Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
I identify conditions other doctors miss by running tests that your insurance usually
doesn't want to pay for because they consider them, quote, medically unnecessary.
And the focus of this show is metabolic conditions, meaning the loss of function in various organs
and tissues that result in problems with digestion or immune system function, high blood pressure,
high cholesterol, heart disease, anemia, low thyroid, diabetes, brain fog, difficulty getting
to sleep, waking up and not being able to get back to sleep, anxiety, depression, dementia,
et cetera.
And I help people with these things mainly with better food, exercise, and supplements.
But as I mentioned at the top of each show, I'm a non-force chiropractor.
So I thought I'd talk a little bit about that for this episode today.
So what is non-force chiropractic?
How is that even possible?
Don't all chiropractors crack your bones, twist your neck, snap your back?
No.
We don't all do that.
But then what is chiropractic?
So the definition of chiropractic just means done by hand.
Chiro is Greek for hand.
And practic from practikos means done by.
So chiropractic just means done by hand.
The term was invented back in 1895 by Daniel David Palmer, the founder of the profession
of chiropractic.
Back in 1895 in Davenport, Iowa, where he founded the very first chiropractic college,
which as it happened is the school I went to, Palmer College of Chiropractic, where
I graduated in 1989.
So I've been in practice for 33 years.
I've been at my current office in downtown Ventura since 1997.
So what is non-force chiropractic?
How can you fix neck pain or headaches or back pain or sciatica or carpal tunnel syndrome?
Any of the things that chiropractors usually work on, how can you do any of that without
manipulating the spine, without doing the traditional style of an adjustment?
The best way to understand this is to understand that most musculoskeletal pain, most physical
pain is caused by hypersensitive nerve endings and patterns of tension in muscles.
Hypersensitive nerve endings and patterns of tension in muscles.
That's what causes most physical pain.
That's what causes most neck pain and most back pain and most foot pain and shoulder
pain and headaches, et cetera.
So someone with low back pain, if you've ruled out a metabolic cause like kidney disease
or bone cancer or some injury to tissue in the back like a herniated disc or dislocation
or a fracture or a torn muscle, some kind of acute trauma, lacking those things, most
pain in the low back as elsewhere is caused by tension in muscles and hypersensitive nerve
endings.
So a lot of times you can't even feel this.
And I sometimes hesitate to say tight and instead say short muscles.
Your muscles become shorter and tighter.
If I say your muscles are tight, you assume that that means you can feel them.
You can feel muscles when they're tight.
But a lot of times you have tight muscles that you can't feel because they've just
gotten shorter and shorter over time.
You may notice that you have less range of motion, less flexibility than you used to.
That's what I'm talking about.
When you have less flexibility, that is due to a pattern of tension in muscles.
The muscles become shorter over time.
And therefore when you lose that flexibility, when you lose that range of motion, it becomes
much more easier, much more easy to traumatize that tissue, to create little micro tears
just through normal movements.
Never mind something like a full blown injury.
For example, a lot of people will herniated disc in their low back and the final straw
is just bending over to pick something up off the floor.
They drop their comb or their toothbrush and they throw their back out.
Well, that's not the full picture.
That low back was an accident waiting to happen for many, many years before someone actually
comes in.
So a lot of times the spot where you feel the pain is not where the pain is being caused.
And it could be a long distance away from that.
For example, really tight hamstring muscles on the back of your legs or even calf, tight
calf muscles can cause low back pain.
And the hamstrings and the calf muscles aren't even directly attached to your low back.
The hip rotator muscles, which are less familiar to most people, but these are muscles in the
upper gluteal area that enable you to turn your foot out like a ballerina turning their
foot out or a soccer player use these muscles.
Most of the time we walk around, we're not turning our feet in and out that much, just
bending the knees like an engine walking forward and back.
But these hip and sitting in chairs, people say, well, how did I get this way?
How did these muscles end up short and tight without me even being aware of it until they
got bad enough to cause the pain?
All you need to do to develop patterns of tension in the hip rotators and the hamstrings
and the quadriceps, all the muscles mainly in your hips and your legs are the ones that
mainly cause low back pain.
