Are Chiropractors Really Bullsh*t? (Special Release: Podcast + BONUS Article!)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. It's not often that I release a special podcast episode on a Tuesday. But, yeah, I'm doing it because of this idea and controversy out there about whether or not chiropractors are really bull. And you're gonna find out in today's show. Now, here's the deal. Not only do you get an interview today on the podcast, but I am also releasing a very special article written to you by a friend of mine named Dr. Patrick Gentempo. And Patrick broke down this whole idea behind the chiropractic industry possibly being full of a bunch of quacks. Whether or not that's really true, whether or not the origin of chiropractic is steeped in quackery and a whole lot more. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Chiro not only are you going to get access to that article that Patrick wrote, you're going to get the ability to be able to leave your questions and your comments and weigh in on this whole controversy, but you'll also get the show notes for all of the things that Jason and I talk about in today's show as well, along with a link to the Joe Rogan podcast that set all of this off and a lot of other episodes that I've done related to the psy babe, the food babe, chiropractors, and plenty more. So check all this out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Chiropractic Cairo. No other commercials or anything for today's show. Just pure frigging content. All right, folks, enjoy. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, the current three causes of mortality in the United States in this order are heart disease, cancer, and pulmonary function. In the UK, it flips. Number one is cancer before heart disease. But the CDC leaves out ientrogenic death, but when they report the numbers, really. Third is ientrogenic death. Pulmonary is fourth. If you go back to the Arthur Schopenhauer quote of truth passes through three stages. We're in that violently, vehemently opposed phase. You're supposed to question authority. You're supposed to question standard practice.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And last week a podcaster and also a comedian, Joe Rogan, interviewed this woman who calls herself the Cy Babe Vet Entrements. I don't know if I pronounced her name quite correctly, but anyways he interviewed her about this juicy, controversial, attention grabbing article that she wrote for this website called the Outline. And the article was called Chiropractors Are Bull. And don't get me wrong, this cybabe gal has some interesting ideas and I appreciate her willingness to question some of the more radical aspects of alternative medicine and potential quackery, which she does on her website. And I also admire her ability to keep us all on our feet and wary of being duped by potentially ineffective therapies. And she's even been on my podcast before. We had an episode called Is the Food Babe Really Full of. You can listen to that and you can also I'll put a link over to the Joe Rogan episode if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cairo and that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com cairo where you can go read all the show notes for this episode you're listening to right now. Anyways, though I personally see a chiropractic doc, some of my dear friends are chiropractors. And from sacroiliac joint issues that I used to get when I was racing Ironman triathlon to neck pain to digestive problems and like pelvic floor realignment and all sorts of different issues, I've had chiropractors fix my body many a time. I've even gone to these chiropractor conventions where I've had freaking like balloon stuck up my nose for inner bone therapy for my face and just had complete clearance of any sinus issues or clogging and all sorts of cool things in myself working with chiropractic medicine. So I wanted to give somebody from the chiropractor community a chance to speak up on the actual science and the actual evidence based research, if there is any, on chiropractic medicine. So I was able to hunt down a chiropractic doc named Jason Jaeger. Actually, Jason, do you pronounce your name Jaeger or Jaeger?

Jaeger.

Jaeger. See second time's a charm. Jason Jaeger, Dr. Jaeger has been practicing since 1999, so he's been in this a while. He works at Advanced Spine and Posture in Las Vegas and he is the administrative director of the Aliante Integrated Physical Medicine, which is one of Nevada's leading integrated physical medicine practices. And he's trained in a bunch of different chiropractic procedures like one called Biophysics, Ideal Spine, the Universal Tractioning System. And he also teaches all over the world in terms of chiropractic research and therapies. He's got a bunch of different positions at different universities like Southern California University and Cleveland Chiropractic College, Parker University, Palmer Chiropractic University, which is one of the universities discussed in that Joe Rogan episode and in this. In this article by Cybabe. So we'll probably get into that too. He's been a past board member for the Nevada Chiropractic Association. He's a current board member of the Nevada Chiropractic Council. He's been deemed an expert by the courts in the states of Nevada or in the state of Nevada. He's got a pretty big resume. I'll put the whole thing in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Chiro but ultimately, the dude knows chiropractic medicine inside and out, from what I can gather, because I vetted a whole bunch of people before choosing him to come on the show. So that all being said, Dr. Jaeger or Jason, welcome to the show, dude.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate the opportunity to be able to have an evidence based debate about some of the topics that CYBAI brought up and that some of the experiences that Joe Rogan had.

Yeah, for sure. Did you read this article, the Chiropractors are Bullshit article?

I did. I read her article and I listened to the podcast with her and Joe Rogan and, you know, certainly had an opportunity to dig in and take some notes and analyze some of the things they said. And you know, as with anything, you need to be a critic of yourself and your profession. You need to be open minded to critique and open minded to grow. That's. That's science, right?

