Why I am an Upper Cervical Chiropractor:

Dr. Gordon Elder , the Director of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX tells the story of how and why he became an Upper Cervical Doctor.

I didn’t grow up thinking that I was going to be a Chiropractor. In fact, I had lots of other dreams and plans. It wasn’t until I was in college, studying for business, that I realized that I needed to change my major and that it would be good for me.

When I was four, I was in a car accident and as I grew up, I didn’t think much about it but, when I was ten, I started getting sinus infections that wouldn’t go away unless I was actually on drugs. As soon as I would get off the drugs, the sinus infection would come back. That’d occur three or four times. My mother, who had been seeing a Chiropractor, mentioned it to him. The Chiropractor asked to check me, and sure enough, it was a bone in the top of my neck that had moved and was putting pressure on some nerves and was affecting my immune system.

So, he didn’t treat my sinus infection but, he put that bone back into place and it allowed my body to restore itself and to heal.

Didn’t make a big impression on me at the time; I was only ten. My mom had been seeing this Chiropractor for a little while because of migraine headaches. In that same accident, when I was four, she started getting migraines after that, every day, all day. Now, she’d had migraines before, since junior high, but they weren’t all day, every day. So, they got significantly worse after this accident, and she saw a

Chiropractor and it got better. A friend referred her to a Blair Chiropractor and suddenly she started improving. In her case, it was a slow process but, instead of just pain relief or pain management, it became her body attempting to heal itself and progressively doing so.

I grew up with that. I didn’t really think about it. We had occasional chiropractic appointments to make sure that I was still in alignment. I didn’t have to be adjusted very often; maybe after a wrestling bout or match occasionally. I went through high school aiming for the air force academy. And when I didn’t make it into the air force academy, thinking maybe Business?

And I started studying business and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t really exciting. I don’t know, it just wasn’t a really great fit.

Now, as it happens, I married a beautiful young lady who had a lot of health problems and I told her that she should see my

Chiropractor. She was a little resistant because she had had a bad experience, like so many people have. But this Chiropractor ran a few tests before asking her any questions about what her problem was. And he pointed to her neck and said,

“You’re carrying pressure on your brain stem and nerves right up here.”

And she started crying a little bit, I think. I remember that I was pretty close to tears because that had been something that we had been suffering with or going through. This was after the first year of marriage so, one year of marriage and she had been suffering from childhood with back pain and headaches and neck pain, and it seemed to be getting worse every year. And the interesting thing is that she had this idea that there was some kind of a tumor or some kind of pressure on the brain stem up here but, all the MRI’s and imaging, doctors said, “That can’t happen. There’s nothing there.” And so, she just felt doomed to slowly getting worse every year. Well, this Chiropractor convinced her to let him adjust her neck and he did. She started sleeping better, she started feeling better, it was a very slow, kind of like my mother, a very slow gradual process.
Meanwhile, I was in business school and realized that this wasn’t so interesting, and my wife ended up working for this Chiropractor and then coming home and telling me all of these cool stories about people who were getting well from things that I didn’t even know that chiropractic could help. I thought,

“Wow! This is pretty awesome!”

Also, I knew that my wife was a pretty severe case, and she may need care for the rest of her life just to make sure that she stays in alignment. I thought, “Man, now I have to live next to a Blair chiropractor for the rest of my married life.” Okay, we can do that, but I got a good idea. I thought, “Well look, I’m good with my hands, I like helping people, and... maybe I should be a Chiropractor?” So, I talked to the Chiropractor, and he convinced me that this was probably a pretty good idea.

And immediately I re-found my joy for school. I enjoyed my pre-chiropractic studies, I enjoyed chiropractic college, I enjoyed learning this very specialized technique that wasn’t even taught at the college that I went to. In fact, at the time, I don’t think it was taught at any college. But as I started going to these seminars and learning this technique and learning chiropractic,

I found real joy and excitement in thinking that I can use my hands and I can relieve suffering and I can help people get well.

And that’s really my story of how I got into Chiropractic. It wasn’t a story of me, personally, being sick and getting well, although that did happen. It was more, watching my wife get well and then thinking back about my mother and how she got well.

Schedule of care at Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX.

One of the most frequently asked questions we get is: “How often do I need to come?”

The goal is to not see you because you are well. Dr. Gordon elder explains the process to get you there.

Once the spine has been injured and it’s affecting the central nervous system, the brain, or the brain stem spinal cord, it takes a while for it to heal. Now, different tissues in the body heal at different rates. Ligaments heal at a different rate than muscles. Nerves, blood vessels, they all have different rates of healing. We have observed that people tend to heal in cycles. And sometimes one thing has to heal before another thing can heal.

