The Back to Health Chiropractic Podcast

By: Dr. Marc Dupuis Board Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician and an Inter
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  • The Back to Health Chiropractic Podcast, with your host, Dr. Marc Dupuis, board certified chiropractic sports physician: Where we discuss tools & strategies to improve the health & wellness of you and your family!
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Alternative & Complementary Medicine Hygiene & Healthy Living
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Episodes
  • Unnecessary Surgery and the Watch Analogy

    Unnecessary Surgery and the Watch Analogy
    Aug 27 2023
    Unnecessary Surgeries + The Watch Analogy The Green Book Series Today I want to apply some common sense, straight line thinking to a problem that is plaguing all “health care systems” worldwide, especially here in the United States.  That problem is unnecessary surgeries.   This has been an issue for over a century!  Dr. BJ Palmer, the world’s most pioneering chiropractor wrote about this for years.  Sadly, his warnings about this topic have fallen on deaf ears as the prevalence, cost and damage to patients done by unnecessary surgeries has skyrocketed!  Nevertheless, his words of wisdom are as prescient today as they were back then which is why I would like to share them with you today! But first, let’s add some context to this discussion.  This is an excerpt from the International journal of clinical practice in 2014: “US health care expenditures per capita far exceeds that of ANY other nation in the WORLD.  Indeed, over the last 15 years, the USA has distantly surpassed most countries in the developed world in total healthcare expenditures per capita with the USA now spending over 17.4% of its gross domestic product on health care ($7960 per capita) compared with only 8.5% of GDP in Japan ($2878 per capita) a distant second.  Such spending growth rates are unsustainable, and the system would soon go broke if not corrected.  The drivers of these spending growth rates in US healthcare are several and varied.  In September of 2012, the Institute of Medicine reported that US healthcare squandered over $750 billion in 2009 through UNNEEDED care.”  Now, with all that spending, surely we have the best outcomes right?..... WRONG, dead wrong in fact.  A 2022 report by The Common Wealth Fund revealed we rank 38th in the world in life expectancy, which is LAST for all major developed nations, there are 3rd world countries with higher life expectancies!  If that was not bad enough, did you know of all countries in 2020, The United States possessed the HIGHEST infant mortality rate which is markedly higher than Norway which was the top country in the world for having the lowest infant mortality rate.  This was reported in The American Journal of Managed Care in January of THIS year, 2023.  This is from the Journal Patient Safety In Surgery in 2017 Title, “Why do surgeons continue to perform unnecessary surgery?” Please listen very closely, what you are about to learn will likely be quite shocking.. “This unrecognized problem has escalated so far that medical errors currently rank as THE 3RD leading cause of death in the United States. Strikingly, in the 21st century, we still have to come to terms with the absurd reality that it is significantly safer to board a commercial airplane, a spacecraft, or a nuclear submarine, than to be admitted to a US hospital!” Let me repeat, medical errors account for the 3RD leading cause of death in the US, over 440,000 people die in the US per year!  Shouldn’t that be a headline on the news??  Keep in mind that data is from 2013, all indications suggest the current number of deaths caused by medical errors are EVEN higher!  Many of those deaths are due directly or are related to complications from unnecessary surgeries.  What is unnecessary surgery?  They define it as follows: “Any surgical intervention that is either not needed, not indicated, or not in the patient’s best interest when weighted against other available options, including conservative measures.”  That last part is extremely important, they included conservative measures being something that should be done if it can benefit the patient over surgery.  Chiropractic is such a measure, which in many cases should be used first BEFORE resorting to surgery.  Notice I said in many cases.  Of course, there ARE TRUE surgical emergencies and a number of conditions where surgery IS what SHOULD be done.  In these instances, surgery can be absolutely lifesaving and or life changing.  Thank god we have skilled surgeons & modern techniques for THOSE instances!  However, those true surgical cases are NOT our focus today.  Today’s focus is on unnecessary surgeries. If you are wondering: Just how many surgeries are performed in the US, each year, the numbers are  staggering: In the US there are 40-50 MILLION surgeries performed each year! According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly 16% of all surgeries may be unnecessary: that would mean in the US there are between 6.4 and 8 MILLION unnecessary surgeries performed each year! In 2020 In the US alone over 700,00 arthroscopic partial knee meniscectomies are performed every year.  Recently, a randomized, double-blind, sham controlled trial (highest level of evidence), revealed NO benefit for patients from the surgery at the 12 month follow up vs. those that did not have surgery. This study, The Finnish Degenerative Meniscal Lesion Study” certainly ruffled some feathers amongst the surgical ...
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    25 mins
  • Improvement in Autistic Behaviors Following Chiropractic Care: A Case Series