For example, all you have to do for those muscles to become tighter and tighter over
time is sit in chairs.
Anybody out there sitting in a chair right now?
Anybody out there spend the majority of their day sitting in a car or sitting in front of
a computer or sitting and reading somewhere?
Throughout much of the world, people don't sit in chairs.
They sit on the floor.
People that sit on the floor in countries in Asia and elsewhere and get up and down
off the floor several times a day, they don't get tight hip rotators and tight hamstrings
and some of these other tight muscles that cause this pain, this situation, this pattern
of tension that builds up that causes low back pain.
So if you have patterns of tension like that, you will eventually develop tension in the
joints and that's what traditional chiropractic is looking for first, mainly is tension in
the joints.
So if you find a tight spot, a tight joint in your spine and mobilize it with an adjustment,
immediately that tension is freed up and you get a little hit of endorphins and it feels
amazing.
And you know, there's nothing wrong with traditional chiropractic.
I tell people I get a lot of patients who come to me who've been to other chiropractors
and I always tell them, you know, it's good that you were getting adjusted because after
examining their low back, it's clear it's been tight for a long time.
If they hadn't been getting some kind of an adjustment or massage or some other kind of
treatment, it would be even worse because you know, you would have developed worse arthritis.
You know, arthritis and the spine especially is the result of lack of movement in those
joints.
That's the main cause and trauma, you know, mild traumas.
If you had injuries that happens, but even when you have a fall slip and fall, you get
in a car accident or any kind of injury where you know that, Hey, I just did this and it
hurt my back.
The part of your back that ends up injured is the part that's already an accident waiting
to happen.
That's the part that's already overloaded by these short tight muscles, by these patterns
of tension that have built up over usually many, many years, if not decades before you
first feel the pain.
So you ask, how can I fix something that's been there for years or decades, something
that's really stuck and really tight without applying some kind of force, without doing
a traditional adjustment, without manipulating the spine or doing some kind of deep tissue
massage or physical therapy or something like that?
Well, the best way to understand that is to understand how your brain and your nervous
system control all those muscles and what's interfering with keeping them supple and loose
and flexible and relaxed the way they would like to be.
And so the best way to understand that is all the nerves that control every muscle in
your body start out in your brain and then pass down through the brain stem through a
little hole in the base of your skull, which then forms the spinal cord, which travels
down the center of your spine all the way down to your tailbone.
And then all of the rest of the nerves branch to the rest of your body, branch off from
the spinal cord, all the nerves in your arm, upper extremity, all the way down to your
fingertips, branch off of the spinal cord and your neck, all the nerves to your legs
and all the way down to your feet, branch off the spinal cord in the base of the spine,
near the bottom of the low back and the between your hips and all the nerves to the major
organs from the vertebra in the middle.
So the cervical spine is your neck, the thoracic spine is your middle back, your lumbar spine,
your low back, and then the sacrum, pelvis, et cetera.
So these, this tissue, this brain and spinal cord, the central nervous system is surrounded
by it's very delicate.
If you remove the brain, I show this to people when somebody comes into my office and I explain
this, I open Grey's Anatomy and show them a picture of a human brain and spinal cord
that's been removed from the body.
And it, you know, it's about the consistency of jello or overcooked pasta.
It's very delicate.
So you could easily just pinch the spinal cord anywhere along its length or right where
it attaches to the brain and cut it off.
And if you'd become paralyzed if you did that.
So the brain and the spinal cord are very well protected.
The brain is completely surrounded by the skull, by a bony container called the skull
that protects it.
And the spinal cord is completely surrounded by the spine, which is essentially a tube
of bone cut up into 24 segments.
So you can move with some levers on the back for muscles to attach to.
And all that bone protects the delicate brain and spinal cord.
But in addition to all that bone, the brain and the spinal cord are also surrounded by
a fluid filled sack called the meninges.
It's the meninges plural because it's three layers that compose this sack and it's filled
with fluid called the cerebrospinal fluid.
So you've probably heard of a spinal tap.
