Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 152 Live - Dr. Beau Hightower

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

Dr. Beau Hightower is the creator of Ortho-Therapy, the CEO of Elite-osm, and Director of Sports Medicine at Jackson Wink MMA Academy. You may have seen him jamming a hammer into his patients to treat... them. He has successfully treated NFL players, major league baseball players, national champion NCAA wrestlers, champion UFC fighters, Ironman triathletes, elite marathon runners, Olympic athletes, and IFBB professional bodybuilders. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 rock and roll. Oh my God. Wow. I, I sound fat and old on here. That's not true. Right, Andrew.
Starting point is 00:00:12 Right, Andrew. No, no. I think I must have the, the fat and old filter on. Yeah. Take that one off.
Starting point is 00:00:19 Oh, it's back. We need the eyelashes and the sparklies. Yeah. We need something. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh,
Starting point is 00:00:24 the Instagram filters. Wait till they have the smell filters. Oh, yeah. Oh, the Instagram filters. Wait till they have the smell filters. That'll be interesting. The smelly filter. Are they going to come out with that? I'm sure they are, eventually. They had smell-o-vision at one point, I think. Right.
Starting point is 00:00:34 Well, everything seems impossible until you do it. Yeah, until it happens. Until it's right in front of us. The Wright brothers, they said that there wouldn't be flight for 100 years, probably. Two years before they did it, and then they did it. Well, they probably did that to swerve everybody, right? Swerve. Yeah, right.
Starting point is 00:00:50 There was, I remember hearing a story where there was like, somebody else was working on that, working on it, working on it, and they gave up, and it wasn't too much long after that the Wright brothers. That's what always happens, man. Everybody, they always give up right before they hit the finish line. People don't want to push that extra mile. We rolling, Andrew? Yep. Oh, man. We're going.
Starting point is 00:01:09 We are live. Oh, my God. We just wasted valuable seconds of everybody's lives. Hey, everybody. We apologize. Welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project. I am your host. We got my boy, Andrew Zaragoza, as our podcast engineer.
Starting point is 00:01:21 And we got Dr. Bo Hightower in the house today. What's going on, Doc? Greetings and salutations. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Awesome having you out here. I've seen you on YouTube, seen you on Instagram, smashing people with a rubber mallet with a big giant hammer and like a metal chisel.
Starting point is 00:01:40 And then people are like, you're digging in on someone's shoulder or digging in on their hip. And then all of a sudden they're digging in on someone's shoulder or digging in on their hip. And then all of a sudden they have this huge range of motion improvement. And I'm looking at it. I'm like, man, is this for real? Like, what's going on with this thing? Like, this can't be, you know. And I've seen a lot of stuff over the years.
Starting point is 00:01:58 There's been some great advancements with soft tissue work and some of the different work from different people all over the world. And, you know, I've had a lot of stuff done to me, had a lot of stuff that has helped somewhat, but hasn't really, you know, been something that has really affected, I guess, my day-to-day in a positive way, I guess you'd say. Right. Other than just the exercising and eating well and that kind of sleeping, like the normal shit, right? Yeah. But, you know, the stuff that you're doing looks like kind of next level. And what I liked about it is that, especially seeing you now in person and having some of the stuff done to us today, is that you're not like, oh, I'm just going to take the hammer out and hammer everybody.
Starting point is 00:02:43 Right. So what the hell is going on with this method? First of all, let's kind of start out with that. Yeah. So, um, I guess it goes, it goes way back. So we talk about bone setting and there's this big misconception that, you know, chiropractic is some unique entity and it kind of is in America, but these forms of manual therapy have always existed and they exist in other cultures and have around the world.
Starting point is 00:03:02 So if you look at Oriental medicine, if you look even at Europe, there are variations of different manual therapists, napropaths. We have osteopathic physicians in Spain and the UK. And you look to the east and we have different types of methodologies. And so the different ways of bone setting have existed forever. In fact, the first bone setter was Hippocrates, the father of medicine. So these types of methodologies have really existed for a long time and they've been tried and true. They wouldn't exist if they didn't work to a certain extent. And we feel the same way about, you know, a lot of oriental medicine, things like that. But what happened before was we lived in a pre-scientific age. So when something worked, nobody
Starting point is 00:03:38 knew why or how it worked. They would just do it on everybody. And so what we've tried to do is to take some of the things that have been proven, tried and true methods and try to peel them back and reverse engineer them and figure out why they work. And if we can figure out why and how they work physiologically, we can apply them to the right patient population. So that means that every single person we see is getting the right therapy for them. So when you look at some of these therapies, ToxSec is one of the variations that you'll see in Vietnam. It's an oriental form of medicine. They're hammering muscles. And if you guys have probably seen some of those viral videos of like Indian doctors
Starting point is 00:04:08 with the hammer, you know, hammering people's spines and everybody goes crazy in the PT world. But there is some level of validity to everything. And if we can figure out when and where to apply it, we can get some great results. So that led us to take a look at bone setting. And we know that structural alignment is important. Muscle tone is important. Muscle balance is important. Fascial health is important. So if we were trying to influence
Starting point is 00:04:28 the bone system to get bones where they wanted to be, you know, say your heel needs to move in or out or your shoulder needs to move forward or back, how could I influence that? Well, popping it isn't really a very specific way to do that. It's manipulation. It's the most common form of manipulation. So what we wanted to look at was a very specific, linear-driven way to move a bone in a certain direction. And so that's kind of how this came about. And we're using that in very specific ways to create very real changes in all of our patients. And for yourself, where was the first time that you saw it? Like, were you kind of like researching some stuff, or did you have like a mentor or something like that that led you to some of this stuff so some variations of it so we've we've seen the oriental version
Starting point is 00:05:08 that kind of piqued our interest and then one of uh one of the fighters that i've worked with in the past alistair overream he had a medical doctor in holland you can't just name drop like that yeah well name drop it man damn alistair overream i love that guy the ream yeah what a savage that is a savage he had a he had a doctor a, a medical doctor in Holland that would do a variation of this as well. And so we started kind of eyeballing some of that. So we started practicing on each other, the therapists, the PTs in our office, the chiro's in our office, and we started having really drastic results. And so we started using it on some of the fighters.
Starting point is 00:05:38 And as we started to figure out which populations worked best, and we really started to focus in on where and what we could help. And that's, you know, sacroiliac dysfunction, frozen shoulders. And that's kind of what we've gotten famous for on YouTube is those kind of issues. And then, you know, when those don't work, that tells us it's not necessarily a bony fixation issue. We can work our way back into dry needling, soft tissue, whatever else we need to do until we get the results we need.
Starting point is 00:06:01 Even if that means that none of them work and we have to pass them on to a surgeon or for somebody with PRP or stem cell or whatever else. One of the things I liked right away, and it's really frustrating to a lot of people, but I find it as a sign of intelligence. When someone's not afraid to say they don't know or they're not sure or it all depends. Right. And you kind of said all those things a bunch of different times out there today. Uh, even though, you know,
Starting point is 00:06:30 of course in, in this setting, you are the material expert. We don't know half of what you know, but when we would mention certain concerns or certain things, you'd be like, yeah, it could be,
Starting point is 00:06:40 maybe, maybe not like, you know, and then you even were hitting my brother with the hammer and you were like, is that better? Worse of the same? He's like, it was worse. And you're like, oh, whoops, we went the wrong way. Right. And you knocked them a couple more times. And then he was like, oh, it's better. Right. It's, it's, it's, it's an interesting thing, but I think that's a really good place. Anyone that's in search of, you know, continuing their education, trying to
Starting point is 00:07:03 learn more or trying to become a material expert you should have a good understanding that that it's possible that you don't always have the right damn answer yeah and sometimes even with all the right material you just happen to be wrong it's just a probability thing we were talking about uh dr andy galpin who's one of my favorite pop scientists and he's one of the people that really follows the scientific method and so when we talk about what science is and popularity wise that term has been bastardized over the years to meaning certainty and that's not what science is at all it means there's a probability of what we're looking at and so when you can say there's a higher probability lesser probability or you
Starting point is 00:07:39 know we don't actually know that's the most accurate way you can approach a problem but doctors studies show. Right. Which, of course, can be used to mean a myriad of things and mostly are used falsely. Yeah, like what's the study done, you know, for? What's it done? Who's it done on? Who conducted the study?
Starting point is 00:08:00 Like there's a lot of things to like, you got to try to figure some of these things, you know, you got to boil all this down. What are some, uh, what are some things that you learned in the last, you know, last few years that's really helped your chiropractic career take off? Um, that's a good question. What's helped me take off. And it's just the integration of different modalities, really learning to master different modalities. And, and, and this is, it is a practice. And during the course of your career, you to master different modalities. And this is, it is a practice. And during the course of your career, you have a massive sample size. And so what you're looking for is what works best in which population size. So as we've added more tools to our toolkit, literally hammer wise, you know, other things like that, the goal is to figure out who and what
Starting point is 00:08:38 responds to what. So you're not giving the wrong person the wrong treatment. So whether that's dry needling, we know when and where to apply that, whether it's the hammer stuff, whether it's cracking, you know, the more tools you have in your toolkit can be better. But sometimes if you just master a few of them, you're going to be at a better place and then you recognize your boundaries. So any clinician, things need to make logical sense, not only to the patient, but the clinician. So if we don't have something that makes a one-to-one sense, if I have a bone that I think is misplaced, well, then it needs to be pushed. If I have a muscle that's too tight, it needs to be stretched, loosened, needled, whatever that is. If I come in and say, I'm going to treat your thyroid by pushing on your shoulder, then
Starting point is 00:09:12 there's a fundamental issue, right? Like we've run into a fundamental crossroads. There isn't even a biological plausibility of that happening. So for the patients out there, and there might be, right? But it's time to be skeptic. And I'm a open-minded skeptic. I'll try a lot of things and I'll go in there and I will say, I don't think this will work. And if it works, then I have to acknowledge that reality. I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and say, oh no, that doesn't work. And it might've worked once by chance. It might be that I'm just the outlier and it might work for me and it might not work for a lot of people, but you won't know until you continue to test that boundary. And that's something that's a nuance that can't be studied in scientific journals because
Starting point is 00:09:47 you have to control every variable so tightly. So there's not a large enough sample size. There's no professional nuance. And there's some, some major fallacies that we can run into, not only as a clinician, but as a patient too. And what about when somebody is like, oh, that's going to take, you know, that's going to take 16 weeks to recover from that. And you got like guys like Terrell Owens, you know, playing in the Super Bowl that one year with like a broken tibia or whatever it was.
Starting point is 00:10:08 I mean, these men and women that you work with are savages. I mean, these are some next level people. Not only do they have the heart, the determination and all that skill set to be a champion, they also are born with some pretty damn good tools. Guys like Bones Jones and kind of list goes on and on of some of these people that you've worked on. But I think what everybody's really curious about is when you work on somebody, you know, we're seeing the movement pattern change a lot. And, uh, sometimes you're doing a, like strength tests and the person's able to push a little
Starting point is 00:10:40 bit harder. Are these things that like really last? Like, do you work on somebody one time and boom, they're, they're good to go. You work on them three times or five times and they're kind of good to go, or there must be like some level of maintenance to this or how does that work? Well, that's a big part of what we do in our practice is when we're identifying which muscles are too tight or too loose, what we've, we spend an hour with everybody in our clinics. You're going to get 30 minutes with me, 30 minutes with my physical therapist. And so as we go through the process of assessing your movement patterns, what muscles
Starting point is 00:11:08 are tight or whatever else, we're helping you identify what you need to work on on your own. It takes constant maintenance. So people are like, well, it's not a permanent fix. Well, nothing's a permanent fix. When you eat food, guess what? You're going to have to eat again. When you wash your face, that's not a permanent fix either. And you're not trying to sell that. You're not saying, hey, look, I permanently fixed the shoulder. Right. It's like we restored some range of motion for today. Sure.
Starting point is 00:11:29 And hopefully this is something we can work with now. Right. And there are some times that is a permanent fix. It was literally just a fixation or an AC joint that's stuck. We get it moving. It's fine. Okay. That's, that's the trauma.
Starting point is 00:11:39 But when you have movement patterns that are built up over the years, that's going to take some time to unwind. But if we can save you money and time and teach you how to take care of yourself, just the certainty to know that you have some control over yourself means a lot to patients. So what we want to do is we want to put together a diagram for them so they know exactly what to work on on their own.
Starting point is 00:11:56 That way they can continue to test the envelope and see how much change that they can make on their own. Think about it like brushing your teeth. You know, brushing your teeth is an impermanent fix. You have to do it. Wait, what? What is that? What is flossing? But no, I mean, it takes maintenance. Like, nothing is forever. Like, you know, working
Starting point is 00:12:12 out isn't forever either. It's not a permanent fix either. You have to continue to do it or you lose what's there. Right. One thing that has confused me in my fitness journey has been I kind of always thought, you know, there's kind of like the move it or lose it theory, right? Sure. And I always kind of thought like, I don't know, I move a lot, you know, I'm moving all these weights and I'm trying to move in these ranges of motion that I would consider like full range of motion, but it's just the range of motion of the particular exercise. Right. But, you know, things like rows and overhead presses and deadlifts and squats and bench
Starting point is 00:12:48 press. And I did all these things for years. And I, I knew about full range of motion from a very young age. I started in powerlifting at the age of 12 and I'm going to be 42 coming up. So it'll be 30 years of lifting that iron. And, um, I always just thought like, if I keep full range of motion, I'll always have it, but like something happened along the way, like some nicks and bruises and bumps and, uh, some tightness. And so, you know, I don't have full range of motion as you saw with like my hip.
Starting point is 00:13:14 Why does that happen to us? Well, there's a few reasons why that is one is injuries, right? So when you damage tissue, when you heal, you replace that tissue with different types of tissue. So just like in your skin, there's scar tissue. It's a different form of collagen that gets laid down. That may or may not have the same elasticity that the original tissue had. And when you think about what your muscles are doing, what the sarcomeres are doing, when you damage the tissue, which is what you have to do to create hypertrophy, you're creating little mini scar tissue within those as well. Also, the way that most people lift, if you're lifting for power or if you're lifting for
Starting point is 00:13:45 hypertrophy, that requires shortening muscles. The way the muscles work is they're just the system of levers and pulleys. In order to move, those muscles have to shorten. So if you continually shorten them over and over again and don't match that and balance that out, one, by stretching, by elongating them, and two, by doing deep tissue work to break through the connective tissue scarring, eventually you're going to see a decreased range of motion through that muscle. And as a byproduct of that, and that's kind of what our orthotherapy is based on, we look at a joint. So the muscles cross several joints. Your bicep crosses your shoulder and your elbow. Your tricep also crosses both. If that muscle is dysfunctional, if it's too short, even if you try to stretch it out, all you're going to do is transfer force from the tendon
Starting point is 00:14:22 to the bone. It'll also cause aberrant motion at the joint. So you should have what we call a balance right there. So if you're looking at your humerus, your pec, and your lateral internal to rotate, your external rotators are your teres minor and your adversponatus. So if they don't have the same strength relationship and strength-tightness relationship, what you're going to have instead of a spinning of that humerus, it's going to come off center. When it does that, you'll start to either have joint pain or joint dysfunction, which will lead to arthritis and actually more severe structural issues later on. So it's important to maintain those balances that we have through, you know, all accesses of the body.
