Dr. Brown's weBlog

The office will be closed on Monday so that we can travel to Atlanta to see our daughter, Arianna. She’s driving from Florida back home to Iowa and Atlanta is as close as she’ll get to South Carolina, so Charlene and I will drive over there on Sunday, meet her for dinner and spend the night in an Atlanta hotel. We’ll come home on Monday evening and the office will be open early Tuesday morning.

Starting the new year off right means getting checked by the chiropractor because everything in the body works better when the communication system is functioning without interference. This isn’t just true for superstars, we all perform better when we get regular adjustments.

Only a few years back physicians and chiropractors were at odds over differing health philosophies. It got so bad that the United States Supreme Court found the American Medical Association guilty of an illegal conspiracy to eliminate chiropractic as a competitive art. But today more and more enlightened physicians are referring patients to chiropractors and of course availing themselves of the benefits of specific spinal adjustments.
In a Chicago Tribune article this month a Professor at Loyola University Medical Center, Dr. Aaron Michelfelder, notes that doctors live extraordinarily stressful lives. Dr. Michelfelder says, “We see a lot of bad things,” and pointed out that 300 to 400 physicians commit suicide each year. Although he laments that “Physicians are always the slowest to change,” he has discovered the benefits of chiropractic care for his own health and well-being.
Another Chicago area doctor, Dr. David Bilstrom, on staff at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, also uses chiropractic to maintain his good health. Dr. Bilstrom observes that, “Physicians tend to be terribly unhealthy people who die at a younger age than others, have terrible stress, work bad hours and eat on the run.”
Dr Bilstrom also advocates the use of untraditional techniques on his patients with chronic diseases who failed to obtain relief from traditional medicine. The Chicago Tribune article quotes him as saying, “The interesting thing…is the same things you do to help treat a person with a problem are exactly the same things you want to do for prevention,” said Bilstrom. “Many medications only target symptoms and not the disease or illness,” he said.
I’ve often thought that it was sad that physicians weren’t being taught about the benefits of chiropractic care, so it is encouraging to see this trend.

The office is open regular hours through Friday, December 23rd. We are closed on the 24th and will open again for regular hours on Monday morning, January 2nd at 8:30 a.m. Please be certain to get in during the next few days to get your adjustment so you are well prepared to perform at your best through the holidays.

Fear tactics are being used against parents and teenagers to benefit drug manufacturer, Merck according to videotaped testimony by an Iowa teenager who speaks out about how her life was ruined by a Gardasil shot. Another injured young girl pleads for the truth to be revealed so that the drug can be taken off the market before others are harmed the way she was. These clips are available to see at the web site of physician, Dr. Joseph Mercola (note: these girls show great emotion describing what happened to them so parents may wish to consider viewer discretion for small children).
As a chiropractor I don’t have a position on this great controversy, but I do remain suspicious when the experts disagree and big money is involved. As parents we all need to look at such matters with a more skeptical eye.

Yesterday I was checking and performing an adjustment for someone here in the office and her mother made an interesting comment afterward. She said, “I’ve felt that this adjustment was different, but never actually seen what it looked like before.” When I looked at her curiously she explained, “It just seemed so meticulous, careful and deliberate. I want you to know that I really appreciate that.” My response was that it’s like following the Golden Rule, i.e. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Their family has only been under care for a few months and they weren’t brand new to chiropractic, but between the lines she seems to have been saying that they weren’t used to precise care. Reflecting on this it occurs to me that this doesn’t make me special as their chiropractor, it just means that I really value a specific adjustment. There’s a good reason why it matters so much. That’s because an adjustment is about much more than making someone feel better. The way we like to express it is simple: Chiropractic…it’s not about your back…it’s not about your pain…it’s about your life!