So as a chiropractor, once somebody has injured themselves, and I correct the problem that’s keeping them from healing themselves, then I want to check more often in the beginning. Usually, we start out at twice a week. Now, that’s not necessarily a treatment twice a week. I hope it isn’t, but it’s a check to make sure that things are still progressing. And then, we go down to once a week, and then once every other week, and then once a month. My goal is to get you to the point where I’m checking you, if possible, once every six months again without finding anything, in the same way, that a dentist would be looking at your teeth, not wanting to find a cavity.

We don’t rely on symptoms to tell us when to treat you. When something needs to be fixed because as the body starts to go back to its normal position sometimes things will hurt, muscles will get stretched.

So, we do not rely primarily on how you feel to know what you need. We use objective tests for that and that’s what those tests are for.

We know that in the beginning, the bones are more likely to go back out of alignment, and so we check more often. You’re not necessarily going to know, at that time, whether it’s in or out. It may feel like it’s out and it’s not. Or it may feel great, and it’s actually just gone out of alignment and needs to be fixed before you do feel something. So that’s why we design each treatment plan for the patient. But also based on the scientific knowledge we have of how fast things heal and what cycles people go through in that healing process.

About 50% of my patients don’t need another upper neck adjustment during the first three months, but I don’t know which 50% you’re going to fall into. I want to catch it almost as soon as it happens.

In the beginning, if you go back out of alignment relatively quickly, you tend to lose progress or regress relatively quickly. As time goes on you could go out of alignment and the body is stronger. And so you don’t regress quite so quickly so, we don’t need to catch it quite as quickly.

It’s best to keep to the recommended schedule.

There are two common mistakes people make:

1. They start feeling better right away and they stop coming in.

2. The other one is that it takes a while for them to start feeling better, so they get discouraged and stop coming in.

We found that the first three months is the most critical time period. If we can make it through the first three months or three month period without having to readjust the spine, we know that it’s getting pretty stable. So in the beginning you may feel real good, but it’s not stable. So we need to keep checking it to make sure that it stays in alignment long enough to get stable.

On the other end I’ve had patients come in where it’s taken almost three months before they really started feeling better. Just the process that the body had to take to get to that point.

And so I encourage people: Go through the schedule that I recommend at least for the first three months. Once you commit to that and we get through that, then we will discuss what the next step is.

I try not to check you more than I really need to,

and so we will space those off but, based on particular times where we know, okay, things are going to be about this stable at this point. And as we go on, you’re going to become more stable and there are certain mileposts, that once we hit, we know that we can safely go on to the next level. 

Heart Palpitations

Dr. Gordon Elder , Director of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX discusses his experience with helping people with rapid heartbeat.

I know from experience the neck can affect the heart.

I had a patient come in several years ago in January. Over the Christmas vacation, she had been to the emergency room a couple times for rapid heart beat. In fact, it was so rapid, the doctors thought it was impossible and tested it a few times because they couldn’t believe how fast her heart was beating.

She told me that her heart had actually been beating faster before she went to the emergency room and they measured it. She said her whole shirt was vibrating.

The typical intervention for this in a severe case was to go in and burn out some of the nerves in the heart. Now in my opinion, we probably need most of the parts that we have in our body. Occasionally something needs to be removed and medicine is great at doing that. But sometimes parts are removed when something else maybe was the problem.

I asked her to not get the surgery right away (a little risky on my part, right, we are dealing with the heart) and I found a problem and said that I thought it could be relevant. I ran my hand down her back and right in the top part of her back there was one bone that when I touched it, she almost screamed. It’s one of the bones where nerves actually come out and go to the heart and then back up. Now the heart gets its innervation from a couple different places, not just the spine. When that bone was that tender, I thought, okay this is probably a mechanical problem, not an organic one that needs to be dealt with with surgery.

I said, “Don’t do the surgery yet, give me a little while, I am going to adjust your neck and see what happens.” I adjusted her neck, the hot spot in her upper back went away, and her heart calmed down. Every once in a while it would come back and we’d check and sure enough, she was out of alignment again. So I know from experience- and I’ve had other patients after that (not as dramatic)- that the neck can affect the heart.

Sleeping disorders

If you are not sleeping like a baby, there may be a reason why that can be corrected

My wife:

When I first met her and we got married, slept maybe 2 hours a night.  She was always exhausted. She was very sick. She had lots of issues. When she got her first upper cervical adjustment I wasn’t a Doctor at the time. She slept for 16 hours that night. Over the years since I became a Chiropractor, I have seen several patients. One of the most common reactions after the first adjustment is: 

”I slept so well last night”. 