Starting point is 00:14:55 So you said that these techniques have been around for a long time. It kind of seems like some of the problems that we have, they, they seem like, uh, first world problems kind of in a way, you know, like, because we have the luxury of like going to the gym and playing bodybuilder or playing power lifter for, for days or years or whatever it might be. Uh, we have the opportunity to, uh, you know, do MMA and kick a bag and do all these things, but maybe hundreds and hundreds of years ago, maybe they didn't do some of those things. Do you think people still were jacked up back years ago,
Starting point is 00:15:30 just from maybe some manual labor that they were doing or hunting or something like that? Yeah. I mean, there's, like you said, there's, there's different problems that we have now. I mean, I mean, if we go way back, if you threw your back out, you were a problem to your tribe and they're probably just going to leave you behind. If we're going back, you know, a hundred, 110 years. You hear that Andrew? You get left in the dust buddy.
Starting point is 00:15:47 That's why I'm working on my deadlift and he worked on my back today and I feel great. I'm not going to get left behind. There we go. He's coming with us. He's coming with us. So if you think about 115 years ago, people were dying from all kinds of ridiculous things like, you know, diarrhea and cholera because we hadn't made the technological advances of antibiotics. I almost died from my own diarrhea.
Starting point is 00:16:05 I was going to say, well, there I go again. I'll see you guys on the other side. He's gone again. Shit, literally. Diarrhea and a bad back. We've got to leave him behind, man. Well, I was listening to, they were talking about George H.W. Bush, who just passed, unfortunately.
Starting point is 00:16:19 But they said he almost died when he was a child of a staph infection, which sounds ridiculous to us now, but I think he was born in 1924. So, I mean, he grew up in an era before the advent of commercial antibiotics. I mean, we're not that far away from this kind of stuff. So, you know, if the average age of living is 35, 45 years old, well, you know, during that process, A, you're not going to live long enough to have some of these other problems, and B, the problems that you have, like polio and all these other things, sure seem a lot more important than a little bit of backache when you're lifting heavy weights. You know, these are first world problems. We do get to go in there and try to turn ourselves into GI Joe. And, and really we're doing things that
Starting point is 00:16:53 our body doesn't necessarily want to do. You know, we have to continue to really lift and eat to keep the muscle size. And when you don't do that for, you know, a few weeks, your body says, no, I'm going to go back to homeostasis and go ahead and eat up all these muscles. So, for, you know, a few weeks, your body says, no, I'm going to go back to homeostasis and go and eat up all these muscles. So, um, you know, particularly powerlifters, MMA guys, it's really cool. It's really fun. It's really awesome to be able to test the limitations of the human body, but we are doing things that the human body wasn't really evolutionarily biologically designed for. And so it takes a cerebral approach to be able to make sure that you don't jack yourself up so badly while you're doing that, that you end up not being able to do that. Or you're so hurt that you can't play with your kids or whatever else. Right. What's something that you learned from,
Starting point is 00:17:31 you know, you're dealing with some great athletes. What's something that you learned from the way these guys act, the way these guys behave, their work ethic, the way that they come back from injuries. What's something that you learned that you carry kind of with yourself? You're like, man, that's cool. I, you know, I dig that. Right. So there's, there are psychological variabilities to all extreme athletes. Some of that is self-denial about injuries.
Starting point is 00:17:55 And some of that is over overthinking certain things too. So you'll see the gamut, especially in, you know, we're talking about extreme machismo activities here, weightlifting and punching people so you're likely to see people that either a they worry themselves so much that they think something's wrong and they're scared or b they completely ignore it even though they're having problems they rub some dirt in it and they keep going even when they should get checked out even maybe they should take a little bit of time off it's kind of crazy that a fighter could be uh the first way like they could worry themselves to be hurt. Yeah. It's, it's a real thing. You wouldn't think that of a fighter
Starting point is 00:18:29 though. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, there are different types of people that become fighters. You know, some of them do it for the glory and the fame. Some of them are natural fighters. Some of them are just tough guys. You know, the wrestlers, there's a culture and a mentality to wrestlers that it's rubbed dirt in it. You're fine. They tend to be the other way. And then some of the other forms of martial arts tend to be a little bit more cerebral and they can overthink things. So, you know, it kind of depends what country they have a background from and who you're dealing with. But it's all variable, like we said.
Starting point is 00:19:02 And so we have to assess that as part of our assessment of that person, too. And then we have to communicate with those patients in a way that's beneficial to them. For the warrior, we have to bring them back. We say, you know, you're fine. You can do this. For the other ones, we have to say, hey, listen, if you don't take this seriously, something really bad could happen. You don't want to rupture your Achilles. You're going to be out for a year.
Starting point is 00:19:16 If we do that, you don't get paid. So that communication is very important, too. And, you know, the proof is in the pudding. We really don't lose very many fighters, knock on wood, to injuries. We've lost maybe two in the last three years. And we have, you know, I think 390 or so UFC fights from our gym, um, during that time. So we've lost some guys with glass in the eye. We've lost some guys with sickness. It's kind of outside of our, our, our scope and our realm. So I tend to not count those cause they're not injuries. That's the ego in me talking. But, um, when it comes to musculoskeletal injuries, given how intense the sport is, I think that our team, particularly not just me, but our
Starting point is 00:19:50 PTs, our coaches, every ancillary staff that works on our, uh, with the athletes does a really great job of making sure that we're finding the right balance of recovery exercise, and then keeping these guys healthy enough and gals to where they can go make a living and entertain us. Right. You know, with some of this tissue work and stuff, is it important in some cases for the people just to kind of take off from what they're doing in order to have like real changes? Because, you know, if you keep working on my, you worked on my hip today, you keep working on these tight muscles. If I just keep, you know, re-cranking them up, re-cranking them up, you know, worse and worse, you know, each week or just doing all the same things I normally do, um, it would it be wise just to say, Hey, you know what, let's pull back from a little bit of that lower body stuff.
Starting point is 00:20:33 Let's let the hip kind of repair. Let me dig in and get some of these layers fixed. Sure. And it depends, you know, again, what the goal is, right? So if I have a fight in six weeks, you know, we may have to tinker with some of the rest versus not rest, depending on what we're looking at. Um, and you can go too far with this stuff too. You know, if you've got overactive muscles and you're rolling out too often, you know, I do the same analogy. You wouldn't brush your teeth for 10 minutes at a
Starting point is 00:20:55 time twice a day. You'd wear your gums out. The same thing can be done. You don't want to spend 30 minutes rolling out on a lacrosse ball. That's counterproductive. You're going to, you're going to turn the tone of the muscle so far down that now you're unstable. Your brain doesn't know where you are in space. And you can actually damage the tissue to the point where it's so weak
Starting point is 00:21:09 that now you've created a secondary issue that you don't know what to do with. So a little is good, but with powerlifters and fighters, I actually prefer them
Starting point is 00:21:17 to be wound a little bit tight. I'd rather them be a little bit tight than a little bit loose. They're explosive athletes. They need to be able to reach in there and either create speed or power. And if we make them too loose, they won't
Starting point is 00:21:27 be able to get to those areas. So even getting people to back off, if they're rolling too much, said, Hey, take it easy. You don't need to come in and spend 30 minutes rolling out one. You're pissing off all the other power lifters because they think you look like an idiot. Right. And, and two, you're, you're decreasing the tone of the muscle so much that you can't find, uh, the power that you need to move the weight you need to move. Yeah. I know when I was in kind of the middle of my power thing career, I went to one of my friends and, you know, he's very well versed in some soft tissue work and he was working on me and he was like, he's like, you know what? I know you got a contest in like three weeks. He's like, there's, there's some crap floating around in there. He's like, I'm going
Starting point is 00:22:03 to leave it because you might be using that. Like it's lumpy. It doesn't feel good in there he's like i'm gonna leave it because you might be using that like it's lumpy it doesn't feel good but he's like you're not in pain right and i was like no i'm good he's like we're gonna leave we're leaving it you might be like bouncing your reps off that thing you know right you know it's finding the the right balance of things so like fight week when i go out i would prefer not to be used we call me the insurance policy so i'm there if you wake up the morning of the fight you can't turn your neck. You know, for John's last fight, he got, he got taken down in a wrestling practice on Wednesday before the fight, hard on the shoulder, uh, Thursday morning, he couldn't pull his hand higher than this on one side. Oh, wow. So we had to get that fixed up before the fight. And that
Starting point is 00:22:36 was the left hand that he actually used to, to finish the fight. So hopefully you don't get used, but you want to be there just in case. So if somebody is feeling great, I would rather not work on them. That would be the best thing possible. And a lot of guys, we have to kind of taper them back. I don't really want to do spinal manipulations or adjustments unless we have to, because your brain doesn't exactly know where you are in space. Otherwise, same thing with rolling out. I don't want you to, you know, get dry needled a bunch the day before the fight, because we don't want that muscle so weak and so loose that your brain, you've been training with your body a certain way this whole camp. If we change the muscle tone drastically now, your brain won't know how to react.
Starting point is 00:23:11 You won't know where you are in space, and that's going to give you a decreased chance of getting your goal done, which in this case would be winning a fight or powerlifting or whatever else. Knowing where you are in space, you're kind of talking to this kinesthetic awareness type thing, right? kind of talking to like kind of this like kinesthetic awareness type thing right like just kind of uh this kind of feel that a fighter gets or a power lifter gets for the the way the weights feel the way their body's moving through space and just like an overall feel of like timing and when to kind of push into something and when to kind of back out of it type of deal so a good example this is uh yeah one of our good friends nick best so he's doing power lifting now he's hitting all the 50 plus yeah uh records and i've been lucky to work, Nick Best. So he's doing powerlifting now. He's hitting all the 50-plus records.
Starting point is 00:23:47 I've been lucky to work with Nick a few times. Yeah, he's not young. Yeah, and he's killing the game. Unbelievable strength. So the last meet we were at, he decided he was going to use a suit, but the guy never trains with a suit. He's a strong man, right? He goes raw on everything.
Starting point is 00:24:00 So he tried to pull it off and use the suit, and he failed miserably. He took it off, and he just killed the weight., his brain and his body weren't used to that. And so when you try to switch it over like that, you can actually, you know, destroy your goals because his bar path was different than his brain expected it to be. So it wasn't that he didn't have the strength inside of him to get that lift, but he tricked himself into not knowing where the bar went. And that's the same thing with a fighter. Like if you know where your jab's going to land, what you don't want is that lap so loose that you're punching past, you're punching short, you get countered and knocked out. And so I always tell people, even if I'm not there or whatever else, you don't get treated by somebody that doesn't know your body and isn't familiar with you.
Starting point is 00:24:36 We don't want to introduce something new this late into a camp. Same thing with the powerlifting competition. Unless you're really hurt, and then we have to do what we have to do. But sometimes people in that pursuit of getting better, somebody's around and they're like, I'm going to let this person work on me. And it's like, they don't know your body. This is something new. You don't know how your body responds to it. And so any, any patient we ask, we want to say, what have you done before? What's helped? What hasn't? And so if somebody, for example, has had their neck adjusted or something like that, and they've had really
Starting point is 00:25:02 bad results from it, well, guess what? We're probably not going to do that. It's not that I think that I'm some magician that can adjust people's necks better. Their body probably doesn't respond that well to it. And so we need to listen to that and then do something else as a response to that. And that's why I kind of started off the podcast with saying that I thought it was great that you were, it's not like you didn't know what you're doing, but you mentioned a couple of times like, well, it depends. Well, you know, I'm not really sure about that necessarily, but here's what I think. And I think that that's such a better perspective to come from because then you can kind of embrace the fact that like you might try something that might not work. Right.
Starting point is 00:25:35 And then the guy tells you like, hey, that didn't work. And then what do you do? Like, you're just going to be like, no, it works. Right. Totally works. And we see that with clinicians out there and that's frustrating to both the patient and, you know, I mean, they're dumping money and time and trust into people. And then you kind of get the idea that somebody's BSing you, and that's a really horrible feeling. Like, oh, well, it worked for so-and-so, and I don't know what your problem is.
Starting point is 00:25:53 It's like, that doesn't help me. Well, I'm not them. I'm a different age, a different height, different background, different injuries. Why would I do the exact same thing that somebody else did? That makes zero sense whatsoever. You got something, Andrew? Yeah, no, just curious. So do you even consider what you do, like chiropractic work?
Starting point is 00:26:07 Not really. So I have a chiropractic degree, right? I don't actually have a chiropractic license. I have a napropathic license, which are, if you took massage therapists and educated them to the level of doctoral degree, that's what that would be. It's a lot more like PT. Now, of course, I have a chiropractic background, so I know how to adjust. But I think having different lenses to look through helps you a lot in assessing who needs what, when, and where. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:28 No, it's because it's awesome because I told you about my back. So I'm like, oh, he's going to crack something in there. And you just jabbed your finger into my gut. And I felt better. So I was like, oh, all right. So it wasn't as exciting as I thought. It was more painful than I expected. But it felt great.
Starting point is 00:26:44 So that's why I was like, okay, well, shit, what is that then? Because that's not chiropractic, you know, services, whatever you want to call it. So that's, yeah, that's awesome. Well, and that's a discussion we had too. I think it gets, it's a misnomer to think of chiropractic as a treatment, even though a lot of chiropractors have repetitive treatment. In a vacuum, chiropractic is a profession, just like accounting or baking or whatever else. So that profession could entail a lot of things. You could be a soft tissue therapist. You could be a rehab expert. You could be a dry needle person.
Starting point is 00:27:10 You could be any of those things. In New Mexico, chiropractors prescribe medications. They have DEA numbers. So chiropractic itself is not an intervention. Manipulation is an intervention. Most chiropractors do use manipulation as their prime intervention. But manipulation is taught in 99% of physical therapy schools too. It's just the differences is when and where you use what. And like we were talking about earlier, you know, uh, everybody that walked into the office,
Starting point is 00:27:33 if I gave them antibiotics, well, you know, anybody that had a latent infection would do better, right? So whatever percentage that is, but everybody that didn't have an antibiotic would actually do worse. I might mess up their gut flora, or maybe they had a viral infection. So instead of throwing just the treatment at somebody and expecting everybody to respond the same way, you need to assess what the likelihood is based on their symptoms. So if they were spitting up green stuff in their lungs,
Starting point is 00:27:55 you know, they had been sick recently, well, now I have likelihood that there's an infection. I wouldn't give them an antiviral because that doesn't make sense. So like if your joints are stuck, for example, and you have pain that's one inch off your spine, well, there's a good chance that manipulation might be the winner for you. But if you've already had manipulation or it doesn't work, again, I don't think that I'm the master manipulator of the world, that that would be the treatment that you need. You've already
Starting point is 00:28:15 kind of ruled that out by process of elimination. And I think it's important to look at every individual and assess it in that way. And, you know, and this is, this goes back to the research thing too. So when you look at even the efficacy of certain types of things like manipulation, we don't really control the variables all that well, because we're not really picking the population that would respond based on whatever the intervention is. So say we took idiopathic, so not knowing lower back pain, right. And we had 50 people in this group and then we adjusted all of them. We cracked all their backs. And then like 20 of them got better. That's less than 50%. So that wouldn't be a very good grouping.
