Episode Description
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Dr. Casey: Hey everyone I’m Dr. Casey with Birmingham Health and today we have Mandi with us, of course, and we also have some guests! With Birmingham wellness massage this is Bryce and this is Anne Marie. I appreciate you guys joining us today and today we’re going to be talking about a few different things. First of all, we got to talk with Anne Marie and it was so good to talk about some of your story and you are a major CrossFitter for how long?
Anne Marie: I wouldn’t say major.
Dr. Casey: We’re gonna see you compete for a championship. We’ll see you on TV
Anne Marie: Yeah I’ve been CrossFitting for about 10 years.
Dr. Casey: What made you say, “Hey one day I want to just bang out some push-ups and pull-ups at CrossFit gyms”?
Anne Marie: Oh well I really never thought about it. I didn’t know anything about CrossFit and the CrossFit I started going to was brand new but I was in my chiropractor’s office and saw a sheet from somebody. Her before and after and how she was enjoying CrossFit and chiropractor’s been saying to me “oh this is a great thing to do it’s a lot of body weight movements.” So I went down there expecting body weight movements not so much barbells but I fell in love with those barbells.
Dr. Casey: There we go. slinging and clanging and banging. Well walk me through like, CrossFit obviously has given you some great results, but has it given you some injuries too? Or tweaked something
Anne Marie: I would say, yeah, definitely some tweaks. Most of the injuries are because I’m super klutzy. I’ve sprained my ankle because I stepped up on a box while a kettlebell I was holding came down my ankle. That hurt. I fell outside running and you know I scraped my knees. I also broke my big toe because I dropped a weight on it. Little things like that that sets you back a little bit.
Dr. Casey: It’s almost like when somebody talks about their nails on a chalkboard and you feel it. Like I’m feeling the injuries right now
Anne Marie: It definitely bangs you up.
Dr. Casey: So you’ve kept your chiropractor and your massage therapist in business.
Anne Marie: Absolutely it’s the only thing that’s kept me going through the 10 years.
Dr. Casey: So one of the things you even brought up was a great thing too. Would you talk about your IT band and walk me through what’s going on in the IT band?
Anne Marie: I’m not really sure but it’s kind of been bothering me off and on since I was in my 20s and pain will kind of shoot from my hip down to my knee. I can find points down my IT band that just hurt. I roll them, I’ve got a massage gun and so I’ll massage through that, ice it, and do all those things but it’s still just kind of flares.
Dr. Casey: Many times when we see this, and you probably see it in your clinic quite a bit and patient care over years, but we see things all the time that are like “why is this symptom not getting better? I’ve done everything, I’ve seen everybody, I do everything at home, this thing still flares up!” and so to me it’s not necessarily that you’re not seeing the right professional care or doing the right attention at home. Sometimes we gotta look at what’s aggravating it and we continually do things that are aggravating so what are all those aggravators? Once we resolve that issue it’s like now the body can catch up. So who you go see for massage or who you see for chiropractic or all the things you do at home and help for it actually become more and more and more effective once we figure out what is that big missing puzzle piece.
In this case it might be an aggravator there. We have a patient that just started with us and he’s done exactly what I said. He’s been to all orthos, all neuros, you know, many chiros, many pts, and he’s done all these different things to try and help out with what is going on with this and still in the same problematic state. So we started off with some basic x-rays to say “well, look, if your pelvis is all twisted up and out of whack, it can be like that for different reasons, but if it’s all shifting one way you actually got one bone longer than the other bone which may have been born that way.” What you have to do is put a small heel lift in that short leg shoe to raise it all up and once you do like everything that’s being pulled out of bad suspension, that’s inflamed and irritated and out of whack, gets to finally calm down. Then all those other things and all those other puzzle pieces actually start working.
Anne Marie: That makes total sense because sometimes my pant legs one will be higher and then when you get an adjustment then that pulls that back into the right length.
Dr. Casey: Yep but the thing to figure out is that is it something that you were born with and that needs a little bit of assistance like a heel lift? Or something that we call postural? Meaning you’ve trained your body to get out of whack and you’ve got to retrain it to get back to where it needs to be and be responsive too.