Yeah, yeah, totally. All right, well, let's delve into this thing, man. The. One of the first things that she gets into in her article is about the whole history of chiropractic medicine. She starts by talking about how chiropractic medicine was born when this guy named Daniel David Palmer, a magnetic healer in Iowa, healed some deaf janitor named Harvey Lillard. And she describes Palmer in terms of kind of.

His whole approach as being little more than the buffoonery of a 19th century lunatic who derived most of his medical theory from seances. So it appears the entire field of chiropractic medicine was founded by a kook based on what she's saying. So I'm curious, what is the history of chiropractic medicine? I mean, is that true?

So that's the allegation. And if you dig into the research on Dr. Palmer back in the day, there's data where he says that some of his influence was from osteopathy. Andrew still was a medical doctor who conceptualized and developed what is now the doctor of osteopath degree. And there are similarities in the hypothesis that was proposed at that time. The osteopathic hypothesis proposed that a bone misalignment or a bone joint dysfunction affected blood flow. Palmer went on to say that he thought it affected nerve flow. So I, I understand the critique. However, hypothesis is a process to vet out an idea. And so do we discount a hypothesis because one person's credentials are less than another's? When we fast forward through this conversation today, we'll look at the preponderance of evidence in the peer reviewed literature on chiropractic and then we have the benefit of hindsight to say Palmer was right.

Okay, so you're saying that even though he had some, I guess, controversial or potentially questionable views, that he was kind of on to something when it came to some issues being related to the alignment of the bones and that affecting nerve flow or blood flow, he was onto something.

I mean, there's a field. Now, if you look on Medicare's website and you look at what the definition of a physician is, I think this will blow everybody's mind. A medical doctor, an osteopath, a pediatric doctor, a dentist and a chiropractic physician are all considered physicians. And you know, as a chiropractic physician myself, I've been in situations where I'm face to face with a colleague from another discipline and they'll look at me and say that they're a real physician and they'll insinuate that I'm not.

You know, it's funny because that, that's opinion where the law federally and certainly in the state of Nevada is that a chiropractor is a physician. And you look again at the research. Just a quick PubMed search of the term chiropractic. It yields 7163 studies on chiropractic research.

Interesting. Okay, so this Daniel David Palmer guy, he, he basically invented chiropractic medicine and then from there went on to open up a bunch of chiropractic schools, is that correct?

Well, he went, yeah, that. That is correct. He started with Palmer, and then after some. Some controversy happened between he and his son, B.J. palmer, Palmer Sr. Went west and ended up opening two or three schools.

Now, is he actually respected within the chiropractic medical community or do people think that he quack, who just got lucky enough to have had a kind of like a good theory that turned out to be potentially true when it comes to you being able to adjust someone and have an improvement in blood flow or release of nerve pain or something.

Like that, you know, it's interesting, and I think, as with any discipline, there's varying opinions within the discipline itself. I think that you would be very hard pressed to find any chiropractic physician in the United States or in the world that would want to refer to somebody within their own discipline as quack. You know, certainly it's a sensitive word. It was a word that was developed in the late 1800s referring to people who were practicing healthcare or medicine without proper credentials or who were making statements that were grossly false. I think you can find that that quackery transcends any type of profession. Personal training, auto mechanics, teachers, medical doctors, dos chiropractors.

Right, but that doesn't make it right.

That's right. It doesn't make it right. And it happens. But I mean, you know, you call that. You call that bullying or even prejudice, you know, of interest going back to the fact that there's a definition legally of what a physician is. You know, after the Civil War, the laws changed about equal rights amongst Americans of different color, yet the actual practice didn't change. There was still that prejudice and those issues and race. You can really, to a lesser degree, extrapolate that to today in healthcare.

Okay, got it. So when it comes to this idea behind subluxations, one of the main things that the cybabe gets into in this article, after questioning the. The origin of chiropractic medicine, coming from this guy who's basically kind of like a controversial figure, is the fact that it's based on this idea of subluxations, or what she calls vertebral subluxations. So my question for you is, first of all, what is a subluxation based on the definition that chiropractic medicine would give it? And then is that true? I mean, is chiropractic medicine kind of founded on this concept of subluxations?

Chiropractic medicine is founded on subluxation. That's the genesis of where it came from. And it is a medical term. It's A term that basically means a partial dislocation instead of a full or complete dislocation of where two bones articulate or joint. The association of Chiropractic Colleges, which represents chiropractic colleges and universities worldwide, 22 to be exact, in the world and 18 in the US alone. All of the chiropractic colleges, Palmer College, included.

Different disciplines and ideologies within our field. Some more conservative, some more liberal. They agree on a definition, and it's that chiropractic focuses on the relationship between the body's main structures, the skeleton, the muscle and the nerves, and how that relates to patient health. Chiropractors believe that health can be improved and preserved by making adjustments to these structures, particularly adjusting the spinal column. They do not prescribe drugs or perform surgical procedures, although they do refer patients to those types of providers. I think that's a reasonable definition.