Starting point is 00:28:51 But we didn't really decide what kind of back pain they had going into it. Like if they all had fascial lower back pain, of course we wouldn't expect the cracking to help all that much. But if they all came in with a stuck SI joint, they were showing symptoms of facet joint blockage on the side, then we would expect, because we know what the mechanism is, that those patients would do better with manipulation. So if you had 50 people that came in that had facet joint-related, SI joint-related lower back pain, acute within four weeks, and we adjusted all of them,
Starting point is 00:29:18 that number is going to be significantly higher than we would have with just lower back pain. And I think that's the key to most of these studies. In fact, there was a research article that came out in the last year that said that arthroscopic surgery for meniscus tears or arthritis was no better than placebo. Okay. Well, that it takes some nuance and context to understand what that means. So we know that, you know, between 42 and 55% of the population has asymptomatic meniscus tears. So that doesn't mean that they're symptomatic. So if a patient comes into the office and they have pain around their kneecap, hurts to go up and down the stairs, there was no injury, there was no trauma, and we MRI them and they have a meniscus tear.
Starting point is 00:29:56 Well, it could be that that was a silent meniscus tear. So in that patient, if we did surgery around it, there's a very little likelihood that that would help all that much because we would think, what, it's patellar tendonitis. It needs a different intervention. Now, if the patient was playing basketball, stuck their foot in the ground, twisted the knee, they felt a pop, their joint is stuck, they can't straighten it all the way, and that patient had meniscus surgery, there's a good likelihood that that patient would respond significantly better. So if you're just saying it works for knee pain, we're not really quantifying the type of patient that would reply to it. So now people are going to go around and say the surgery is bunk. It doesn't do anything. Well, yeah, if you do it on the wrong person, then of course it's not. And that's why you need
Starting point is 00:30:30 clinicians that are experts to decide who gets when and where what. But unfortunately, we become slaves to the literature. And we say everything's evidence-based. The evidence doesn't really control those types of variabilities. And like we were talking about before, they're actually at fundamental odds at each other. Epidemiologists and scientists look at a population. If we drew a Gaussian distribution or normal curve, they're looking at the first and second derivative. They're actually taught to ignore the 2% on each end. So in society, we don't just throw away 4% of people. We say, okay, maybe they need something else. So a clinician's job is to look at an individual and give them the treatment that they need. So fundamentally, a statistician, epidemiologist, insurance company, and a doctor have fundamentally different goals and objectives.
Starting point is 00:31:12 And so meshing those two things together gives us the best care for A, the population, but B, also the individual. What is your education background? I got some notes here on you and says you have three bachelor's degrees and a master's degree and a something neuropathic medicine another you got all kinds of things going on yeah so my bachelor's degrees I've got three BS's so I'm really full of BS I guess right so my bachelor's degrees are in biological sciences human anatomy and health and wellness I almost had my BA in chemistry that That was my original major. But then you have to go back and do all the core classes again. So I kind of let that one go. My master's degree is in exercise science. And then my doctorate degrees are in
Starting point is 00:31:54 chiropractic medicine and napropathic medicine. And then I've been in and out of PhD programs a couple of times. But at this point, I'm not going to do research. So for me to do a PhD program, it doesn't make sense to me. I'm a clinician that understands research, but I'm not doing research. And I think it's important to not try to do everything. We talk to people like Dr. Gallup and BioLane and those kind of people, and we try to bridge the gap between clinicians and scientists so that we're creating a better line of communication and a better fundamental understanding so that patients and the layperson out there can take what we talk about as far as research and take what we've talked
Starting point is 00:32:29 about as far as individual usage and blend those two things together so they're not at odds. What's your background with sports yourself? So I played college football. So I played five years of college football. I played at Colorado State and University of New Mexico. Five years, that's a record. Aren't you supposed to go to school for four? Well, you know, some of us are a little bit behind. Yeah, so I redshirted. You know, I wrestled growing up. I wrestled for seven years growing up.
Starting point is 00:32:52 I played basketball and other kind of stuff too. And then I've done NPC physique shows back in the day. Cool. Yeah. And what about MMA? You kick some bags and do some stuff here and there? I kick some bags, but I mostly just go downstairs and get beat up.
Starting point is 00:33:06 They get their revenge on me from what we do at the office. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it's funny because fighters are instigators too, so they always try to get the ancillary people to wrestle. And so then John will call me out and I'll have to wrestle like his manager or whoever else. You can't back down at that point, right? And then you realize how out of shape you really are.
Starting point is 00:33:24 All that hypertrophic lifting in the 8 to 12 range doesn't last very long. Your muscles fill up with blood, and now you can't move. And then you realize that if you got in a fight with this guy, you would actually die. Well, it's good that you at least have a wrestling background. I know that wrestlers, the old trick is find the biggest, most jacked guy in the room and ask him to grapple with you, And you can just kill him because all you got to do is pull on their neck a little bit a couple times
Starting point is 00:33:48 because all they're going to do is resist. If you pull on someone's neck, they're going to bull back towards you because they don't know what you're trying to do. Do that about 20 times and the guy will just pass out. Guy's legs will be rubber before he even gets a chance to do anything. But if there's a combination where the guy knows how to wrestle
Starting point is 00:34:05 and he's strong, then he might be. You're okay for a few minutes at least. Yeah, yeah. Well, the problem is then you run into guys that know jiu-jitsu, and that's like a whole different animal. And you're like, oh, wow, I thought I was in a good position, and now I'm asleep. Have you messed with any of that, jiu-jitsu?
Starting point is 00:34:18 A little bit, yeah, a little bit. But, you know, it's very humbling. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very humbling. You know, sometimes you, you start feeling yourself and whatever it is. I ran into this the other day, like one of my patients, I treat a ton of scientists, um, an evolutionary, uh, molecular geneticist. And so we started talking about, you know, CFOS genes and, you know, I'm usually, if not at the top or one of the top of the room is when it comes to, you know, we're
Starting point is 00:34:44 talking about genetics or biology or things like that. And this dude went down like a rabbit hole. And when you like, it's such a helpless feeling when you run into somebody that knows so much more about something. And you're like, yeah, yeah, I get it. And you drop a couple of buzzwords and you're just kind of like. It's the same way on the wrestling. You're like, I just heard Oprah talk about it. What Dr. Oz says.
Starting point is 00:35:04 Yeah, yeah. You know, like on a regular person, I'm it well dr oz says yeah yeah you know like like on a regular person i'm gonna get a takedown you know there's no big deal but then uh you know my buddy devin clark he's fighting uh this weekend actually he was at nc ncaa uh division two national champion wrestler damn and you go two moves in right like i got a duck under i switch to the double leg well this guy's got six more moves for every one of those and then you realize how helpless you are. And you're so deep in the water. And it's like a really, really scary feeling when you realize that you can do nothing to
Starting point is 00:35:30 this person, either physically in his case or even mentally in the case of the scientist. And you're just like, whoa, I have no idea what I'm talking about anymore. And they're so excited because they know that you're drowning. Well, at first, I think they're excited because they're like, hey, somebody gets me. Somebody can talk to me. And they let it all out. And then they realize that my're drowning. Well, at first, I think they're excited because they're like, hey, somebody gets me. Somebody can talk to me. And they let it all out. And then they realize that my eyes glazed over. And then they're like, oh, sorry, sir.
Starting point is 00:35:52 Yeah, they thought they had a buddy. They thought they had somebody to compete. Yeah, it was you against the world, right? I was telling this to my PT buddies. I was like, you know, because when we talk about communication with patients, we talk about even like social media. You know, what you want to do is give people what they want, not what you want to give them. And you have to think about the average person. The average person thinks they're smarter than they are.
Starting point is 00:36:13 The average person is obviously not smarter than they are. So, you know, one of my buddies is a PT. He's like, no, everybody knows this. And I was like, I guarantee you they don't. I was like, what do you think the percentage of the population that has doctoral degrees are? And he's like, I don't know, 20, 22. And I'm like, bro. And we looked it up up it's 1.5 oh my god so you know and out of those people how many of them are idiots right whether they're social idiots right they don't understand um interactions with other people they can't communicate at a level that they can understand
Starting point is 00:36:39 so they're just spouting out all these you know scientific terms so that means your eq is not so good or even some of their iq is not so good. Or even some of their IQ is not so good. They just were really good at rote memorization. So it's electrolytes. Why? It's got electrolytes. What are electrolytes? It's what plants crave.
Starting point is 00:36:54 It's like, I understand you read the medical book, but what does that mean? How do you put that into real life? Antioxidants. Don't we need them? Right. Yeah. What are those buzzwords? Antioxidants.
Starting point is 00:37:03 We need fiber. It's organic. It's grass fed. It's farm to table. them right and yeah what are those buzzwords antioxidants we need fiber it's organic it's uh grass-fed it's uh farm to table you know every buzzword you can think of and i'm like but what do you mean by that specify what does that mean you know and you push them on and they don't have any depth of knowledge whatsoever and you realize you're like okay well this isn't the person that i'm going to go to for any kind of nuance about my health like you were talking about you can go see an endocrinologist but the questions that you're asking aren't the questions that they're used to receiving,
Starting point is 00:37:27 and they may not know how to answer them. They're used to somebody just saying, well, what do I do? Well, here, take this pill. Here's this medicine. Well, what if I do this or this or this? And they go. Yeah, it's usually about two questions deep that you kind of realize, oh, okay, whoops, this guy doesn't really know as much as I thought he would know. Well, he can tell you everything out of the book, but you're not the book. And we were talking about that before. They're designed and the education is designed to take care of the medium. So look at the patient across the population. How many people bench and squat as much as you in the world? What percentage of people? 0.001,
Starting point is 00:38:00 right? So just on that alone, your care is going to be different. How many people eat types of foods that you eat okay one two percent so i mean how would that person even have any background or experience in dealing with somebody like you your medication dose is just going to be different the way that your response from hormonally are going to be different not only from the way that your body has responded to hormones in the past but hormones you might still be on i mean there's so many variables and nuances that it's intellectually dishonest to throw a sure answer at somebody right off the bat. I'm not on hormones, bro. All natty.
Starting point is 00:38:31 All natty. So what the hell happened with your Instagram account? You and I were going back and forth. I'm sliding into the DMs. I got my DM sliding pants on that Andrew and I invented. Safety first. Safety first.
Starting point is 00:38:45 Yeah, I got my helmet on and everything. I and I invented. Safety first. Safety first. Yeah, I got my helmet on and everything. I'm sliding in. And everything's going smooth. We're going back and forth. And then it just says like IG. Did you think I blocked you? It just says like IG user or something. And there was no picture, no nothing.
Starting point is 00:38:57 Your name disappeared. I was like, what happened? Yeah, you know they talk about like Insta-famous? Well, I got Insta-murdered. Got Insta-killed. Yeah, Insta-killed. Insta-wamous. Well, I got Insta-murdered. You got Insta-killed. Yeah, Insta-killed. Insta-wasted. Yeah, they KO'd me, man.
Starting point is 00:39:08 So I had reposted. Yair Rodriguez had this really amazing knockout a few weeks ago. He's this fighter from Mexico. He took a fight on short notice. He's had a ton of issues, man. He had a gallbladder problem. He tore his ribs up previously. Took this fight with a Korean zombie on short notice.
Starting point is 00:39:23 Five-round war. And he knocked a dude out with one second left with a behind the back elbow. Yeah, my homeboy Izzy style wrestling. Shout out to Izzy style. He jumps over the cage, comes in there. So, they had posted it online and I reposted it. And so, you know, it was getting a lot of traffic.
Starting point is 00:39:38 And more than anything, I'm just trying to show promotion for my friends. I want the people to see them. I want them to be excited about Yair. And I get this email and it's like, hey, you've posted UFC content. This has been taken down. And then three hours later it says, your account has been disabled for violating
Starting point is 00:39:54 copyright terms, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, so they completely deleted the account. Do you think specifically that was Dana White who did that? I don't think so. I think that it's a tool. I don't think there's any people, and that's the scary thing about the AI and the bots. I think Dana White was on the computer, and he took
Starting point is 00:40:09 your shit down. He saw it. Yeah, he might have, so that's the highlight right there. So he dips under there, watch this, and he goes bang. Oh my god. With one second left in the fight, and he was gonna lose the decision. Shit. He was down on the scorecards. Damn. So there goes Izzy jumping over the top. Oh!
Starting point is 00:40:25 Everyone's getting more hurt after the fight. I mean, the amount scorecards. So there goes Izzy jumping over the top. Everyone's getting more hurt after the fight. The amount of heart. This is 25 minutes into this fight and he lands the shot and KOs Korean Zombie. It's amazing. Play that back again. That was awesome. One of the craziest KOs you'll ever see. That was so cool. Are you
Starting point is 00:40:40 freaking out when you watch these guys fight and they win? You're getting close to them. Yeah, I'm going nuts, man. These are my friends, man. I care a lot about their success and their health. So, yeah. Wow.
Starting point is 00:40:52 I've never seen anything like that before. Yeah, behind the back. And I'm jumping up and down and going crazy. So, it kind of sucks that that's, you know. And Instagram, it's a big thing, right? You know, it's the way we connect. It's how you connect with me. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:41:02 So, luckily, Eddie Cohn hooked us up, right? Yeah. So, mutual friends are always helpful. The GO me. Yeah. So luckily Eddie Cohn hooked us up, right? Yeah. So mutual friends are always helpful. The GOAT. The GOAT, Eddie Cohn. So yeah, they code my account. We're pulling every string possible. You just can't get a hold of anybody at Facebook or Instagram.
Starting point is 00:41:14 So if you're out there at Facebook, hey guys, I got Bitcoins. What do you want? What do you want here? Somebody help us out. They're going to hear this and then be like, well, that's why you got banned because of this video that they're showing. Oh, no. Are we going to get banned now? Is Dana White going to call Facebook?
Starting point is 00:41:29 Oh, man. Oh, man. So, I mean, I even had, so IMGWME owns it. And I contacted them. I'm like, yo, listen, these are my patients. That's how they communicate with me. I'll delete it. And they retracted the claim, actually.
Starting point is 00:41:40 They actually retracted the copyright claim. We just, you know, somebody at Facebook has to say, okay, you're not a violator and reactivate it. Mark Zuckerberg. I think Mark Zuckerberg and Dana White shut down your Instagram. They might have. You figure they have more important things to do. They said, who do you guys want to see Conor and GSP fight next? And I said, Mark Zuckerberg.
Starting point is 00:42:00 So, yeah, so they KO'd the account. So I have a new one. It's got like 1,100 followers. I think we were like 180,000. It's not 450. Where are you at now, man? Something like that, yeah. So, they KO'd the account. So, I have a new one. It's got like 1,100 followers. I think we were like 180,000. It's not 450. Where are you at now, man? Something like that, yeah. You're super.
Starting point is 00:42:10 Real life famous, insta famous. Man. That's unbelievable. I can't even walk down the street anymore. Everybody's trying to get selfies with you. Yeah. See? Selfie.
Starting point is 00:42:18 Selfie stick. Yeah. All over the damn place. All over. You try to go to the grocery store. So, yeah. Hopefully, we can get that back. If not, it's whatever. You try to go to the grocery store. So, yeah, hopefully we can get that back. If not, it's whatever. But subscribe to the YouTube channel out there.
Starting point is 00:42:30 Also, if you guys are out there right now, make sure to unsubscribe from T-Series. Make sure you subscribe to PewDiePie. Do your part. Oh, yeah. You got to back up PewDiePie. Are you subscribed to PewDiePie? Yeah, well, he's losing. He's like this other guy's.
