EPISODE SUMMARY
Guest: Dr. Jamie Browning
This episode highlights the significance of research in upper cervical care and emphasizes its positive impact on a person's health. Dr. Jamie Browning discusses the connection between neck alignment and various health issues, such as migraines, TMJ disorders, and IBS. She also discusses using tools like pupillary constriction measurement and thermal imaging to assess patients and track improvements. Dr. Browning emphasizes the need for accessible research resources and collaboration among healthcare professionals to bring hope to patients with complex conditions.
Dr. Browning’s background is that she played volleyball from seventh grade all the way through college. She is a former Navy reservist, so she had a lot of battle wounds that I had to deal with. Her main symptoms were TMD, IBS, and Migraines.
When the atlas bone misaligns, it pulls and tugs on the jaw, leading to TMJ issues. Upper cervical chiropractic can correct this alignment and relieve jaw and digestive issues.
The healing process for migraines takes time, as it involves tissue regeneration and the recalibration of fluid flow in the brain.
The ultimate goal of chiropractic care, especially upper cervical chiropractic, is to help patients adapt to their environment.
Discussing the different Upper Cervical Techniques such as NUCCA, Blair, and Knee-Chest. All these techniques are gathered under one umbrella in the ICA Upper Cervical Council.
As the president of the Upper Cervical Council, Dr. Browning’s call to action for Upper Cervical Chiropractors is to be more involved in research and to pool their resources: time, talents, and treasures.
The Upper Cervical Council aims to make research sharing more accessible and affordable by providing a bibliography to members.
Good research validates the things that we know, it shows how reliable our care is. The other thing it does is we get to test parameters and learn even more about what this care does.
Research also proves the reliability of technology, such as measuring the pressure behind the pupils, using temperature differential measurements for dysautonomia, safe, effective, and reliable use of Cone Beam CT scans, and much more.
The ultimate goal of chiropractic care, especially upper cervical chiropractic, is to help patients adapt to their environment.
Most of the world does not have Upper Cervical available, but due to good research and standards, it is now possible to take it to Europe and eventually other parts of the world.
To contact Dr. Brownig:
To find out more about the ICA Upper Cervical Council:
https://www.icauppercervical.com/
To find a doctor near you: https://www.icauppercervical.com/find-a-doctor/
To find out more about Sherman College of Chiropractic:
To contact Ruth, go to https://www.blairclinic.com
ruth@blairclinic.com
https://www.facebook.com/rutelin
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What Pain in the Neck? The podcast. I am Ruth Elder, your host, and I am recording this from my hotel room in Dallas. I'm attending a conference, International Chiropractic Association Upper Cervical Conference. I'm here with the busiest person here at this conference, Dr. Jamie Browning. Welcome.
Hi.
Dr. Jamie Browning, you are the president of the Upper Cervical Council this year.
Yes, ma'am.
In addition to that, you have your own private practice.
I do.
And you have a very important position at Sherman College of Chiropractic.
Yes, I am.
You are a wife and you have three kids.
That's true.
It is super impressive. All weekend long, you have given this call to action for the doctors that are here and you are living it yourself. You said, all along, we're all busy, we've all got things to do. I know I've been in most of the sessions, and you've been leading almost all of them, and spoken and had more responsibility than anybody else here, and yet here you are on this podcast. I don't take that lightly, so thank you.
Oh, well, thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be part of this.
I'm really excited for you listening. There's going to be some really incredible stuff that most people don't get the privilege to hear.
That's true.
That's the background for this podcast, is for years and years, I've had the privilege of being in the background and listen to conversations that most people don't get to hear, and I want people to get a snippet of it.
Yes, you have such a distinct vantage point there. You're correct. Yes.
I want to just find out a little bit about your background. How did chiropractic happen, and why upper cervical?
Oh, okay. It's a couple of folded stories sewn together. I was working on a master's in counseling at the time. Actually, I was working at Sherman, which is like a chiropractic college. It's a college I work for right now. I was working there as an admission counselor because my background was psychology and that seemed to be something that I could do. While I was there, I was entering to a master's of counseling.
When I did my master's of counseling, which I was doing really well, top of my class, something wasn't being fed for me, something was really kind of off. While I was in school, I heard a man named Dr. Reggie Gold, who is very integral to our history, and he really took a huge step forward for chiropractic, especially Sherman College. He came and spoke and I thought, "Gosh, this is it, I'm working here at the school, but this is what I need to be doing.
You were working as a counselor at Sherman College?
I was, yes. I so was. I did a full circle. It's kind of crazy.
