Episode Description
Children need help too. In this episode Dr. Casey talks about a special child patient he helped including a story or two about his own daughter Lexi! Also discussed are insurance benefits and being enrolled in a VA program that allow veterans to see chiropractors of their choice.
Dr. Casey: So I wish I had gotten that uh shot of you getting into that chair.
Mandi: Oh we’re on? Okay. Yeah, man, leg day’s rough.
Dr. Casey: How many days we’re into it? Two days?
Mandi: Two days. No, this is day three.
Dr. Casey: Can you take your kid up and downstairs yet?
Mandi: She’s big. No, I can’t. She’s a big one, yeah. I can barely get myself up the stairs!
Dr. Casey: Well at least you’re hitting it. What workouts are you doing?
Mandi: I don’t want to tell you because you’re going to laugh at me.
Dr. Casey: Is it Beachbody? Body Bye Bye?
Mandi: I mean it might be Beachbody
Dr. Casey: Or are you doing uh what is it Tae Bo with Billy Blanks?
Mandi: I’m doing some straight up CrossFit stuff.
Dr. Casey: Okay, there it is. You’re not going to be using the bathroom for a few more weeks.
Mandi: Oh gosh no. No public restrooms.
Dr. Casey: So let’s talk about some cool things that we’ve experienced this week!
Mandi: Okay!
Dr. Casey: Last week we had a kid come in and you asked me last time about pediatrics and what’s my favorite case, this and that. One of my cases about pediatrics, and I figure this is something that was extremely important for you guys to hear, because you don’t get to see or hear this all the time or probably even rarely, but we had a kid contact or it was the parents that contacted us and they have a kid that is about five or six years old. She is one of four patients in the united states that has a chromosomal disease that makes everything in her guts just kind of tighten up and sphincter up and there’s a lot more to it but part of the problem what they’re needing help with is that she can’t have a bowel movement without having to bear down so hard and have hemorrhoids and I forgot how many ballots of hemorrhoid cases that she’s already had.
But they’ve tried everything, they’ve been to everybody, done this, done that, and now they’re like, “oh my god, this is our last resort. We don’t even know what to do at this point!” So you know, we come in and we do a little nerve scan up and down the back to see how the nerves are behaving and pinpoint different areas of different parts of the spine. I said, “Hey this is where you’re finding some areas where the nerve is overactive and if we get that calmed down by getting normal spinal motion in there we should see some things to behave better.”
And so visit one mom came in and we went over all that and we did an adjustment. Nothing miraculous happened but she came in the next day and dad brought her the next time and what we ended up seeing was that there was a little bit better sleep. Just a little bit better sleep, that’s all. They noticed the next time they came in, mom came in with her with her kiddo and she said to me that her kid was on the toilet and that she said, “Mom, I’m not even having to push to get anything to come out!”
Mandi: Oh my gosh. I’m glad I wasn’t here. I would have been crying.
Dr. Casey: Yep, just in two or three visits it’s like you’re getting something that’s just so unbearable for this child, that’s producing hemorrhoids at such a young age, and it’s just like holy cow! That’s what gives me goosebumps is when you hear life changing things like. We’re tearing up a little bit.
Mandi: Sorry I’m still postpartum that’s why I’ve got my postpartum hair so don’t hate.
Dr. Casey: I’m postpartum too.
Mandi: Oh yeah. Postpartum hormones are still going.
Dr. Casey: I stayed up all night with my kiddo last night. She’s getting better though, which is another cool story too. (My wife and I) had a baby girl almost six months ago and when she was a newborn, I mean, it was just one of the healthiest babies and healthiest deliveries that you could have had. But Lexi was having some problems with her blood sugar though to where it was just bouncing around. It wasn’t low, it was just on the lower end of normal, and then a couple of times it bounced low. So this is our first child, you know, first experience of us being in the hospital as parents and we ended up having an issue where all day had been. Then Chassidy needed a fan so I went home to go get a fan showered up
It was only about an hour lapse of time that I left and came back and I was almost back to the hospital and I got a call from Chassidy, in tears, and in a kind of hysterical moment. I was like what’s going on she goes “well the whole doc, you know, team nurses, and everybody’s up here and they’re saying they’re having to take her to the NICU!” and I’m like “how in the world are you, like, I’m gone an hour and there’s no mention of anything going wrong or anything!” It’s like now all of a sudden we gotta take her to the NICU, the doctor’s gone, let’s just get her in. I’m literally pulling up and we get back upstairs finally and there’s the whole team in there and they’re like “oh yeah because of her blood sugar irregularities we’re having to take her to the NICU.” And I’m like “wait, wait, what’s going on here?” And it was just their standard protocol and I was like “holy cow! This is standard protocol? So how come we’re just now getting word that this is going to be a thing?”
So we’re freaking out and we’re trying to figure out what to do in order to handle all this. My wife, who’s just given a child, just incredibly upset when we have a baby, who has been as healthy as she could possibly be, now all of a sudden then she’s going into the NICU! This is during all this COVID stuff where nobody’s there to help out and so I’m sitting there stuck. I’m like “Well what do you? Do you stay down here with your kid? Do you go back up there with your wife?” You know, what do you do? It was this whole stressful event and honestly, I know they have their protocols and everything else, but looking back on things it probably wasn’t something that needed to happen had we given it a little bit more time.
This has come from some advice from (my wife’s) OBGYN that did the delivery. It used to be they just give her some sugar water and give it a few more hours and everything else but we were going through this whole stressful event. So I had to compartmentalize all my emotions and finally once we got down into the NICU, everything was still battling where her blood sugar is just all over the place. Well, these are the cases that come to see me when they’ve had enough of everything else that’s not working. So I had to put all this aside and start thinking clinically. We did some different adjustments that are very light adjustments. Almost as if you’re lightly pressing on a piece of fruit or vegetable to see if it’s ready to cook.
