Episode 48: Chirodontics
Transcript…
In this episode, you will learn:
- How the bones in your skull affect your entire body
- What happens when pain or a diagnosis becomes part of your identity
- Different ways a stress response will show up in the body: like an asthma attack
- The importance of going upstream to solve the problem
Episode 48: Chirodontics
Katie Wrigley 00:08
Welcome back to the Pain Changer podcast. This is episode 48 and I’m your host Katie Wrigley. What do nerve flow, movement and water have in common? They’re all pillars of wellness. According to today’s guest, we will be taking a deep dive into this topic and also touching on a field that is new to me. Chirodontics. I’m not even sure what that is, but I am fascinated to learn. All of that is coming right up. With me today is Dr. Christopher Boyhan. Dr. Boyhan was born and raised in northern New Jersey, where he was a competitive athlete student in both football and wrestling. He went on to play football for the University of Massachusetts only to have inconsistent health derail his athletic career. But he learned at a young age to not accept no as an answer. And it’s this mindset that helped him overcome his – ugh can’t even talk today. It’s this mindset that helped him learn to overcome the many obstacles life presented to him on his journey. It is his mission in this life to help people learn how to solve their own problems. By building a bridge from health care to personal development. I love that. He has narrowed the essential elements of health down to nerve flow, exercise and water. Simple and oh so important. Boyhan earned his undergraduate degree in sports medicine from William Paterson University with honors and he was awarded honors at Sherman College of Chiropractic where he earned his doctorate degree. Prior to becoming a chiropractor he worked as an athletic trainer for 10 years at the collegiate and high school level, and also worked as a medical devices sales representative for orthopedic trauma and spinal surgery in the Northeast region of the US. In his free time, William does his neurology homework and learns powerful new health and wellness additions to his practice, like chirodontics, the best water systems and more. I cannot wait to dive into this. Welcome to the pain changer podcast. Chris, it is so nice to have you here with me today.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 02:06
Good afternoon, Katie. Thanks for having me. In the warm introduction, and just want to start off by the sign behind you says it all, chronic does not mean that to be permanent. And we’re going to talk about what that looks like for people’s lives today. Hopefully,
Katie Wrigley 02:22
Yes. And, you know, that was actually one of the affirmations that I used when I was disabled myself five years ago was when someone every time I went to the doctors like oh, this is chronic, this is chronic. And I’m like, who says I have to be permanent. And then I just went ahead and trademarked it. And now it’s the tagline for my company. But I that’s what I
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 02:40
I think that that’s great. Because I think that that’s awesome. Because a lot of times people get a diagnosis, and they take that as their identity versus being like 1/8 of their life, right. And they start to live that way. And they get labeled. And I think that it puts people under a thumb thinking that they can’t do more for their life, right? And then there’s not other possibilities. And a lot of times and obviously I think it sounds like you were maybe at the wrong type of doctor, you know, if you want to be healthy, and people are telling you you’re suffering from chronic things, but not trying to solve it. Is that what you really want out of the experience?
Katie Wrigley 03:16
It was not. I wanted people to help me not keep telling me what was wrong with me. So I kind of broke away from the traditional medical system and started seeking out experts more in line with what I believe that you’re doing now for your patients.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 03:30
Yeah, and neither one is wrong. The question I always ask people is just “How healthy do you want to be?” You know, and if you want to just get out of pain, there’s a lot of things I could do. I could take you outside, kick you out or you know, create a new problem. But if you want to be healthy, then it’s a totally different type of conversation for people.
Katie Wrigley 03:48
And I love the way you ask, “How healthy do you want to be?” Like, there’s just so much possibility I hear in that question. Because there’s levels, right? It’s not just oh, you’re healthy or not healthy, like yes, there’s an off and on switch. But how healthy do you want to be?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 04:05
Yeah, well, if you had orthopedic trauma, you know, you’re out there in vain and got your finger cut off by a snowblower. You’re gonna want someone to stop the bleeding, right? Yeah, so that is not dead care. And that doesn’t mean that you’re not healthy. It just means you’re not dead. Right? Talk about adaptive capacity, the next step would be sick, not sick care. You know, you go in with a symptom, you get a pill, you’re not sick. But then the difference of not sick to actually being healthy is a very different scenario for people and looking at the markers differently. You know, we’re, a lot of times people let things that are acute start to become chronic. And then obviously when they meet you or I in our practice, their tutor and on chronic become impermanent, right, and it’s a fear of the unknown takes over because like they have no context to what is the next step or what is it going to look like for them, um, you know, and they’re different. They’re caught up in different health care models with different practitioners here and all different types of information that can kind of be overwhelming. I’m sure you might have felt that way yourself.
