I’m starting out 2017 with an offer for prospective new patients. Through the end of February people who schedule new patient appointments and are referred by a current member of the practice will receive the adjustment portion of their first visit complimentary. This reduces the cost from $120 to $70 for the 45 minute initial appointment.

This post is a reminder that when scheduling an appointment online it is critical to remember to press the “FINISH” button at the end of the sequence in order to have the visit sent to the server. If you don’t receive a separate confirmation e-mail as soon as you make the appointment and a reminder e-mail the day before you’re coming in then the visit doesn’t exist! The button is at the very bottom right corner of the screen and can be hard to see on smaller devices. Thanks and I’ll see you in the office.

I’d like to talk about problem-solving care vs. wellness care in chiropractic. Most of the time people initiate care with a chiropractor to address a particular problem or symptom, usually musculoskeletal in nature. What happens after the issue improves or resolves varies from person to person. Some discontinue care entirely, while others return if the problem (or other problems) re-occurs. Some will adopt a loose schedule of ongoing maintenance visits to fill in the gaps between any symptom-based care they may need and still others incorporate a wellness aproach with regular adjustments aside from feeling bad or good.

With all of these different approaches to care it is important to clarify the difference between a symptom-based adjustment and a wellness adjustment. Actually, there isn’t one!  A chiropractic adjustment has a singular goal every time it is performed; to detect and help the body correct spinal misalignments (subluxations) which are interfering with the nervous system’s ability to properly express health. This is the same on the first adjustment as it is on the 5,000th. Therefore every adjustment is both problem-solving and wellness-promoting at the same time. There are always problems which are addressed through spinal care, even though most of them are asymptomatic and there are always potential problems which adjustments help to keep from becoming an issue.

Most of you know that I am a strong advocate for wellness care. I frequently use the examples of changing the oil in your car or having preventative denatl care to support the concept of proactive spinal maintenance. Waiting for poor spinal health to result in dis-ease in the body is like waiting for a tooth to abscess before going to the dentist.

So the real distinction between symptom care and wellness care resides in the mindset of the patient. I encourage you to consider the preventative benefits of chiropractic; after 23 years of observation in my practice it is a clinical fact that long-term wellness patients tend to have fewer symptom-based problems and are more pro-active about their health overall.

See you in then office!

How have we strayed so far?
A health care crisis grips this country. More importantly, a health crisis grips this country. Americans are among the most fortunate and best positioned to experience and enjoy true health of any people on the planet. Yet statistics tell a rather different story. Infant mortality rates, the growing incidence of chronic degenerative disease, rates of diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, violent crime perpetrated on one another; all place us well back in the pack. This, even though we spend significantly more on “health care” than any other country,
The reason for the quotations above is at the heart of the contradiction. We don’t have a system that enlightens and encourages us to be healthy nearly as much as one that waits for and then reacts to and treats sickness (dis-ease care); a for-profit system that cannot survive on wellness, but thrives on illness. It is one that too often uses fear of becoming sick as a powerful marketing tool, fostering the belief that our bodies are inherently wayward and prone to malfunctioning (“Ask your doctor if the purple pill is right for you”). This is a departure from the truth with far-reaching consequences. In fact, our bodies, innately intelligent and self-regulating, strive for perfection every moment of our lives, right to the last. And the fact that we will never actually be perfect, at no time deters the organism from pursuing it.
Tragically, the majority of ill health in this country is the result of bad choices people make (both individually and collectively) over and over and not the genetic cards we were dealt. Of course, there are millions of exceptions that are related to environment and genes, but it doesn’t change the overall proportion. The big money-costing (and money-making) conditions like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. are driven more by ill behavior over time than any other factor. Deep down, we all know this to be true and don’t need it spelled out to us in a study. Yet many accept the notion that no matter how they behave, medicine will be there to fix them. When Michelle Obama modestly promotes a campaign to encourage healthy eating in kids (with current childhood obesity rates hovering around 40%) she is criticized by many for “over-stepping”. This is like saying that educating kids about crossing busy streets at cross-walks instead of jay-walking through traffic is excessively controlling. Adults don’t like being presented with the reality that they are passing on their bad behavior to children.
It isn’t access to health care that should be our priority as a birthright instead of a privilege, but rather health itself. We are each individual stewards of that birthright, with a responsibility to behave in a way that honors it. When we actually have a robust and center-stage Public Health System that educates, promotes and inspires people to be well, then perhaps we will begin to actually empty hospital beds rather than fill them. I work towards this every day, because it is our very lives that are the measure.
Stuart Grey, D.C.
Brookline, MA

“Knowledge is knowing a fact. Wisdom is knowing what to do with that fact.”