Mandi: And we see those that need heel lifts a lot more than I would think. It’s just more common than I thought it was so we see it a lot
Dr. Casey: It comes in very regularly and when people put it in they feel like they’re just stepping on something at first but you’re not going to feel like this whole new person because you put the heel lift in But it starts to calm that aggravator down and then now, all of a sudden, everything starts to become more effective. It’s almost like if you have the whole house on fire and the firemen are on the front side of the house spraying it down, there’s some jack wagon on the back side who’s throwing gasoline on it. We have to balance that equation and you’ll cut out the aggravating part to get the inflammation, the fire, to calm down. But when we see it for after a long period of time, if they were born that way, and they need that heel lift and that support but sometimes you have a 40 year old patient coming in and I mean you feel the knots all over his back and I tell him “that’s been there. You’ve been training that for 47 years and you’re going to need some help on a regular basis. So we’ll be sending you a client here shortly because of that.” Because it is something you have to address in addition to all these other things too so if you find yourself in that rut of like “What is going on? What is being irritated? I’ve seen everybody I’m so frustrated and nothing’s working!” Well we have to find out what are all those aggravators and once we figure out what those aggravators are, we should start to figure out the forward momentum that you need there. But we see different types of cases in here.
Mandi: I try to think of people that you guys have in common. You have certain clients that we see and he has certain patients that come to you and one of the biggest things that I needed last year was, when I was pregnant, I needed to be adjusted regularly and I needed massages regularly.
Dr. Casey: Well when you started to do that what did you see a difference in?
Mandi: Oh my goodness, well you also did acupuncture on me. I had very high anxiety when I was pregnant, I was nervous, and so he did the acupuncture for anxiety and fatigue and then I felt certain relief because I had a pelvic dysmorphia situation and he would adjust me for that and I would immediately feel relief.
Dr. Casey: And you didn’t have to take anything that would hurt the baby or hurt you while pregnant
Mandi: No, I mean I was at the perfect place to be while pregnant. I was here.
Dr. Casey: Then, you know, you guys see pregnant clients too?
Bryce: Oh absolutely.
Dr. Casey: What’s a common complaint that may come in with your pregnancy clients?
Bryce: Low back. Typically, one side or the other, they just feel off and so a lot of times if we see that lady, you know, in her fourth or fifth month, they’ll get that relief and go, “Wow! Okay.” They feel whole again on some level and then the closer that they get to the baby being born, the more often they’ll kind of get on that rhythm.
Dr. Casey: We identify exactly the same thing because of how much physical stress that happened over a very quick period of time because, if I’m not mistaken, you said you’ve had a child too?
Anne Marie: Had two.
Dr. Casey: You’ve had two children! And so you probably can identify in those last two to four weeks are a heck of a lot tougher than the very first few, right? But, overall, the course of nine months, that’s a very quick transition to have your body morph into this certain way. So, yeah, it’s going to put challenges in different areas.
Mandi: And you don’t know what kind of position the baby’s going to be in when you wake up in the morning because you could walk to bed fine that night, wake up the next day you got a creature on this side and you have to like walk a little bit.
Anne Marie: And it’s hitting your sciatic nerve down your leg so you got the pain shooting down your leg and it’s agony
Dr. Casey: And what do you do? You take some muscle relaxers, then?
Anne Marie: not when you’re pregnant.
Dr. Casey: So what are the options? We gotta to do something, this is killing me
Mandi: Neither: that’s your options.
Dr. Casey: Did you ever get it when you were pregnant? Did you get adjusted or did you see massage at that point in time?
Anne Marie: No, I had one massage with my second pregnancy that was sort of like my little present before I had her and I thought it was so wonderful. It just made me feel so much better and I was probably four or five weeks away from delivering her so I wish- I mean we’re talking more than 20 years ago- I wish I had known more about those options for me when I was pregnant.
Dr. Casey: Sure! Because you said you have seen a chiropractor and you started seeing a chiropractor…
Anne Marie: I saw a chiropractor many times in my 20s.
Dr. Casey: When were you pregnant though? What age were you then?
Anne Marie: I was 28 when I was pregnant with my first one, turned 29 right after she was born, and then 31 during my second.
