Getting Patients Returning, Shoulder Impingement, Cervical Manipulation, & X-rays and Neurodegenerative Disease

The Chiropractic Forward Podcast: Evidence-based Chiropractic Advocacy

CF 133: Getting Patients Returning, Shoulder Impingement, Cervical Manipulation, & X-rays and Neurodegenerative Disease Today we’re going to talk about getting your patients back in your office, we’ll talk about shoulder impingement, cervical manipulation research, and we’ll talk about low dose x-rays being the cause of neurodegenerative disease. But first, here’s that sweet sweet bumper music

OK, we are back and you have found the Chiropractic Forward Podcast where we are making evidence-based chiropractic fun, profitable, and accessible while we make you and your patients better all the way around. We’re the fun kind of research. Not the stuffy, high-brow kind of research. We’re research talk over a couple of beers. I’m Dr. Jeff Williams and I’m your host for the Chiropractic Forward podcast. If you haven’t yet I have a few things you should do.

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Do it do it do it. You have found yourself smack dab in the middle of Episode #133 Now if you missed last week’s episode, we talked about giving, we talked about maintenance care, dry needling, and we also talked about vitalism.

Make sure you don’t miss that info. Keep up with the class.

While we’re on the topic of being smart, did you know that you can use our website as a resource? Quick and easy, you can go to chiropracticforward.com, click on Episodes, and use the search function to find whatever you want quickly and easily. With over 100 episodes in the tank and an average of 2-3 papers covered per episode, we have somewhere between 250 and 300 papers that can be quickly referenced along with their talking points.

Just so you know, all of the research we talk about in each episode is cited in the show notes for each episode if you’re looking to dive in a little deeper.

On the personal end of things….. The last two episodes have had a talk about vitalism and all of that. I got red in the face and gripey and some would even say…..disagreeable. None of that this week. Fun and positivity. I made the mistake of going back to recording the personal part of the podcast….this part of the podcast….two weeks in advance. Well, it bit me in the butt an episode or two back. I should know by now that that damn COVID’s going to change the program. Lol. I said it was looking good and numbers were great and by the time we get to air time, 2 weeks down the road, the roadmap was different and crap was firing up everywhere again.

It sounded silly for it to be firing up everywhere and there I am on a fresh episode talking about how good it’s looking. Lol. So…..I’m not going to mention anything like that again. Besides, you guys are probably not in the mood to hear more about it anyway. Instead, I’ll tell you that I’m at about 81% of where I want to be. The least I want to see per week is about 180 appointments. Each week. 13 – 15 new patients per week. That’s the LEAST I want to see. As of this recording, last week I saw 146 and 15 patients.

So, I’m not at 180 yet but I’m more comfortable with my new patient count. Let’s keep that rocking and the other numbers should take care of itself sooner than later. It’s a Monday afternoon and I have 120 on the books. That’s before Wednesday gets booked up, Thursday, and Friday. So, starting a Monday with 120 already booked for the week, that tells me we have a good chance at a continued recovery. What are your numbers looking like? Is your practice starting to get back to normal and stabilize?

What are you doing to make sure your business survives this mess? I want to hear about it so I can share it with our audience. If you’ll share with us on the Facebook page, in the Facebook group, or by sending me an email at [e-mail]…..I’ll make sure and share with the rest of our listeners. This can be an excellent way to help others that are struggling right now. Last week I talked about giving. Well, this is a great way to give back to your profession and colleagues that may not be doing as well as we are. I’ll start. I doubled down on Social Media Instead of one post a day, we went to 3 per day and 4 per day on the weekends. We went from just talking about chiropractic to fun posts with a little bit of chiropractic here and there.

About every 4th or 5th post.

We want to entertain. I don’t know that anyone wants to be sold anything right now but, I don’t personally mind commercials or being interrupted if I’m simultaneously being entertained. So that’s what we did. We started entertaining our crowd We asked for people to help us by inviting their friends to our page. And they did! We hit numbers that would have taken us 3 years to build. We hit them in only about 4 days. I was amazed. Just because we asked and, it seems that at this time, more people are willing to help others. Of course, that’s if they’re not bitching at each other about masks. I got back to my weekly emails to my patients.