How did you get that job?
Fast forward, while I'm in school-- I'll tell my upper cervical story and then I'll tell you how I got there. My upper cervical story is, I'm in the middle of the program. My background is I played collegiate volleyball and I started playing volleyball when I was in seventh grade. I played all the way through college. I'm a former Navy reservist, so I had a lot of battle wounds that I had to deal with. Having all of that and being in chiropractic school, chiropractic helped me tremendously, but I really had a lot of issues, migraines. I had a TMD disorder.
What is TMD?
TMD is TMJ disorders, which is the temporomandibular joint, which is really just the jaw and it doesn't work properly. When people say TMJ issues, TMJ is the anatomy, TMD is actually the anatomy gone wrong. That's the stuff that I had. Then I also had IBS, which is a bowel issue that it's very spastic in a way, and you can't eat a lot of foods, things like that flare you up. I had all three of those things.
Wow.
Chiropractic helped some, general chiropractic did, but I got to a point where it didn't help. My migraines especially were getting worse. I ended up having this phenomenal mentor. His name is Dr. Steven Conicello. He just recently passed away, but he opened my world to upper cervical. I went to his office on Friday nights, a bunch of students did, and we learned all kinds of stuff from him. I had my first adjustment, and the technique was called knee-chest. I got that adjustment and my TMD, my TMJ issue gone within about two hours. My IBS issue was gone within two weeks.
Wow.
My migraines rolled off in about a year, which is how the nervous system would have healed by that point.
Now that you are a doctor, can you explain that? what's the stomach and the jaw and the migraines got to do with the neck?
Fantastic. It's a great question. A big thing to do, especially-- This is what we will be talking about this weekend here at the conference for the doctors that are attending. The things that we really excel well in when it comes to anatomy and physiology, especially in the upper cervical spine, the things that we do really well with that and the things that will come out of this conversation is the atlas, which is the top bone in the spine, the things that most people are working on aligning. Do you have a question?
No. Okay. It's good. Actually, I think this might be a good-- I think our listeners actually may have a question about that. We're talking about upper cervical and you're talking about the atlas, which is the top bone. You have said knee chest. I've had Dr. Jeff Scholten on, and he does something called NUCCA. We are here in the Blair Clinic doing the Blair technique.
That's right.
Maybe this is a good time to take a little parenthesis and say there's upper cervical, and then there's these techniques.
Yes. Upper Cervical Council is all the techniques are coming together under one umbrella to learn and get better at a craft, but within that is how you execute the actual adjustment or how we align the person back into symmetry, and those are called techniques. Every person that's here has found a technique that works really well for them and that has really a strong effectiveness for their patients.
In the ICA Upper Cervical Council, we have a group of affiliate techniques that are under our umbrella. NUCCA is one of them, Blair is another one, Knee chest version KCUCS, which is the actual affiliate technique, that's what I learned, and I actually am doing atlas orthogonal too, which is another technique as well.
Well, thank you for explaining that. Now can you pick up your story?
Yes. When we talk about things like TMJ issues, the atlas, the top bone actually has muscle attachments to the jaw. There's actually attachments to the hyoid bone, and that bone is, if you go and feel your neck right now, it's that bony prominence and you're going to swallow and it's going to move up and down. That bone as well. There's a lot of things that keep that top bone in alignment and attaches also to the jaw.
When that bone is out of alignment, it actually starts to pull and tug and it makes the jaw sit in an improper way. It starts to really load and get really heavy in the joints and that's how the joints don't work effectively. That's how a TMJ issue becomes a disorder. That's what I'd had. After my adjustment or after my alignment from the chiropractor, at that point, those muscles relaxed, those little leverage points went back into place and my jaw was able to sit itself back where its supposed to. That's why it was immediately relieved.
The IBS issue, the gut issue, that's a sympathetic issue. What happens, and when I say sympathetic, there is sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic is your fight or flight. In South Carolina, we would say, "A bear is chasing us. We need to get out of here," and then parasympathetic is the rest and digest. That's the thing that helps you actually digest your food, helps your heart rate, helps all the things that keep you alive and functioning well.
Well, what happens in the nervous system is that when that atlas bone misaligns, those two parameters, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, get uneased. They actually aren't doing effectively what they're supposed to do, and in reality, your fight or flight, your bear chasing you actually accelerates more. When that happens, your gut can't do its job. It can't digest like it should, and so spastic things happen down there. We see this very often in our offices. We have a lot of patients that have IBS issues, as I'm sure your office sees as well.