Okay, so. So a subluxation, and when I was taking strength conditioning and athletic training and anatomy courses in college, it would just mean that my, my part of my body would pop out of the socket or like a shoulder joint would pop out of the socket. Is that really the same thing or are there like two different forms of subl.

You know, so there's going to be a more focused, conservative medical version where it's a joint that's popped out of the socket. So you've had that happen, Ben?

Yeah, it's happened to my shoulder before.

How did it feel?

I mean, it hurts. Pops back in. It's. I mean, it hurts. I mean, it kind of like smarts for a little while, but it's not like a full on dislocation where it stays out. It just kind of pops out and comes back in. That was back when I used to do a lot of tennis in high school before I discovered things like rotator cuff strengthening and crossover symmetry and all these different ways you can, you could strengthen the shoulder. Yeah, the joint would just pop out.

Right. So it would partially dislocate or it would sublux.

Right.

And it would hurt because there's ligaments and there's tendons and there's muscles and there's nerve endings. And then whether it, it fell back into place on its own or you needed some assistance, whether you did it yourself or somebody helped you, it typically made the joint feel better, right?

Yeah.

And then it functioned better. And so this is the premise now you delve into how does that affect a symptom? Well, it certainly affected you symptomatically in that subluxed position. And then when you look at the spinal cord, there are some more critical structures moving through the center of the spinal column than, say, your AC joint or your glenohumeral joint. There's your spinal cord, and then there's exiting nerve roots that go to every muscle, every tissue, every organ in the body. So as we get into the chiropractic subluxation and that definition gets broadened, there's different positions on what else gets affected by not allowing that electricity to flow to that body part. If you really chunk it down and you say that you don't get proper electricity to your bowel, could that affect your bowel's ability to function at its optimum? And I. I think it's a reasonable, logical assertion of anybody that's had college science courses that that makes sense. It could.

Now, when you say electricity, what exactly do you mean?

So the brain is basically conducting electrical impulses, comes down the spinal cord, your central nervous system, and it exits out into exiting vertebral nerve roots that go off into various body parts in upper extremity and trunk and lower extremity.

Okay, so you're essentially talking about the conduction of nerve signals or muscle signals.

That's it.

Okay, got it. And when something is. Is out of alignment, like say if a. If a vertebra has moved just slightly, it could put pressure on a nerve or put pressure on a vessel and affect the actual electrical signal that would travel to a muscle or cause something like pain.

Right? That's. That's the premise. So you can get pain, or you can get numbness, or you can get weakness. You can get atrophy of the muscle. Certainly, I would expect you could get atrophy of an organ.

Okay, now when you say atrophy of an organ, what do you mean by that?

Well, you need to have nerve flow, and you need to have blood flow to every body part. And I'm chunking this down and making it just very rudimentary and simple. But in the absence of having either a brain signal or blood going to tissue, the tissue will certainly not function properly. It may atrophy. It could die in extreme cases.

Right, okay, got it. So when you're making an adjustment to, let's say, my neck, Right. Like, that's a really popular one. You go in the chiropractic doc, puts their hands around your neck, they say, oh, this is off. That's off. And then they pop your neck, and it actually feels pretty good. Like, even just the popping sensation itself, frankly, feels pretty good. I've even got to the point now where I have one of these neck traction devices hanging in my house that I'll. I'll hang from. And actually, one of my friends, Isaac Jones, who's been on this podcast before, is a chiropractic doc. He gave that to me. It's like a Pettibon cervical neck traction device. So I pop my neck every morning and it feels great. But I'm curious, is that an example of a sublux or. Well, I guess what I'm trying to ask you, Jason, is every adjustment that I get a sublux or are there things other than subluxations that a chiropractic doc is doing when they're manipulating you?

So there's various schools of thought, and we could just pause on that question and probably talk for two hours, and then it could be so controversial, it would generate 20 other podcasts with different doctors from different perspectives. But you get into the objective analysis of a chiropractic subluxation. How do you determine that? Some schools of thought, and in older times it was palpated, you would feel it, you would look for motion, increase motion, decreased motion. There are, there are X rays that we look at. You know, certainly I prefer the objective analysis of imaging, X rays and mri. But there, there must be a measurable normal. That must be an agreed upon measurable normal in the scientific community. And then there must be an agreed upon deviation from that normal, which we would call subluxation. So when you get in and you hang from your traction machine, and if you get that release or that cavitation, maybe you had a partial dislocation of that joint, maybe you're simply gapping that joint and it's causing a nociceptive response, a pain relieving response. It releases endorphins. You feel better, you function better.

What's the difference between gapping a joint and fixing a subluxation?

It's one of heavy debate, and I think that, again, we could have a lot of dialogue on that. But I want to go back to what's normal alignment, what's abnormal alignment, and what sort of vectors and interventions and tools do we use to try to restore that patient to first structurally normal alignment, which then should result in functionally a normal functioning human being.