That's where they remove some cerebrospinal fluid maybe to see if you have an infection.
If you've ever heard of an epidural, epidural means around the dura.
So that's an injection that goes right around that sack to block pain, which is a common
thing in people with low back pain or during pregnancy.
And sometimes they even inject pain medication directly into that cerebrospinal fluid in
severe cases too, which is called a nerve block.
So that sack protects the delicate brain and spinal cord inside the skull and the spine.
And then once the nerves exit the spine, then they're surrounded by a thick layer of connective
tissue of their own that protects them.
So the communication between your brain and all those muscles happens through the spine.
And that's why if there's any area of your spine that's creating pressure, and it's often
not even really pressure.
The idea of a pinched nerve is a simple way of explaining things to somebody that's sort
of easy to grasp, but it's really not, it's rarely what happens.
Rarely is the pressure so severe that pinching is an accurate term.
It's more just rubbing.
It's just a slight pressure.
All it takes is a little bit of pressure on a nerve where it exits the spine to create
pain in your shoulder or in your neck from nerves that are exiting the spine in your
neck or pain in your low back or glutes or down the back of your leg, sciatica from pressure
of the nerves exiting your spine there.
And that pressure can be from, in a worst case scenario, a herniated disc or a dislocation
or a fracture.
Nerves and fractures are pretty rare in the spine.
Herniated discs are pretty common, but it's much more common than that.
Take sciatica for example.
The nerve that goes down the back of your leg, it's a big bundle of nerves that's formed
by several nerve roots at the base of your spine.
So just imagine those nerve roots exiting the base of your spine on either side in the
sacrum area, the low back, the bone that your two hip bones connect to.
Several little nerve roots are connecting back up and forming a bundle that forms this
thick cable.
It's about a half inch thick called the sciatic nerve.
And that goes down the back of your leg and every muscle and every sensation in the back
of your leg and from the knee down, front, the whole leg from the knee down and your
foot, toes, everything are all innervated.
They're all the nerves too.
All of those parts of the leg and foot are from branches of this sciatic nerve.
Well, that nerve can be irritated where it originates in the spinal cord.
If you have a herniated disc, that's a common cause of sciatica or any pain, numbness, tingling,
burning, shooting down your leg all the way down to your toes.
It might just be in your toe.
It might just be just a pain in a few of your toes or numbness or tingling or burning that's
caused by pressure where those nerves originate in the spine and your low back.
And that could be caused by a bulging disc.
It may not even be fully herniated.
It might just be have some micro tearing that's creating a bulge.
But again, this isn't really pinching the nerve necessarily.
It's just rubbing on it a little bit, irritating it all the time.
And that's why the pain can come and go.
Well, the sciatic nerve after branching off from several levels of the nerve roots that
exit the low back also goes through some of these hip rotator muscles in the glute area
called the piriformis and the gluteus minimus and medius.
The gluteus maximus, most people know that one, that's the big butt muscle.
But there are some smaller glutes underneath that one and another hip rotator called the
piriformis.
And these muscles, the sciatic nerve goes right under the piriformis.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley presenting to you safe, effective natural solutions for almost any
health challenge.
And the focus of today's talk is non-force chiropractic and specifically low back.
We've been talking about some of the causes of low back pain and in a little bit I'm going
to present a couple of cases of some really bad disc herniations that I was able to help.
But right now we're going to get back to the hip rotator muscles that press on the sciatic
nerve.
So these muscles in the upper glute area can irritate the sciatic nerve.
And a lot of times people think they might have something really bad.
So for example, I've had patients come in who have had an MRI and they have a bulging
disc or two or three bulging discs in their back and they're told they may need surgery
or sometimes they've already been told they absolutely must have surgery.
Sometimes they're scheduled for surgery and I check them and find out that they've also
got, they do have a herniated disc, but they've also got a tremendous amount of tension in
these muscles that are irritating the sciatic nerve in the gluteal area.
And when I relieve that tension, it takes the pressure off the sciatic nerve and the
sciatica goes away.
So a lot of times many, many people have bulging discs that don't cause a problem at all, especially
if it's in the lumbar spine, the low back.
