Chiropractic Adjustments INSTANTLY Improve Head Control in Neck Pain | #513

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we are back with more brand new research. This one is all about how spinal adjustments improve head movement control in people that have chronic neck pain. We're going to dive into this brand new research, gonna highlight what they found, how it applies to your practice and how can you communicate this to your existing patients and also to help attract more new patients who might be completely unaware of how you may be able to help them. We're gonna dive into that and much more on today's episode. Before we get started, I wanna say a few words about netcare, the best hardware and software cervical assessment tool on the market, bar none. If you wanna see that in action, you can head over to my YouTube channel. Otherwise you can visit neccare.com, link down below. They will hook you up with 10% off for being a listener of this podcast. So if you would like to step up your game in the assessment tools realm, neckcare is what I recommend. Neccare.com but as I said at the top, today's episode all about research. This study is titled the effect of Spinal manipulation on Eye and Head Movement Performance in Participants with Chronic Neck Pain. Of course, that link is down below. So if you have ever adjusted a patient with chronic neck pain and noticed that they immediately move their head a little free or a little easier, almost like something freed up, this is going to be the science that indicates how that happens, I'm going to say, beyond just the biomechanics alone. So this is a 2025 brand new study published in JMPT and it is all about again, how the spinal adjustments that you deliver, how they affect eye and head movement performance again for individuals specifically with chronic neck pain. And this one is really fascinating, not just because of what it says about the brain and nervous system, but also because it helps explain why chiropractic care may immediately, immediately improve how people move, how they react and even how they feel oriented in space. And in my mind, this is one of those studies that we all know this happens. However, knowing something happens, I'm going to say anecdotally, and then also being able to see how that plays out in the research is a beautiful hand in glove phenomenon. So it's not just that you're like, okay, yeah, obviously I'm adjusting people in my practice. They're getting them off the table, they're moving better, wonderful. I think we've all seen that painfully obvious. However, the next level underneath that is like, okay, besides just the biomechanics alone, how is that happening? So these, the researchers for this study, they wanted to understand how cervical spine adjustments influence motor performance. This is massively impactful because to me, this goes from everything of the bare minimum, getting out of pain, all the way up to the highest level of sports performance. We're talking about the intersection of motor performance and the delivery of your care. It's hard to understand anything that would be more important. So this is basically how well people control their head and eye movement. So we all already know that chronic neck pain can really mess up proprioception, which is your body's ability to sense where it is in space. This can affect a lot of different things and a lot of are really important things. Balance, coordination, and even that eye movement control. So patients can. How does this play out? Well, patients can often report things like dizziness, headaches, visual disturbances, or just feeling, quote, unquote, off. I feel like I need an adjustment. I'm sure you've heard all of this, and this is a cool study because it starts to piece all of this together. So the team of researchers for this study asked a really simple but a massively powerful question. Does adjusting the cervical spine make a measurable difference in how people move their head and eyes? So to find out the answers, they brought in 40 individuals. Half of them had chronic neck pain or symptomatic. The other half had a history of neck pain but were currently asymptomatic. Every single person performed a computerized eye and head movement task, kind of like a video game, that measured how quickly and accurately they could move their eyes and head between targets. Then all of them received a single cervical spine adjustment, and immediately afterward, they repeated the same exact task. So that's kind of the setup. So single adjustment, no compounding benefits, which is a really good. Would be a really great follow up to the study. But this is like the bare minimum, right? Let's establish the baseline. So as we look into some of the key findings and stats, this is when, as you can imagine, things start to get pretty interesting. Let's, let's highlight eye movement time. Now, there were no significant changes after an adjustment. So the spinal adjustments did not alter how quickly the eyes moved between the targets. Now, if we look at head movement time, big change. This is where things really took a turn. The symptomatic neck pain group showed significant improvement in head movement speed after receiving a spinal or a chiropractic adjustment. In other words, after an adjustment, their head movement time decreased. They were able to move their head faster and more efficiently. Asymptomatic group, no change, which makes total sense. If you don't have dysfunction, there's less room to improve. So the bottom line was the study did not find any change with eye control. Now with eye control I actually be really interested to see on with longitudinal follow up. In other words, with multiple adjustments over time, does that change? Again, great follow up study, but in this one there was clear improvement in head movement control after a cervical adjustment. So this gives us real evidence that the adjustments that you're delivering can have really immediate neuromuscular and sensory motor effects, especially in these individuals who are struggling with chronic neck pain.