Okay, got it. So when it comes to this idea behind some chiropractors being full of bull or being quacks in the article, Cybabe kind of gets into a whole bunch of things that go above and beyond just like manipulation of the spine or manipulation of a subluxation and kind of gets into different Aspects of chiropractic care that I've personally experienced. Like the little thing that you, what's the little thing that you push against the muscles that kind of like pops against the muscles like a trigger? I'm talking about.

So it. You could be talking about the activator.

Or the impulse adjusting device, like the activator is one. Or there's like these scans that they'll do where they'll do like a. There was this one guy I went to, did like a full body scan. Then he had like eight different supplements I was supposed to take based off of the, based off of the scan results. And then of course there's, you know, a whole bunch when it comes to everything from, you know, supplements to nutrition advice, to all sorts of things that go above and beyond just like fixing subluxation. So where is chiropractic medicine in terms of either policing or keeping track of or even like drawing a difference between what might be considered evidence based chiropractic care and kind of more quackery or things that are less established in science?

Right. So from a regulation standpoint, and we didn't talk about it in the intro, but I'm the secretary and treasurer for the Nevada Chiropractic Physicians Regulatory Board. So the association supports the rights and promotes chiropractic as a profession. And then the regulatory board really polices the chiropractic profession. And our mission statement is to look out for the health and the best interests of the public. So with evidence based medicine, we need to see all healthcare practitioners operate within best practices. Now I love this saying, we all practice, we're practicing and so practice isn't perfect. It's practice and things evolve over time. If you go back and you look at the history of a physician, the physician school of practice used to be separate from surgeons and barbers. You would get a surgeon and barber degree, you would cut hair and you would cut skin. And then eventually, 100 years down the road, after much, much infighting between the professions, the college of surgeons left the college of barbers and the surgeons joined the physicians. So I like this saying. All truth passes through three stages. It's first ridiculed and then it's violently opposed before being accepted as self evident. Chiropractic is in this place. I mean even with Cybabe, she, if not violently, she vehemently opposed some of the basis of chiropractic in her article and in her podcast with Joe. You need to be critical of everything that we do, but we need to fall back on evidence. Based practices. You then develop what's considered a standard of care. A chiropractic doctor must practice within the standard of care of healthcare. What's in our scope, we can do spinal adjustments, we can do different physiotherapy interventions, postural re education exercise, physiotherapy. We do traction.

You've talked about doing decompression traction of your neck or your back. That's a long axis distraction. You can do two and three point bending traction to restore lordosis or reduce dangerous hyper kyphosis or scoliosis. There's literature to support that that's in very solid medical journals. So there's a lot of different subspecialties, if you will. Chiropractic has historically called it a technique, but we're starting to see it develop that subspecialty terminology. And one chiropractic physician may focus on nutrition, another may focus on spinal manipulation solely or only. Some like to integrate therapeutic interventions with the adjustment. And that's really once you get your degree, you have to pick up a path at a technique or a subspecialty.

Okay. Now when it comes to these subspecialties and when it comes to things like nutrition and supplementation advice and a lot of these things that many chiropractic docs are doing, what's the education look like? I mean, because I know for an MD for example, they get maybe if they're lucky, like two to four weeks of nutrition instruction at a typical medical school. As far as like the standard curriculum for medical school. What did your education look like when it came to your schooling in chiropractic medicine?

One of my best friends is my partner in my medical physical therapy and chiropractic practice in our group in Vegas. And we talk about this at length. He went to USC and they had very limited nutrition education. In our early years we would have fun and dialogue and debate because he felt that the carb from a Dr. Pepper was not any worse and not any better than the carbohydrate from Brown Rice. I think, and I'm seeing out in the world that we're seeing a turn of perspective with our medical and our DO practitioners towards the use of food and nutrition as medicine. If you do a compare contrast to the academic hours between a chiropractor, a do an MD and a naturopathic doctor, chiropractic doctor has 3,606 in classroom hours, but about 1023 clinical hands on hours. You contrast that with an MD, an MD only has 2,600 academic hours, but they have more than Double the clinical hours. 2200. A DO is just behind the MD 2145 academic hours. 2520 hours clinically, a naturopathic doctor has more academic hours than both a DO and an MD3348 with about 1400 clinical hours. In my education, I went to a school in Southern California where the curriculum was developed with the assistance of Harvard Medical. We did an integrated curriculum. We were taught and trained to be able to integrate with the other disciplines. I had pharmacology, I had minor surgery. We had really had minor oncology, we had minor surgery in our training. Now, at a regulation level, it's not in our scope. We can't do it, but I had it in my curriculum.

What is minor surgery?

We were taught how to do stitches.

Okay, gotcha.

Right. So entry level stuff. But you know, we had substantial biochemistry as it relates to nutrition. We had quite a bit of nutritional background. And at least back in earlier days in the medical education, it was considered unnecessary. Right, Because a carb is a carb.