They've lined up nurses back in the days when MRI machines were first coming out, they would
line up hospital staff and just do MRIs on everybody because MRIs have no radiation,
no side effects.
They've already paid for the machine and just see how many people have disc herniations,
whether they have low back pain or not.
And two thirds of everyone they do MRIs on have a bulging disc somewhere in their low
back.
And that's usually not the cause of the problem.
It's usually doesn't cause any pain at all or any symptoms.
It's not even necessarily dangerous if it's a really small bulge, especially if you get
a more complete exam and identify patterns of tension in the muscles, which are not your
back muscles, but muscles in your hips and your thighs and your legs.
Those are the muscles that are actually overloading and creating most of the stress on your low
back and causing the discs to bulge in the first place.
And there's a couple of muscles in the back.
There's also a psoas muscle, which I could do a whole show on that pinches your spine,
one of the core muscles that often goes unidentified.
A lot of doctors never check that muscle either.
But the point is, if you identify these patterns of tension in the hip rotators and the hamstrings
and the quads and glutes and calves and then develop a strategy to release the tension
from those muscles, then the problem is much more likely to the correction of that.
That style of correction is likely to last much longer than if, say, you just had a deep
tissue massage or traditional adjustment.
Again, both wonderful things, temporary relief.
But if you can get your brain to reverse this pattern of tension, to release this pattern
of tension that's been built up in the muscles that are constantly stressing some part of
your body 24-7, even while you're sleeping a lot of times, then that's a much more lasting
solution.
So that's why I choose to not do traditional adjusting.
I used to.
Everybody, we were taught it in school.
It's actually really fun to crack necks and twist backs.
It's very satisfying, the little popping sound every once in a while.
My patients who have been to other chiropractors and are getting great results with non-force
chiropractic, sometimes they'll come in a couple of months later and say, you know what?
It just feels like if I could just get a little crack right here, that would fix that.
And I say, all right, we're going to do the non-force work we always do first.
And if there's anything left to crack there, we'll do it.
And of course, there never is.
It released the tension in the muscles.
If you can reconnect your brain to your back, then you no longer feel like you need a crack.
I'm a little proud of that one.
I wrote that a long time ago, and I'd kind of forgotten about it until just now.
If you can reconnect your brain to your back, you'll never feel the need for a crack.
So one of the great things about using non-force methods is I actually can do things that some
traditional chiropractors can't.
If you have a really bad herniated disc and you're scheduled for surgery because your
whole leg is numb or you've lost muscle mass, you have obvious severe pressure on a nerve
somewhere, you can't crack that spine.
You can't do a traditional adjustment on that low back.
And I actually have chiropractors, traditional chiropractors that refer patients like that
to me because they know they can't do a regular adjustment on them anymore.
And I've had several patients like that that were scheduled for surgery.
And I look at their MRIs and I tell them, yeah, that's pretty bad.
You're probably going to need the surgery.
Well here's an example.
I had a man come to me who had a seven millimeter disc herniation in his neck.
That's really, really bad.
A seven millimeter disc herniation is bad in your low back.
Well, the discs in your neck are much smaller.
This thing was sticking out into the canal, definitely pressing on his nerves.
He had pain, severe pain in his neck all the way down his arm.
He couldn't, he lost strength in his arm, in his hand.
He couldn't, he couldn't hold a pencil.
He couldn't write.
He couldn't squeeze anything with his hand.
He was, you know, a lot of significant loss of muscle strength, pain and numbness.
And I told him, you're definitely going to need the surgery.
But guess what?
They usually schedule these surgeries a couple of months out.
So you definitely have to have the surgery, but no hurry.
We'll get you in in a couple of months.
Have you ever heard that before when you try to make an appointment with a specialist?
So anyway, he's not scheduled for surgery for something like six to eight weeks.
And I examined him and the segment that had this herniated disc was the second to last
one in his neck.
C6, there's six to seven vertebrae in the neck is the second to last one in his neck.
And so C7 and T1, T2, three, four, five, six, the next six or seven vertebra below the damaged
disc were, it felt like they were almost fused.