Starting point is 00:42:42 No, he jumped back up again, man. They're overtaking him, right? No, we're doing our part, man. Everybody out there, the bro army is doing our part. So, he hasn't lost yet. No, he's still the other guys jump back up again man they're overtaking him right now we're doing our part man everybody out there the bro army's doing also he hasn't lost yet no he's still up all right and you know the issue right like he is he's an original creator t-series is like a vivo corporate thing man we can't let that go down that sounds like a bunch of crap yeah man but isn't it like uh some like indian kids and they like sing or something or dance or something so it's like this i don't even know what it's this massive record label right it's like vivo but in india and india has what 1.5 billion people and so they're just putting music videos out every day every day every day and so you know
Starting point is 00:43:13 uh pewdiepie's setup is kind of like y'all's he's got like two dudes and they're editing and they're going at it you know uh in a very organic way and so the youtube community is really rallying around him to try to beat this this entity. So it's this race. How many followers does PewDiePie have? I think he's at 75 million now subscribers on YouTube. That's insane. PewDiePie has like an app or a game or something where you can like, like the app or the game is like, you win stuff by like – it's like a game within a game. Do your kids play this?
Starting point is 00:43:47 Yeah, my kids play it. Nice. Yeah. You win stuff like based on how much people like the stuff that you create. And so it's very similar to like Instagram and YouTube, but it's like a game within a game. Wow. It's like a dream within a dream. It's like Inception of video games.
Starting point is 00:44:03 Yeah. It's like, wow, how deep does it go? He has his own dream within a dream it's like Inception of video games yeah wow how deep does it go he has his own video games I just saw Ralph Breaks the Internet with my kids was it good
Starting point is 00:44:11 I just saw it too it was amazing it was really good I loved Wreck-It Ralph you know yeah this was really good that's one of my nicknames
Starting point is 00:44:17 is Fix-It Felix because I got the hammer oh yeah there you go there you go well in Wreck-It Ralph he's like acquiring all these likes
Starting point is 00:44:24 he's got to make money so he tries a bunch of different ways. He's got to make money. So he tries a bunch of different ways to figure out how to make money. And then he goes to like. Or cleavage. Then he goes to BuzzTube, which is YouTube. And he makes quote unquote viral videos doing a bunch of weird, stupid things. He's got this funny idea.
Starting point is 00:44:40 He's like, I'm just going to. He goes, well, I'll just copy whatever's popular and I'll just do that. And it's all these videos of him like replicating eating the ghost pepper and like yeah all these things it just kind of makes it making fun of what's the guy he like puts like lemon juice in his eyes yeah stuff like that yeah all that all that crazy stuff this the sadist porn or whatever they call it we're just we apparently want to watch people hurt themselves yeah what's that what's that within our dna that's jackass the original member you're right yeah the show jackass breaking beer bottles over their head and so it's steve-o but in this movie uh wreck it ralph he he's what he's walking around he's like what's this room he's like oh my god he's like what is it says comments and he's like kind of looking around it's not where you want to
Starting point is 00:45:20 be yeah he's looking around because he's like actually inside the internet and so there's these huge screens in front of him and he looks up and he's like wreck it ral to be. Yeah, he's looking around. Oh, no. Because he's actually inside the internet. And so there's these huge screens in front of him. And he looks up and he's like, Wreck-It Ralph is really cool. And he's like, oh, that's great. And he gets a big smile on his face. And he looks around and sees a couple other good ones. And then he turns around and he just sees this long list of like, you're old and fat. Why are you even on the internet?
Starting point is 00:45:40 You're washed up. Get out of here. Your squat form is terrible. You don't even know what you did. That's not even depth. He was just getting ripped apart, and he got all sad. I was like, oh, my God. It's like, this is real life right here.
Starting point is 00:45:51 Is that what happens sometimes after your podcast? Oh, of course. Yeah, just drown my sorrows in some Ben & Jerry's. There you go. Tonight dough or fish food. How about yourself for Ben & Jerry's? What's the new one that's- Is there a new one?
Starting point is 00:46:03 Yeah, it's Resist. Oh, great. Resist flavor. That's what it's called? Yeah. What's the new one? Is there a new one? Yeah, it's Resist. Oh, great. Resist flavor. That's what it's called? Yeah. What's that? It's resistance to patriarchy. Oh.
Starting point is 00:46:13 But what's in it? I think it tastes like justice. Hmm. I will not be partaking of it, actually. Oh. No, what's the, yeah, cookie dough. I'm with you with the cookie dough, for sure. Do you eat pretty clean-ish?
Starting point is 00:46:29 Uh-oh. Anyway, moving on. I should, I don't. Priorities, priorities. I had a meal delivery service for a while. It just doesn't work for me. I wouldn't eat the meals. They go bad.
Starting point is 00:46:39 It's just kind of a waste of money. So I'd eat okay. There's a Panera Bread around the corner from my house, get a salad or whatever, So I'd eat okay. There's a Panera Bread around the corner from my house, get a salad or whatever. But I'm not a cooker. My fiance cooks sometimes, mostly for her fitness stuff. So sometimes I'll get some of that, which is a bonus for me. This is a big problem with physicians is that they care for other people. Right.
Starting point is 00:47:01 Do you care for yourself? Do you get exercise in and stuff like that too? Yeah. Okay, well, there you go. Not as much as, uh, but I try to make it at least somewhat of a priority. I'm not a runner anymore, but I try to walk three or four days a week, right. You know, get outside a little bit. I don't really lift heavy free weights anymore. My joints just don't respond that well to it. I've torn everything, right. I've torn my back. I mean, if you wanted to look at somebody who was a chart of somebody that needs surgery,
Starting point is 00:47:22 I've got nine ruptured discs on my back, six compression fractures, torn my meniscus on my right hip, my labrum on my right hip, I've broken my shin, my ankle, torn my right glod. Well, you should have
Starting point is 00:47:31 listed that when I asked you about your education. Yeah, here's the school of hard knocks, guys. I've been hurt, so I get it. So torn both hamstrings,
Starting point is 00:47:37 torn the pec here, I've got the bones around the shoulder, torn rotator cuff, torn AC joint, dislocated my thumb like a month or two ago treating. That was a first.
Starting point is 00:47:46 I didn't think that was going to happen. You know, dislocated all these joints that go too far. Oh, man. I saw that when you were working on my brother. I was like, what the hell is going on? He's got these crazy fingers. But I was like, maybe it's an advantage for being able to work on people. No, this is a football injury, man.
Starting point is 00:47:59 We were playing Fresno State, and, you know, I was setting up a kick return, and the guy was about 260 and faster than I thought. And I turned around, and he was right up on me, went to punch my hands and these three fingers all went the other direction. So when you dislocate stuff, the ligaments are torn and that doesn't really ever come back. So as a result of that, those fingers go further than they should. And that will eventually do arthritis if I don't get prolo or PRP or whatever. Um, but the key, you know, for me again, I've thrown my back out 20, 30 times over the years, but I've figured out what works for me as far as A, avoidance of certain types of exercises and B, which muscles I need to roll out and what the frequency of that is.
Starting point is 00:48:33 And that's really important that I hit those. So because I have this torn pec over here, when I try to do bench press, it doesn't work because it shifts me off to the left. So I've got to get you in a slingshot. Yeah, man, me too, man. So I've got to do mostly cables. You know, I could still probably clear 25 reps So I've got to do mostly cables. Um, you know, I could still probably clear 25 reps if I needed to on two 25 or whatever.
Starting point is 00:48:49 Um, but I haven't squatted in 15 years because that compression with the compression fractures on my spine guaranteed to throw my back out. Even at two 25, two 30. Like I remember getting ready for a men's physique show about eight years ago. And I was doing RDLs with like 25 pound dumbbells.
Starting point is 00:49:04 And I threw my back. It was just like, all right, that that's the kicker. Apparently I can't lift any weights in that position because my back says hell no. And so when you, when you have those schmorals nodes, what happens is you have the disc and the, and the vertebra and the, and the disc itself herniates vertically into the bone itself. And so as a result of that bone is very sensitive. Discs actually don't have that many nerve fibers. when i move forward or back the disc material goes into the bone forward or back when i either compress or hyper extend so for me that means i'm going to be you know sleeping on the recliner for four days and popping tylenols and so at a certain point you realize that this just isn't going to work for me anymore and that's the thing we were talking about listen to your body we were talking
Starting point is 00:49:41 about that earlier you know if you're stand efforting you can lift power you can you can squat and bench the roof, and he doesn't have injuries. I know he threw his back a little bit, but he fixed it with the big three. But his body works well. Some other guys end up with hip replacements, like your brother,
Starting point is 00:49:54 and so it's important to just listen to your body. If you continue to hurt yourself the same way over and over again, and you've also gone to experts and they've corrected your form and they make sure that everything's right, and you still get hurt, well, maybe that isn't for you. you know so you're at jackson wink and uh
Starting point is 00:50:08 with the the type of care that you provide um is it kind of full service is there like someone else who might take over and and offer i mean i know these are a bunch of fighters and so they they probably have people all over the place but is this facility kind of full service are you part of the facility are you separate from the facility? How does it work? We sublease from them, but we are the sports medicine department of them. So we have a rehab room that's essentially like a training room for an NCAA team. We've got ultrasound, e-stim, decompression, recovery boots,
Starting point is 00:50:40 any kind of modality that they would want to use. We've got every type of equipment for them to roll out on their own. And then we have six providers there. We've got two physical therapists, doctors of physical therapy. We've got myself. We've got two napropathic doctors. So there's always somebody there to either do wound care, to close cuts, or to treat the guys when we need to.
Starting point is 00:50:58 So I'm not there today, but we've got our director of physical therapy is there handling stuff. And then we also have that other location, like I talked about, with Cowboy Cerrone over at the Performance Ranch. We need to get Cowboy in here. That's what you need to do, yeah. Yeah, we love that guy. We're huge fans, as is everybody else in the world. He's a fun interview, right?
Starting point is 00:51:16 Yeah, and we are looking at expanding. We're looking at Vegas and a couple other places. Awesome. It takes me about six months or so to train somebody after they have doctoral education to do this. But, hey, man, they're all contractors, so they set their own hours. They do what they want to do. They get a percentage of the revenue they make. And, you know, some of them are making between $150,000 to $200,000 a year, you know, hanging out at a cool gym, treating fighters and changing people's lives.
Starting point is 00:51:38 Do you own this yourself, this practice, or is it with other people? Yeah, I do own Elite OSM, so I created it myself. And the way it started, I was setting up a business. I had moved from Ohio. I worked for another company. I was living in Cincinnati, and I was setting up a deal in Scottsdale, but I'm from Albuquerque originally. So I stopped through on the way back, just had a bad breakup. I basically spent all my money on lawyer fees, so I was pretty much broke. So I had about $500 in my account, so I couldn't pay my apartment rent that I had gotten for six months. And so magic of social media, people had heard about me on Facebook because I used to treat some of the
Starting point is 00:52:13 Dallas Cowboys and stuff like that. So I started driving around with a table in the back of my car to people's houses and charging $45. Oh man, there's a lot of people listening right now that can relate. There's a lot of chiropractors and massage therapists who are like, okay, there's some hope for me. Yeah, you're just out there hustling, man, just trying to make enough to get by. And so I didn't have enough. And so I knew a guy that owned a building and he let me front lease a single room. It was $500 a month and I didn't have to pay it all up front. So I started treating people.
Starting point is 00:52:40 And the barber that I was going to was friends with Diego Sanchez, and he referred him in. I started treating him. He sent a few more people, Julie Kedzie, Tim Kennedy, Andrei Arlovsky, Alice Rover, and Greg Jackson. And so then when they opened the new facility, they asked us if we would join them there in the facility. So they invited us to come be a part of their team. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, our team has grown up to 10 providers now.
Starting point is 00:53:02 And, you know, we're grossing, you knowing near a million dollars a year in revenue on it. It's been a great success. I'm just super thankful for all the people, my providers, the patients, and the gym itself for helping us to achieve that success. Essentially, everybody took a chance on me. A lot of our providers were either working at a gym, doing the front desk stuff or whatever else else when they decided to go all in and go get their degree to be able to do this. And, uh, you know, luckily it's worked out really well for everybody so far. You know, a lot of people have a lot more resources than they think. You know, somebody might ask, you know, how do you start a gym or how do you start this or how do you start that?
Starting point is 00:53:41 Well, you start by talking about it. You start by kind of poking around, telling people, you know, tell other people your hopes and dreams. I want to one day own a chiropractic practice. Sure. Might sound outlandish because maybe you were not even in school for it yet. Right. But as long as you're starting to stack the chips up towards, uh, towards heading in that direction. Right. Um, other people will help it. You know, I know there's a lot of negativity out there, but other people will help it. You know, I know there's a lot of negativity out there, but other people will help and you have to communicate with people. The guy that's
Starting point is 00:54:09 standing, sitting over right over here, uh, Casey, um, he was my neighbor. He lived across the street from me and he would see these boxes come into our house all the time. And those were boxes of slingshots. And he and I, and my wife and stuff got in conversation over the weeks and months that we lived there, uh, at the mailbox. And we talked about you know what he does and what what i do and he's like oh okay that's like that's cool you got an invention he's like i i do shipping and receiving i do logistics yeah yeah lived right across the street from me but like if you're a dick and like i see him out by his mailbox i I see his kids outside, I never say hi to anybody, never talk to anybody. I understand keeping to yourself, but also why not be neighborly to your neighbor?
Starting point is 00:54:54 Why not be friendly? And so just those little things can make a huge difference. In your case, going to the barber, I'm sure there must have been conversation of you telling him what you do and what you, what you enjoy. And he probably thought about that when Diego Sanchez came in and said, well, you're jacked up all the time. You got to meet my buddy. Right. And, and, um, you know, people don't think about this, but when you go out there and you offer quality for other people, you're going to get it back. And there's a lot of people that need your help. It may not be even with your job. They might just need help with somebody to talk to. They might need somebody to give them a ride somewhere.
Starting point is 00:55:28 And it's in our nature. It's neurologically wired. We have these things called mirror neurons. When I smile at you, your wiring tells you to smile back at me. We are community animals. We're here to help each other in that sense. And so if you can help somebody, you should do that. If you have the ability to do it, you should do that.
Starting point is 00:55:42 And guess what? The universe will almost always pay you back. That person will come back and they will help you in some way, shape or form. And those are, those are the kinds of bonds you just described that, that turn into something big, that turn into really great connections that can be life-changing really. Uh, was it this expensive to, to try to figure out like, you know, as soon as you started getting in position to, to figure out, like, I'm going to kind of open up my own spot. Was it an expensive endeavor or it was, uh, the costs were kept? I run a really low overhead.
Starting point is 00:56:10 Always have. I've never taken a business loan. You know, we buy things when we can afford them. Um, I think that's really important for people to understand that I did the same thing. I never, never borrowed money, uh, that nothing like that. Just, yeah, just, you know,, just bootstrapping it, you know, and taking it one step at a time. Yep. And, and mind your margins and, um, you know, tables are about two grand a piece. We've got 10 of them now. So we've got $20,000 worth of tables and just,
Starting point is 00:56:35 you know, silly stuff like that. But the overhead is the product is us. Um, so really the margins are pretty good as long as you can, you can be good enough to be busy. Now we're a cash-based practice. We don't do any insurance. None of our providers do insurance. So our population of patients, we get better outcomes than most people do. We get 88%, 90% resolution rate. Part of that is biased because the people that come to us want to get better.