Yes, absolutely.
For sure. It took about two weeks after my adjustment for my auto-- it's called the autonomic nervous system. That's the same nervous system that's the parasympathetic and sympathetic, it took about two weeks for it to reset. Then my migraines actually took about a year, a little more than a year to probably go away.
I have noticed that in our practice, that while migraines, we knock it out of the park, I think everybody who comes in with migraines get better.
Yes, absolutely.
I have noticed that oftentimes migraines do take a little bit longer, and it's a little bit more up and down-
They do.
-messy healing process in general.
It's true. With migraines, typically, and when we talk about the nervous system too that goes with migraines, the actual regeneration of the tissue, the healing of the tissue takes about a year. Then the new things that we're discovering that we're talking about even in these conferences is about how the fluid that's around your brain and spinal cord known as CSF, and the blood in and out of the brain through the skull, those kinds of things play a big role in migraines as well.
Research shows us, in our own research, it shows us after people get that alignment, that those things start to calibrate themselves over time, and you don't need a ton of alignment. To be honest with you, if you get lined up and you hold that alignment, those things get better and better and better, but it does take some time to go through healing, and that's how all healing is.
Yes. It's about getting the bone in place.
Yes, ma'am.
Then as long as it stays there, you leave it alone.
Yes, ma'am.
We said, find it, fix it, and leave it alone.
Yes, that's right.
Okay. You set me up for where I want to go next.
Oh, good. Great.
Perfectly, because you mentioned this conference here this weekend and you said research. The main reason I wanted to invite you here was to talk about research.
Oh, great. Good. My favorite topic.
Yes. You can talk about research at Sherman College, you can talk about research in the Diplomate Program. That's the call of action. I've heard you tell doctors here, "Get involved in research."
Absolutely.
First of all, why is research important, and then how does it need to be done? You've done some amazing things in the standards and doing it just right, and then also in making it accessible. I know this is very wide, but talk to us about research.
Traditional research that you think of, chiropractic didn't really put its foot into those waters until really about 1980s. We are now kind of coming into our own of understanding how we need to be doing research. Now, we have our forefathers who did research, but traditional way of-
That was my first question, is knowing some chiropractic history, but I think that's a little outside.
Yes, that's okay.
We can do another episode another time about that because that is super interesting too.
It is. When I say the current research, it's things that are going into journals, peer review. The things that you think of when you hear research data, those are the places that we're starting to put ourselves, and that's the big call to action. We have to in our upper cervical world. We see this in our offices all the time. You see great patient testimonials, you think you see miracle cases that really aren't miracles because they are actually the expected, right?
Yes, you can prove how it happens, and why it happens, and how often it happens, and how often it doesn't happen.
What's great about research is, yes, it's all those things. It validates the things that we know, it shows how reliable that our care is. The other thing that it does, though, is we get to test parameters and learn even more about what this care does, and it even wows us at this point. For example, this weekend we have things like pupillary constriction that we are measuring, so your eye.
Pupillary, that's the eyes?
Yes, your eye, the pupil in your eye, the constriction levels. There's a machine that measures it, but it measures off of the pressure behind your eye that's causing the constriction issue. What we talk about, like I just mentioned a minute ago about the fluid that surrounds your brain, when we have a misalignment in the upper cervical spine or the top bones in the spine, when there's a misalignment, that fluid gets backed up into the brain and then it starts to press into the eyes and the eyes can't do what they're supposed to do. What we're finding with measuring those tools, that people who come in for care, we'll do a pre and post, and this is not me particularly, but the researcher-
Pre and post means before you start your treatment and then post is after?
Yes, ma'am. When we do that, we find that someone who gets assessed before they get the care and gets assessed after the care, the actual pressure changes and changes for the better, and those are things that we are seeing daily. Now, it wasn't created for the chiropractor. That's not what those-- Those tools and instruments were created for optometrists and ophthalmologists. What's amazing is we're able to take their standardized testing and we're able to put it into our clinics and say, "Oh my goodness, look at all of the things that we're affecting. It even surprises us and makes us even more excited about the things that we do.
Absolutely. It makes me more-
Committed to it, right? I love it.
Yes, and more excited to it. Obviously, I am on board as a team member, but first and foremost, I think of myself as a patient.
Yes. A lot of chiropractors that are here were the same way too, we were patients at one point first.
Yes. I'm excited about doctors doing this level of work.