There was no movement in them at all.
So I told him, if you don't get this area loosened up, even if you have the surgery,
you're not going to have a very good outcome because this, this is, this is so tight.
That's why this last segment that could move gave, finally gave out because nothing else
is moving.
It was overloading this tissue and that's why you got this herniated disc here.
So I recommend that we work on this, mainly this middle back of yours and get it loosened
up so that when it comes time to do the surgery, you'll have a better outcome.
It'll be less likely that the surgery won't give you the relief that you need.
And we did that.
And I worked on his back for about three weeks and I never touched, I didn't touch the herniated
segment C6.
I didn't touch the vertebra below that or the one below.
I stayed two segments away from that disc and all I was doing, he's laying on his back
and I'm just lifting these tight spots in his middle back up and holding in a way that
sends feedback to the brain so they can figure out how to release that tension.
Well, I did that for about three weeks and he started to gain strength back in his hand
and the pain in his neck was gone by half.
Well around six weeks, whenever his surgery was scheduled, he was like 50% better.
He had gained almost all of the strength back in his hand and his pain was like a quarter
of what it had been.
And he went back and saw the surgeon and the surgeon said, yeah, well, if you're doing
that well, let's hold off on the surgery.
So about three months later, he's got no pain, full strength back in his hand and it's like
he's almost as good as new.
He's still just got a little stiffness in his neck and he knows he needs to be careful.
And this was a man in his 30s.
And he was otherwise, you know, in pretty good shape.
But I told him, I said, I have no idea how you've recovered this well.
There's no way that disc herniation is gone.
We've just gotten enough pressure off that it's not rubbing on those nerves and causing
the nerve symptoms anymore.
And we've relieved the tension from your middle back so it's not overloading that tissue and
the disc is healing.
But there's no way that bulge is completely gone.
It's just shrunk enough, apparently, based on physical findings alone to not press on
the nerves anymore.
So I was, I was, I literally, I begged him to, you know, go to his doctor or come up
with the cash himself so that I could order a follow up MRI so we could see what that
disc looked like.
But he just, he said, I'm, I'm good.
I feel fine.
He was driving to me from like an hour and a half away.
And so anyway, I never got to see a follow up MRI on next week's show.
I will present another case of really severe disc herniation where I have a series of MRIs
that chart the fact that we were able to reduce the disc herniation or reduce the bulge in
the disc with the type of treatment I'm talking about.
But anyway, this guy was fine.
I just told him to be careful.
Maybe six months, eight months later, he came in and he'd hurt his neck.
He stopped coming all together.
I hope I think he kept doing his stretches.
But anyway, he came back in about six months later and he'd been playing with a niece or
a nephew or some kid, some small child holding him up, arms outstretched, holding him up
in the air.
You know, that, that kind of movement can really irritate your neck and he'd re-injured
it a little bit.
And even then we just, you know, did the same thing, worked on him again, got him back on
his stretching and got him in coming in once a month for a little, for a little while.
And that was several years ago and he's, he's still feeling fine.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley sharing with you safe, effective natural solutions to almost any
health challenge.
Always remember the health of your body is more important than the name of any disease
that you've been diagnosed with.
Do something to be healthier this weekend than you were last weekend.
Please review last week's episode, all of the prior podcasts are available on my website
at Dr. Binkley or the website is BinkleyHealingCenter.com.
You can find past episodes of all these shows there.
Last week I talked about all the reasons you really should try and avoid eating too much
sugar.
Yes, even right now during the holidays, it's sugar is really, really bad for you and it
causes a whole host of health problems, which I detailed in last week's episode.
So eat a little fat and healthy protein before you go to those parties, some olives, some
chicken, something to fill you up before you're tempted with all that sugar and plan to go
for a 30 to 45 minute walk afterwards.
Thank you for tuning in.
Have a very Merry Christmas.
I look forward to speaking with you right here on KDAR next week at 4 PM.
You've been listening to safe, effective natural solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
Dr. Binkley at BinkleyHealingCenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 PM for safe, effective natural solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.