Interesting. Okay, so you did actually get some nutrition education. But.

What did it look like in terms of graduation? Because I know that the cybabe talked about how Palmer, for example, one of the universities that you're associated with, you pretty much just have to to enroll and you're guaranteed to graduate. I don't know if that's exactly how she said it, but she said it's basically very, very easy to pass your schooling at something like Palmer College of Chiropractic. Is that true?

It's patently false. I mean, it's just a ridiculous assertion. If she knew how to go onto Google and if she could look at the academic requirements for any of the 22 universities I talked about, or if she would even go onto PubMed and typed in the word chiropractic or chiropractor, a big bulk of her critique would have been negated. As I mentioned earlier, the preponderance of peer reviewed literature in both medical and chiropractic journals, it's a lot. Right. And it's not an enroll and pass scenario. It's a very intensive course.

It'd be surprised to know or to tell the public that many of our professors are MDs.

Really?

Yep.

Like what kind of MDs?

Medical pathologists, general practitioners, anatomists, neurologists. But I would say shooting from the hip. 50% of my instructors at the university I went to for chiropractic school were medical doctors. Wow.

And where'd you Go to school.

It's now called Southern California University of Health Sciences. So that's the university. And then they have a college of chiropractic in the university called Los Angeles College of Chiropractic.

Okay, gotcha. Interesting. I did not know that so many MDs taught at chiropractic facilities or chiropractic universities. Right. So when it comes to this problem of quackery in chiropractic care, you know, kind of returning to all these things that go obviously beyond subluxation fixes that docs are doing, she talks about people in the article, people like Josh Axe, who's also been on my show before, and his website where he talks about reversing cavities and fixing UTIs and staph with essential oils, things along those lines. Or she talks about this guy named Eric Berg who discusses how he'll work on adrenal fatigue or on the adrenal glands. Or Billy Demoss, who believes, like, there are better alternatives to vaccinations, things like that.

What's your opinion on this? I mean, do you have any opinions on any of these people that she mentions or on this idea behind quackery in general being a problem within the chiropractic industry? Not that I'm saying that any of those people I just mentioned are quacks, but those are some of the examples she gives when she's talking about quackery.

Yeah, I mean, my interest and my love is in clinical biomechanics. So, you know, as I got my chiropractic degree and I decided what direction I wanted to go with my career, that's the direction I went. So, you know, you mentioned. Was it Eric?

Eric Berg, I think, is one of the people she mentions when it comes.

It's the first. And it's the first time I've heard of him, which doesn't mean anything good or bad about Eric.

Currently he has 472,000 YouTube subscribers. So you're not spending enough time on YouTube, man.

I know. Where have I been? I mean, I need to get on YouTube more, and certainly I'm aware of Josh Axe and Billy Demoss. Listen, I think that nutrition is important. I think nutrition.

Is something that we need to intervene in. As I was spending time and doing research before I came onto the show with you, one of the things I looked at was the American Medical Association's website, and I did a search on nutrition on their website. A top nutrition intervention that PMDs are talking about is D3, and critical levels of D3 being too low. And less critical on the high end. But you know, nutrition is coming into the purview of all healthcare providers. And I, you know, if, if somebody like Josh Axe or somebody like Billy Demoss, if they're really practicing below the standard of care, if they were, if they were doing quackery, you know, there's regulatory boards for that. And so, you know, instead with Cybabe, it's, it's just talk and you know, if there's really an issue, there's a regulatory board that can step in and police that.

And if I could just give my opinion on a lot of this stuff, I mean, you know, for me I'm a, you know, I'll use myself as an example, right? Like I'm, I'm a personal trainer and I'm a nutritionist and you know, I will, for example, with some of my clients, look at something like heart rate variability, you know, and that's not necessarily something that you would think would fall inside the defined scope of practice of someone like a personal trainer who should be writing out workouts or nutritionists who should be giving someone their carb, fat, protein, macronutrient percentages and looking at their micronutrient or their vitamin intake and things like that. But along my journey of learning what can actually make somebody's body or brain better, I've discovered that something like heart rate variability is a great way to actually test the body in the morning to see what the sympathetic nervous system is doing and the parasympathetic nervous system system is doing based on the difference in the time intervals between the beats of the heart. I don't think that me going outside of what might be the generally accepted scope of practice for something like a personal trainer or a nutritionist in incorporating something like that is quackery. I think it's just basically engaging in better living through science and identifying things that I wasn't originally educated in, but things that have turned out to make my clients lives better. When you look at somebody like Josh Axe, I'm sure he learned in the same way that you did how to do something like an adjustment on a spine or a neck to fix a subluxation. But I also know that he's taken a deep dive into everything from.

Kefir and grass fed yogurts to essential oils and herbal medicine and all sorts of other things that I, I respect when it comes to making other people's lives better. And you know, folks like Billy DeMoss questioning the popularity of vaccinations. I really don't think there's anything wrong with that? I don't think that makes them a quack at all.