Dr. Casey: So you’re kind of like my wife and I but let me ask you this: you said you started to see a chiropractor, got pregnant, and stopped seeing a chiropractor. Why did you start doing that or stop doing that? What were your fears about it?
Anne Marie: I just didn’t know enough about it. I really wasn’t informed enough about what a chiropractor could do and I guess it scared me a little bit. I saw him just a few times and it was mainly for my shoulder and probably the same IT band thing that was bothering me and always bothered me then. So yeah, I just didn’t know enough.
Dr. Casey: That’s very common. I can’t tell you how many times you’ve probably heard conversations in the clinic when we talk about women that surprise the conversation, they actually do it in a funny way. They’ll whisper to me, “Hey. I’m pregnant.” I’m like awesome! That’s awesome! It’s like they have to stop doing something they found that they’ve enjoyed that helps them and they’re fearful. They’re like, “Well I guess this is going to be the last time I see you for many, many months.”And I’m like “Oh, this is the very start of it.”
Mandi: See you on Tuesday!
Dr. Casey: Yeah but what ends up happening is a very common thing of not knowing how chiropractic can help somebody through all development ages of pregnancy and even pre-pregnancy. It helps them get their body healthy to a point to where it can help them get pregnant, stay pregnant but then it’s like they find themselves pregnant. In trimester one it may not produce all the pain related things that might bring people in.
Mandi: It reduces the nausea.
Anne Marie: Acupuncture can help that. I wish I had known that. I was so sick, oh, like for the first five months of my first [pregnancy]. Acupuncture would have been wonderful.
Dr. Casey: And sometimes it can be in a way where we do it once or twice and it eliminates the nausea but sometimes it just needs a little bit of help because things have been bottled up for a period of time and we gotta retrain to go different ways if you will. But yeah it’s very common to have that fear about it and we sometimes see patients in their worst stages of fear where the sciatic issue and they are in their third trimester and they’re like “Oh my god, what is left to do? I go to my traditional doc but I can’t do the things that they want to do like. I feel like that’s going to harm me and harm the baby so what is out there?” and they finally see me and walk them through and calm all their fears down and say, “I wish we’d found you in your first trimester. I don’t think that we would have 100 avoided sciatica or SI joint dysfunction or you know varying ligament pain, a lot of these types of things that you guys face, but it would have been a hell of a lot easier to respond quickly or to the treatments at that time too and it would eliminate probably the pain that you’re facing at that point in time and reducing that to a certain point and probably eliminating it too. So I wish we’d known”
But, generally, I wish that we could get that word out to more females that are trying to get pregnant and trying to have a healthy pregnancy because we even see most of our patients have a healthier labor and delivery time. When they implement all the soft tissue work, do your females come back to you later and just say,”Hey the labor and delivery time wasn’t nearly as bad?”
Bryce: Yeah for the most part. They have to kind of give it that first. There’s a question I had: is there a particular period of time after the baby is born before they should start coming back?
Dr. Casey: So that’s the fourth trimester, right? So it is actually some of the most important parts for recovery depending on how intensive the labor and delivery was. We may switch things up but it’s important for mamas to come back in pretty soon, within a week. The misconception of chiropractic and how physical these adjustments can be. It can be very different at different levels of different stages for different patients and for our pregnant moms that come in, no it’s not going to be very physical, but there are things that will help their body respond way more quickly and get them back to a more normal state or whatever their average or normal state of feeling that they used to be after that fourth trimester has dissipated.
Bryce: Similar to us and when they come in, you know, one, two, three weeks after they have had a baby we’re not doing deep deep tissue. We’re doing that light, you know, swedish, we’re just trying to get everything calm
Mandi: Yeah they’ve had enough nurses pushing on their uteruses
Dr. Casey: Yeah, “Don’t poke that, poke this. Help this out, all right?” But in general too and you know outside of pregnancy cases you know we see that quite a bit I don’t know if you guys have any bouts of arthritis in your cells or other patients too.
Bryce: Oh yeah. Yeah we see a lot of clients that think, you know, “I’ve tried all these other methods, I’m always in constant pain,” They get a massage and all of a sudden they’re going “whoa now I’m able to rest easier.” Maybe they sleep better and they get back on that routine and it’s something that they’re not taking a pill for you.