Absolutely. Other things that we talked about this weekend were things like thermal imaging. Thermal imaging is where we take an infrared system and we actually assess how much heat is coming off your skin. Let me give you an example that everybody probably can relate to. During COVID, temperature was a big deal. Everybody cared and cared so much about temperature. Well, this is my wheelhouse, is thermal imaging. It's one of my big research goals. The group that I actually trained with is called the American Academy of Thermology. It's one of the largest educational bases of thermal imaging.
They came out with even papers that said if we're going to do COVID testing for temperature and body temperature, it needs to be done this way with infrared and certain processes. They're the only ones who came out with a standard, and FDA adopted it and said it was probably the proper way. Most people were doing temperatures on their forehead and so forth, but in the reality, the best way to do temperature is a completely different way with infrared and it's a whole process that came out.
Anyways, we know temperature gives signals to the body and it gives signals for you to understand the body. What it tells you is things are good or things are not good. We're going to do the same thing, we're going to take temperatures of your entire body depending on the area, but we'll take temperatures of your skin. What we're looking for there is symmetry and we're looking for you to adapt to your environment.
Now, what does adapt to your environment mean? If I put you in a room and I say, "Okay, let's, let's take off your jacket and just put you in a tank top," and you're sitting in a room and it's cold. The room, when I say cold, and I'm from South Carolina, so cold for us is like 65 degrees. Anyways, the room is really about 65 to 67 degrees. That's for the temperature of the camera and also to challenge the patient a little bit. What we should see in thermal imaging is all the heat that was built up should start to dissipate or start to go away slowly and start to symmetrically cool on both sides of the body.
Essentially, you should get cold all over.
You should, and we're going to check it out throughout the hour. Then what we end up looking at is, "Well, this area of the body didn't do that. This area of the body did not adapt the way it should. It should have cooled at an equal rate as the other side of the body did" This is not a chiropractic idea. In fact, to be honest with you, this started back in with Hippocrates. Hippocrates used to lather clay on the backs of his patients and he would look for the area that cooled the fastest because what he was looking for was the clay to harden, and where it hardened was the area of concern. Even he knew back then that was an issue. If we go forward, that's what we're looking at here.
Something like the American Academy of Thermology, we are dealing with MDs, DOs, DCs, which are chiropractors, we're looking at veterinarians, dentists. We're all at the table looking at the same kind of thing, are our patients adapting properly? What we are doing with thermal imaging is we're getting assessments of our patients. We're seeing where things are misfiring and going wrong when it comes to adaption, we're putting them under upper cervical care, and then we're taking this thermal images again and seeing how they are adapting. What we're seeing is things are changing that even we didn't expect to change.
Now, we knew this because, really, to be honest with you, a lot of our patients that come in that need thermal imaging done have what's called dysautonomia. Dysautonomia is a catch-all term, and if you go Google it right now, you'll find from primary to all kinds of other issues, and it can be kind of scary at times, but in reality, dysautonomia is just a catch-all. What it means is your autonomic nervous system, the one that I explained earlier about the parasympathetic and sympathetic, that system has just gone awry. It's just gone off the tracks, and that's why it's called dysautonomia.
That autonomic nervous system, to be honest with you, can act independently of what's called your central nervous system. Your central nervous system is your brain and spinal cord. Your brain and spinal cord is what keeps you alive. Your autonomic nervous system tells you how to adapt to your environment. Well, for someone who has a dysautonomia issue, which, to be honest with you, diagnosis-wise, which is starting to change, about 700,000 people are diagnosed with that a year, but that's mainly for a primary. A primary dysautonomia is more of a genetic issue.
What we're finding now for groups like the Dysautonomia Project, which you can look them up online too, they're doing great work, dysautonomia really is just a collection of symptoms that we're looking for. It doesn't have to be a primary. Primary means it's more genetic and it has more of a dire consequence. Those are not the things we're talking about mainly, we're talking about something like a secondary or idiopathic. Secondary meaning you have some other presentation in your life, something else going on with you, and then you have dysautonomia on top of that.
That main issue that you're having in your life caused you to have dysautonomia. Your autonomic nervous system just went haywire based on it. So that could be you had a whiplash injury, or you played football when you were younger, or you had a very big emotional thing happen in your life, whether it be from verbal trauma and abuse, those kinds of things that can put you in a dysautonomia state.
Yes. If I remember correctly in the session yesterday, they were talking about dysautonomia and also in relation to post-concussion injuries.
Absolutely. Honestly, that's almost guaranteed at this point for me. The third part is idiopathic. Idiopathic meaning we just don't know why someone has dysautonomia, but I really think idiopathic is not idiopathic because what I would like to say is we just didn't understand. That's what it is. Research is about understanding-
Absolutely.