And in my opinion, a lot of these people are actually discovering things that would be considered to be extras on top of generally accepted chiropractic care or chiropractic scope of practice. But I don't think that that makes them complete quacks. At least that's, that's my opinion.

Yeah, I, I agree with that. I don't think it does either. And the, the trend in nutrition, I think that if you go back to the Arthur Schopenhauer quote of truth passes through three stages. We're in that violently, vehemently opposed phase. You're supposed to question authority. You're supposed to question standard practice. It's how we develop and we grow. It's how we got to the moon. You know, we do the things that are hard, not the things that are easy. Kennedy said that we need to keep pushing those envelopes. And, you know, nutrition is within the scope of chiropractic physicians. You know, radiology is within the scope of chiropractic physicians. Exercise is within the scope of chiropractic physicians. And, you know, they've developed an interest and they're exploring a path. Hopefully, if they find that a direction that they've gone maybe is a dead end or it's not accurate, then they, they admit it freely in a public forum and then they attempt to retest a new hypothesis. There's nothing wrong with that. And I agree with you fully.

Yeah. And I don't think, at least from what I understand, that the number of, like in the U.S. for example, the number of adverse events caused by something like chiropractic medicine, you know, the number of people being hurt or maimed or killed even comes close to, to what happens in hospitals or what happens under the care of MDs, or even like, frigging, like dentists. I mean, from what I understand, like, both of those professions have been shown to kill more people or to maim more people or to harm more people. Again, not, not that I'm saying that MDs or dentists are, are going out of the way to hurt people. But at the same time, I think chiropractic medicine is a pretty small piece of the pie when it comes to people being hurt during medical procedures.

This data will blow your mind. So there's what we perceive in the public and there's opinions on left, right in the middle. And then here's the data. So when you do a Medline search and you look up the Published incidence of death secondary to chiropractic adjustment. The Medline search, which did a meta analysis of all the data available, said there was 26 ever. PubMed only came into existence in 1996 and certainly there's been peer reviewed literature much longer than that. But so an entire medline Meta Analysis, 26. The paper goes on to say we believe there should be a few more, so let's have fun with that. A few is three. So we'll take the 26 and we'll make it 29. And then it says we believe that this data is grossly underreported. Now, grossly underreported is a very subjective comment, so I'll have some fun. Are we going to double the 29 or triple it? Or how about why don't we go 10 times and we'll make 29 to 90 in the lifetime in the history of a profession that's about 100 years old. So now contrast it with the 2014 data on ientrogenic death. And it's funny how we as doctors, we put funny Latin words on things to make it sound better. But ientrogenic means doctor caused. So in 2014, iantrogenic death was 241,000 people in that year alone. And then when you go to the CDC's website, the current three causes of mortality in the United States in this order are heart disease, cancer and pulmonary function. In the UK it flips. Number one is cancer before heart disease. But the CDC leaves out ientrogenic death. But when they report the numbers, really third is Ientrogenic death, pulmonary is fourth. But there's no side babe reporting on that. Joe Rogan's not talking about that. Or maybe is. It's not on any of the news media stations. We hear, quote, john Q. Public dies of.

You know, medical error or complications during surgery. And we all go, oh my gosh, poor John. What about his wife Betty? There's none of this uproar about, you know, the genesis of surgeons and barbers and physicians and leeching coming in and out of vogue. It's interesting.

Yeah. And there's actually, there's a, there's another pretty comprehensive article that kind of brings up some of the things that you just put brought up over on the Medium website called the Cybabe is neither scientist nor babe. She's bull. It's actually, it's a pretty entertaining article, but it actually gets into this idea behind the. Well, it's kind of dizzying, the statistics about the number of MDs who actually practice versus do not practice, evidence based medicine and the harm done by the medical profession, in addition to some of the issues with the history laid out in that Joe Rogan episode with the the SAI babe. But I want to ask you, and I'll link to that by the way, for those of you listening in, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cairo for you, Jason, where do medicine and supplements fit into your practice versus just pure adjustments and anatomical work?

So in our group, and I believe that it's fair to say we're considered one of the nation's centers of excellence, we've brought in MD and physical therapists and chiropractic physicians together to work in a unified setting. You're seeing that be the way to go in the peer, you know, combining interventions, working together.