That’s not true for everybody and is not true all the time, but definitely, your sleep rhythms are affected by your nervous system.  What’s happening when you are sleeping is your body is kind of resetting and processing things that happen during the day. If you have a neurological problem, it can definitely be interrupting that.

Not to mention that if you have back pain, and the back pain goes away, you are probably going to sleep better.

Sciatica & Upper Cervical Chiropractic

In this video Dr. Elder talks about what sciatic pain is and isn’t. He then discusses different treatment options and why it makes sense to try less invasive methods first.

A lot of people who get pain in the leg are told, or think that it is sciatica. The sciatic nerve is a large nerve that runs down the back of the leg. When it comes out from the spine, it comes from from several different parts and they merge and come apart and merge again. Then there are nerves about the size of the thumb that are running down through your buttocks down the side of the leg like a line. If you have a pain that is broad (about the size of your hand) running down the back of your leg, that is not sciatica; it can be a pinched nerve of some kind, but not sciatica. 

If it is like a line of fire going down your leg and it is really bad, and goes down the back of your leg and the bottom of your leg, down to the heel and then shoot out the toe, that is what sciatica feels like (or so I’ve been told). 

That nerve can be pinched in a couple of different places. It can be pinched because of a muscle that is too tight in the buttocks, it can be where the nerves come out from the spine because the spinal pieces are not lined up properly or somehow smashing and swelling and causing problems on the roots of the nerves themselves. 

What I’ve noticed is probably about fifty-percent of my practice is made up of people with low back pain and a high percentage of those have sciatica.

When I adjust their neck, the sciatica goes away.

Now, there have been a few where it has not gone away, but we send them to another chiropractor or therapist to help get the last percentage away. It will go down a little bit with me, their moving better, their other symptoms go away, but the problem is so progressed that they need more than just closing the barn door so to speak. So we send them to someone else, they get the rest of it, and it gets fixed. 

In some cases, people do need low back surgery, but please do not rush to that. There is a diagnosis code on the books for failed low-back surgery syndrome because it happens so often. So that should not be the first choice. First choice, look at your posture, look at your nervous system, and get those fixed.  If you get to the point where you have to go around in a wheelchair, then you might think about surgery.

The Lubbock Legacy Continues

In the beginnning...

 

Dr.William G. Blair adjusted his first patient in Lubbock,Christmas 1949.

He decided to become a Chiropractor after suffering from severe asthma and getting near immediate relief after his first Upper Cervical adjustment.  A perfectionist, he worked tirelessly to improve imaging and adjusting techniques in order to help more people. They started flocking into his office in more numbers than he could imagine. The Blair Chiropractic Clinic was built in 1955 in its current location on Ave Q.  Dr. Blair  treated thousands of patients before his lungs forced him to retire in 1984. Dr. Blair also developed a curriculum to teach other DCs how to practice his specialized technique and handpicked Dr. R. Weldon Muncy in California to carry the torch as head instructor for the Blair technique. Today there are Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractors as far away as Australia and Europe with a concentration in California.

Continuing to carry the torch...

 

Dr. E.A. Addington considers himself Dr. Blair’s last student.

With his analytical mind and attention to detail he has continued to provide excellent quality care to the people of Lubbock and surrounding areas. He was awarded the distinction of Blair Chiropractor of the Year by the Blair Chiropractic Society in 2014. Due to a genetic condition and  several bad accidents, his health has been failing and he has been unable to accept new patients the last 6 years.However, Dr. Addington has sacrificed greatly  to continue the legacy of  caring for people despite severe pain and reliance on a walker.

This takes us up to present day: November 1st marks the date Dr. Gordon Elder moved into town from California as the third Director of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic.

To infinity and beyond...

 

Dr. Gordon D. Elder was introduced to Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic as a child

His mother brought him to Dr. R. Weldon Muncy for chronic sinus infections that cleared up when he was in alignment. His mother had been suffering from debilitating headaches24-7 that improved under Dr. Muncy’s care.The Blair Technique once again changed Dr. Elder’s  life after he fell in love and married his Norwegian wife, Ruth. Ruth was almost crippled by pain and chronic illness growing up. She was unable to participate in many normal  activities. This all started to change after she trusted her husband’s advice and sought Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic care. For the first time in her life she began to sleep through the night and started a long healing process. (Now 24 years later she is a personal trainer and exercise instructor! A bit of a transformation !?)

Gordon was unhappy with his college major and as soon as he decided to become a Chiropractor his calling was found. During his time at Cleveland Chiropractic College he excelled academically. Simultaneously he attended continuing education seminars in the Blair method as well as extensive one-on-one mentoring by Dr. Muncy who had been handpicked by Dr. Blair to continue as the head teacher for the Blair technique. Dr. Elder is Certified as an Advanced Instructor in the Blair Technique.