I had fallen off to emailing only once every 3-4 weeks. Now I’m back on a weekly schedule. I revamped my To-Do list to include everything thing that I need to accomplish every day so I don’t forget or let things lapse. I want to stay on point with getting our message out every day, every week, every month. I decided to try a professional company for Facebook ads. We still have a lot of really mixed results on that sucker right now so I haven’t talked much about it but I’ll let you know how we do down the road.

In the meantime, as if I needed something else to occupy my time, I started a voice-over career on the side. Lol. To go along with my sculpting, drawing, and art career. To go along with my furniture building career. Which will go along nicely with my singer/songwriter/guitar-playing career? Geez….is that the very definition of A.D.D. or what? But yeah, if you need any commercials voiced for you, holler at me. I’m happy to help.

Back to the office, I got back to doing weekly YouTube videos. Every week like clockwork. That made me get back to writing my own weekly blog. That’s work I used to hire out to a guy in South Africa but I took it back over for a bit and it’s been fun actually. So, as you can see, I’ve made A LOT of changes to get back on track and get this sucker not just where it was this time last year, but 10% or bigger. Why the hell not? Overall, I have made it a point to highlight what we are doing to help keep them as safe as we can. If COVID is the barrier, then we need to do everything we can to remove that barrier.

Alright, as I said, you guys and gals send me your suggestions of things you are doing to get your patients back in your clinic.

Item #1 This first one this week is called ‘Relationship between shoulder impingement syndrome and thoracic posture’ by Hunter et. al.(Hunter D 2020) and published in Physical Therapy journal in April of 2020 and that means that that is one hot son of a mother!!

Why They Did It They say that shoulder impingement is the most common form of shoulder pain and a persistent musculoskeletal problem and that we have had limited success in treating it. They wanted to test whether or not thoracic posture has anything to do with it.

How They Did It

• This was a case-control study.
• Thoracic posture of 39 participants with shoulder impingement was measure using the modified Cobb angle from a lateral x-ray.
• They accounted for age, gender, and dominant arm
• T-sp range of motion was measured with an inclinometer

What They Found

• Individuals with shoulder impingement had greater thoracic kyphosis and less active thoracic extension
• Greater thoracic kyphosis was associated with less extension ROM

Wrap It Up “Individuals with shoulder impingement had a greater thoracic kyphosis and less extension ROM than age- and gender-matched healthy controls. These results suggest that clinicians could consider addressing the thoracic spine in patients with shoulder impingement.”

Item #2 Item #2 this week is called “The Effect of High Velocity Low Amplitude Cervical Manipulations on the Musculoskeletal System: Literature Review” by Giacalone et. al.(Giacalone 2020) published in Cureus in April of 2020 which makes it too hot to handle for me!

Why They Did It They say that cervical manipulative techniques are mostly used for the treatment of biomechanical joint dysfunction, but little is known about possibly using them in order to achieve better performance on a healthy subject

How They Did It

• A systematic search was carried out on the Pubmed electronic database from the beginning of January to March 2020.
• Two independent reviewers conducted the screening process through the PRISMA diagram to determine the eligibility of the articles.
• The inclusion criteria covered randomized controlled trial (RCT) manuscripts published in peer-reviewed journals with individuals of all ages from 2005 to 2020.
• The included intervention was thrust manipulation or HVLA directed towards the cervical spine region.
• After reviewing the literature, 21 of 74 articles were considered useful and relevant to the research question.

What They Found

• HVLA techniques, on subjects with musculoskeletal disorders, are able to influence pain modulation, mobility, and strength both in the treated area and at a distance.
• Cervical manipulations are effective in the management of cervicalgia, epicondylalgia, temporomandibular joint disorders, and shoulder pain.
• With regard to results on strength in healthy subjects, given the divergent opinions of the authors, we cannot yet state that manipulation can significantly influence this parameter.

Item #3 Our last one is called ‘Low-dose x-ray imaging may increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases’ by Caroline Rodgers(Rodgers C 2020) and published in Medical Hypotheses in April of 2020…..look at April…..not just bringing us COVID…but also bringing us a bunch of plates of steamy hot stuff.

As the journal says, this is a hypothesis. The hypothesis presented in this paper explores the possibility that X-ray imaging commonly used in dental practices may be a shared risk factor for sporadic dementias and motor-neuron diseases. As the evidence will suggest, the brain is ill-equipped to manage the intrusion of low-dose ionizing radiation (IR) beyond that which is naturally occurring.