-and is what you're saying.
You got it. That's where I'm going.
Obviously, that's why we do research. These were great examples. Also, I will link in the show notes.
Oh, good. Great.
I had a representative from Titronics-
Cool. Very cool.
-that I've interviewed too. I'll link that episode too.
Oh, that's great. That's perfect.
If somebody wants to find out more about thermography, that's a-
Very cool.
-whole episode about that. One of the things that impressed me, and the first time I heard you speak was two years ago, and you were talking about the standards of research.
Research. That's right.
Then also making it more accessible to doctors.
Absolutely.
Can you talk about those two issues, how research needs to be done, and what you are doing so that doctors who need it can get access to it?
With the Upper Cervical Council, which is one of the many things that are special about us, is we have our own bibliography. Now, our bibliography database is really all the supportive pieces for all the work that we do. Some of it is chiropractic, but a lot of it is evidence work to help support upper cervical care. If I need something for anatomy, I can pull it from this part. If I need something about a clinical presentation, I can pull it from this part.
We want to have an area where doctors can grab and have access to these things, because a biggest part of research, or I think the hardest part is building it. When you start to build research, you need a bibliography in your research piece. Bibliography, let me explain what that is because I'm sure that's coming up, it's literally a explanation of the research pieces and how you got to where you got with your hypothesis, your question. Now, a bibliography that I was talking about that we did for the Council is literally a warehouse, almost, of research pieces.
If you went to a library and you said, "I need something in this theme," or whatever, or subject, you would go to a certain area, locate it and pull it out. That's what that bibliography is. The bibliography for the Upper Cervical Council is more like a library where you'd pull the journal piece out that you need. A bibliography for a research article is all the research pieces you put into making that paper. Does that answer it?
Yes. Then also, a lot of times for doctors to get access to research, they have to pay thousands of dollars sometimes.
Oh, yes. Journals are not cheap at all. What we're hoping to do with this, and on the honor system, honor code, when it comes to research sharing is that, and we're hoping to make this available as we go, when you join the Upper Cervical Council, we could give you access to this bibliography that we have that you can pull from and you would not have to pay anything but other membership fees. That's all.
It is helpful because, really, when you look at a journal, it's not just that, it's thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to be part of a journal. I have a leverage, it's very nice that I'm at Sherman College and we have access to all those kind of journals, and so I'm able to pull pieces and so forth. Again, we're not putting out in a public format. I can't do that. That's actually unethical. I can't post it anywhere or put it in public, but I can give you abstracts and give you links and I can pull those pieces for you.
Another thing I wanted to touch on with the research is you mentioned some of the projects where dentists, and ophthalmologists, and MDs ,and chiropractors and all these professionals work together. That is a really neat thing about the research, because I feel like when smart people work together, then as a complicated patient, I can get better help. How does that fit in with your work in the ICA Upper Cervical Council? Maybe this is a good way to tie in why you decided to join the Diplomate. I know that you were one of the movers and shakers in getting the Diplomate Program started. Do you want to talk about that?
Yes. I think the big thing with the Council is unification. We want to bring everybody on board so we all can build together, because as the tide rises, all ships rise too. We want to bring the entire level of chiropractic up even. A big part of that is working with paraprofessionals as well. It's not just us on an island and we're only talking chiropractic speak, we're going to talk with paraprofessionals. Paraprofessionals are people who don't do chiropractic. They're in another field, whether it's medical field, dental field and so forth, but they are aligned and they're like-minded and then we see commonalities in patient bases.
Typically, where paraprofessional work started from was where we would send a referral off to someone that we thought needed extra care outside of chiropractic, and we would see and have that conversation about that patient, and that's how the beginnings of paraprofessional work started. Now we have like-minded things where we already know because of research, and you know because of those instrumentation things we're talking about, that this person needs some extra help in this one area because their alignment might be an issue for them and it might have made that issue worse, but they still have that other issue that needs to be dealt with. We work with paraprofessionals that way.
Then what we've now gone to, which I absolutely love, is we are writing papers with paraprofessionals. Some of the things that you'll see, even at the conference this weekend, is we write with dentists, we write with ophthalmologists. I have a physiatrist that I work with that I'm trying to get papers with too. We are collaborating, and that's how we take our work, our research work and we actually proliferate it throughout the field.
People who typically wouldn't have seen our work before, but because it has an ophthalmologist on it or a dentist on it are now seeing the kind of work that we do and how it, again, lines up with their objective. They want to get that patient better, but they can't get them to where they need to be because they had an upper cervical or they had an atlas issue. That's where we come into play.