Starting point is 00:56:59 They're willing to invest money into it. I've been in clinics before. This is my fifth clinic that I've built, by the way. If I flew from New York to go see you guys or something, I'm going to be all pumped up about getting help. And you're probably going to do the exercises we tell you to do on your own because you invested in it. Nobody washes a rental car. So you have to have some skin in the game. Except for maybe Smokey. That's funny. But you have to have some skin in the game. And so because it's a cash-based practice, people that come to us are A, more athletic, B, they're more invested in their health. I've been in practices and family practices with medical doctors where we've taken insurance. And when you don't have
Starting point is 00:57:31 any co-pay, nobody really cares. We can't get them to be motivated to do what they want to do. So as a result of that, our outcomes are better because we have the people that are invested. They're putting money into their health and they're willing to take the time and the money to get better. So that's a really cool thing. It's kind of a, it's a tough thing too, because we have to keep our price at a point where it's affordable. We're in New Mexico, we're the second poorest state in the country after Mississippi. So it's not right for us to raise our prices to where we're paying, you know, and this might sound silly to California, but a hundred dollars a session is too much for New Mexico. When we go to other states, we will have a higher price tag. But what I don't want this to do
Starting point is 00:58:06 is to become in some country club, you know, yet see elitist place. We want to be able to provide care to everybody. And I've said this on another podcast before, you know, I never want finances to come in the way of somebody's care. There's something that they can do for us
Starting point is 00:58:19 that's worth its while, whether they, you know, advertise for us or, you know, come in a vacuum. We will never let somebody go out just because of money. We'll make sure that we take care of them. And I think that if you stay true
Starting point is 00:58:30 to the heart of why you're doing this, then all the other stuff take care of itself. We get plenty of referrals because we take care of people. And that money will take care of itself, honestly. You don't want to nickel and dime people. I always tell people, treat people the way you would want your mother being treated. You wouldn't want them, if they happen to be five minutes late, unless you're always on time, you can't hold them to that same standard, which as a doctor or a clinician, you're never always on time. You're always running behind, which is that not frustrating as a, as a patient where you show up on time and they see you like an hour and a half later, but the one day you show up three minutes late, they're like, we have to reschedule. You can't see you. That's a load of crap, man. And that's not okay.
Starting point is 00:59:03 And you need to treat people like you would want to be treated or you'd want your mother your you know your sister or whoever to be treated and i think if you take those principles and you stay true to them um as long as you're focused then on what your main goal is and you you really you know make yourself um focus on what you're really great at you know hedgehog principle um things will take care of themselves and and for us we've been lucky and blessed enough to where that has been the case. I got a lot of friends that are trainers and coaches and chiropractors and massage therapists and things like that. How were you able to know when to let go and bring other people in? Because I got friends that they can't really do it because they're worried that the quality won't be there.
Starting point is 00:59:46 They're worried if they teach somebody else or coach somebody else up that it won't be the same. Well, it takes constant revision, honestly. The way that I do things is very specific. And one degree off, eventually you're going to be really far away. So with our office, we continually do rechecks. And I'll have them come in and shadow me, and I'll go shadow them. We just want to make sure that we're all staying on the same page, because once you get a new tool set, you might forget about the things that really worked well before.
Starting point is 01:00:11 And then all of a sudden, you're not getting great results, and you can't tell why that is. It'd be easy to blame it on the patients and say, oh, they're not doing their exercises, or maybe these cases aren't fixable. But you have to look in the mirror and hold yourself accountable. The most likely scenario in any situation is you're the variable. You're the same person that's seeing all these patients. So if we're having bad outcomes, what's the most likely thing?
Starting point is 01:00:31 Well, I'm doing something differently that I wasn't doing before. Maybe it's my PT. I don't know, but there's something that's different than there wasn't before. So being realistic with yourself, having other people there that can check you too, that you can put your ego away and you can let somebody that you work with say, hey man, you got to shape up a little bit. It's Um, it's, it's not an easy thing to do, especially when you're the boss, but sometimes that thing is necessary. But as far as quality control, you know, it's, it's one of those things that I always say in business, if you're having
Starting point is 01:00:56 to micromanage, you hired the wrong people. So I've always tried to hire people that I knew cared about people and that were genuinely interested in humans and wanting to heal people. All the other stuff I can teach, I can teach anybody how to fix problems. It might take a little longer. We might have to hit it over and over again to get you to remember everything. We might need note cards. But as long as I know that they're there to genuinely want to take care of people and their hearts in the right place, they're going to make money.
Starting point is 01:01:18 They're going to be better at treatment. We're going to get this whole thing figured out. And I don't worry. I don't try to have that scarcity mindset. What if something could go wrong? What if something could go wrong? You know, what if something could go right? I think something important for people to embrace is the people that you hired, you shouldn't think about what if something went wrong. You should understand that there's a possibility they can do it better than you.
Starting point is 01:01:37 And that's a real thing, too. You know, that's like if I go to Andrew for something that's more in his wheelhouse, I'll be like, you know better than I do. We said it the other day. We were working on a commercial shoot that we're going to be shooting pretty soon. We were just kind of walking through it. And our head of media was directing us and showing us. And I was like, man, it doesn't sound right. But then I always thought about it more.
Starting point is 01:02:00 And I'm like, well, why the fuck do it? Why does it matter what I think? I don't know. I don't have the vision that he has. I don't know. I don't know the angle he's thinking about with the camera and stuff. So then I rethought about it and I was like, well, if you just did it your way, totally your way, which it should be your way.
Starting point is 01:02:15 Sure. That's what I hired you for. Right. You know, tell me again, like, what do you think it will look like? And then it started to make more sense. Right. Okay. But I think a lot of people need to understand.
Starting point is 01:02:24 Learning to let go of parts of that too. Right. Yeah. And understanding your own sense. Right. Okay. But I think a lot of people need to understand. Learning to let go of parts of that too, right? Yeah. And understanding your own boundaries, right? Yeah. Yeah. It can be. We have tons of therapists that are better at certain things. Dr. Needles, we call Dr. McDonald.
Starting point is 01:02:33 She's our PT, but she's the best at dry needling. You know, she's done it more. She's more experienced. She's had more education with it. I can dry needle pretty well too, but that's not really my wheelhouse. You know, we've got other ones that are great soft tissue. You know, our tissue specialist, Alicia, Greg, Sean, they were classically trained as massage therapists. So they have a different perspective on soft tissue where I may not have
Starting point is 01:02:53 that loving touch, as you may have noticed, they may be able to get in there with maybe an older patient or kids and do better with those people. And so what you just said is a hundred percent true. In some circumstances, you can't control everything and you need to learn how to compartmentalize your life and not take it home with you. And then if you hire somebody, make sure you hire the right person and then let them do what they do. You know, you can't do everything yourself. It's just not possible. There's limitations to resources. And like we said in the other room too, you know, in life, you get to be really good at maybe two or three things and you're maybe okay at four or five and you kind of suck shit at everything else. Like I can't, my car is messed up.
Starting point is 01:03:26 It's like the old Mitch Hedberg thing. It's like, you know, when the light's at E, I get real cocky. I'm like, ah, I got this one. Let me go get the toolbox, a.k.a. the credit card. And if that's not it, I don't know what to do. I got to call AAA. Like, if the windshield wiper breaks, you're like, I got to get a new car. Right, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:03:41 So that's not my skill set, you know. My brother's a mechanical engineer. He can fix damn near anything mechanical, you know, that's, it's not my strength. And so, you know, it's important. And people have a hard time with this. It's like, everybody's a doctor, everybody's a nutrition expert. And it's like, bro, what are you talking about? You're a computer engineer. Why are you trying to coach people on nutrition? Like you should maybe have some experience, some, some hands-on real life experience before you start telling everybody what they should do with their body. What do you think about some people that own a business
Starting point is 01:04:08 that just kind of can't let go of the fact that they feel and they really truly believe that everyone's showing up just for them? Like, oh, they're just here to see a bow-high tower and they're not, you know. Obviously, you have a different thing going on now, but when you first started, how were you able to let go of that part of it? What do you mean by that? Or were you just kind of, you wanted to set your business up a little differently from the beginning? You wanted to have a practice where you had multiple people servicing a large number of people.
Starting point is 01:04:38 In our line of work, for example, there's a direct trade-off from time and money. And so the only other way to make that work is to teach more people how to do this and then stream some of the revenue back to yourself. And then you pyramid it. Eventually, you create avenues for them to create revenue the same way. That way they can teach people and everybody else does better. And so the goal is, of course, a rising tide lifts all ships. If you can get everybody doing better and they can teach other people to do better, a,
Starting point is 01:05:06 everyone will do better financially. B, way more people in this world will get great care, great musculoskeletal care. Right. Um, so being able to separate those things, you have to realize that there's some limitations. Like my body won't be able to do this to everybody forever.
Starting point is 01:05:17 It's, there are limitations. I can't do this when I'm probably 65 years old. So how do I create a backup plan for that? Well, I'm not selling slingshots at three in the morning while I'm asleep. It's not the way my business operates. So really the only way to make that happen is I'm going to have to get my knowledge out there, which I like to do
Starting point is 01:05:31 anyway, but I have to teach other people to be dependent and to be skilled and to do the things that we do. It makes a lot of sense. One thing I noticed about when you were working on my brother is how much you, like, it was great watching you, you know, look at him and watch him move around and some of the other people you worked on too. But I could tell like every once in a while, you're almost getting like frustrated. Like you're like, Oh man, I need to not frustrated. You, you were really thinking about how can I fix him? How can I help him? How can I help him more? And you were looking really acutely at his shoulder and his neck and, and his body in general. And you were like, man, how do I make this thing move better? I really liked watching you kind of unpack all that and, and try and
Starting point is 01:06:14 seeing firsthand kind of how your mind is working. Yeah. It's probably fun to watch from the outside, not being on the table, right? Yeah. When I was on the table, yeah, it was kind of a difference. Not everything you did killed, but. Yeah. But some of them are pretty rough. Yeah. A couple of things. And they're worse on kind of a difference. Not everything you did killed, but. Yeah, but some of them are pretty rough. Yeah, a couple things. And they're worse on somebody with a dense muscle that's been worked over the years. Like when we get like 45, 50-year-old women in there that have been in pain a long time, they think this feels good.
Starting point is 01:06:33 Right. So it's all perspective. They have chronic pain, but their pain is a different type of pain. When we get somebody with dense muscles, it sucks. It's not fun. Bodybuilders, powerlifters, fighters, yeah, it's a battle. Yeah, but you're looking at that kind of stuff. I think it's really important to, again, you're being realistic and you're working through an algorithm in your head.
Starting point is 01:06:52 So you clear one thing one at a time. And like I was telling you before, better, worse, same. You have to get that feedback to create your worldview. And so what we're doing is we're testing one variable at a time. So what are the things that could be limiting me? Well, this shoulder bug could be the shoulder position. So we'll treat that and then we'll recheck it again. If that's a little better and I see something new now, I've created a new layer. Now his lat's holding him up.
Starting point is 01:07:10 So let's check that out. Okay. And now I've treated that. That didn't help at all. All right, move to the next thing. What about the pec? Okay. Worked on that. That helped quite a bit. All right. Let's go back to the pec. Okay. It helped a little more. Let's go back until it doesn't work anymore. Now we'll look at it again. It's still not where we want it to be. So now I need to find something else. Does he have a rib out? Is it subscapularis that's limiting him? And so that's the way you work through it until you get somebody to a normal range of motion to where they get their goal. And their goal may not be what your goal for them might be. So we have to remember that too. We don't live in their body. You know, only they know what they feel. And it's important
Starting point is 01:07:39 to listen to their feedback because the words we use to describe pain may not be universal. You know, like I've said this before, I can say the word dog, you say the word dog, and what we have in our head mentally might be different than, you know, some lady out there. I might say dog, I'm thinking snoop dog, you're thinking about a schnauzer, and she's thinking about her ex-boyfriend that cheated on her. It's the same word, but it has a completely different context. Even anatomically, we'll say shoulder, I'm going to think the glenohumeral joint because I'm being very specific. Somebody might say this is my shoulder, or this is my shoulder. And we get that all the time. So that's why telemedicine is like a horrible idea because you're not actually getting
Starting point is 01:08:11 verification of what we're talking about. And then your original theory ends up being completely wrong and you have to work your way back to something else. But it's important to acknowledge that you are wrong and then to make sure that you're clarifying exactly what we're trying to get so the patient can accomplish their goals, not your goal. What's something that frustrates you that you see going on in the medical community or, you know, with the chiropractic and some of the things that you work? Well, you know, I think in chiropractic, one of the ones, the lack of pragmatic thinking, and some of that comes to not being given a set of tools while they're in school that they can work with. If you're only given a couple sets of tools and you're not of the mind seat to where you can go out and get other
Starting point is 01:08:47 tools, then either A, you're going to get really frustrated that your outcomes aren't as good as you thought they would and you'll leave the profession, or B, you'll start to learn to convince yourself that that same treatment works for everybody and you just keep doing the same thing over and over again. And neither one of those are really congruent with your words, thoughts, and actions and getting yourself where you need to be. That's a little bit frustrating because you're not teaching these students the lenses that they need to work their way through. As far as medicine goes, I mean, I think one of the big issues is the shortage of doctors. I think that they're oversaturated as far as work. I think that the insurance companies don't want to pay for anything, so they're having to work harder for less money.
Starting point is 01:09:21 And really, it's a scam if you think about it. So we have these great students, and they do everything the right way. They have a 3.9 GPA and they're trying to get into med school. Well, the med schools limit the amount of students that get into it. So they're only going to let 40 in per class. So because there's this supply and demand, what they can do is jack the price of the school up significantly. So now they come out debt slaves and that determines how they act in the real world, too. So now they may be more inclined to order more tests or do other things that may not be exactly what the patient needs, but subconsciously they know that they have to make more payments.
Starting point is 01:09:53 And I'm not accusing doctors of unethical behavior, but I think that finances are a part of our subconscious brain. And if you need money, you may be more likely, even like I said subconsciously, to recommend something that maybe they don't necessarily need. I see this with chiros. If they have a $40,000 x-ray machine, well, guess what? More people are getting x-rays than they maybe would have ordered if they didn't have the x-ray machine. It's not even necessarily corruption or anything like that. That's just part of being a human being.
Starting point is 01:10:18 So that's part of the problem. So now we don't have enough family doctors, so then we have to run a bunch of nurse practitioners through, and nothing against nurse practitioners. They're great practitioners. My family doctor is a nurse doctor. So then we have to run a bunch of nurse practitioners doing nothing against nurse practitioners. They're great physicians. My family doctor is a nurse practitioner, but why are we creating secondary and tertiary systems of the same practitioner instead of just letting more people in? So that's part of the problem too. So then what happens is we say,
Starting point is 01:10:35 we'll open a DO school. So the DOs are medical doctors here in the United States as well. Well, they'll, they'll let, you know, a little bit better, a little bit lower GPA in a three, four, three, five, but as a consequence, now they're going to be $120,000 a year. So now again, we're running people into this massive amount of debt. So we don't have enough clinicians. Then we want to give insurance, which is of course by nature, a scam, you know, insurance companies only exist because of illogical behavior, right? Insurance by its very nature, you're going to lose more than, than you'd have there. Like if you have a house, what are the odds of it? This is the wrong time for the fire ratio in this area. Insurance is a scam.