Dr. Casey: How many pregnant women with arthritis do you see, potentially? You’re not going to x-ray the patient during that time frame but you know some people think that arthritis is like it’s a death sentence. “I got the arthritis!” I’m like, “No, it’s there, but you know let’s flip that script a little bit and say ‘yeah, you do, but why do you have that and what do we have to do to move out of that?” but yeah we have patients that come in that have in those beginning stages or even more moderate stages of that too when they’re pregnant. Sometimes we find that out later once we can x-ray them or sometimes they bring the x-rays that they had prior before pregnancy and they come in I’m like “well you know this is a weaker area and it’s going to probably show up during your pregnancy at some time” but also too it may not even be present quite on x-ray but we’re going down that arthritic route because where joints are stuck and not moving and muscles aren’t sliding and gliding the way they should be it. Starts creating a lot of problems for us and I mean how many conversations of that do you hear in here?
Mandi: Oh a whole lot and I get so excited whenever the pregnant women come in because then we get to see their babies!
Dr. Casey: Oh yeah. They’re like “oh my god you adjust babies?” and I’m like “yeah” and they say “you’re not touching my baby”
Mandi: I think I was in here a week after I gave labor. I was like, “hey Dr. Casey. Me then her.”
Dr. Casey: Yep and it’s because she became aware. Anne Marie you talked about not knowing certain things and you just don’t know what you don’t know. And part of that fourth trimester is not just for mama, it’s even for the baby too because it was physical on you guys. I got to observe because of my wife but I didn’t get to feel what you guys have been through but it’s physical. It’s just as physical for the baby in a sense if you could just take the same things that happened when we were retrieving a child, whether it’s cesarean or natural childbirth, and you bring that baby in here and you let me reenact it. You’re probably gonna see me do all the same things I would do in a chair to your child and you would kill me first and maybe not even call the cops right? It is a brutal scene and it’s physical on the child as much as it is on mama and so it’s very important many times to see that this child starts to get things back into normal working condition when it hasn’t produced the pain problem yet. But we see it all the time like what are some of the top things that mamas bring their kids in for that you hear of?
Mandi: Colic for the newer babies and there’s ear infections that come later. Even like a little bit older there’s like bed wetting he can help with or allergies.
Dr. Casey: Yeah it’s like bed wetting and seven years old still wetting the bed. Like why is that? It’s against your brain and your spinal cord overactive creating components that’s not allowing your body to act normally. So a lot of times when they see those real chronic conditions, yeah that’s when they actually have to make sure even at seven years old they don’t have all these tight tissues issues that us adults do that are CrossFitters. That they need to see some degree of tissue work and so that’d be something that- I don’t know if you guys see a lot of pediatric- but you’ll see that sometimes that’s going to be a big funnel there to help out those conditions. Like we see a side effect of having these issues would be like torticollis in a child and this tight muscle in the neck. Well, yeah, you know, what ends up happening in the traditional worlds that go to their pediatrician and they see torticollis.
“Okay well let me do some work and massage this out and stretch this out and you go home and stretch this out and here’s this prescription. Take this to help out.” That’s the traditional way of handling it but, sometimes, it takes a very long time for that to get the results where we could have gotten there quicker had we started taking care of the root cause of the problems and addressing it the right ways. So once you do that then all those other things you know are probably even unnecessary at that time.
Mandi: Right, especially the medicine. I mean I’ve got two girls. The first time Dr. Casey saw my oldest when she was three and she was colic for six months when she was a baby and had I known all the benefits I would have been here every day but that’s why my new one I just, “there you go.”
Dr. Casey: We talk to our patients too all the time about this band-aid approach like, “What do you want out of this?” And you tell me how many times people come in acutely to then want the quick fix. Do you guys see that?