No one else in healthcare can do what we do. No one at all. I can't tell a patient to go rest for an entire weekend and their alignment's going to be fixed. I can't go tell a patient to drink some water and that's going to be fixed.
Or exercise.
Or exercise.
I'm all about exercise.
Of course. Absolutely. That's part of health. You need that for health, but it will never fix this issue.
Or eat healthy.
Exactly. I can't eat away alignment issue, yes.
Nothing will fix the alignment except fixing the alignment.
Absolutely. You really need someone who has spent time and effort and are meticulous in what they do, especially the patient bases. We see now we are not a human species the same as we were 60 years ago. We sit more, we are in distress instead of eustress. Eustress is good stress for your body, which is like the--- when people were doing labor and stuff a lot that was mainly-- or they walk to and from their jobs, while that's not fun and they would rather be in a car, that was better for their system. Then now we sit all day, and so our system starts to break down more.
We don't eat healthy. We eat a lot of fast foods, as you know. We actually don't work our diaphragms like we're supposed to. There's a lot of things that our body is not accelerated at the rate it should have. We actually are in a deep evolution way. We're kind of going backwards. Our patient bases that are coming in, just like myself, I'm part of this patient base, we come into offices and we are a little more complicated than people 15, 60 years ago.
For that complicated case base, you need someone who can understand that complexity, which is what our diplomates do. That's a big part of our Diplomate Program. We are not going to probably adjust necessarily or align someone much differently than we would have if we weren't a diplomate. However, what a diplomate does for us is it gives us a bigger understanding of what's happening with that person.
We also get to see-- we now have management ideas. I know what to expect with this patient based off of what I learned in the Diplomate. I also know how this patient can be co-managed with another paraprofessional and get the best outcomes possible. I also can use that information that I've learned to go out and see more of that population group. I think this is where the Diplomate really excels at.
For example, my wheelhouse, again, dysautonomia patients, which is pretty much all I see at this point, and it's funny because I didn't really market that or put that out there, but one tells the other, tells the other, tells the other, it's all referral-based process, but that world and what's called central sensitization, which is fibromyalgia and IBS, all those things we talked about earlier, that area is an area of patient base that feels neglected. They feel like no one cares and they feel like no one can help them.
It's very lonely and [unintelligible 00:28:55]
It is, absolutely. That's where, again, because I'm a diplomate, I want to feed into that and explain it to them better because mainly that patient base has been told, "You're perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with you, it's in your head."
It is. Now I have to unwind that conversation that they constantly tell themselves because that's what they were told. The only way I can do that is be highly educated in understanding what's going wrong with them. I think that's what the Diplomate brings as well.
When you find a doctor who's a diplomate, they will have more of that knowledge.
Absolutely.
Whether you're thinking about the Diplomate Program, the ICA Upper Cervical Council, Sherman, your private practice, a couple of things. What is the number one thing that you want people in general to know? Then I've heard you give so many calls to action here this weekend-
[laughs] I'm very demanding.
-to doctors, but there's listeners right now that either are experiencing some of those symptoms and they're in that lonely, despairing place. Do you have a call to action for them, do you have a call to action to someone who might be their doctor, or do you have a call to action who someone who listens to this and they're not a doctor and they don't suffer from it, but they're thinking, "Okay, this is a great cause. I want to help out to either spread the word or learn more"? What are some calls to action that you have for all of us?
Okay, so I'm going to start with your first question. I may have missed some of them, so keep reminding me.
I know you're supposed to do one at a time.
I understand. Don't worry. From the first, I think the biggest thing that I can say is, when we when I see a patient, especially all the things that we're talking about here, all the complexities, I don't look at that patient and go, "Oh, that's not good," I say, "Man, there's a lot of hope here. There is a lot of hope."
That's a great perspective.
Yes, it is. Most people who come to us, as you are well aware, we are the doctors of last resort, and it's so frustrating. If you came to me first, but they didn't know. They come, again, with all of these layers on their shoulders of things that they're told, "That it will never happen, never change. There's no hope," and I see hope. There's constant hope within that.
Yes. I think that's what I love the most about my job. Even before the first adjustment has happened and they've had a consultation, I can see they already have hope and you can see it-
They feel it, right?
-yes, in their face.
