Chiropractic After Surgery | Podcast Ep. 99

Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. This week we are back with more research and it is all about chiropractic care after surgery. What does the research say? And I think this is a great one to make sure you tune in because I can guarantee that you have some patients in your practice or prospects in your community that have had surgery that have the question of is chiropractic right for me and their mind. And this will give you the education, information and ammunition to address that head on and in a fantastic way. Before I get started, I will say a couple things that over the last eight weeks or so I have traveled to Austin, Texas, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and just spoke yesterday at the Master Circle Super Conference in Orlando. A huge thank you to everyone who has had me come out and speak. A big thank you to all the docs out there that I have had the opportunity to meet. I met two fantastic docs from London, England just this weekend. Also had a chance to catch up with with Dr. Bates out there in Arizona not too long ago and many, many more. So thank you to everybody who's come up and said hi and hung out and taken pictures. It has made the travel a lot easier for me. But as I said at the top this week we are talking research and it is about the title of the paper says it all.

Chiropractic Management of Post Surgical Lumbar Spine Pain A retrospective study of 32 cases. This came out in JMPT, the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, and in 2011, so just a couple years back and I'll repeat that title one more time, Chiropractic Management of Post Surgical Lumbar Spine Pain. A retrospective study of 32 cases. And actually we just featured this piece of research for all of our members for their monthly research brief. So if you haven't checked that out, hit us up@the evidence basedchiropractor.com but we know that that post surgical spine pain is a common condition in up to.

40% of individuals after surgical intervention.

And currently the landscape tells us there's about a half million spinal fusions done.

And performed each and every year.

The amount of decompressions is probably exponentially greater than that.

When I say decompression I mean laminectomy, foraminotomies, those sorts of things. So there are hundreds of thousands or in my opinion probably 1 million plus easy people who are having surgery for spinal conditions each and every year. Up to 40% of those individuals are gonna have some pain. Many factors can contribute to that. It could be a recurrent disc herniation, it could be scar tissue, it could be segmental hypomobility. It's not the same as it was. It could be continued nerve root compression due to ligament hypertrophy. That happens. And of course, muscular deconditioning. If somebody, you know, there's a difference between an acute injury and a chronic process. Many people with an acute injury, their spine might be in great shape, but there might be a herniated disc due to a trau sports motor vehicle, et cetera. But a lot of people that we see and go in for surgeries are in a chronic deconditioned state. This has been building up for decades and deconditioning is a huge issue with that. They might have the surgery to address the predominant issue, but they're left with a lot of other challenges in the wake of that. Now, the good news is research has shown low force chiropractic techniques can provide tremendous relief for these patients by improving the range of motion, decreasing the intradiscal pressure, opening that foraminal canal or that central canal, and also, of course, chiropractic stimulating the central nervous system. So a couple quotes that the researchers found that I wanted to touch on here are. A change was observed in the mean, pretreatment and post treatment NPS pain scores of 6.4 to 2.3, a reduction of 4.1 of 10. Let me repeat that one more time. These are the pain scores of individuals who underwent chiropractic chiropractic care after having a surgical intervention on their lumbar spine. And yes, I did say that correctly. They dropped, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, they dropped 4 points. Nearly 40% decreased pain with chiropractic care when they were suffering from post surgical pain. That is powerful. The researchers also found, quote, the group of patients in this study that had the greatest reduction in pain scores were, was the group that previously underwent combination surgery, meaning disectomy, laminectomy and or fusion. So this paper broke out combination surgeries, as you just heard, which included disectomies, laminectomies, infusions, or then they broke them out individually. Patient that just had a dissectomy, just had a laminectomy or just had a fusion. And again, they found the greatest reduction in pain scores, which is sort of surprising to me, was in the group that had the most amount of surgery. They had that combination surgery. Additionally, the researchers found, quote, the results of this study showed that patients with low back pain subsequent to lumbar spine surgery improved with chiropractic care. So again, individuals that not only had radiculopathy, but that had, you know, axial pain, local pain, their low back hurt, they underwent lumbar spine surgery. They didn't get what they wanted, they ended up with pain afterward, 40% of individuals fall in that boat. They did improve. The results unequivocally showed that these individuals did improve with chiropractic care. So again, I love a study like this because to me, this is the real world. We see again, 1 million plus people each and every year undergoing spine surgery, lumbar spine surgery in this case, and 40% of those individuals, so hundreds of thousands end up still having pain. That's not an indictment of the individuals doing the procedure. You know, there's many factors, again, that can contribute to post surgical pain. But the bottom line is a lot of times, you know, really the modus operandi, what's happening with these individuals is what you're not going to like to hear. And it's what, you know, they end up going in for an injection. Well, that doesn't work. Then they are fast tracked to pain management, opioids, narcotics, and all of that good garbage. So this study is a really a great one to showcase to other healthcare providers. Number one, it's great to showcase to people, patients, prospects in your community. Let them know that just because they had a surgery perhaps that that doesn't mean they can't come into your office. And I'll tell you, there are more people than you understand that are scared or that withhold coming into a chiropractor's office because they've had surgery. And if the surgery didn't work, ooh, I don't know. I don't want a chiropractic adjustment to mess it up. I don't want more pain. I'm scared. I wonder when this big intervention, I still didn't get what I wanted. How can a chiropractor help me? These are the real world questions that people have because they don't understand what we do. So research like this and breaking it down in a little bit more of a simple fashion for your community is extremely important. It absolutely is gonna open people's eyes to what you can do. A 40% reduction in post surgical pain is astounding, especially when that was found in the group that had the most surgery. That is powerful. That showcases what we can do with chiropractic care. But additionally, this is just a fantastic paper to showcase and again highlight and interact with other healthcare providers in your community. Because the bottom line is there's many docs out there they don't love. They see a patient, a primary care doc sees a patient post surgically that's still in pain. Again, they don't know what to do, so they just send for the injection. They send back to an orthopedic, they send to a neurologist, they send back to a neurosurgeon for more surgery at times. But a paper like this showcases that your office should be their first stop and then make decisions from there. This is unequivocal research. It's fantastic data to be able to share with again healthcare providers and community members. And to me it really gets to the essence of what we do at the Evidence Based Chiropractor which is showcase chiropractic care, showcase the power of the chiropractic adjustment and showcase where we can fit in, how we can help people and how we can work with other healthcare providers to have better health and wellness in our communities with natural healthcare chiropractic being the center of that. So again, if you are looking towards 2018 and you should be, we're into November. You gotta start thinking about 2018. If you are looking to build relationships with other healthcare providers in your community, check us out@the evidencebasedchiropractor.com Nobody's done it longer, I argue nobody's done it better. But check out what we have going on because the research like this is what we put into action for our members each and every month. Additionally, I'm still harping on the fact that the I the podcast application got updated. If you're using an iPhone and you can leave feedback and ratings right from the app. So when you park your car when you get to the office, I would love it if you took two minutes and gave some feedback, gave a rating for this podcast. It helps us reach more and more chiropractors and thank you a ton for listening. We're reaching over 7,000 chiropractors per week right now on this podcast. I am humbled and honored to have your attention for this 10 to 15 minutes on your way to the office and also if you have any items that you would like us to cover on this podcast, let me know. Jeff@theevidencebasedchiropractor.com I would love to hear from you. I look forward to hearing from you soon. I hope you have a fantastic week in practice and I will talk to you soon.

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