We’re coming in for a landing this time. That is, in our last installment we talked about health care from a forty thousand foot view. We looked at conservative vs. aggressive care, and how chiropractic fits in (hint: on the conservative side).
Today we’re going to head down to ground level and get more specific about the approach I use to treat my patients. As I mentioned before, the type of work a doctor performs is frequently motivated by his (or her) interests. I’m no different in that regard.
How Did I Get Here?
Perhaps it’s just best to start with where I came from.
While I had always been interested in the study of how the body works, I’m not sure I really knew that for a long time. Spare time in my teenage and college years was spent pouring over books on training for athletic endeavors.
I thought I just wanted to figure out how to compete and win. Really, what I wanted was to understand what happened to my body when I used a certain training technique, be it physical, mental, or nutritional. The competition was just a bonus.
Shortly after my undergraduate training, though, my vehicle for exploring my passion had a breakdown. I had an injury that wouldn’t go away. Training was suddenly not a possibility. Not without pain, anyway.
While I could still read and learn about the body, it just wasn’t the same to me without the first-hand experience. So, I looked for help to fix the problem.
Eighteen months, two MDs, and three physical therapists later, I was still in pain, unable to exercise. It was somewhere in there that I realized that most doctors really aren’t like the ones you see in the evening medical drama on TV, where a brilliant diagnosis is followed by a creative treatment.
My experience was that most doctors spent no more than about 5 minutes of their time, frequently not even laying a hand on me — much less performing a full physical examination — after which point they wrote a prescription for pain-killer or anti-inflammatory medication.
This didn’t help me. The pain might be better while on the med, but it did nothing to fix the cause. As a result the pain came right back once I stopped taking the medication.
My limited understanding led me to believe that the only doctors really looking into the cause of conditions were the researchers in laboratories, and even then they tended to spend their time on new medications to treat the symptoms of a problem once it had already started.
My frustrations became clear: What happened to interacting directly with a patient? What happened to figuring out how to prevent a problem before it occurred? If that wasn’t possible, what about correcting the original thing that caused the damage in the first place, making a medication that merely covered up the symptom irrelevant?
A New Approach
I didn’t have any answers. I just knew that the care I had received thus far was frustratingly inadequate.
By happenstance I was referred to a doctor who did things differently. He used a system that, at its essence, allowed him to ask my body “questions” to determine what was wrong.
It was a way of working that melded the inquisitive, perhaps more cerebral process of diagnosis with in-depth interaction with the patient. In addition to what he could derive from my history and his own intellect, he also incorporated what my body could tell him from the result of simple, sequential muscle tests.
Muscle tests? Yes.
Consider for a moment that a great number of the standard tests you experience in a doctor’s office are already muscle tests.
Stick out your tongue and say “ahh”? A muscle test (of the muscles that are controlled by your Vagus nerve).
Shining a penlight in your eyes? A muscle test. (The ones that open and close your pupils.)
Hitting your knee with a hammer to see if you’ll kick? A muscle test. (That one I’m guessing you knew already.)
What these muscle tests have in common is that in each case the doctor isn’t usually looking for a problem with the muscle itself, but rather with the nerve that supplies it. The muscle tested is merely a window to what is happening with your nervous system.
Your nervous system is aware of far more than what occupies your thoughts. Try simultaneously coordinating your blood pressure, how much blood to send to your skin on a cold day, the balance of hydrochloric acid in your stomach, and the tone in deep spinal muscles that keep you from folding over like a cold french fry, just for kicks.
Since your nervous system is your interface to the world on so many levels, conscious and subconscious, it makes sense to find creative ways to tease information out of it that might not have bubbled up to the top of your everyday worries.
Outside of your nervous system, it is certainly possible that there could be a problem with the muscle itself — the nerve is sending and receiving a signal just fine, thank you very much — in which case it would be the doctor’s job to direct treatment to the problem in that muscle appropriately.
What the doctor does is determined largely by the group of “answers” received from the tests performed, and his ability to direct treatment based upon the available information.
Fast Forward to Now
This, in essence, is the system I use now. The grouping of tests and treatments that I use every day, with every patient, is called Applied Kinesiology (AK).
The tests employed are used not as a replacement of, but in addition to, standard diagnostic tests you would find in most doctors’ offices: basic physical examination, orthopedic tests, blood tests, and the like.
AK, while taught to any practitioner with a license to diagnose (e.g. medical doctors, chiropractors, and osteopaths), works from the holistic foundation of chiropractic: that disease is caused by mechanical, chemical, and psychological stressors (see this article for more on that idea).
As such it draws together the core elements of many complementary approaches to treatment, providing an interdisciplinary approach to your health. This is true holistic care.
In other words, you don’t just do structural work on a problem because it’s the only thing you know how to do. This is the “to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail” approach.
If there is a nutritional aspect to the problem, it comes up in the system and we address it. The same goes for mental or emotional stress that might be impacting the condition.
This means that a well-rounded knowledge of how bodies really work is required. We don’t pretend to know everything. Referral to outside experts is common when the need arises.
The Bug, Caught
What happened to me? I got better. After almost two years of floundering around, within 6 weeks of beginning treatment with AK methods I was back training again.
By then, though, I had had a true peek through a window of how the body really operates. I wanted more. That led to me becoming a doctor.
It’s pretty much impossible to unmake that omelet. Once introduced to this form of care, you don’t want to go back to a more narrow, single minded way of looking at things.
Like a rich, complex, and delicious piece of cake, though, you can’t really enjoy the creation just by reading the recipe. You have to be willing to give it a try, take a bite, and see what you might have been missing.
I invite each of you to come in for a taste, and experience what truly integrated, holistic care is all about!