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So there's a couple layers to this. I want to dive into one many individuals. I just can't overstate this enough. There are many people in your community right now that have been dealing with neck pain a long time, AKA chronic neck pain, and believe falsely that they're too far gone for chiropractic. I've been dealing with this way too long. I don't think a chiropractor can help me now. Somebody told me I had a disc herniation, right? This is normal conversation that's happening. It's crazy, but the gap and divide between public knowledge of what you do and your knowledge of what you do is wild. It is far greater than what you think it is. So starting at the basics, this is the teach and invite philosophy of the smart chiropractor in action. Teach people how to make their life better and invite them to come into your practice. Teach and invite. Gary Vaynerchuk would call this jab, jab, jab, right hook, invite. It should be the foundational elements of pretty much all of your marketing and communications. And it's for a good reason. It's what's gonna drive the best results. It's what it's about leading people on their journey and ensuring that you are the logical choice. Well, how do you do that? You do that by getting out and teaching. This podcast is an example of it. In action for over 10 years and 500 episodes. There are many products and services I offer chiropractors in building an audience on this by teaching and inviting as I did at the beginning with net care, as I will at the end with leander table and as I shout out the smart chiropractor in our tools is just the way business is done quite often. So you can, you can do that yourself in your practice by hopefully taking some of the information you have from this podcast, among many other resources and utilizing it getting out there and telling the story consistently. So let's dive back into the research. So what does this mean in practice? Well, when people come in with chronic neck pain, we all know this, they often develop altered sensorimotor integration, altered patterns. Basically their brain and neck muscles aren't talking to each other as smoothly as they should. And that's one of the reasons that you see people move slower. They're moving more cautiously and often with a pretty significant decrease in range of motion. Their body is basically protecting itself, even if it's subconscious. So after you get in there with an adjustment, the head movement time can improve significantly. Meaning that they could move faster without losing accuracy. I'll say that again without losing accuracy. And that is a huge point. This is this, they refer to this kind of as Fitts law, which measures the speed accuracy trade off. It's like saying you can move fast but not at the expense of control. And what we're seeing is adjustments may actually optimize motor control. So this is not only about speed, it's about maintaining or potentially even improving accuracy. And that is where tying it back to where we started, we start to look at sports performance. There's so many ways that this could be implemented as we continue to learn more. So again, it wasn't just, it was not just about speed, it was also about accuracy. They also found a reduction in something that's called time to peak velocity. This means participants, the people in this study reach their maximum movement speed faster after an adjustment. So this suggests better coordination and timing of the muscles that are controlling their head, their head movement. So this is where things start to get really clinically relevant. So again, many of us patients stand up after adjustment. They instinctively kind of move their head around and say, wow, that, that feels better. But now this is objective data to kind of back that up. So adjustments aren't just about improvements in range of motion. They may also improve how efficiently the nervous, the central nervous system controls muscle timing and coordination. That's massive. Now sense this dives right into sensory motor function improvements. And what could that lead to? Less fatigue, less guarding, better posture, better balance. And pain isn't the only outcome that changes. Even without immediate pain relief, patients may move better. And that's often the first step towards feeling better. So this study adds to the growing knowledge in the body of evidence that the adjustments that you deliver have real neurophysiological effects and they can ultimately change how the brain and the body communicate. So I loved this study. Let's get into communication. So as we make this practical, this is now about how do you translate information like this into something that you're having a conversation either with a prospective or an active patient? And it's just about letting them know, hey, when your neck isn't moving well, it can throw off how the muscles and your eyes coordinate, you know, movement of your head. An adjustment can help restore that connection so you can move freer and more naturally. Again, also just letting people know, this isn't just about improving motion. We're actually also improving motor control. Your brain and your body start working together and can work more efficiently after each adjustment and letting people know, hey, many people notice their head feels lighter or easier to move after adjustment. That's your nervous system recalibrating and getting back in sync. That's consumer friendly language that just makes it easy for people to be like, okay, I understand, it's simple, it's relatable, and it's pretty much neurologically accurate. So you can, again, where do you use this many places? You can use this in your report of findings. You can use this in and during your reactivation campaigns. You can use this information for patient education videos or workshops, and of course, for interprofessional communication. So while the adjustments in this study didn't change how people's eyes moved, it did improve how their heads moved, Especially in those individuals with chronic neck pain. So the adjustments that you're delivering can actually help restore more natural and efficient motor control by improving how the brain integrates sensory feedback from the cervical spine. And that's what we see clinically. Right? Right. People are moving easier, feeling lighter and have better control. In research like this continues to back that up. Now, the really exciting parts for me are this is chronic neck pain, non chronic neck pain, two group, single adjustment. Again, foundational, very basic. I'm super pumped to see where this goes in the future because as we start to see, I just, I immediately think of sports performance because, man, when you're on that knife's edge, on that razor's edge and you know, you're an F1 driver and you're 1/100th of a second matters in terms of your reflexes. If you're a NFL NBA player where the level of competition is so high there are just fractional differences make the difference between literally winning and losing first and last. Something like this get starts to get really exciting because there's no question that what you do changes the integration sensory motor control, amongst other things with the patients you're delivering this care to. Getting out of pain is clearly the first step for most people. It's hard to have optimal performance if you're living in pain, but when you start to go above and beyond that, man, I am excited for where research like this can take us in the future because I got a feeling we are just, we probably have not even started. I want to say to scratch the surface into the depth and breadth of what you do. So if you want to make what you do easier, I do recommend Leander Tables and they're willing to hook you up with a thousand bucks off their series 950. Fantastic table, awesome company. And they're going to hook you up for being a listener to this podcast. Check it out at leandertables. Connect with their team and they will hook you up again with $1,000 off. I'll drop that link down in the show Notes. Thank you so much for tuning in again. Whether this is your 500 plus episode that you've listened to or whether it's your first, deeply appreciate you taking time out of your day. If you would do me a solid and leave a rating or review that helps more docs and more people find out about this podcast, that would be awesome. If you're listening on your phone, you can scroll on down, tap some stars, leave me a note that would be fantastic. Thank you so much for being a chiropractor. Have a fantastic week in practice and I will talk to you soon.

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