Oklahoma City chiropractor, chiropractor in Oklahoma City,

Chiropractic FAQ

How does chiropractic care work?

Chiropractic helps to remove postural imbalances and structural misalignments that can accumulate in our bodies over time. Our spines change and develop problems just like our teeth, eyes and heart. Left unchecked, these changes may lead to pain, stiffness or other more serious problems.

The nervous system is a key part of your body. It is the communication system between your brain and all of your body's muscles, organs and tissues. For your body to remain healthy, your nervous system must function well. For your nervous system to function well, it must be free of interference. The spine is the most common site of nervous interference because nerves travel from the spinal cord through openings on either side of the spine to get to all of your cells and organs.

Each of us is born with the ability to heal and recover from illness. Our bruises heal, cuts mend and common colds are overcome. Your nervous system regulates this inborn healing ability.

Think of your brain as a central command post sending and receiving information through telephone wires (your nerves), which branch out to connect all areas of a city (your body). A short circuit in a wire cuts off communication just like misalignments in your spine can put pressure on the nerves. This pressure interferes with your nervous system, affects your ability to self-heal and may prolong injury or illness.

The customized care you receive from your chiropractor can help to improve your posture, muscle balance and mobility. It can also restore the integrity of your nervous system and get rid of pain quickly, so you can get back to feeling good today!

Is chiropractic effective?
Yes. Chiropractic care is safe and effective. Scientific evidence proving that chiropractic care works is overwhelming. Over the past 20 years, many controlled and independent research studies have shown again and again that chiropractic care is safe and effective for treating low back pain, neck pain, headaches and other conditions relating to the spine. Based on these scientific studies, the consensus is that chiropractic care is the treatment of choice for most spinal problems. The extent to which a person can benefit from care varies depending on their problem and how long it has existed.

Do many people see chiropractors?
The non-surgical, drug-free healing nature of chiropractic provides benefit to the health of millions of other people worldwide each year. Most chiropractic patients experience real relief and improved general well being, and continue to make regular visits a part of their healthy lifestyle choice.

Why should I see a Chiropractor?
From professional athletes to homemakers, engineers to electricians, young people to seniors, chiropractic care has been the answer to optimum health. Many people see a chiropractor for back, neck or other joint problems. Still others find that regular visits to their chiropractor keep them in peak condition.

Regularly a dentist checks our teeth, an optometrist checks our eyes and a doctor checks our blood pressure and heart. Yet, we take the spine - a crucial component of our body - for granted. Call your family's chiropractor today because regular checkups of your spine can help you maintain better health.

What is Subluxation?
A subluxation - short for Vertebral Subluxation Complex (VSC) - is an abnormal condition commonly involving several vertebrae. It occurs when vertebrae in your spine lose their normal position and/or motion.

Subluxations most often occur in response to the daily stresses placed on our bodies. Common things such as emotional stress, poor posture from sitting in front of a computer or standing at a workstation for a long time may lead to subluxations. Car accidents, improper lifting or work injuries are other common causes of VSC.

Many health problems, including subluxations, are subtle in the early stages of development. In the same way that a cavity or heart problem can be overlooked before causing pain or other warning signs, a spinal problem may develop and exist for years before causing difficulties.

To detect the possible onset of a VSC, your chiropractor will conduct a thorough examination, including a detailed history, orthopaedic, neurological and postural evaluations, and possibly an X-ray (radiographs) if he or she deems these to be necessary to fully assess your condition.

Your chiropractor is uniquely qualified to recognize and diagnose spine related injuries. He or she is the only Doctor with specialized training to correct spinal problems and their multiple effects.

What is a chiropractic adjustment? Is it safe?
An adjustment is the main method of treatment used by your chiropractor. It is a specialized, controlled and safe pressure applied to your spine to restore the proper motion and position of your vertebrae. It is a precise procedure that your highly skilled chiropractor has learned and perfected over years of training at a Chiropractic College and in clinical practice.

Every health procedure, from taking aspirin to giving blood, involves a level of risk. Chiropractic adjustments are among the safest of all health care interventions because they are non-surgical, drug-free and present an extremely low risk. And they work!