Starting point is 01:11:10 It's like gambling. You'll always lose more than you get in. Casinos shouldn't exist if we were logical, rational beings. So when we're looking at that kind of stuff, the insurance is designed to protect chronic capitalism too. So if you have a surgical screw for your hip, you get a patent for it. Now it's a $5,000 screw. In true capitalism, right? Somebody would say, that's a great thing.
Starting point is 01:11:29 I can make that for better and cheaper and get it on the marketplace. So instead of paying $16 for a Tylenol or $200 for a bag of saline or $4,000 for an ambulance ride, who would pay with that would actually cost. So what we say is we're going to say, um, you know, we're just going to give more health insurance to more people instead of saying, we're going to say, you know, we're just going to give more health insurance to more people instead of saying we're going to get better health care. We're going to get more doctors. We're going to have more access to stuff. We'll say we'll put universal health care and then we'll overrun the system even more. So first things first, one, we've got to be able to get the prices down of medications, of surgical procedures, all those kind of things.
Starting point is 01:11:59 They're astronomically high and they're held that way because of crony capitalism. Two, I think we need a lot more clinicians out there. We need more doctors to be admitted to medical school. That way we have more doctors in the field. That way we have people that don't have to wait three months or they don't have to fly to the Mayo Clinic or wherever else to get care. And then three, I think it takes a lot of introspection and maybe more business training so that these clinicians don't have to work on a hospital system and they have a little bit more freedom by having a private practice. I think everybody listening to this podcast has probably had this happen to them before
Starting point is 01:12:27 where you go to the chiropractor, they spend 12 minutes with you, they crack your neck and maybe crack your back, and then you leave and you get a bill in the mail and it's like $495. And you're like, wait, what happened? You know, like some of that to me is really crazy, and I never understood why it's not like, hey, this is about how much this is going to cost. That's a rational, ethical way to behave. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:12:54 The service that we're about to do for you, like when you take your car in, for example, the place will call you up and they'll say, hey, wow, we didn't realize, but it's not just that your car overheated, but there's A, B, and C wrong with it too. Do you want us to proceed? Right. You know, they should kind of give you like a heads up, like, hey, you know, here's what we're going to do. Plus they could just look at you and say, okay, you're 20 years old. Like, I don't know, you're probably just starting your life.
Starting point is 01:13:23 Maybe you don't have a lot of finances. Hey, kid, I can crack your neck for 50 bucks, or we can do this, and it costs 300 bucks. That seems rational, right? Right. But it's not like going to a restaurant where there's the steak costs this much, the chicken costs that much, the pasta costs that much. It doesn't work that way. Well, all healthcare runs like this, this right so like our rehab tech she had uh thyroid cancer and so she's still paying off sixteen thousand dollars of um bills because she had an anesthesiologist that happened to be out of network that came in when she wasn't awake um so i mean people get saddled with these bills and there's no way out of it really um and like you said it's not like and even as far as quality there's no guarantees in health care like you go in and have an operation, but what if it doesn't work?
Starting point is 01:14:06 Do you get your money back? Of course not, right? But that's ridiculous. If the stakes sucked, you could send it back, right? I mean, so that's ridiculous. And that's something we have at our practice. You know, our motto is results matter. So if we don't think we can help somebody or we don't make any kind of discernible changes
Starting point is 01:14:19 at all, we're not going to charge that person because this is a service rendered. So if we didn't get the desired outcome or anything near the desired outcome, in my opinion, this goes back to treating people the way you'd want to be treated. I'm not going to charge the money for that. That's, that's ridiculous to me. You're not happy with it. Right. A hundred percent. And then we, we never bill anybody. Like, you know what the price is for the service. You're getting an hour for $70 and we'll do what we can in that process. And if we can get, you know, our stated goals, 30, 60, whatever the percentage is better, then we're going to continue with care.
Starting point is 01:14:47 You can always choose to discontinue care or vice versa, or we may refer you somewhere else. You may need to see a surgeon, but we'll know pretty well right on the first visit if this is going to be something that's going to work for us. We should see 60% improvement right off the bat. And we know that because we have a large sample size. We have 10,000 patients that we've seen in our office. That's a tenth of the population of Albuquerque. Math is not my forte.
Starting point is 01:15:10 Sounds about right. We do have 10,000 patients, but I think there's 600,000 people in Albuquerque. So divide that by the factor. But yeah, we have a large sample size. We know what this works for and what this doesn't. And it's important to know your limits and what you can't help with. And I think that a lot of times healthcare clinicians, whatever that might be, because I mean, you can kind of define what you're going to get based on, uh,
Starting point is 01:15:31 the generic profession that you're going to see, right? If you go to the family doctor, what's the most likely thing you're going to get? NSAIDs, ibuprofen, rest. Okay.
Starting point is 01:15:39 You go to the surgeon, what's the most likely thing they're going to tell you, right? You probably needed an operation. You made it an injection. If you go to a PT, what are they going to tell you? Okay, well, you might be out of alignment. Your muscles are weak in certain positions.
Starting point is 01:15:50 The chiropractor tells you your bones are out of place. Massage therapist says you're carrying all your stress in your neck. So you're choosing the type of healthcare service that you're going to get by definition. So people ask me all the time, they're like, can you refer me to a chiropractor in New Jersey or whatever? I said the same thing earlier. You know, I'm not going to refer you to an accountant in New Jersey either. It's a profession.
Starting point is 01:16:10 Hey, do you know a good baker in Vermont? Should I go see a baker? Should I go get an accountant? Well, I don't know. There's a lot of crappy accountants. I would only refer you to an accountant that I trust. Same thing with a lawyer, right? Hey, do you know a lawyer out in New Jersey that does what you do?
Starting point is 01:16:21 No. And I wouldn't recommend you to go to somebody that I haven't had personal experience with. So the same thing goes with surgeons, chiropractors, whatever else. Like, I think it's ludicrous to suggest somebody to go see a certain profession without knowing that person's background, seeing some of their testimonials, and then maybe even having a sit down consult and making sure that you guys are on the same frequency, the same, you know, vibe. Like, you know, everybody has a different set of values that they need. And that may have to do with religious overtones that may have to do with, you know, age has a different set of values that they need. And that may have to do with religious overtones.
Starting point is 01:16:45 That may have to do with, you know, age, all those kind of things. And so not everybody is a good fit for everybody. And we're not the right fit for everybody either. As you can tell, our treatments are sort of intense. And so there are some people that that's not going to be for them. So what we want to do is have a network of people that we can refer them to other people. Same thing with other types of stuff. Like I could do nutrition, right?
Starting point is 01:17:04 Like I have a master's degree in exercise science. But I know that there are people that are more refer them to other people. Same thing with other types of stuff. I could do nutrition, right? I have a master's degree in exercise science, but I know there are people that are more experts in those fields. I'm the soft tissue, musculoskeletal, biomechanics guy. So instead of trying to do all those things, instead of selling supplements and all those other things, we want to be really good. We want to be good at musculoskeletal care. And if we need to refer for those
Starting point is 01:17:20 other things, we want to have a network of great individuals, at least locally, that we can send to. Is it hard to become a chiropractor? Yes and no. So when you look at the statistics, you have to have a bachelor's degree to get in. So you need four years of undergrad first. You need pre-med, biochem, all that other kind of stuff. So the admission rate to most chiropractic colleges is somewhere around 44%. So it's easier to get into than pharmacy school or medical school, for sure. And that makes sense, right?
Starting point is 01:17:49 The amount of liability and all those other things that go along with it, that makes perfect sense. The actual curriculum, and here's some background on chiropractic, which is interesting. So the profession was founded in 1895. Again, we're at a pre-scientific era. So we're talking post-Civil War. Medicine was treating people with castor and mercury. And we were bleeding people's things. The ideas out there were not very good anywhere.
Starting point is 01:18:12 So some of the original chiropractic ideas were sort of pseudoscientific. I've heard Joe Rogan talk about it before. But if we're going to criticize the origins of psychiatry or medicine or whatever else, the origin of everything is kind of stupid because this is a pre-scientific age. So what was going on, they had something called the Flexner Report. So there was a reorganization of medicine in the 19-teens. And so what happened was they were trying to eliminate all forms of what they called quackery. So that included osteopaths who are now medical doctors, that included chiropractors and lots of other fields of medicine. Magnetic healing was really big around
Starting point is 01:18:45 that time. A.T. Still, who was the founder of osteopathy, was also into magnetic healing, which, by the way, of course, there are some nuances to that as well. Like we said now, we know that leeches can help with wound care. We know that magnets can be useful in MRIs. But sometimes our ideas are just off from the beginning, and that seems to be the case with most of those professions. So the AMA put out a smear campaign to try to eliminate chiropractic because they chose not to join the system. The osteopaths chose to join the system. And so now they're essentially medical doctors they prescribe. And as a result, there was actually an antitrust lawsuit case that was settled in 1982 called the Wilk case. And the AMA, the American Medical Association and the
Starting point is 01:19:24 Academy of Surgeons, was found guilty of disseminating false information about chiropractors to the public, to high schools, in an effort to smear them and eliminate them as a competition. And so some of those biases still exist within our society, particularly in older generations. And so it's this weird sort of professional bigotry. You know, chiropractors, they're in the VA hospital. You know, they work with the Olympic team. Actually, the head of the sports medicine team for the Olympic team for the United States of America is a chiropractor.
Starting point is 01:19:53 Every professional sports team has one. They have a niche, right? So they are good at a certain few things. When they try to go outside of those things, we should probably say, hey, what do you think you're doing there? It's like an optometrist. What does an optometrist do? Well, they set you up for glasses. Well, if they wanted to fix your digestive system, you might have to ask a few questions and say, maybe this might not
Starting point is 01:20:10 be the right person. So as long as everybody's staying in their lanes and works as a healthcare team, I think we can get the right amount of care. But understanding the background on some of those professions is kind of interesting. So circling back around to your question, chiropractic has always been in competition with standardized medicine, whereas physical therapists were kind of a mid-level before nurses as well. So the chiropractic education has been a doctoral degree since the very beginning. Licensed to the United States, you're required to call yourself such as the government. But the programming is actually identical to medical school for the first four years. Medical doctors then go out and specialize and become surgeons and all these other things.
Starting point is 01:20:47 So the actual curriculum is really intense. And we take four parts of the boards, just like medical doctors do as far as steps. Whereas our physical therapists just only have one board examination. Wow. Even though chiropractic and PT, their scopes are really overlapping. And in reality, at probably some point, those two professions should probably merge because they're doing a lot of the same things. Gotcha. Yeah. I'm only asking because like, I mean, you put out like a feeler on Facebook or something like, oh, like my neck's hurting. Does anybody have a recommendation for a chiropractor?
Starting point is 01:21:15 And you get like 15 different recommendations. And I've been to like three or four in my life at this point. And, you know, like I was telling you earlier, it's like my, my fiance goes in, she has a neck thing, crack, crack, crack. Okay.
Starting point is 01:21:28 Hey, what do you got? Like, Oh, my lower back's been killing me for years. Oh, crack, crack, like the exact same thing.
Starting point is 01:21:33 Sure. And I'm like, how, like, how does, like, is that just a universal thing? You know,
Starting point is 01:21:38 like why? No, it's not. I know, obviously, but it's just cause, but then like the 15 minutes you spent with me, you didn't crack me at all.
Starting point is 01:21:44 Right. And I feel better. So it's like, that's why I with me, you didn't crack me at all. Right. And I feel better. So it's like, that's why I was asking. I didn't mean it in a, like trying to put down the practice by saying, is it easy? It's just like, I'm curious. And it seems like, yeah, it's a grinder to even be able to call yourself a chiropractor. Right. It's three, four years post bachelor.
Starting point is 01:22:02 It's a grind. And you have to take state jurisprudence examinations and all the other stuff. You have to have background checks over all this other kind of stuff, too. So when we talk about that, there's a fundamental problem in some of these professions being outliers, dentistry and chiropractic being the big two. Because those two fields, they're both doctorate degrees, because they're not really integrated too much in the medical system, there are no jobs in the hospital, generally speaking. There are select jobs for chiropractors at the Veterans Hospital, VA, but they're kind of few and far between. As a PT, you can almost always get a job at a hospital, same with a nurse. And as a consequence of that, almost every chiropractor has to go out on their own as a business person. Well, every person that goes into healthcare is not inherently going to
Starting point is 01:22:41 be a good business person. In fact, in a lot of ways, those two things are contrarian to each other. Somebody that spent their whole life working on academia is less likely to be a good business person than somebody that isn't. So now we're expecting these people to be able to run a successful business while managing student loan debt and potentially a business loan. Well, what happens sometimes is in order to survive, sometimes their behaviors start to become repetitive just to be able to make more money. So it creates some sort of ethical quandary. And this is what we're talking about. Yeah. Maybe they're seeing a lot of people every day, seeing like 20, 30 people every day. To make ends meet. And during that process of getting five to 10 minutes, the odds of you
Starting point is 01:23:18 having really specialized care is probably going to go down. And so going back to these complaints, we were saying, it's not just chiropractic, it's medicine too. And you're seeing the same thing in medicine now, because of the time limits of the hospitals, they get 10 minutes with you and they're backing out the door in the middle of your conversation. And I think all of those things lead to depersonalized and poor patient care. And it's something we need to address across the board. I've had a lot of care like that before, where somebody like, they take you into like one, like you're in a waiting room and then someone takes you into like another wait like a pre-waiting room like this is the room where you wait a little bit less than the first waiting room and and like somebody comes in and like does some shit with you
Starting point is 01:23:54 like maybe they check your blood pressure or whatever and then somebody else pops in and then finally you get to see the person and boom you're out the door it kind of reminds me of like a restaurant sometimes when when when you get seated. Obviously, the hostess is going to seat you or the host is going to seat you. And then a waiter will come over. But I always kind of hate when somebody else serves me the food. I'm like, where the fuck did my waiter go?
Starting point is 01:24:16 I want that interaction with that person. That's the person that's waiting on me for the night. And that's the person that I want to tip well. It kind of seems like you're getting cheated and when you have these other people kind of in and out of these uh like waiting rooms and pre-waiting rooms and stuff like that you kind of feel like you're getting cheated like man i only saw the guy for like eight minutes i had like 87 questions i wanted to ask him and obviously you're never gonna get the service to be able to ask that many questions but you feel like you're entitled to at least a couple,
Starting point is 01:24:45 especially after you get that bill. In our office you will, but, you know. We asked you a lot of questions today. We made you work on a lot of people too. Hey, man, happy to do it. Happy to do it. But I think that same experience has been had a lot in the PT world and the dental world too.
Starting point is 01:24:58 You know, in order to get a PT office going, it's a lot more cost efficient for the owner to have a bunch of PT techs and PTAs. People go in three times a week for six weeks, but they're only seeing the same PT once or twice. So the old adage, you want five different opinions, see five different doctors. And so you're getting all these mixed messages. So the outcomes are not great. Dental office too, right? You see your dentist for like 24 seconds. You see the hygienist, they do stuff, the dentist pops his head and he goes, oh, it looks fine and runs back out the room. And so the way that these businesses are set up, they're not financially viable to have a lot of
Starting point is 01:25:27 high level clinicians. And I think that leads to poor care. And the reason why I made the dental chiropractic analogy is because those people have to be on their own, the margins are a little different. You know, a dental office, the overhead is significantly higher. There's also a lot more money coming in. But what the ADA has done a great job of doing is gaining public authority, so public trust. And so when you talk about who is the public authority in the musculoskeletal world, well, it's going to be probably neurosurgeons, right? Like they're the go-to people and partly rightly so, but partly that's a consequence of branding and marketing. And so we've convinced people that they need to go to the dentist to have their teeth cleaned twice a year. We even know the
Starting point is 01:26:04 evidence may not support that. So 90-something percent of people have a dentist. Right. It's not necessarily the same thing for a PT or a chiro or a massage. Yeah, I never understood that. Like, why aren't we getting our blood work done at least every five years? You know, like, you're going to the dentist twice a year? I think twice a year is probably a good idea, you know.