That was actually, I didn't tell you this, but that's actually. So I ran personal training studios and gyms for about eight years here in the Spokane and Coeur d' Alene area. And each of our facilities. Well, my facility in Coeur d' Alene was an nd a nutritionist, a chiropractic doc, a physical therapist, and me as a personal trainer and nutritionist. And then my Spokane facility was, it was a sports medicine Maryland physician, a do two chiropractic docs, a whole team of physical therapists, massage therapists, and then me as a personal trainer. And we also had a whole biomechanics facility along with high speed video cameras, biomechanical analysis, EKG analysis, all sorts of things. So it was basically like this, this integrative approach to the human body that brought a lot of these folks who specialized in certain aspects altogether. Right. So the chiropractic doc would be doing SI joint adjustments and fixing these subluxations, and then the sports medicine physician would be analyzing someone's knee and perhaps referring out to an orthopedic surgeon. And the physical therapists were assisting with rehab or biomechanical evaluation. And so, yeah, I mean, I absolutely appreciate the efficacy of a facility that it sounds like you have in Las Vegas.

It's such a fulfilling environment to work in. And we work as a team, we work as a family, we leave the ego at the door. We all realize where we have strengths and limitations and we always challenge ourselves to grow. In my group you're required to get post graduation certifications in biomechanics. My group you're required to publish. When we were putting our medical group together, my partner said, okay, well what prescriptions are we going to prescribe? And we sat there and we thought about it and I, and I suggested how about none? And he went well you know, what about say an anti inflammatory or if somebody's in pain, an opioid or what about a muscle relaxer? And I.

You know we accomplished that with the therapies that we do. And if we really, really just think we need that, why don't we refer to somebody that that's their specialty, like a pain management medical specialist. And he kind of cocked his head to the side and he said wait a minute, you mean I'm not going to get these calls at midnight asking for more Lora Tab or oxy? And I said well how's that feel? And he goes I love it. I mean we're going to really, we're going to be doing real medicine and we're thinking and we there's this funny thing in the public's eye in mind that to be a quote, real doctor. And here we get back into that prejudice. Real doctor means you prescribe drugs.

And as the pendulum swings right now, where opioids are really, finally it's being exposed what they're doing to us in Nevada, Governor Sandoval said one person every day is dying. Chiropractors, instead of trying to attain legitimacy by getting prescriptive drug rights through legislation, why don't we stay in our wheelhouse, keep doing what we're doing, the pendulum swings back to us. The governor said chiropractic was the number one early intervention solution to the opioid crisis. Number two, he said was acupuncture. Number three, he said cognitive behavioral services. He didn't say physical therapy. I think physical therapy needs to be on that list. But you know, what an interesting time as the truth is passing through the three stages, right?

Yeah, interesting. So you guys really don't have like your big glass cupboard full of supplements and stuff like that when people are coming in to get a chiropractic adjustment or do you care?

You know, I do. I, I've got a multivitamin. We you. I like Metagenics, I like Integrative Therapeutics. There's a couple supplement companies we work with. I like Apex, we do multivitamins. We recommend Omega 3 fish oil. D3 is a critical recommendation for us age dependent chondroitin and glucosamine. There's some limited research on its benefit for knees and low back. So we do have that glass.

That glass cabinet that has the list and the host of supplements. I'm probably one of the largest consumers of, of vitamins. And supplements and minerals in my practice.

How do you vet those? Because what the cybabe says is that the supplements that most of these chiropractors hawk are hardly regulated.

It's interesting. So you take a company for example, like Metagenics, they regulate themselves and by the way, they're MDs, DOs, PhDs and chiropractic physicians. They regulate and conduct themselves as if the FDA were regulating them. They, they test, they verify bioavailability. You know, they, they certify the highest grade of nutrients in their, in their supplements. Just like we talked earlier. Is there good and bad in the supplement industry? Yeah, of course there is. We use, we use top notch, top brand supplement companies.

Okay, got it. Now what do you think about infant chiropractic care? Because that's another thing that was brought up in this article was this idea. She actually talks about Billy DeMoss and says this is a man who wants you to trust him with your infant still undeveloped skeleton. And then she goes on to talk about how he'll recommend frequent chiropractic treatment of infants to help with muscular relaxation or breastfeeding or quieting the baby, et cetera. And she describes it as cracking the undeveloped skeleton of a fragile human. What's your opinion on infant chiropractic care? Is that true?

You know, she spun it in a way to just make it sound horrible as if you're cracking the bone.

Right?

Yeah, it sounds terrible the way she lays it out.

So let me start with a story. Two children that were in my practice in around 2007.

Had at chiropractic care their whole life and they had presented to my office for chiropractic care. They wanted to use their health insurance. Their health insurance approved it, but it required an MD referral from their, from their primary physician. So I actually reached out to the, to the doc personally because he told the parent that the American College of Pediatric Medicine doesn't support chiropractic care for kids. He said I'm not doing the referral. So I called up the doc and said hey doc, how you doing? I understand what you shared with my patients parents and I've got somewhere around 172 papers in the peer reviewed literature detailing chiropractic intervention for pediatrics. If I sent you links to all the papers, would you consider looking at them and talking about them? If you like. And if it's viable, would you consider making the referral? And I sent him the studies and he made the referral. And those patients have continued to be under chiropractic care for another 10 years. Since then, that pediatrician happened to be my kid's pediatrician. We've had really good open dialogues about it. You go back to the three stages of truth. Where is chiropractic in its place in evidence and research in the healthcare field? And certainly medicine is probably ahead of us in the research field. But chiropractic is coming along and we're seeing good data for it.