What can I expect from my visit to a chiropractor?
As a licensed practitioner, it is the duty of your chiropractor to do the following:

-- A thorough review of your specific problem is conducted, including relevant past history and overall health.
--You will be asked to perform physical tests and movements to help identify the problem.
--In certain situations, an X-ray may be used to confirm the history and examination findings and to investigate for the presence of any underlying bone conditions or pathological developments.
--A diagnosis is made, with treatment options for its resolution outlined. If it is, a plan of treatment is communicated. If it is not a chiropractic problem, an appropriate referral is arranged.
--A prognosis is made, taking into account your general health habits, occupation, stress and activity levels.
--Your response to treatment is monitored by your chiropractor, who looks for an improvement to your specific condition, as well as for changes in your overall health. Two of the basic components of chiropractic care are wellness and prevention. Utilization of exercises, along with nutrition and lifestyle modifications may also be suggested to improve your overall well-being and promote active, patient-centered care.

What results can I expect from treatment?
That depends on your condition. The length of time you have had the problem, your age and the degree of your disability all affect the length of your treatment. Your Doctor of Chiropractic should be able to give you an estimate of the extent of relief you should receive from the recommended treatment and how long you can expect it to last. One of the main reasons people choose chiropractic is that they often get quick results. Individual cases vary and chronic conditions obviously need more treatment. However, Workers' Compensation Board studies show that people with low back pain return to work much faster with chiropractic care.

How long do Doctors of Chiropractic go to school?
Today's graduating Doctors of Chiropractic have studied and trained in a post-secondary college or university for at least seven years. Just like medical or dental students, they must first complete undergraduate study before applying for admission to a chiropractic college.

Becoming a chiropractor is a demanding and highly rewarding path that includes a minimum of 4,500 hours of intense academic study including classroom learning, clinical science and internship training. During the course of their training, he/she will have studied the following three areas:

-- Basic sciences, including anatomy, physiology, pathology (the study of diseases), biochemistry, clinical sciences, X-ray interpretation and differential diagnosis.
-- Training in the philosophy and practice of chiropractic.
-- Clinical internship with emphasis on hands-on practice.
Your chiropractor is a primary contact provider just like your family physician, optometrist or dentist. You do not need a referral from your medical doctor to see a chiropractor.

WHAT IS NUTRITIONAL THERAPY?
Simply put, Nutritional Therapy is use of whole foods and whole foods concentrated to clinical potencies to restore and maintain health.

WHAT MAKES NUTRITIONAL THERAPY DIFFERENT THAN DIETS AND VITAMINS I CAN GET JUST ABOUT ANYWHERE?
In the first place, the doctors in this office are experts in the use of whole foods and whole foods concentrated to clinical potency and in the management of your return to health. In the second place, Nutritional Therapy uses these whole foods and whole foods concentrated to clinical potency which are specially designed to enable your doctor and you to achieve your health goals.

WHAT ARE SOME CONDITIONS THAT HAVE BEEN TREATED WITH NUTRITIONAL THERAPY?
The answer to that question is just about everything. The body has a great ability to heal when given the chance to do so. Many times all the body needs to make health cells - - to build its health - - is the right ingredients, the right Nutritional Therapy!

SOME OF THE CONDITIONS THAT OFTEN RESPOND TO NUTRITIONAL THERAPY:

BALANCE = HEALTH
IMBALANCE LEADS TO DISEASE

HOW DOES DISEASE OR IMBALANCE BEGIN?
The body has to have whole nutrients to maintain health balance and functional health. Unless all of the required elements are available and able to be assimilated, body chemistry imbalance results and disease begins to set in.

HOW DO I KNOW IF I HAVE AN IMBALANCE IN MY BODY CHEMISTRY?
Symptoms are nature’s way of communicating what the body needs for health. Symptoms often occur in patterns. If you are having symptoms in recurring patterns, you may have an imbalance in your body chemistry and a disease process may be developing now.

WHEN I TAKE MEDICATIONS MY SYMPTOMS GO AWAY. DOES THAT MEAN THAT MY IMBALANCE IS GONE TOO?
Medications can alter bodily functions, but they do not build up the stores of whole nutrients necessary to maintain the body’s health. Medications usually only mask the symptoms, while the condition of bio-chemical imbalance continues and the disease process works deeper into the body’s systems.

A balanced body chemistry means that all of the bodily functions are also balanced. Healing will be rapid. Sleep will be deep and restful. Your digestion will be proper, elimination complete. Balance, hearing, vision will al function properly. A balanced body chemistry also assists in your hormone functions and helps keep you feeling young and fresh. Your appetite will be moderate and your consumption based on your needs, neither will you overeat nor under eat.