Starting point is 01:26:20 Yeah. If you can afford it, you know, you should be getting your blood work done. And you're not getting, yeah, blood work should be done. I mean, you should be getting, like done. And you're not getting, yeah, blood work should be done. I mean, you should be getting just your body checked out in general. Are you losing strength and you're losing movement patterns? I mean, that's not good. Or more serious issues, thyroid issues, cancer, stuff like that, that if you're just getting simple blood work done once or twice a year,
Starting point is 01:26:36 you're going to catch it so much earlier that you're actually going to have a shot at beating these kind of things instead of not going to the doctor for five years, either A, because you haven't been taught that that's important, or B, because it's so financially detrimental to you that you can't afford to do it. Like these are some of the basic problems in healthcare. And they're not an easy fix, but I don't think we're doing anything to help those kinds of things out. It should be an easy fix though, because if the dental community has figured it out, like most people do, I agree.
Starting point is 01:27:02 Like I don't know what the numbers are, but you mentioned 90. I don't know if that's true or, or, or what, but it seems like a lot of people that I know that have dental insurance do go to the dentist. Right. Or even if they don't, they still make it once a year. Yeah. You know, yeah, they're still going at least once a year, but ask them about who their primary care doctor is. They don't even know. Most people don't have one anymore, right? They don't like, they don't even know. For multiple reasons. One, like you said, the cultural authority of it, But two, there's no primary doctors anymore. They all retired because they didn't want to deal with the electronic medical portion of the Obamacare.
Starting point is 01:27:29 Their payments were so much less now that they can't afford to run a business. So that goes back to the financial portion again. And so who suffers? Well, it's the patients that suffer. Well, you might even go to a doctor and they might say, I can't be your primary care doctor. And you're like, what? You're like, I don't even understand because I don't know the medical stuff. Yeah, I'm not accepting any patients right now. I can't help your primary care doctor. And you're like, what? You're like, I don't even understand. Because I don't know the medical stuff. Yeah, I'm not accepting any patients right now.
Starting point is 01:27:48 I can't help you. Right. Yeah, you're like, what the fuck? Yeah, and I'm guilty of this. But it's like, a lot of people don't go to the doctor until something's wrong. And then it's like, oh, but your primary, he's not available till this date. You have to wait four months. But so-and-so's available today if you want to take them.
Starting point is 01:28:01 It's like, yeah, fuck it. I'll take whoever you got. And at that point, it's like well and it doesn't matter andrew actually is the guy that's responsible for losing all your records too yeah everywhere i go i'm like i i don't exist yeah whether it's the airport or in the medical community like i'll you know i'll be like oh yeah i came here like you know two years ago for this and they're like we don't have any records. I'm like, what the fuck's going on? It was my job to lose all those records before I worked here for Super Training.
Starting point is 01:28:28 All right. It was so funny when he mentioned to me that that used to be his job. I'm like, you've lost all my records all the time. I'm like, I don't exist anywhere for some reason. I'm off the grid. He's off the grid. No, you're not.
Starting point is 01:28:40 If you have that cell phone, you're on the grid. I know. I'm on the grid. Google's listening, man. They're going to serve you up some ads that you've been talking about. Yeah. That's happened to me before. We were talking about getting a refrigerator in here.
Starting point is 01:28:51 And then I went to use my phone one day and like an Ikea thing popped up for like a fridge or something or one of those stores. I was like, what the hell is this? I was like, oh. I was like, we were talking about. I'm like, no. I'm like, yep. I guess it is true. It's good and bad, right? Like it makes our life easier, but you know, these companies want all of your information. So when they created Google, they were like, you know, we're going to
Starting point is 01:29:14 take pictures all over the web and we're going to create a browser and it'll help you find things. And then by the way, we can rate them and you know, people can pay money to end up higher, but that wasn't enough information. So what did they do? They made Chrome. So they made this really easy way for you to put, because if you just type in the website, then Google wouldn't be able to store your information. Well, then what happens is they say, well, we'll link it to Android. So when you get home, Android tells them everywhere you've been. So all the rest of the information that you've had.
Starting point is 01:29:36 And the same thing happens. And we like these services, but we're willing to give up all of our information for that modernity. We do a Facebook. They basically own every picture you've ever posted forever, you know, and, and what could, what could go wrong? I don't know. You get blackmailed.
Starting point is 01:29:50 You could have the fappening thing happen when everybody had their nudes posted and, you know, and it's just like stuff is out of your control. And, uh, I still haven't recovered from that. Neither have we. It's rough. It's rough. It's rough for everybody. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:30:04 It's rough for everybody. Rough times, but that for everybody. Yeah, it's rough for everybody. Rough times. But that's, you know, it's kind of the nature of the beast. And, you know, with EMR, it's a scary thing, too, because you're federally required to have electronic medical records. And to me, that seems a little bit scarier. The idea was that other doctors would be able to access them to get better care, but that has never been the case. And, you know, it creates potential for people to steal that information. They could sell it.
Starting point is 01:30:23 They could blackmail you. And most of the systems, it's like anything else. They require it legally. And then so Practice Fusion was a service we used for a long time. It was free. Well, of course, it got bought by another company. And now it's $100 a month per provider per year. So now we're running into $17,000 more cost per year.
Starting point is 01:30:39 But we're not making any money from it. So we create these laws. It's like auto insurance. It's like we mandate it. But anytime you use it, it goes up. Right. Meanwhile, you think about how much money you could have saved on your insurance, not by switching to Geico, but maybe if Geico wasn't spending billions of dollars advertising every year, maybe that money could go back towards your pot.
Starting point is 01:30:59 Right. God forbid, you know. Have you ever noticed any supplementation having any sort of impact on anybody's pain, you know, help manage some of these tissue issues? Yeah. You know, some of it's anecdotal and, you know, because the research is always changing. It's like glucosamine. For a while, everybody was like, yeah, that works.
Starting point is 01:31:20 And then the research came out that it didn't really work. And when you look at, statistically, we talked about this before, nothing really works when And then the research came out that didn't really work. And when you look at, statistically, we talked about this before, nothing really works when you look at research. So even if you look at ibuprofen and Tylenol, in most RCTs, they don't do any better than placebo. I don't agree with that. I think there's some outliers to that. And I kind of feel the same way about a lot of these other supplements. So there were some research that came out recently about heart disease and fish oil, that it may not reduce the risk. So everybody's like, ah, don't take fish oil anymore. Well, that's not really true because it does thin your blood. It does decrease inflammation. That has been shown scientifically over and over again. So omega-3s will generally, and there are outliers,
Starting point is 01:31:57 some people that don't respond. So you need to test each one individually and try it yourself and see. But omega-3s is something that I like people to take as far as pain and joints go. It's good for your brain too. Omega-7s, I'm a big fan of omega-7s. I do take CBD personally myself. There's a brand out there that I've been using called Glow that I've had more success with.
Starting point is 01:32:17 Less inflammation. And I have an autoimmune disease too that was caused by antibiotics. I thought you looked fucked up. Yeah, man. It's mostly in my face. immune disease too that was caused by antibiotics. So I have a... I thought you looked fucked up. Yeah, man. Yeah. It's mostly in my face. A little bit in my pinky toe. There we go.
Starting point is 01:32:33 But decreasing inflammation, just like your brother's, is a really important part for me as far as not even having long-term joint damage, GI damage, skin damage. So I find that taking CBD before bed helps me sleep better. And I guess I don't realize that I'm in pain, but when I take it, I sleep six, seven hours instead of three or four. I'm like, why am I awake? And I guess I'm in pain. But like I said, you know, if you've been lifting for long enough,
Starting point is 01:32:56 what's pain? Right. But like vitamins and minerals, things like that. I don't, I don't take a whole lot. You know, do you suggest any, I mean, when some like, I don't know, I've heard some people say that, like, magnesium can help your muscles be more, you know, looser or something like that. You know, it can.
Starting point is 01:33:13 You just, you know, I wouldn't really be taking it unless I was deficient. So I think it goes back to your bud work. So if you're deficient in something, yeah, go ahead and take it. But, you know, there's a, there's a cost and a benefit to everything that you take, both financially and biologically. So, you know, while some people might be shy on magnesium, having too much magnesium can make you sick as well. It can make you, you know, have bowel irritations. And, you know, there's a lot of other things that can go on.
Starting point is 01:33:37 It could even mess with your heart. You know, it can affect the way potassium and sodium work. So, you know, generally tinkering with supplements that you don't know a lot about and don't have anybody to coach you on is not necessarily the best thing. We get into this too, like big pharma is a problem, right? We are over-medicated as a society, but the solution to big pharma being corrupt doesn't mean that supplements are necessarily clean. In fact, they're just as corrupt just on the other end. It's like Republicans and Democrats, right? You're like, okay, well, that's corrupt. Well, here's a different kind of corrupt. That doesn't mean that
Starting point is 01:34:04 either one is the right answer. Just because you don't like one doesn't mean that the other one is the right one for you. So I think it's important to be careful with supplementation as well. It's just not just a free pass. Like, you know, it does have a physiological effect, sometimes good, sometimes bad, just like medication. And at least you can say with medication that there is some level of FDA approval to it. So at least you know what's in it. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:34:24 A lot of times, you know, you'll hear that something's good for this. And then, you know, a lot of people rush out and they start taking a lot of that supplement and it's like, well, you know, maybe you should, you weren't taking any before. Sure. And if you want to experiment with it, maybe you should just take like a little bit and just see what that does. Right. See if it makes a difference at all. And to me, that's irresponsible. And again, it takes away the individuality. So if somebody wants to be the expert in research, again, you know, a Dr. Galpin, somebody like that, then, then that's the person you just listen to. I don't think that's my wheelhouse, but I can tell you tentatively what's worked
Starting point is 01:34:55 well for me. And that's generally fish oil, CBD. And that's really about all I ever take. You know, my, my stomach doesn't do all the way. I don't do any of that kind of stuff. Um, I just try to eat my nutrients, you know, I try to get enough fruits, veggies, meat, you know, my stomach doesn't do all the way. I don't do any of that kind of stuff. I just try to eat my nutrients. You know, I try to get enough fruits, veggies, meat, you know, and balance it out that way. What do you think one of the big misdiagnoses is out there when somebody comes to you and they're like, man, you know, they told me I needed a knee replacement or they told me I need A, B, and C. And, you know, I've been super frustrated with this. I wanted to, you know, get your opinion on it because I saw you whacking somebody with a hammer on YouTube. What's kind of been the thing you've run into the most?
Starting point is 01:35:31 So we talked about this a little bit earlier, but, you know, a lot of what we talked about are silent diagnoses. We said, you know, 82% of people that have never had back pain have disc bulges or herniations, you know. Up to 90% of people that have never had shoulder pain have some sort of pathology in the rotator cuff or labrum. So one of those things is being a slave to your imaging. Imaging is just one component. You need to make sure that your physical examination, your method of injury, all those things equate it,
Starting point is 01:35:53 like we talked about with the knees earlier and the meniscus earlier. So, you know, relying too much on technology and imaging and not enough on examination and problem solving is a problem. So that's one of the biggies. You know, some of the other junk diagnoses too, fibromyalgia is one that gets thrown around all the time. I've probably only seen one or two people that have ever had true fibromyalgia. And I know that because they can't handle deep tissue work. Their body has what's called allodynia, which means that their body responds to pain when there shouldn't be any. The wind blows and they have swirling patterns of pain all over the body. That was almost like me today when you were on my leg,
Starting point is 01:36:23 you were putting like... That's your fasting, man. Blood sugar was through the floor. Yeah, that too. But you gave me like one pound of pressure and I almost died. Yeah. But did you die? I was close to death. But did you die?
Starting point is 01:36:35 I almost died. But did you die? I'm still alive. He's still alive, folks. And that's what really matters. So fibro is one of them. A lot of times it's just a lazy diagnosis. Arthritis is another lazy diagnosis. You can certainly have arthritis and actually not have pain. It depends on the
Starting point is 01:36:49 level, you know? So those are some, some biggies that I see. And then some of the things that I found that are underdiagnosed, one of them is Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. So it's a connective tissue disorder, EDS. We're just starting to learn more about it, but these people, they have a connective tissue problem to where they dislocate bones easily. Um, they have arterial issues, they have problems with energy and things like that. And so they're, they're told that at their head case, their psychogenic component and come to find out they have this kind of rare obscure disease state that gives them a lot of different problems. Um, so that's something we, you know, we found, we found variations of dystrophy that have been not seen by PTs and things like that. And we're like, Hey, yo, this is facial scapular dystrophy.
Starting point is 01:37:26 You need to see a geneticist. We can't really help you with that. So, you know, just, just being aware of the statistics and the probability and then trying to, to bring those into your real reality, you know, looking at what you're actually saying and then making sure that we triangulate ourselves to where we're getting the closest, most accurate diagnosis. And I think that partly, you know, as humans, we like to define things. We like black and white. We like to put names on things and things work more on a continuum. So say you're, you know, your blood
Starting point is 01:37:53 pressure is one, your systolic is 122. Well, does your body really know the difference between 122 and 118? They're pretty similar, but we would medicate one and not the other. Well, 122 and 137 are significantly further apart than 122 and 118. 122 and 137 are still in the same category of stage one or pre-hypertension. I don't know if they've moved the barriers now or not. But, you know, the way we demarcate what a disease state is or isn't is sort of arbitrary, you know, where your A1C is or whatever else. And so I think it's important to look at that person as a whole and then look at all the risk factors before we decide we're either going to A, medicate them too much or B, tell them not to be on medications. Because there's
Starting point is 01:38:32 certainly a place for medicine and it needs to be applied appropriately, but there's also a lot of over-medicalization of our society as well. Andrew, you got anything over there? Yeah, what's something that people are maybe not thinking of when it comes to, say, body work, chiropractic work, ART, just everything in general, that might not really... It can help with something that people may be not thinking of. I've had a chiropractor tell me that it can help with ADHD if your spine's a little crooked in a certain way. And I thought that that was pretty crazy but i'm like oh okay yeah so that's a i mean to me that's a pretty outlandish claim i would need
Starting point is 01:39:10 to see some evidence of that um had to do with like the the top of the spine being misaligned and the head tilt or some shit like that i mean i don't know exactly i think it might be biologically plausible but that wouldn't necessarily be my go-to and something like that first of all adhd is a very hard to quantify disease state. Like we don't have even lab values. Yeah, I know. It was just like the most outlandish thing that I had heard. But like, is there something that people, maybe they're not really thinking of that, like, oh, that actually can help like my digestive issues or some shit like that. So, so one of the biggest internal portions that I've seen, obviously having severe back pain is going to affect your digestion. You
Starting point is 01:39:44 know, when your muscles are spasmed up, it's hard for your gastrointestinal, anybody who's thrown their back out knows that. They get really constipated when their back's hurting. So just not being in pain can certainly help a lot with that. As far as internal stuff, I'm not one to much believe in the subluxation theory or think that things connect to the organs in that manner, but we have seen some things. There's some research that supports it, that the upper cervical spine, the neck, those areas certainly cause headaches. They cause the ophthalmic
Starting point is 01:40:13 referral. So if I push on C1-2 area, you'll probably feel pressure here. So when your upper neck gets really tight, you can certainly get headaches, foggy vision, and you'll go to the optometrist and your vision's actually fine, but you feel like you're sensitive to light, even grumpy. So one of the best ways that I've found to address that is just get like lawn furniture, like something that you would have in your patio, scoot down, get the hard part right underneath the base of your skull. And there's three parts that I would hit. One is the nuchal ligaments, so straight into the center under the skull.