Then we, as doctors, especially diplomates too, we are seeing it so often, we know the hope. I feel confident in the hope. That would be my number one thing. Then for the patient who's struggling right now too, I would start with that conversation, "There's hope there," and someone who feels like there's nothing that can be done for them, they've been told constantly that, "Oh, we've done all the tests, every single test we possibly could do. There's no other test to be done, and you look just fine."
Earlier when I said your central nervous system, which is your brain and spinal cord, they can be functioning just fine, but your autonomic nervous system can be misinformed and it could be giving you wrong information to your brain, and that's where we would come in and help out tremendously. There is a website. There is the ICA Upper Cervical Care. You can Google it.
Yes, I will put a link to it in the show notes.
Awesome. Go there and it will tell you about our doctors. You can actually contact the Upper Cervical Care Council and they will link you to one of us or get you at least connected to me. I'll be glad to set you up with someone. For a doctor who is seeing a patient base that's getting more complicated every day, one thing I would tell you is jump on in. That's my big thing. Come and join us. The conversations we had this weekend, I've had side conversations with plenty of people after these presentations, and their eyes have been opened.
Really, honestly, what we've done is we're the finger putter honors. This is my second one. I'll explain it.
I like it.
The finger “putter-oners”. While you're in practice as this chiropractor, you're seeing these things, but you can't figure out exactly what it is. What we did this weekend is we explained some stuff and you go, "Ah," you put the finger on it, "That's exactly what I've been seeing, I just didn't know how to define it." That's what we do at these forums. Come and join us and learn the conversation.
On top of that, when you have these kind of patient bases, there's a few rules that you should follow. A, they don't need more adjusting. They don't need more aligning, what they need is their body to heal, and you need factors, objective outcome measures, or some kind of factors that you're monitoring and watching to keep you from doing such things, because most likely, again, adaptation, I mentioned it earlier, the ultimate thing that we want, especially in chiropractic, but even more in upper cervical chiropractic, is we want the patient to adapt to their environment.
Everything else in this world, you go anywhere else, they're going to try to adapt the environment to you, which is fine. There needs to be some of those things. Right now it's 2023, we're in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas, and if we didn't have air conditioning, we'd be dead, That's adapting our environment to us, we're helping us out. However, you need to be adapting properly. We're sitting here having a nice, calm conversation, my heart rate shouldn't be escalated like a bear is chasing me. I need to be at a low resting heart rate, which would be normal for an adaptational phase.
Yes, and the air conditioning is on, I should not be sweating right now.
That's exactly right. The fancy word for that is called vasomotor instability and that's part of the autonomic system we were talking about. That's what I would say. I'd say, for a doctor taking care of these patients, a lot of it's going to be education on your part to educate that patient. A lot of it's going to be you watching. To be honest with you, they don't need more stimulation. That's the problem. They are already overstimulated.
Less is more.
Less is absolutely more, and research is proving less is more. Our Council, our diplomates are doing that research. I don't remember the other questions.
Well, I think you answered it. Actually, the follow-up question is, just some person that may not be super sick and they're not a doctor, but something sparked in hearing about this. What can I do to help out if I'm in that boat?
I think the links that you're going to see that are going to be posted, I would check out those areas and see where, even within that, the Council itself. It's the same kind of thing when you're on Facebook or any kind of social media, anytime I've discovered something, I like to share it, and social media is rapid in sharing. Even if you don't completely understand it, post our links. Talk about, "Hey, I listened to this podcast. This is really interesting. What do you guys think?" You don't have to have the conversation. The conversation is in the podcast, you just have to do the welcome. Here's the entry point, I've shook your hand, come in the door. Now these people are going to explain stuff to you.
Yes. Maybe you've heard about upper cervical, "I just found out about this, what do you think?"
Yes, and I think I might know somebody who needs this kind of stuff too. That's what we would love for you to do. That kind of stuff helps us out tremendously. We get our voices heard louder. Absolutely.
I have asked you a bunch of questions, and you do so much, we could talk for days. What is the question that I haven't asked that you just really wish that everybody would know or everybody would understand?
I guess, I'm going to give it in a statement, but it could have been asked question, what is someone who goes throughout their life and doesn't get upper cervical care, and has all the
Which is most of the world.
It is, right? How would their life have been changed if they were under really good upper cervical care? Now, I cannot project the future, but what our biggest focus is is function, we want the body to work at its optimum. Inside your body is an intelligence and it's so well designed. If you don't believe me, just Google cadaver studies and look at pictures. There is no possible way it is created and intertwined the way it is by accident. It is beautifully made.