Now that kind of health may sound like a miracle. You might say, “I could never feel that good.” But try to remember the last time you felt like that. One year, five years, 10, 15, 25, 45 years ago? Did you ever feel that good? If you did, you know it is possible to be that healthy. Many adults who enjoy balanced body chemistry say they feel like that now.

SYMPTOMS versus CAUSE

WHEN I TAKE ASPIRIN MY HEADACHES GO AWAY, BUT THEY COME BACK. WHY IS THAT?
It is treating the CAUSE that corrects a problem and eliminates the symptom. If the CAUSE of headaches were a need for more aspirin, then most of the headaches in the United States would be gone because most people take aspirin for their headaches.

Obviously aspirin does not treat the cause of anything. Few drugs or over-the-counter medications do. In fact many disease conditions are caused by medications. Because medication does not treat the cause, but may reduce the symptoms, treatment for the cause is often delayed while the underlying condition worsens. Besides, when symptoms are covered up by medications, the defense mechanisms of the body (that are triggered by the symptoms) do not come into play and the problem worsens.

Symptoms have had a bad rap for many years. When “modern science” came up with “miracle drugs” to suppress symptoms, we started looking at symptom patterns as bad. The fact is symptoms can be our friend. If we understand they are the outer reflection of an inner imbalance or a need of the body, then we will be more conservative when it comes to suppressing symptoms with chemicals.

Symptom patterns throughout the history of healing have been a main indicator for treatment. A wise physician might ask hundreds of questions in a patient interview to determine, along with the help of physical signs, what caused the disease, then through training and experience arrive at a treatment plan.

But symptoms are not a reliable gauge of the underlying cause once they have been suppressed or altered with chemicals that do not treat the cause.

DIAGNOSIS OF CAUSE

There are several successful methods for determining the cause of a health problem. Here are a few:

1. Questionnaires
2. Tissue samples – Blood, Saliva, Urine, Hair
3. Imaging, X-Rays, MRI’s, etc.
4. Clinical Experience

Here are brief explanations of each of them:

1. Questionnaires
As mentioned in the symptoms section, symptom patterns have been used for thousands of years to determine the state of the body’s chemistry. Your doctor may have you answer extensive questionnaires designed to help her or him find the cause of your problem. Such questionnaires usually group symptoms by organ or glandular systems.

Often your Nutritional Therapy doctor can combine your answers with other information – including vital signs – and through clinical experience make the correct recommendation for your Nutritional Therapy.

At a later date, the patient can answer a second questionnaire, which the doctor compares with the first questionnaire’s symptom pattern. Then the doctor can make further recommendations until the desired level of health is achieved, followed by a maintenance dosage of key supplements.

2. Tissue samples – Blood, Saliva, Urine, Hair
Various tissue samples may be collected by your doctor for the purpose of analyzing the result of your body’s chemistry. Blood and other bodily fluids are made up of the products of metabolism.

If there is a dysfunction of an organ or glandular system, the normal bodily fluids will not be found upon examination. A doctor trained to evaluate these various tissues for biochemical balance will use the experience of thousands of other cases with similar laboratory findings. The Nutritional Therapy that benefited those cases will be recommended for your case. Computer analysis is often utilized to better consider all of the variables.

3. Reflex Analysis
Although now composed of billions of cells, the body was at one time just one cell in your mother’s womb. As the differentiation of the cells progressed and finally developed into a complete person, these parts of the original one cell continued to maintain relationships in their differentiated parts.

In other words that part of the one cell that became your pancreas, (for example) also became part of your arms, legs, abdomen, cranium, hands, feet and so on. That is why some highly trained doctors can touch one place on your body and know if another part is healthy or not.

The Chinese, Ayurvedic, Persian, Greek and many Aboriginal societies have highly developed reflex analysis methods. Perhaps the most well known is the Chinese acupuncture meridian system. Using such reflex analysis systems, the doctor evaluates functions of the patient’s organs and glands.

Then with this knowledge and drawing on thousands of similar cases for thousands of years back, the doctor gives a balancing substance designed to restore the patient’s health.

In the United States many reflex systems have been developed over the past 70 years. De Jarnette, Rees, Bennett, Goodheart and Versendaal are all doctors who have already moved the reflex analysis into the 21st century with their extensive research. Your doctor may use one or all of these reflex analysis systems to determine which organ or glandular system is the cause of your condition.

4. Clinical Experience
Clinical experience encompasses all of the previously mentioned methods of determining a patient’s needs. In honing a doctor’s diagnostic skills there is no substitute for clinical experience. After observing hundreds and hundreds of cases respond to Nutritional Therapy, a doctor soon gathers skills for determining what is best for most conditions. Also, today many great doctors write books, lecture, and produce videotapes so we can all gain from their experience. That way the clinical experience curve is much sharper and there are many more wise doctors than there used to be.