    Improvement in Autistic Behaviors Following Chiropractic Care: A Case Series
    Apr 24 2022
    Welcome to the Back to Health Chiropractic Podcast   I’m your host Dr. Marc Dupuis on this show we discuss tips, tools and strategies to improve the health & wellness of you and your family!   Today we are going to discuss a 2011 Case Series titled, Improvement in Autistic Behaviors Following Chiropractic Care.  This case series was published in the Journal Pediatric, Maternal & Family Health, in December of 2011. As many of you are all too well aware, the rate of Autism is rising at an extremely alarming rate.  In the United States, as of 2021, 1 in 44 children are being diagnosed with Autism!  In the 1990’s the rate was 2 out of 1000 children and in the 1980’s it was 10x’s less than that, just .1 - .4 children per 1000 were being  diagnosed with autism!   We need all hands on deck to tackle this massive health issue.  Today’s discussion is NOT focused on the likely causes of this massive increase, rather I want to focus on a case series that showed improvement in autistic behaviors following chiropractic care. As noted in the introduction in this paper, Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by abnormal social interactions and communication concurrent with repetitive behaviors and mannerisms. From the paper’s Abstract, Methods & Outcomes sections: Clinical Features: This case series involves two case studies.  Case one involves a 20-year old autistic male who displays aggressive behavior towards others.  Case two is a 17-year old autistic female who abuses herself.    Intervention and outcome: Both patients received a trial of chiropractic care for 5 and 4 months respectively with visit frequency of once per week.  Both patients responded favorably to chiropractic care with the male patient decreasing in aggressive behavior and the female patient decreasing in self-abuse and improved socialization.  For the case involving the male, he attended a total of 20 chiropractic visits and was adjusted using a low force Activator adjusting tool.  He began showing signs of improvement after his 4th adjustment that involved being more co-operative, having a longer attention span and he even began to watch tv which he had not previously done. For the case involving the female, she attended a total of 16 office visits and was adjusted using a combination of low force Activator tool adjustments and drop table adjustments.  She began to show signs of improvement after her third visit in the form of sleeping through the night, which was unusual and she demonstrated less self-abuse.    Conclusions: Each had favorable results after undergoing chiropractic care.  This case series provides supporting evidence that individuals with autism may benefit from chiropractic care.  More research is warranted in this area.  Now let's talk about the likely mechanisms behind chiropractic care and the results from this case series.  As we discussed recently in another neurodevelopmental disorder and chiropractic paper summary, the MAIN goal of chiropractic care is to improve brain-body, body-brain communication.  We do that by analyzing the spine for abnormally positioned or abnormally moving spinal segments, known as vertebral subluxations.  Vertebral subluxations are corrected by specific chiropractic adjustments. Because vertebral subluxations, by the stress caused to the surrounding spinal cord and nerve roots, cause nervous system interference, it should make sense that correcting vertebral subluxations reduces nervous system interference and therefore could help those suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders.  I will cover the more technical aspects of exactly how this works but first; It is very important to note: people alway ask, does chiropractic cure this or can chiropractic fix so and so conditions?  The answer is no, chiropractic is designed to do one thing and one thing only: correct vertebral subluxations which enables the body to better do what it was designed to do!  Of course, by helping the body to better do what it is designed to do, this results in improved health & healing which explains why so many health challenges and perhaps why the two individuals with autism as described in this case series responded well to chiropractic care!   Now, to get technical about how chiropractic care improves brain-body, body-brain communication.  The authors describe one likely mechanisms of action: Recent research has demonstrated that spinal adjustments to vertebral subluxations can lead to neural plastic changes in the central nervous system (As demonstrated in the 2010 paper Haavik, Taylor, Holt, Murphy, Exploring the neuromodulatory effects of the vertebral subluxation and chiropractic care in the Chiropractic Journal of Australia).  Plastic changes in the brain can alter the way the brain synthesizes and releases neurotransmitters.  This may be significant as abnormal levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin have been found in individuals with ASD.  ...
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    9 mins
  • Autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder & Chiropractic: Literature Review

    Autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder & Chiropractic: Literature Review
    Apr 10 2022
    Autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder & Chiropractic: Literature Review Welcome to the Back to Health Chiropractic Podcast   I’m your host Dr. Marc Dupuis on this show we discuss tips, tools and strategies to improve the health & wellness of you and your family!   Today we are going to discuss a 2015 literature review, titled Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Chiropractic: A Systematic Review of the Literature.  This research review was published in the Journal Pediatric, Maternal & Family Health, in March of 2015. This topic is so important and timely since Neurodevelopmental disorders include some of the most challenging health issues facing children today, namely, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder).  The rates of ADD, ADHD and ASD are rising within the global population at an alarming rate, while treatments seem to be sadly lagging behind.  Therefore, any intervention, especially those that are non-invasive & safe that shows promise should be looked at closely.  Despite there being numerous pharmaceutical drugs on the market for these conditions, their results are mixed and side effects are often just as troubling as the conditions they are supposed to be addressing.   The Summary or Abstract of the review is as follows:The objective: To provide a comprehensive analysis of the current body of scientific literature regarding the chiropractic management of a wide variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. The Methods of the Review: A literature search was performed using PubMed, MANTIS, the Index to Chiropractic Literature, McCoy Press, Galileo, and ScienceDirect. Inclusion criteria consisted of full-text peer-reviewed articles written in English as they related to the efficacy of chiropractic management of neurodevelopmental disorders. The Results: 50 articles were selected.  The results were: 3 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT), 7 Reviews of Literature, 3 Case Series, 34 Case Studies and 3 Survey/Commentaries. The Conclusions: The majority of articles dealt specifically with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD)/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and were predominantly case studies. While we believe there is enough evidence to support the use of chiropractic with children who have been previously diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, especially ASD and ADD/ADHD, the chiropractic community should see this as a call to action to provide more research regarding neurodevelopmental disorders. Given that RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) are the gold standard of research, the authors acknowledged that although 3 RCTs supporting Chiropractic care for neurodevelopmental disorders is a great start, we need to fund additional research projects to build upon these initial studies.   Lets dive deeper into this research review.  Now, what does Chiropractic care have to do with neurodevelopmental disorders?  For those of you not familiar with HOW chiropractic actually works, the answer is quite simple.  The MAIN goal of chiropractic care is to improve brain-body, body-brain communication.  We do that by analyzing the spine for abnormally positioned or abnormally moving spinal segments, known as vertebral subluxations.  Vertebral subluxations are corrected by specific chiropractic adjustments. Because vertebral subluxations, by the stress caused to the surrounding spinal cord and nerve roots, cause nervous system interference, it should make sense that correcting vertebral subluxations reduces nervous system interference and therefore could help those suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders.    It is important to note: people alway ask, does chiropractic cure this or fix so and so conditions?  The answer is no, chiropractic’s purpose is Not to treat specific diseases, rather chiropractic’s purpose is to do one thing and one thing only: correct vertebral subluxations which enables the body to better do what it was designed to do!  Of course, by helping the body to better do what it is designed to do, this results in improved health & healing which explains why so many health challenges have responded to chiropractic care!  Getting back to this literature review the authors point out; “With rising incidences of various neurodevelopmental disorders, the likelihood of healthcare professionals encountering them as a presenting complaint in their clinics is just as likely to rise.  With chiropractors serving as portal of entry providers, it is also therefore likely that the practicing chiropractor will encounter such patients.   It is therefore important to understand the possible relationship between chiropractic care and neurodevelopmental disorders. The evidence presented within this literature review aims to demonstrate the plausibility of chiropractic care as an appropriate healthcare service utilized for neurodevelopmental disorders.  ...
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    9 mins

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