132 - The Science of Chiropractic: Turning Research Into Better Patient Communication

And I'm going to continue this week with the third leg.

And I know we've talked about philosophy and we've talked about art the last couple of podcasts.

But I am going to talk today about the science.

And what's hilarious about me talking about the science is I definitely would say it's that this has in the past would have been the one that I most overlooked or at least felt less called to be interested in.

And maybe some of you feel that way.

Maybe some of you geek out on the science stuff.

There is some things I want to say.

And in my evolution of how life has unfolded, practices unfolded, opportunities have unfolded.

You know, here we are.

I'm in practice 16 years now.

And last year, we actually got the opportunity to publish a large case series with Havoc Research, Heidi Havoc's work, and with Life University and their research team.

And that has been an incredible experience getting to work alongside them and also getting to do something like research.

publish an article that helps hopefully the rest of the profession as well, as well as ourselves, put into, you know, the arena of science, some of like what we're seeing and some theory behind why we're seeing it.

And so we obviously ended that study that we published last year, which is a review of 180 kids getting weekly chiropractic care, school age kids showing quality of life improvements and showing improvement in hyperactivity.

with routine chiropractic care, but that is part of the science as we're saying, okay, why are we noticing what we're noticing? Why do so many people of all ages improve in so many areas of their life and function with something as simple as chiropractic care and the adjustment being part of how they're taking care of their nervous system and their body.

You know, the science piece now is something that I think more about.

Like when, you know, I look at what we're up against as far as trying to help more and more people understand why to utilize chiropractic, I do believe the science piece is really important.

Maybe partially just so that we can have more of a beacon or more of a megaphone to, you know, what we've clinically seen in our practice where we're like, Maybe we're not that into reading research, but we are into communicating with patients and helping more people understand what we're seeing and putting more quantifiable data behind the outcomes of chiropractic.

So that's my plug to just nerd out a little bit.

The other piece I wanted to bring up is that when we think about our evolution of understanding the philosophy, I think there's a component of the philosophy that when we start to look through the lens of our philosophy, we can look to learn about what we're seeing in the science through that lens.

So I'll give you an example.

Obviously, in our philosophy, we say things like life is intelligence and that there is an intelligence operating through everything, right? That's part of our major premise.

And that understanding of like life is intelligent and this expression of life through matter is very important to chiropractic is to look for this demonstration of intelligence and Then we go and we understand things like, okay, I believe I read a research paper in the last year that was from, I think, Tufts University, where it was talking about how there's these bioelectric fields that they believe are how the body organizes when a baby is forming its first tissues is that these electrons.

the bioelectric fields or these tones or these electromagnetic signatures of how the body moves energy intelligently is part of how a baby's body knows to develop a cell into an eye cell versus a kidney cell.

So I read that and I think, that's intelligence in action, right? That's learning that there is so much more playing out than us just being kind of robotic or mechanical, right? So when we understand our philosophy, we can read some of what's coming out in science and be able to understand it through a different lens.