Okay, so if you had a baby, you would bring a baby in for chiropractic care. And I guess my follow up question for that is, why would a baby need that? Like, how would a baby's spine and stuff be messed up?

Well, for sure. So there's a funny chiropractic saying, if a tree was real bent and crooked, did it start that way when it was a sapling? And so I'm not saying it is. I'm saying is it possible that a subluxation can occur in a young one? I mean, how many times does a baby fall? Learning to walk? If you fell in the first, like now for the next two years of your life, as much of as a baby fell in the first two years of their life, what would your spine feel like? What would it look like? So the premise that a baby's joints can go out of alignment just like an adult's joints makes good sense.

Is birthing a trauma? It certainly could be. Right. We've seen again, good data in the literature to support chiropractic intervention. Now is the big strong chiropractic man or woman gonna grab a baby's neck and wrench it? No, it's ridiculous.

You look at, say for contrast, a surgeon, A surgeon heals a person with a knife. Freddy Krueger hurts a person with a knife. It's application, right? It's the sensitivity of your art. And that got left out by cybabe.

Okay, got it. So when it comes to infant based chiropractic medicine, is there actual evidence behind that?

There's evidence. There's evidence in the peer reviewed literature.

I pulled up a recent meta analysis and if you can bear with me while I get the study up. It was published in 2014, I believe it's called Best Practices for Chiropractic Care of Children. A consensus update. I'd like to give you the link so we can put this into the podcast.

Yeah, send it over. I'll put it in the show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cairo for those of you listening.

In, the conclusions of the paper were that only two statements from previous set of recommendations didn't reach an 80% conclusion on the first round, and those were revised. All the seed statements and the best practices for pediatric chiropractic reached a high consensus level. And there's a general framework for what constitutes evidence based and reasonable approaches to chiropractic management of infants, children and adolescents. That came out of the National University of Health Sciences in Chicago, which is considered a rather conservative evidence based school and had involvement also with Harvard and the. The inception and conception of their curriculum.

Interesting. Okay, so infant chiropractic care is not necessarily something that involves taking a fragile skeleton and ripping it apart.

That's what you're saying.

Send me that link. I'll put it in the notes. Just email it over to me. So is there a good way for people to know if they're getting a good versus a bad chiropractic diet? Because, I mean, there obviously are, you know, and I'm just gonna come around and say, I don't know this Eric Berg guy. And I do think that there's, there's like an overhype of adrenal fatigue like Cybabe talks about in that article. I think personally, adrenal fatigue is a myth and that there are, there are other underlying causes of it. And that's actually exactly when I had Another chiropractic doc, Dr. Isaac Jones, on this show. And I'll link to that episode. We talk pretty comprehensively about everything from Lyme to mold to a lot of these issues, issues that Isaac as a chiropractic doc, helps people out with. He's pretty efficacious with, but he doesn't necessarily like paint everything with that adrenal fatigue brush. But then there's other people that she talks about in that show who are admittedly they are friends of mine. Josh is a friend of mine, so is Billy. And I don't think that these guys are quacks because I've talked with them. They're very intelligent and what they do is based on evidence. But I do think there probably are some quacks out there. I do think there probably are some harmful people out there. So how can people vet a chiropractic doc properly if they say, oh, whatever, my neck hurts, my back hurts. I think I want to go try this out and at least see if it makes a difference.

Well, I agree with you. And I mean, you take the term of her article, which is Bull, and she pulled that from Penn and Teller who did a show called or do a show called Bull. And they did a show about chiropractic and when I watched that show I was embarrassed because there are outliers in every field that, that aren't practicing within the standard of care. So you know what's good or bad. I think you're going to get a lot of varying opinions on this. Who decides it, who defines it. You know, some chiropractors would say that, that you're bad if you do anything but adjust. Some chiropractors would say if you only adjust that that's also not good. So there's really varying opinions. My opinion, I want to see a doctor chiropractic that practices within or above the standard of care within their field. I want to see a DC use best practices. There's several best practices out there. Our state association has adopted and recognizes certain best practices.

If you ask my opinion, the idea of putting your hands on somebody's spine, their neck, their mid back, around their spinal cord and moving that joint with your hand without lifting up the hood first, AKA imaging, I don't like it. I think it's unsafe. It concerns me, it scares me. Could I put my hand on your back and make your back make a popping sound? Yeah, but then I'm just a cracker, right? I'm not doing good medicine, good chiropractic healthcare. So I like imaging. I think imaging is important. And I'm going to tell you there's people that are going to strongly disagree with what I say about that. My, my practice in the middle of town in Vegas is in the same building as a neurosurgeon. He's one of the top medically published neurosurgeons in the world. And I'm there at his invite and.