When the brain’s antioxidant defenses are overwhelmed by IR, it produces an abundance of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that can lead to oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, loss of synaptic plasticity, altered neuronal structure and microvascular impairment that have been identified as early signs of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, vascular dementia and other diseases that progressively damage the brain and central nervous system.

Common assumptions regarding the risks of low-dose IR will be addressed, such as 1) comparing rapid, repeated bursts of man-made IR sent exclusively into the head to equivalent amounts of head-to-toe background IR over longer periods of time; 2) whether epidemiological studies that dismiss concerns regarding low-dose IR due to lack of evidence it causes cancer, heritable mutations or shortened life spans also apply to neurodegeneration; and 3) why even radiation-resistant neurons can be severely impacted by IR exposure, due to IR-induced injury to the processes they need to function.

If X-ray imaging is found to be associated with neurodegeneration, the risk-versus-benefit must be reevaluated, every means of reducing exposure implemented and imaging protocols revised. So…..we here at Chiropractic Forward will be following along here. Because if this turns out to confirm that radiation causes neurodegenerative disease, you know what that means for the chiropractors shooting x-rays on each and every patient and then doing several follow up x-rays on them? They won’t be happy campers. But, maybe they’ll start following more guidelines that say no x-rays outside of red flags. I’ve said several times that I’m not against chiropractors that shoot initial x-rays. I’m really not.

Some are just more comfortable working on people when they’ve seen what they can see. My issue is using the initial x-rays as a scare tactic and communicating in a catastrophic way to achieve a long treatment schedule out the patient. One they likely don’t need at all. My other issue would be repeating x-rays several times through treatment.

That’s not evidence-based and the patient doesn’t need them.

Alright, that’s it. Y’all be safe. Continue taking care of yourselves and taking care of your neighbors. Tough times are upon us but, the sun will shine again. Trust it, believe it, count on it. Let’s get to the message. Same as it is every week.

Store Remember the evidence-informed brochures and posters at chiropracticforward.com.

The Message I want you to know with absolute certainty that when Chiropractic is at its best, you can’t beat the risk vs reward ratio because spinal pain is primarily a movement-related pain and typically responds better to movement-related treatment rather than chemical treatments like pills and shots. When compared to the traditional medical model, research and clinical experience show us patients can get good to excellent results for headaches, neck pain, back pain, and joint pain to name just a few. It’s safe and cost-effective can decrease surgeries & disability and we do it through conservative, non-surgical means with minimal hassle to the patient. And, if the patient treats preventativly after initial recovery, we can usually keep it that way while raising the overall level of health!

Key Point: At the end of the day, patients should have the guarantee of having the best treatment that offers the least harm. When it comes to non-complicated musculoskeletal complaints…. That’s Chiropractic!

Contact Send us an email at dr dot williams at chiropracticforward.com and let us know what you think of our show and tell us your suggestions for future episodes. Feedback and constructive criticism is a blessing and so are subscribes and excellent reviews on podcast platforms. We know how this works by now. If you value something, you have to share it, interact with it, review it, talk about it from time to time, and actively hit a few buttons to support it here and there when asked. It really does make a big difference.

Connect We can’t wait to connect with you again next week. From the Chiropractic Forward Podcast flight deck, this is Dr. Jeff Williams saying upward, onward, and forward.

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About the Author & Host Dr. Jeff Williams – Chiropractor in Amarillo, TX, Chiropractic Advocate, Author, Entrepreneur, Educator, Businessman, Marketer, and Healthcare Blogger & Vlogger

Bibliography Giacalone A, F. M., Magnifica F, Ruberti E, (2020). “The Effect of High Velocity Low Amplitude Cervical Manipulations on the Musculoskeletal System: Literature Review.” Cureus 12(4): e7682. Hunter D, R. D., McKeirnan S, (2020). “Relationship Between Shoulder Impingement Syndrome and Thoracic Posture.” Phys Ther 100(4): 677-686. Rodgers C (2020). “Low-dose X-ray Imaging May Increase the Risk of Neurodegenerative Diseases.” Med Hypotheses 142(109726).

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