Starting point is 01:40:41 And then the mastoid processes where your SDM is attached on both sides. And just put pressure straight down into it like that and kind of rock your head back and forth. That'll help a lot of people's headaches. It'll help their vision. You know, manipulation can help with that too. But again, if there's a more, excuse me, a less invasive way to do it, I'd rather do that. So that's one of the biggies.
Starting point is 01:41:01 And so going back to the original chiropractic story, one of the interesting thing is the guy claimed to cure deafness by adjusting the person's upper back or neck allegedly. So nobody actually knows if that's true or not. It's a first person, you know, narrative. So we don't even know if that if you actually believe that, if that's what actually happened. But there are a lot of documented cases in the literature of somebody having trauma to their neck and losing their hearing as a result of that. So if that trauma can cause a loss of hearing, then theoretically, potentially, you can make somebody's hearing better by making their neck better. Now, define deafness. Well,
Starting point is 01:41:35 do we think a non-medical doctor in 1895 really knew the definition of what deafness is? It could be tinnitus, Meniere's, there's so many things that could be deafness. You know, if your hearing was a little bit better, we think somebody that was a salesman might turn that little bit better hearing into I cured deafness and now it turns into this tall tale. I mean, there's just a lot of variables that go into that story. So I think it's a cautious tale to try to take something literally like that, especially from somebody that we're three generations back. We tend to not listen literally to a lot of stories from, you know,
Starting point is 01:42:06 the medieval times, 1800s, the industrial revolution, because nobody was actually around back then that can give us first person accounts. And the history is always written by the victors. And sometimes the victor isn't necessarily war victor. It's somebody that, you know, he passed the story onto his son to impress him and that turned into a tall tale. So, so, you know, instead of judging something like that, I think a little nuance helps.
Starting point is 01:42:32 Gotcha. I have a really good and hopefully not too unhealthy habit of like popping everything. Like I'll crack my neck, I'll crack my back. I've been popping my knuckles left and right. Um, first off, what makes that sound? Yeah. So we, we think what makes that sound, nobody actually knows for sure. Right. So, um, there is synovial fluid in your joints, and there's a certain amount of gas that's distributed within that. And what we think happens is there's a circular shape to a joint. And so when we deform it, what happens is there's a pressure change on the end. And so the gas bubbles will form almost like a bubble up against that barrier. And when that bubble breaks is when you get that cracking sound. The gas distributes throughout the joint. We think that what happens is there's some sort of stimulation from the gas
Starting point is 01:43:09 itself onto the joint mechanoreceptor, and that has a neural feed loop to the muscle associated with it. And what we think is that when that happens, it relaxes the muscles associated with the joint, giving you 20 to 30 minutes of relief. So that crack is associated with full range of motion in a joint. So if a joint is stuck, cracking it is a good way to get it unstuck. But the thing is, if you've already cracked it, the likelihood that it's stuck isn't very high. So you can pop it without it actually being stuck. And that's what will happen when you're having to crack something over and over again, but
Starting point is 01:43:42 it's not actually really changing much in the long run. So is it bad that I do that? Probably not. So they've done some studies. They've actually done a hand-to-hand study where somebody cracked their knuckles on one hand for years and years and years. And the joint that actually cracked their knuckles the most was healthier than the one that didn't. And so one of the theories we think that might happen, why we start to get so osseous as we age, is maybe we don't get our spine cracked enough. And I'm not saying it needs to happen often,
Starting point is 01:44:12 but if that joint doesn't move for a long period of time, what happens is our body will start to ossify it, put connective tissue down, and then you'll never get the range of motion back. So if you don't use it, you lose it. We think what might happen in some of our spinal joints is if you don't get motion in their prolonged period of time, you'll never get it because your body will solidify those areas.
Starting point is 01:44:30 So in general, cracking is probably a good thing, but not all the time. All right. I'll try to keep that in mind. Well, too much of anything is bad, right? Right. So they have something called over-manipulation syndrome. So this is when somebody's been manipulated too much. And when I say manipulation, I mean cracking.
Starting point is 01:44:47 So if somebody goes to a chiropractor, PT, or whatever else, and they crack them too often, when you crack somebody, you're taking a joint to its end range of motion. So what limits the end range of motion? Ligaments. So what happens if you continually push that envelope too much, those ligaments become lax, and they overstretch, and now you have no stability of those spinal units. And so the last place you want instability is in your upper cervical spine or anywhere in your spine. So, you know, it has its place.
Starting point is 01:45:11 But again, too much of anything is a bad thing. Stem cells? It looks promising. It looks very promising. And there's a lot of different variations of them. There's the mesenchymal cells. There's PRP. There's the ones that theyal cells, there's PRP,
Starting point is 01:45:27 there's the ones that they draw from your bone marrow. I think regenerative medicine will probably be the future. We just don't have enough data on it to know exactly when and where to apply it yet. It does make a lot of sense in tissues that are lacking vascularity or connective tissue, discs, things like that, to try to stimulate those areas. And anecdotally, we've had a lot of patients do really well with PRP and stem cells. Yeah, PRP. What's a PRP injection? So PRP, that's a platelet-rich plasma injection.
Starting point is 01:45:53 So they take your blood out, they centrifuge it, they take the one portion back out, inject it in an area that doesn't have good blood supply. So that will stimulate healing in that area. Do you think we can inject almost anything in there and have some sort of result? Because sticking a needle in something, like dry needling, something like that. And I know when I was at Westside Barbell,
Starting point is 01:46:15 I mean, these guys did all kinds of stuff, but they would just inject saline solution. Sure. And it's like they felt relief from that. I don't know what science shows about it, but they did that quite often. Yeah, when you look at the research, actually a lot of times, uh, saline injections do just as well as cortisone injections. And the question is why? That's crazy. It's just water and salt, right? Right. And so what that means is maybe it's not inflammation
Starting point is 01:46:36 that's being changed there. Maybe it's, uh, maybe it's the needle being inserted in. Maybe that's the part of it. Yeah. Yeah. They piercing the muscle and causing that neurogenic relaxation, getting some fluid in there. It could be, you know, yeah. Putting the fluid in there that, that, that, you know, causes a neurological reaction, um, by creating space. We don't really know. Um, but it does seem to have some sort of benefit. We just, we just don't exactly know why. And the truth is in medicine, we don't know much yet. And, you know, medicine is still a baby. It's still an infant. We're still trying to figure things out. And because people want so much certainty, they get so obsessed with science and pseudoscience. And let me tell you something.
Starting point is 01:47:08 Medicine is the least scientific field that there is. I think like 51% of all medicine has some sort of evidence basis whatsoever. And most of the studies have not been proven to be reproducible. So there's this thing out there called the Reproducibility Project. They've taken gold standards. You're less likely to get published reproducing a trial. They want new stuff. They want something new to publish in the literature.
Starting point is 01:47:29 So when they've gone back and taken those gold standards, I think like 32% of them actually ended up being reproducible. And these were considered the gold standards of our time. And of course, we can understand why. There's so much variability to people. People are so different. And so trying to put them all in a box is a very difficult chore and it usually ends up poorly. Dry needling. Dry needling. There's a mixed research. You know, um, again, I think that has to do with how the
Starting point is 01:47:53 studies are done. Anecdotally, we've seen amazing results with it. Um, it's more invasive than manipulation. So we, you know, if you looked up the chart, so stretching is probably the least invasive. So it's probably where you'd want to start with, right? If that's not working, you go to massage, it's more invasive. You go to manipulation, that's more invasive. Then we go to needling, we're piercing the skin, potentially creating infections. We move to injections with medication after that. You know, we moved to minimally invasive surgery and then invasive surgery. And things should always move conservative to more advanced like that. So if the other things aren't working, we find that dry needling can really help people that their muscles just won't respond to the other stuff. And great outcomes.
Starting point is 01:48:31 Cupping? Cupping has its place. In my opinion, I think cupping works with motion. So if you're moving with cups, I think that we can get some good results. I think it allows fascial stretching between the two cups. So for example, if I put a cup here and I put a cup here and then I had you move, what it does is it creates suction between the two areas. So I can stretch the tissue between the two cups. But if it's passive, I don't find a whole lot of benefit to it. Right. And then what are your thoughts on like, uh, you just see so many, so many of these, uh, people pop up on Instagram that are just like raking people with these different tools and doing all these crazy things. I mean, um, you know, do you think this is a good thing for your field? Do you
Starting point is 01:49:09 think it's a bad thing? Like, you know, where do you see all this kind of going? You know, again, good and bad are kind of mixed terms. So I think that it is something, I think there's some good and some bad. I think that, um, you know, a lot of tissue, just like lifting weights, if you create an inflammatory response, you're going to get some level of healing to the area. Um, but you know, a lot of tissue, just like lifting weights, if you create an inflammatory response, you're going to get some level of healing to the area. But, you know, you have to be careful that, you know, we're always talking risk to benefit. So you have to make sure that the risk benefit ratio is appropriate. So there has to be some, like I said, biologically plausible or physiologically plausible mechanism why that thing might work. And preferably you'd like to have somebody that has malpractice insurance.
Starting point is 01:49:44 That way that you have some sort of recourse if something goes wrong. That's something I get on people about, don't let people work on you that aren't licensed. The reason why we have licensing is so that the person is protected against sort of malpractice. And there's a reason why they carry malpractice insurance. So if somebody gets hurt, the patient has recourse. If you're just going to Joe Schmoe that doesn't have any education or licensure, then you have no recourse if they hurt you. And I think it's important to make sure that you know that somebody has some level of credential before you let them touch your body because it's your body. I think sometimes people are a little too flippant with that. And it's easy, you know, with the internet, anybody can look like an expert. And I think
Starting point is 01:50:20 it's important that you understand where that comes from. You know, anybody can, there's diploma mills left and right out there. And you can buy a PhD without any kind of university accreditation. And then you're a doctor or something, something, right? And so people may not know that that's not a clinician. That's not a healthcare profession. You know, there's a difference between a doctoral degree and a professional degree. That's kind of changed over the years.
Starting point is 01:50:40 There were, I think there were eight professional degrees for a long time. So you had optometrists, which are ODs. You had DOs, which are doctors of osteopathic medicine. MDs are medical doctors. You had DVMs, which are doctors of veterinary medicine. You had DPMs, doctors of podiatric medicine. DDS, doctors of dental surgery. And those were the only doctoral professions.
Starting point is 01:51:03 Those were considered first professional degrees along with JD, Juris Doctor, which are lawyers, which for some reason don't get called doctor like the other ones because they're not clinicians, I suppose. So the only one of those that went to medical school is MD. So podiatrists, optometrists, they're all doctors, psychologists,
Starting point is 01:51:18 but they don't go to medical school. So they're first professionals. Well, what we've seen is an expansion of degrees because it makes more money. So now everything is a doctoral degree. So pharmacists became PharmDs. They're doctors now. PTs are now DPTs. They're doctors. They have doctors of nursing practice. Audiologists are now doctors as well. And of course, the inflation means that those universities can charge more money and make more money because everybody wants to be called doctor. It's an ego boost, right?
Starting point is 01:51:42 Dr. Evil. Dr. Evil. Yeah. Yeah, right? Dr. Evil. Dr. Evil. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Dr. Evil. One million billion bajillion bajillion. So when we're talking about healthcare like that, you know, we've just seen this massive expansion of professions. And so it's, it can be very confusing for patients to know who they're dealing with and who they're not dealing with. So, you know, you have this thing we just talked about that you give all the way your
Starting point is 01:52:04 information to, it's called Google, and you should be able to look up a little bit on, you know, is somebody licensed? Did, you know, you have this thing we just talked about that you give all the way your information to. It's called Google. And you should be able to look up a little bit on, you know, is somebody licensed? You know, what's their background? And do your due diligence before you go ahead and give your body away to somebody else because things can go wrong. What's your mission?
Starting point is 01:52:17 What's your goal? My mission and goal. Well, my first mission is to eat some Chipotle. I heard that's on the way. Yeah, that's on the way. That's true. No, I mean, our lifetime goal here is we just want to be able to get the best musculoskeletal care to the most amount of people and be able to provide a good living for all the people that buy into this project. You know, we want to help as many people as we can.
Starting point is 01:52:39 And, you know, if we can make a living doing that, then I think that's a win. How can people learn about, like, you know, how you treat people? Like, do you do seminars or anything like that? We've got something in the works. We'd like to do that soon. You know, I think as far as a full practitioner, you know, we're mostly only hiring physical therapists at this point. It's a little easier to train them. But, you know, it takes about six months to train them.
Starting point is 01:52:59 We're working on potentially putting together some seminars for some of the hammer and chisel stuff. So hopefully that'll be in the works soon that chiros and PTs can come kind of learn some of these. It's really learning an approach less than a technique. I don't believe in protocols. I don't believe in techniques. I believe in rational thinking. I believe in working your way through a problem and being responsive to the information that's getting back to you. Yeah, we saw you use a lot of techniques today. Yeah. And I think teaching somebody how to think is more important and how to problem solve is more important than teaching them a protocol. It's intellectually lazy to expect a protocol. People aren't protocols. People are individuals. So I think that if we can teach
Starting point is 01:53:34 people how to think in some of these seminars, I think that'll go a long way. But until then, I'm teaching. I'm starting teaching in January at the Napropathic School. I teach at the Napropathic School in New Mexico. It's called Southwest University of Napropathic School. I teach at the Napropathic School in New Mexico. It's called Southwest University of Napropathic Medicine. So if you want to be a napropath, come on down. You can learn directly from me. I teach three hours a week up there to doctoral students. And other than that, I'm going to be putting some of those lectures up on YouTube. You can kind of just follow along as far as we talk about injuries. And then you'll be able to understand probably a little more about how these clinicians think. Otherwise, yeah, check out the YouTube.
Starting point is 01:54:07 Maybe I'll get the Instagram back. We'll see. We'll see if Zuck is going to keep dropping the hammer on us. Yeah, Zuckerberg. He's upset. He's a robot. He's so mad at you. Is he a human being or is he not?
Starting point is 01:54:19 I don't know. Has he been replaced with his own AI yet? Yeah, some of the work that you did on a bunch of us today was really fantastic. Really appreciate you doing that. Yeah. And, um, you know, I legitimately felt better, uh, when you're working on my hip and, you know, obviously it felt worse first because you were kind of digging in there pretty good on a couple of tight spots, but you know, it worked really well.
Starting point is 01:54:41 And I think Casey, uh, out of all of us was probably like the most amazed because he's just had a hard time. His, his whole side of his body was shutting down, trying to do pushups. He was pushing all crooked and everything. And now, uh, after you worked on them, I mean, we saw it firsthand today. So thank you so much for coming out. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us. It was awesome, man. Thank you so much. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later.

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