Dr. Elder has practiced the Blair Upper Cervical technique exclusively since he graduated in Dec.99. It is with great humility and dedication that Dr. Elder and Ruth decided to transfer their patients to other Doctors in California and relocate along with their children to Lubbock to continue providing specific Blair Upper Cervical care to West Texas.

What does this mean for you?

 We would love to meet you and hear your story.

First: Come in for a  screening!

This is a quick appointment designed to see if you have a bone out of alignement in the spine causing nerve impingement.  It is for you to decide if you want to give us a try .It would be an honor and privilege to partner with you in your quest for good health.

If you decide this type of treatment seems tight for you we will provide receipts with all the codes insurance companies need including Medicare.

We look forward to seeing you soon.

Second: Tell a Friend!

We rely on people who understand the power of specific Chiropractic Care to spread the word that we once again accept new patients across all age groups here in Lubbock ,South Plains and all of West Texas.

For questions or to make an appointment, please  give our office a call. We’d love to talk to you.

Posted in Chiropractic Clinic, Upper Cervical Doctor and tagged asthma, blair upper cervical, Chiropractc adjustment, Chiropractic, Dr. Addington, free screening, headaches, healing process, health insurance, hisotry, legacy, Lubbock, medicare, pain, relief, sinus infections, West Texas

Chiropractic: The Cure for Deafness?

Those holding to a “modern” and “enlightened” concept of chiropractic may well envision snake oil when confronted with the above claim.  But for many people at the turn of the century this was a valid question.  The speculation whirled around a magnetic healer in Davenport, Iowa, and his janitor.

The magnetic healer was Daniel David Palmer, known by his initials D.D., and the janitor was a man by the name of Harvey Lillard.  In D.D.’s words:

    Harvey Lillard, a janitor in the Ryan Block, where I had my office, had been so deaf for 17 years that he could not hear the racket of a wagon on the street or the ticking of a watch.  I made inquiry as to the cause of his deafness and was informed that when he was exerting himself in a cramped, stooping position, he felt something give way in his back and immediately became deaf.  An examination showed a vertebra racked from its normal position.  I reasoned that if that vertebra was replaced, the man’s hearing should be restored.  With this object in view, a half-hour’s talk persuaded Mr. Lillard to allow me to replace it.  I racked it into position by using the spinous process as a lever and soon the man could hear as before (The Chiropractor’s Adjuster, Portland Printing House Co, Portland, 1910: 18).

    This was the first modern chiropractic adjustment and the event that launched chiropractic as a profession.  D.D. Palmer defined chiropractic as the “science, art and philosophy of things natural, and a system of adjusting the articulations (joints) of the spine, by hand only, for the removal of the physical cause of disease.”

Today’s concept of Chiropractic as a treatment only for low back pain, headaches and other musculoskeletal problems was alien to chiropractic patients of the early 1900s.  They understood chiropractic to affect the whole body by the removal of interference to the nervous system.

We don’t know if any of Dr. Palmer’s subsequent patients were ever cured of deafness, but we do know of three Blair Chiropractors in the last two years who have had patients regain their hearing after beginning care.

Posted in Conditions and tagged Chiropractic, deafness, history

Meet Dr. Elder

Dr. Gordon Elder has been in practice as a Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractor since 2000.

"Dr. Elder has been my chiropractor for 5 years now. I can't imagine what I would be like without upper cervical chiropractics. I've had a lot of back issues throughout my adult life. This type of chiropractics has healed all of them from herniated discs to a weird rash, even my son's scoliosis. Thank you Dr. Elder for all you've done for me and my family!!! You keep us "balanced"

EDUCATION

Dr. Elder graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cleveland Chiropractic College's Los Angeles Campus in December of 1999.  In addition to his Doctor of Chiropractic (DC) degree, he holds a Bachelor's degree in Human Biology, is a Fellow of the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association, and is an Advanced Instructor for the Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic Society.

EXPERIENCE

Dr. Elder was trained by R. Weldon Muncy, D.C., Dr. Blair's designated teaching successor and spent his first year of practice in Dr. Muncy's clinic in Lancaster, California. After over 17 years of practice in Lancaster, Dr. Elder was tapped by E.A. Addington, D.C., Dr. Blair's designated clinical successor to take over the directorship of the original Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, Texas.

Dr. Elder has also served in various ways in the Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic Society, most notably in the design and organization of the testing system used to certify proficiency and instructors in the Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic Technique.