WHOLE FOODS CONCENTRATED TO CLINICAL POTENCY
SYNTHETIC versus WHOLE FOOD VITAMIN COMPLEXES

Dr. Royal Lee, a visionary of whole food concentrates, stated many times that there is no way a synthetic vitamin could do the same job as a whole food concentrate complex of vitamins. Synthetic vitamins can alter function but they cannot support function. This was proved many times by early researchers in the nutritional field when animal experiments showed that the test animals could not live on bleached and synthetically enriched products. Today this makes even more sense. One of the many experiments of that time was published in the “Vitamin News,” November 1940, where cells, whose growth like ours need B1 vitamins, were used to test the difference between whole food concentrates, synthetic crystal B and no support nutritionally at all.

As you can see the growth of cells supported with whole food concentrates was much greater than with the synthetic vitamin. Dr. Lee stated, “The natural vitamin complexes contain the various closely related principles that are normally found together in foods. The more we study those complexes, the more complex they appear. That is why synthetic and chemically purified ‘vitamins’ are really not vitamins at all. They are only fragments of vitamins.”

Dr. Lee goes on to say, “Vitamin deficiencies are now becoming recognized as specialized forms of starvation. Even overweight persons getting their full quota of calories, carbohydrates, fats and proteins, are very often starving to the danger point of disease from vitamin deficiencies.”

WHY TREAT A STARVATION DISEASE WITH A DRUG? WHY USE CHEMICALLY PURE CRYSTALLINE POWDERS CALLED VITAMINS TO TREAT DISEASE FROM STARVATION WHEN WE CAN USE WHOLE FOODS CONCENTRATED TO CLINICAL POTENCIES?
There is no reason if you can get quality food sources for the products.

Healing the body has a priority system. Before trying allopathic methods, first try whole foods, and then whole foods concentrated to clinical potency, then herbs, then homeopathy, and then synthetic products.

The reason is this: The body was created to receive its life force from the assimilation of nutrients both known and unknown from whole foods. So this is the first method of balancing body chemistry. After this dietary step is taken, then the remaining imbalance of the body is best treated with whole foods concentrated to clinical potency. Because so many diseases are due to those two issues alone, millions of people would be healed by just those two steps. Those people who continue to develop symptoms would then best be treated by herbs and homeopathic remedies. (See “Homeopathy and the 21st Century,” Dana Ullman). Synthetic vitamins are the last resort of the so-called alternative methods. That’s because high dosage vitamin therapy covers up symptoms and can also create imbalance in the body’s chemistry due to their action that leaches essential micronutrients out of the body’s storehouse.

ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS TO HEALTH

Chemicals in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, and food additives as well as products of internal combustion engines also have known effects negative for your health. Many people are suffering from disease due to these effects. Removal of these hazards from our external and internal environment is the answer. But until that happens, there are whole foods concentrates known to reduce hazardous buildups in your system.

ONCE YOU HAVE BEGUN YOUR NUTRITIONAL THERAPY

WHY DO I HAVE TO TAKE SO MANY SUPPLEMENTS?
Clinical experience has shown that the body requires high dosages in the beginning of treatment to replace the missing health factors.

AS I FEEL BETTER SHOULD I TAKE LESS SUPPLEMENTS?
Reducing the recommended dosage may slow down your progress. If your goal were to drive your car 100 miles and you travel at 50 miles per hour, when you got halfway there should you reduce your speed to 25 m.p.h. or go FULL SPEED AHEAD at 50 m.p.h.?

CAN I CONTINUE TO TAKE MY HEALTH FOOD OR DRUG STORE VITAMINS WHILE I AM ON THE NUTRITIONAL THERAPY?
It is best to stop taking synthetic vitamins as they often mask symptoms and do not always correct the deficiency.

NUTRITIONAL THERAPY FROM HEAD TO TOE

On the following pages you will find the results of actual cases treated with Whole Foods Concentrated to Clinical Potency. Some of the responses may surprise you. You will probably find symptom patterns similar to your own, a family member or a suffering friend. It will be your job to give that suffering person this book and to refer them to the doctor’s office where you got it.

This is how we can all join together to make this a better world. By each person getting healthier the world will be a better place to live. So here we go. Patients Speak about Nutritional Therapy from HEAD to TOE.