there's more pressure in the back or on the left or the top right or whatever, your posture will change. So you can stand on a pressure plate and kind of see where on your feet where you're putting more pressure and where you're putting less pressure, if you're standing evenly on the left or the right or the front or the back, and you can change. The tooth pressure in the mouth with an orthotic or something, and your feet will change. Racehorses, this is just to kind of prove a point, racehorses are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. I'm not sure. It's not my area of expertise. But one of the things that they know about horses, if the teeth don't fit properly, then their gait or how they walk and run is thrown off. And it's the same in humans. If our teeth don't fit properly, how odd is that at the entire other end of the body? If the teeth don't fit properly, then your posture is off. And that can create low back pain. That can create ankle problems, hip problems, because it affects the upper cervical spine. So you've got these little sensors in your mouth, these nerve sensors, and if they're not hitting properly on the top teeth, hitting properly on the bottom teeth, then your posture will change. It'll affect your posture. How? I don't think we know that yet, but we can see it. We can see how when we change somebody's upper neck, how their posture changed, and we can see when we change somebody's bite, how their posture changes. And those two are intimately related. And before this weekend, I didn't realize that.
Okay, so this brings up two questions in my mind. The first thing you just said, it seems like there's a lot we don't know yet. So the first question is what I already asked. How do we break that cycle if someone's listening and they go, yeah, I think that's me, what do they do with that information? Kind of piggybacked on that is who does that kind of work?
So it is on the very forefront right now of treatment, of therapy, of science. Not many people do a work that works together with an upper cervical chiropractic specialist and a dentist. Many dentists don't even know how important this part I mean, they know how important the mouth is in general, but this relationship with the brain stem and the upper cervical spine, that's kind of out of I won't say scope, but the mindset of most chiropractors or most dentists I apologize. Well, most chiropractors too, obviously.
It almost sounds to me like it goes both ways. So an upper cervical doctor will totally understand how important the upper neck is, but maybe not how important the jaw is in relation to that. And flip flopped, the dentists understand and study everything about how important the nerves in the mouth are, but may not understand how intimately the upper cervical relates to that. Is that fair to say?
From my experience, from my limited experience, I would say that's absolutely correct.
Okay, so we asked what? Does a listener do? Where do they turn?
Okay, so this is really new, these two things working together. The most foundational concept I believe, I still believe is the upper cervical spine. And not everybody who addresses the upper cervical spine is going to be super knowledgeable about how to treat it or how important it is. So really we need to look for Upper Cervical specific Chiropractors. There's about seven different upper cervical techniques and usually people can Google upper cervical chiropractic and find somebody. They may not be somebody close. They're kind of a rare breed. They're growing. They're a rare breed. But it takes more education than just being a regular chiropractor who in themselves help a lot, but don't always know exactly how to treat the upper cervical spine or the top of the neck.
Yeah. Also, I will just interrupt here and say at the Blair Clinic in Lubbock, Texas, we have a pretty vast database of Upper Cervical Doctors around the United States and even some in the rest of the world. So if you don't get very far with googling, feel free to call the Blair Chiropractic Clinic.
Right. It's not so much that we have a database, but we have access and know where to look and know how to search sometimes. Most upper cervical chiropractors don't, I believe, do not understand the importance of the mouth. And as we've talked about before, the goal is to fix the problem, to put the bones back into the proper position so they're moving correctly, so that the nerves are clear and the body is able to control everything about itself as efficiently and as well as possible. And to do that, if we fix it correctly, then we don't want to keep having to do it because that means there's something else wrong.
What you're saying is staying in that alignment is what?
Heals people.
Healing. So I've heard in upper cervical circles, holding is healing.
Right. Yeah. So holding is healing. And so this new well, I should say new to me information addresses the issue of people who do not hold well. Now, it may address as well other issues. They may be holding well, but have some things that don't clear up. That can clear up once we realize there's an imbalance between the mouth and the jaw and the upper cervical spine. So myself, for example, I hold really well. I hardly ever need to be adjusted. I hold my adjustments well. But I think that there are some issues, some other health issues I have that, because there's maybe a tug of war between my teeth, which I've not had to have a lot of until recently, had to have a lot of work done. I never had to have braces. But when I moved to Lubbock, I cracked a molar in the right lower jaw and then a year later, the same molar on the opposite side of the jaw cracked. We've removed those. We're planning to put in what are they called?