Now, in order to keep it going, there is a process in the medical world that we call homeostasis, things where everything's got to stay in equilibrium. It's got to be even. In our world, we would say that intelligence keeps you adapting. What we want to happen for your body is we want to say, "Okay, well, we have figured out through all these keys and cues that we have learned over time, all these measures, the things that I've talked about earlier, that your body is into a state of a-- what we look for is a pattern and it's a pattern that shows dysfunction.
We're going to look for that pattern and then we're going to actually align you and then we're going to see that pattern start to alleviate. It actually goes from something that looks dysfunctional to something that looks like adaptive. For me, if someone went through their entire life and didn't have this care, it looks like most of the people that you're seeing who are sick, and these people have been told from day one, at least in America, they've been told constantly through their TV and so forth, is that their body was never expected to be good. Their body is expected to fail them and they need all these other things to help support their body that's failing them.
When in reality, if they had had the care that we provide, they would see that their body does really well and way better than expected and has hope, because what we typically see in healthcare is we take away that hope. We automatically tell people from day one, "Well, you can expect that this at age this is what you're going to have to deal with, this age, you have this to deal with, and you can't expect a quality of life when you're in your 80s and 90s," and it's sad. In reality, what we can say to you is, "Your body's completely adapting the way it's designed to do and you should be able to have hope that you're going to have a healthy and great experience in your life as you age."
I like that.
Thank you.
To wrap it up here so that you can get back to your next session, [laughter] I want to find out how people can get in touch with you, whether they're in South Carolina and they're suffering from some of those symptoms and they want to see you as their doctor. Maybe you're somebody who's thinking about studying chiropractic and might want to check out Sherman College, or whether you're a chiropractor and you want to find out more about the Upper Cervical Council. How do we get in touch with you?
The easiest way for my practice to reach out to me is through email. I have a practice email, and you start the conversation there and then I get in contact with you. My email, it's drjaimebrowning@gmail.com. Then if you're interested in Sherman College too, it's very easy. I'm on the website and those kinds of things too, but you can reach out to me at my Sherman email, and it's jbrowning@sherman.edu. Just reach out. If you're interested in this world, I will tell you, Sherman College is a great place to learn this craft. We have two diplomates that are actually on staff, they're on the faculty, which is unheard of across the board, and we are upper cervical focus school. We keep upper cervical as a premium and a paramount thing that we want you to learn.
Yes, and you have, like you talked about, an excellent library of research.
Also, if you're doctor or maybe even a patient wanting to find some research-
Absolutely.
-maybe you can guide them in the right direction?
Yes. Then if you want to link up with us and join arms, the ICA Upper Cervical Council, we're going to have a link for that. Please check out our website, see the kind of stuff that we're doing, see our conversation that we're having. We just got back from Europe. We did a two-week and we did a mastermind with the diplomates and then we went and spoke to European doctors over there, and we're starting that conversation because we're trying to not all-- It's not just for my local hometown, it's not just for my state, it's not even for America, it's for the entire world. We're trying to get as much out there as possible as we can.
Yes, this is actually what I want to do more personally.
Awesome, I love it.
I know.
It breaks my heart that my friend in Norway can't get the care they want.
Yes, it's so frustrating.
Yes, and I know that it's most countries in the world.
That will say, one thing we learned a big time this time with Europe was having that bibliography, that research, that's what actually got us through the door. We presented a whole bunch of bibliography with evidence because that's what we have to do, that's another way that research moves and shakes, is it actually opens doors for us because they can see our efficacy, they can see how valid what we do. Validity means that what I say I'm measuring or what I say that's happening actually happens, and then we're reliable, we can do it over and over and over again.
That's what we're starting to show and we're hoping that if we can do that and open a door in one country, then maybe we can use that country as a pilot and a way to say, "Okay, this is what we did," and we take that same game plan and we go to all the other countries and try to move a little bit of the needle
Yes and prove it over and over.
Absolutely.
Yes.
I know for you, that's got to be something near and dear to your heart.
Yes. Then my call to action for you is reach out if you need help.
Yes, absolutely, I totally will.
[laughter]
Okay. All right. Thank you much-
Yes, that's my pleasure, thank you.
-for your time and your expertise. My hope is that someone's life will be changed because of you being on here today.
Your podcast is incredible. I'm just impressed you've created all of this and you do this out of the goodness of your heart because you care and love these people. That's amazing.
Well, the bottom line is I got help because someone told me.
Absolutely.
Like you said, most people don't know what they don't know.
No, they have no idea. They just don't know what they don't know. Exactly, they just don't know. That's right.
All right. That's it.
Awesome.
Thank you so you.
Thank you.