So that’s what we did with Lexi and after even just one adjustment, they came back and finally took some more blood work. It was the first time that her blood sugars were spiking high and staying high into normal levels. Not sitting there, kind of teeter-tottering on the lower end of normal. At that point time she skyrocketed to where everything was just balanced out now and that was just from one adjustment in the NICU. So those are things that we had to deal with in our own personal life with Lexi and now we see that she’s about as happy and healthy she should be. Immune systems working and building, you know, she’s sick right now and she’ll get over that here in a couple more days and keep building more immunity.
Mandi: I just feel really bad for that five-year-old. Five years of just being a parent, and knowing how helpless you feel whenever your babies are sick and you don’t know what else to do. There’s so many things that you’ve told me that can help with pediatrics and I had no idea. It makes me so frustrated that that advice was never given to me before
Dr. Casey: And it’s all too common. It’s just you don’t know what you don’t know and pediatricians aren’t taught what we’re taught. But we see it so many times that there’s just cases that fail in the traditional world of medicine and it’s all because you missed the most basic steps of normal nerve function through normal spinal function.
Mandi: I’m so glad they found you.
Dr. Casey: Well, I’m here to help and so if you have any type of pediatric questions, whether you know some of the top cases that I guess you’ll google and find, or you know, when it comes to ear infections, constipation, colic. Many times you can get kids with different types of pain related things, usually headaches also,
Mandi: And growing pains.
Dr. Casey: Yep, as the kids grow, it puts challenges onto the nervous system and that’s why they can have pain in different areas too. But outside of that make sure you bring me any questions you got for pediatric cases.
Mandi: Absolutely!
Dr. Casey: So we want to talk about some insurance stuff. We get insurance questions all the time too. (To Mandi) What would be one of the things that you think that we hear about most?
Mandi: “Do you guys take my insurance?”
Dr. Casey: And most of the time yes. There are different ways of taking that insurance and we are credentialed with who?
Mandi: Blue Cross, Blue Shield
Dr. Casey: Correct. But we’re not credentialed with, say, United Healthcare, but there are what we call “in-network” and “out-of-network” benefits. That’s part of the reason why if you call up any clinic, not just my clinic or any other chiropractor, but any other medical clinic and you ask, “do you accept my insurance?” Well yes, if they want to file the out-of-network benefits. So you need to know what your out-of-network benefits are. There’s a whole different, and I don’t get how this insurance can get away with this, but they have their whole in-network deductible which is sometimes meetable, and they have their out-of-network deductible. What’s that network deductible usually, Mandi?
Mandi: Oh my god.
Dr. Casey: It’s through the roof! Through the roof!
Mandi: And hopefully you’ll never meet that. Hopefully you won’t have so many medical requirements in order to meet that deductible.
Dr. Casey: And because of that, that’s why we have time and service discounts to where if you have such a high deductible, we will avoid going through insurance and keep things more cost effective. We do have some better cash plans
Mandi: The care plans are very beneficial.
Dr. Casey: Yep. It does help people understand what they need, getting the repetition that they need, and they’re getting the help that they need.
Mandi: Let’s talk about the veterans.
Dr. Casey: So one of the things is that we have some different type of insurances that are out there, and I think it’s Railroad is the name of the insurance, but it doesn’t really give us a whole lot of coverage and it hasn’t been really effective for Vets getting the type of health care they need through chiropractic care. So they came up with a veteran program that you can actually go in and get a prescription through the VA clinic to come see a chiropractor of your choice that’s enrolled with this program.
Mandi: That’s so awesome
Dr. Casey: We’re newly enrolled with them and so typically now once you get that from the VA clinic, they should be covering the cost of your visit up to a certain amount and I think that amount would cover the adjustments alone in chiropractic clinics. So if you’re a vet it’s definitely worth your while. I know the VA clinic will probably use up a lot of your time to get that prescription but it’s worth your while to get some things in action so you can start getting the healthcare that you need without having as much of the responsibility financially.
Mandi: Absolutely.
Dr. Casey: You deserve it!
Mandi: I think so many suffer silently and now you can do something about it
Dr. Casey: There’s so many failed cases through physical therapy and pain management and once they start seeing what we do in chiropractic, they’re like “Oh my god, this is just a world of difference better!” I mean, just thinking about our patient that came in, without sharing his name right now for HIPAA violations, but we had a VA guy come in and got adjusted. He’d been to other chiropractic clinics and we had him laughing hysterically because of the unexpected results he got from our clinic versus some previous results he got from another client.
Mandi: He was expecting to get popped and you actually adjusted!
Dr. Casey: We know what we’re doing here and we took care of him and he was just overly ecstatic and happy about his results. So if you’re a vet I would suggest looking into what contacts you have. If you go to the VA clinic or VA hospital and see about trying to get you a prescription to see chiropractic care for any type of pain related thing. If it’s a neck thing, back thing, shoulder thing, hip thing, they’ll probably do a quick evaluation and write your prescription to go see some chiropractic care for over a period of time.
Mandi: Come to us.
Dr. Casey: Yeah we’ll be glad to help you! Outside of that we talked about pediatric stuff today, we talked about insurance stuff, we talked about VA program, so any questions you have regarding any of those you can definitely email us at info@bhamhealth.com. You can check out resources that we have on our website at bhamhealth.com.
Mandi: And if you have any questions about anything else that we haven’t been talking about, just hit us with whatever you got.
Dr. Casey: Yeah call us at the clinic, you can reach us at 205-385-9999. Awesome! Anything else we got to go over this week?
Mandi: I think that’s it for right now.
Dr. Casey: More CrossFit right? Have a great week guys and we look forward to speaking to you next week!