Implants.
Implants, yes. As opposed to a bridge. And then a few weeks ago, one of the other molars in the lower part of my left part of my jaw that had a filling in it was weakened and we were going to have to do something with that. So we just put a crown on that one. And I realized that some health issues, not major, not severe, but some things that I have going on may well be related to some of those things. Maybe there's a reason I cracked my teeth. I've had a history of grinding my teeth. I don't think I do that anymore at night, but I think I do some abnormal jaw positions during the day which are causing some problems and probably cause me to crack my teeth. So there's things like that that even though I'm staying in alignment, there's some other things that are related to the fact that my jaw has not adapted to my normal natural position neurologically, structurally, that we can change. But when it comes down to the average patient, we want to make sure the neck is in alignment. We want to make sure that there is no tug of war going on between the structure and or nerves of the mouth. And that will help a lot of healing. Now, that's not to say everything is going to be healed by that by any means. There's other issues, but those are two foundational issues that allow other health care problems to be easier solved or more easily treated. Because you're taking care of some of the foundational things and you can build a better structure on top of that, a healthier structure on top of that, maybe even identify the problems better. Because you took care of some foundational issues that were complicating or obscuring what the real problems were.
You just had a really big weekend of learning and you're about 24 hours past that. So I'm sure a lot more studying to be done and thinking about it, but just kind of off the top of your head or from your gut, where do you see yourself going with this information?
Well, I believe that Upper Cervical Chiropractic or Craniocervical Junction Specialists. Really, it's an unknown and unseen and yet so foundational to our health form of health care. It’s foundational, but it's not the answer to everything. And a lot of times by fixing that, we can by extension, the body will then be free to fix or control other health issues a lot better. And I've seen that in my office over and over. But we're always striving to excel still more. So what I see happening is having a center sometime in the future, maybe in a year, maybe a couple of years, probably slowly growing, where we feature Upper Cervical Chiropractic and in conjunction, as a next step up the dental care or working with a dentist. But the ability to analyze a patient's mouth and see if there are issues coming from that and building on top of that, then once those two things are taken care of, looking at what's left is there other things that are still that the body isn't healing by itself. Whether it's because it's been there too long or been damaged too much. Well, then we're looking at rehab, muscle rehab, neurological rehab. But we have to fix a foundation before, number one, seeing if those things are necessary. But number two, then knowing that those things being effective, because those things being applied before we fix the foundation are going to have an effect, probably a positive effect, but not nearly the depth. I mean, we want people to be well, and the human body is designed to be well. It's designed to heal itself. So we don't want to cover things up. We don't want to short circuit the healing process and cover up a symptom or cover up a problem or solve a problem that is in itself a symptom of a deeper problem. We want the body to heal from the ground up, as it were, foundationally. And that's going to give people a better quality of life. That's going to give people just economically the ability to stay out of the hospital and not have to manage things like diabetes to the same extent or any other degenerative processes that our society seems to be in a pandemic about and to use less drugs that cause other problems. I mean, drugs are good, they have an effect, but I think we use them too soon. And then we don't go searching for the foundational issues and fix those. We just say, okay, everything's okay. We're going to manage this with such and such.
So you're talking about healing as opposed to covering up symptoms?
Yeah.
Okay. So I'm going to double back a little bit. One of the questions I had for you was who does this kind of work? So I feel like it's probably fair to maybe give a little credit to your teacher this weekend.
I think he deserves a lot of credit. So it's Dr. Chris Chapman in Salt Lake City at the Lift Clinic. I think it's theliftclinic.com. He is an Upper Cervical Chiropractor, slightly different technique than I use, but a very good one. And he had four kids that were doing well, and then they got put in braces and suddenly they weren't doing well anymore, health wise, and he was having to adjust them more. And that's what spurred him at least one maybe of many things, but into investigating the role of the mouth and the teeth in upper cervical spine health. So, again, that was Dr. Chris Chapman at the Lift Clinic. And I'm hoping in the future to work more closely with him as I develop my own clinic, using his materials and learning from him and collaborating with him. And he's done great work over the last, I don't know, 20 years maybe.
So I guess one application here. If you want to find out more about this kind of work, look into Dr. Chapman, maybe Google him, and also go. Stay tuned for the future application of this here in Lubbock at the Blair Chiropractic Clinic.
Yep, that's right.