However, when it comes to healthcare, I do not believe we take the right approach. The primary method of healthcare in this country is to get people to not feel their symptoms. What we are trying to do is to look at the idea that if you treat a symptom alone, and you do not find the cause of it, the symptom’s just going to keep coming back. Moreover, you are going to have to take stronger and stronger and stronger drugs. That is why there’s an opioid crisis in this country. The volume of opioids prescribed in the United States is staggering.
There was just an article in The Atlanta Journal of Constitution on the front page, and they said they looked at the number of opioid prescriptions written in the United States per 100 people, and it was 100 prescriptions. That does not mean everybody got one, but there’s enough written for everybody in the United States last year to have at least one opioid prescription. Some states were more than 100, like Alabama, which was 127 prescriptions per every 100 people. That is a little bit out of control because opioids do nothing to fix the patient. What they do is they just make the patient numb to their pain, but eventually the body says, “Well, I need something stronger now, because I have overcome this numbness.” There’s a reason that the body’s feeling symptoms. What we focus on, is we focus on function.
We believe that if you address function, or whatever the functional deficiency is in the patient, then the symptoms will go away and stay away, and not require more and more medication. Not taking this approach is why we get such bad grades in healthcare.
What we are trying to do, is we are trying to shift healthcare away from a symptom-based model into a function-based model so that you can improve the patients. Arthritis, the most common degenerative problem we have, is a functional-based problem, and if you address it, you can change the function of the patient, which means the symptom will decrease and will go away if you correct the functional deficit.
That is what our approach is. From these three disciplines, we are trying to improve function in the patients so that they acquire less or no pain medication to handle their symptoms. Does that make sense?
Yes, that makes total sense. Can you explain a little bit more about correcting a functional dysfunction or give an example of how someone with arthritis might be treated differently from the functional standpoint instead of the symptom standpoint?
Dr. Mike Carberry: Sure. There are many examples I could give you, but a very common one is spinal surgery. Without getting too complicated, we have discs between each level of our vertebrae. The discs are soft but very tough, cartilage-based pads that are a cushioning to allow us to be able to move. Our spine is 90% of our weight-bearing joints in our body. These discs, because they are soft, do not have a direct blood supply, because if we did, the blood vessel would be pinched off by the weight bearing of the disc. It is kind of like if you parked your car on a garden hose, you could not water the garden. What must happen is to imbibe nutrients into that disc, each vertebra must move independently. When you improve the movement of the vertebrae, it can absorb more nutrition, and a weakened disc, which could be bulging, can un-bulge and restore its nutrition strength back to it so that it will not protrude anymore and function again.
The only way to do that is through chiropractic and physical therapy. There are also medical treatments that you can do that involve injections. By following the tenets of Janet Travell, who was a medical doctor who treated John F. Kennedy, you inject fluid into arthritic areas. This approach can break down scar tissue and adhesions, which is limiting the motion of that joint, and allow the joint to re-imbibe nutrients again.
The I agree that there are times when people need to have surgery, but surgery creates scar tissue. If you must get surgery, there should be much treatment afterward to break up the adhesions, because nothing creates more scar tissue than surgery. Everybody knows, all the statistics point to in healthcare, that when somebody gets surgery, his or her degeneration will accelerate, because we do not address the limitation of motion from the scar tissue formation.
That is one of the things we would address. In our clinics, we probably see one out of three of our patients already had failed back surgery. Failed back surgery, the national statistic, I believe right now, is running around 75% failure rate, and it is because of the scar tissue. That is an example of treating the symptom at the expense of the function.
So how does the body healing itself after surgery have such a negative impact on the outcome?
Dr. Mike Carberry: That is a great question. If the body has a herniated disc, that is a threat to the spinal cord. The spinal cord is probably the second most important structure in your body, following the brain. The brain runs everything, and the way it communicates is through the spinal cord. When somebody has a herniated disc, the body is making a priority decision, what’s more important, them being functional and out of pain or me jeopardizing my nervous system? So, what the body will do is try to heal it as quickly as possible by utilizing scar tissue. However, we know that through the intervention of holistic-type medical treatments, including chiropractic and physical therapy, you can limit and reverse the amount of scar tissue formation and stimulate that joint to heal better without future complication.