Bryce: Oh yeah it’s surprising but some folks will be like “I thought I’d be all better. You know, I used to get massages and I was all better.” Well, as the body ages, and if you’re not being that proactive, it’s a longer recovery period and I know it’s similar with chiropractic on some level as saying “okay so for your first massage your body may feel good for a day or two. Maybe up to a week. But the more you come in the longer that period is going to settle in your body where you may need to massage twice a minute for a while and then it can back off for once every three years”
Dr. Casey: We call that the holding period. You’re training your body to hold for longer because you’ve gotten it conditioned to be so responsive towards everything that happens. So when we first start it’s very effective and people start to feel better like “I’m fixed!” I’m like “yeah until you go bowling tonight and then what happens?” You know your arm and shoulders out of whack again so we got to repeat the process. “Don’t go bowling tonight now!” You know let it calm down, let it get more responsive, let it start holding and then over time yeah you’ll start seeing those same things. It gets better for longer and you’re not as much on this pain roller coaster.
Bryce: I mean what’s great is there’s so many avenues of wellness where you can get out and do some find something that you love on the weekend or in the mornings but, I mean for me, it was when I hit 36 and I loved playing ultimate frisbee and I took a weird fall and I did not recover the same. I was already doing chiropractic and massage but then it really meant something and it was like okay now I get recovery. I see what’s going on here.
Dr. Casey: You didn’t quite have the perspective that you do now about things that you need to do so you can do these things. You can still play hoops, you can still get out there on the field and launch frisbees. But what happens like if you know you don’t do those things? Let’s say you don’t do the tissue work or you don’t maintain some degree of regular chiropractic, what happens to you then on at that point?
Bryce: I see a lot of folks that I play basketball with have an injury and we don’t see them for two or three months and they hobble back on so they have other ways of recovery that we may not think is the best. But what’s interesting is, one thing that I learned that was huge, was a new piece that I’d lost in high school. You learn when you play a sport you better stretch you better warm up and cool down and I was playing basketball in my 20s, 30s and it wasn’t until the pt reminded me, you know, I was tweaking an ankle and he goes “what are you doing with warm-ups” and I was like what are you talking about? He showed me some youtube videos and I got out there and I was like “That’s what I did in high school.” So in terms of chiropractic massage. warm-ups. that helps me be mobile
Dr. Casey: You know it’s funny how different societies do different things and out in japan- I just got to witness this because my brothers in the navy and we went out to visit for a week- and I got to see all the japanese workers before they would start, they’re warming up like a football team would. I don’t mean they’re lining up in contact drills but I mean they’re stretching, mobility, and what happens is you see in the workforce that injuries are reduced. Workman’s comp went down for these businesses so I can imagine your own personal workman’s comp for you and basketball injuries got a little bit less expensive because you started taking care of those things. But we see people all the time when we say well did you ever have an injury they think like concussion, gashing, wound, like major events where they were they had to go see the surgeon about things or was taken to the ER. Like well that’s a type of injury, that’s a macro trauma creating a really nasty event that you have to seek professional help about. But many times it’s like just out there on the court. How many people just kind of kind of roll an ankle and was that an injury” “Oh no I was fine. I got to finish the game. I kept playing.” And then five years later what happened to that ankle?
Bryce: Well like I came in to see you last year because a young guy decided to jab me right here in the rib and what was great was you gave me some awesome things that I could do to help.
Dr. Casey: It wasn’t even chiropractic stuff.
Bryce: Yeah one was k-tape, one was ice that’s right it was great.
Dr. Casey: And you got it on there, it helped out, it helps you get back to the court quicker so you can elbow him back right?
Bryce: That’s right. But you’re able to modify your adjustment I think sometimes people think oh well I got this part that’s hurt, that’s not a chiropractic thing, like my rib you know but I was able to let you know and you modified the way that you adjusted.
Mandi: A lot of people think he does the same thing for each patient and it is very different because your story is different and your body is different.
Bryce: Your goals and your athletic pursuits
Mandi: Right. Like I’m not going hiking every weekend. I want to but I just don’t but if that were the case he would modify that for me.
Dr. Casey: yeah every story is different. Most of the time I’ll say well I’m glad you told me so let’s do this right? Well outside of that is there anything else that we wanted to discuss today that you had on your list?
Mandi: That’s all I have on my list. Is there anything else you’d like to add Bryce?
Bryce: I think we’re good to go
Dr. Casey: Well, Anne Marie, Bryce, thank you so much. Mandi it’s always great being with you on camera. Thank you guys for joining us and we will see you on the next podcast!