B.J. Palmer

Through the first 15 years chiropractic developed in a very open playing field. Medicine had not yet politically and legislatively asserted itself as the sole guardian of health care in this country and chiropractic quickly exploded in popularity, with schools springing up and people benefiting from chiropractic in rapidly increasing numbers. The scope of practice was not restricted to symptomatic treatment of musculo-skeletal pain since the chiropractic premise was that all function in the body is controlled by the nervous system and therefore there is no specific health issue which could not be improved through appropriate spinal care. The divergent philosophies and applications of chiropractic and medicine, combined with chiropractic’s surging popularity set the stage for a showdown over health care control which would rage into the second half of the 20th century. This period will be discussed in my next post.

 Allopathic medicine is on the offensive regarding its ability to influence public opinion and utilization of alternative care. Anyone who questions this should read the medically generated reports and studies regarding the efficacy of alternative options. There is a decidedly critical stance relative to “scientific validity”. The chief of general medicine at a local hospital recently predicted that 95% of alternative therapies would not withstand scientific scrutiny. Allow me to stick my neck out and agree that most alternative systems will never be scientifically proven or dis-proven, at least not in any classical sense. Most of them are better explained by a quantum model and the sooner the alternative care community embraces this instead of trying to make excuses for it, the sooner the debate can really be clarified. In any case, medicine creates a serious dilemma for itself by focusing on this point. Only 30-40% of medical practice is actually proven scientifically; the rest is based on clinical trial studies and the vast majority of this “science” occurs in the treatment of chronic illness. Granted, clinical trials can be an investigative step along the way to scientific fact but they are most certainly not science in of themselves. When you look at the incidence of iatrogenic (caused by treatment) illness and mortality (now the third leading cause of death in this country), especially in light of estimates that early next century one out of two middle-aged adults will have at least one chronic degenerative illness, serious questions could be raised about medicine’s effectiveness as primary gatekeepers of non-critical health care.

There has also been a noticeable escalation in the already saturated advertising campaign by medicine designed to keep people in the “sickness/reactive” health care mindset. Most troubling to me is the explosion of ads for prescription drugs. Especially for children, these ads plus the constant barrage of messages for over-the-counter medication encourage a belief system that health care is about getting sick and then trying to figure out how to make it better. It ensures almost obligatory compliance with the allopathic system and inherently shifts the focus away from a preventative, wellness approach to health.

These trends will continue and the debate over them will shape the future of our health care system. It will get more heated and the stakes will get higher. I believe there will be many casualties as a direct result of this escalation and I encourage all of my patients to consider carefully the implications for themselves individually as well as for their friends and family. I think there will be increasing pressure from the medical and scientific community to regulate, restrict and even prohibit access to alternative care and it may well be insufficient to sit on the sidelines, hoping it will “all come out in the wash”. I encourage you to stay informed.

Sixty years ago many chiropractors were in jail, charged with practicing medicine without a license. Only through extraordinary commitment and perseverance were we as a profession able to establish that we are practicing something entirely different from medicine; something called chiropractic. In fact we are not in the business of treating disease, but rather locating and correcting vertebral subluxations which interfere with normal neurological function and the ability for the innate intelligence in the body to express balance and homeostasis. And in keeping with the wellness approach, chiropractic has historically promoted healthy life-style issues regarding diet, exercise and soundness of mind, even before it was fashionable to do so. The same challenges faced by my profession for 103 years are now being brought to bear on other alternative methods as well and again it will require persistence and fortitude to overcome them. I encourage patients to present questions and concerns to me regarding these matters and to do so without reservation.