Katie Wrigley 05:10
Absolutely. And I want to go back to what you’re saying here. But before we do, I want to give a little bit more of your background. And you had mentioned that you were a professional or collegiate athlete, athlete, but you’re having some inconsistent health problems. Would you mind opening up and just sharing a little bit about that, and how that led you to the work that you’re doing today?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 05:32
Sure, I mean, coming off the Super Bowl little kid didn’t want to be a professional football player, you know, before I even watched football or played, I just knew that I wanted to play at the highest level. And my mom often tells me some stories of when I was young, and I was probably about five, and she brought me to tumbling class, and a student asked me to leave because I was too rough with the other kids. I wasn’t hurting anybody, I just had a higher level of energy going on there. And you know, when I was 10, the doctors didn’t think I could play sports. And what had happened was I suffered some birth wound trauma and also trauma on delivery where they actually took me out with forceps from my mom and pulled me out, which not only changed the shape in my head, as I’ve come to learn later in my life with the chirodontics, but initially was the structural misalignment, or what would call them chiropractic subluxation of the upper neck. And, you know, we know that the brain stem attaches right to the brain in the Upper Cervical. So for me, it was putting pressure on the respiratory center. So, I, no one knew this, you know, I just was showing symptoms of chronic asthma attacks. Always being sick and out of the hospital, taking the pill or shot, the current roof was going on, basically my pediatrician’s worst case, and they’re like, there’s just no way you can play sports because you just can’t breathe. And I was like, I don’t, I’m not listening to you, I’m gonna do this. And my mom finally signed me up for football. And, you know, I basically leased my way from being a 10 year old kid to division one football school. But every day I was taking nebulizer treatments just never consistently healthy. And as the levels got harder, you know, my body was strong enough, but internally I was weak, because things weren’t working right.
Katie Wrigley 07:12
Wow. And I as someone who also struggled with asthma, and I was an athlete, as a child, what what the treatment was, for me, as they gave me steroid shots all the way through college, or not through college through high school to help control my asthma because I did four hours of swimming a day. And so that was thought to be healthier than taking the albuterol, you know, or looking at where the asthma was coming from in the first place. And so my immune system took a hit from that, as I’m sure yours took from the nebulizers. And everything that you were doing like that symptom treatment in there starts to become a game and it’s not getting into the root.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 07:49
Yeah, I mean, I’ll just talk about albuterol, you’re probably closer to my age or slo-bid was like the only medication that was like those little nasty pills, my mom used to be like I’m sorry, this is all that we have, you know, unfortunately through me and cases like yourself, I’m sure your pediatricians all learned from us a lot, where kids from now maybe get a little bit of better care, but they’re still treating the symptom, which is dangerous, because the long term effect on the body, the buildup of all those corticosteroids is what is dangerous. It’s not the acute care to open up your airways, it’s the long term effect of you know, they’re not an anabolic steroids, they don’t build you up, they break you down, and you run the risk of demon rising your bones and having all kinds of other health problems later, later down the road. And the more I looked at the spine and the nervous system in the brain, what I realized was that when you’re having an asthma attack your nervous systems work backwards. Have you ever gone outside and played with a lot of kids? Like remember, freeze tag? Yeah, it was a lot of fun, right? I used to go to my cousin’s house and be like, 30 kids outside playing freeze tag, you did not want to miss this experience, like this was the highlight of your week, get an asthma attack and had to crawl like three flights of stairs up there to get the inhaler going. And then you had to calm down for 20 minutes. And then you can go back out. What’s happening is that your body’s saying I’ve had enough. And what I mean by that is, instead of your lungs dilating playing freeze tag, they’re actually constricting when you’re exerting yourself, which is what creates what we call a common date asthma attack. And then you have to ask yourself, why is the body constricting when it needs to expand? And what is happening is the same, there’s too much pressure in the nervous system, especially on the brain and spinal cord. So I’m going to shut you down and put you on the ground before you die. Same thing like you see, a lot of complications of people have blood pressure medicines, they’re always having to change the prescription because the body has other checks and balances to raise the pressure where it wants it. Even though if you’re going to cut off one pathway, it’s going to build the pressure up somewhere else until you can neurologically redo that. So that helped really reframe things that my body would just not properly experience stressful responses properly.
Katie Wrigley 10:08
And I’ve heard that as well, from a practitioner I was working with, I did a root cause analysis. And I know that’s someone a mutual friend of ours also does as well. And part of my homework from her was don’t do cardio for a while. So like if you’re having an asthma attack, when you’re doing cardio, that’s your body saying that’s a stress signal, I want you to stop cardio for a while, and I kind of went like, ah, like, I didn’t know what to do. But I stopped. And I can say now, that between a mix of some supplements to help boost my immune system again, so it’s working more properly. Some other treatments to help with some of the other things going on and diet changes. I have had multiple cardio workouts and I don’t have asthma attacks anymore.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 10:51
Wow, that’s awesome. Yeah. When I first listened to the podcast with our mutual friend, and they were talking about this protocol, and how minerals really run the show, and when your body’s already taken all these medicines in or eating or exercising and trying to be healthy the oxidative stress builds up. If you don’t, if your body’s demineralized from all the long term, petroleum based medicines, withdraw the minerals out of you naturally, you have no chance to exert yourself properly to try to be healthy. And so you can reset all those pathways back up for success. Otherwise, you’re just you keep digging a bigger ditch. And that’s exactly what happened to me, you know, I rose to this football school where you work since you’re 10 years old to get there, you’ve made sacrifices, relationships, mowed lawns to go to camps, met all the right coaches, didn’t go to parties, and your body just fails on you and says I just can’t do this anymore, right. And it’s very demoralizing. And a lot of people will just accept that. And then people like yourself, where I dig a little deeper. And that’s why I was so excited to come on the show today to be able to share this with others, that you’re not your disease, and to educate the parents, the moms and the kids that you know, there are other ways to look at what’s going on with you.
Katie Wrigley 12:08
Yeah, absolutely. And that actually, that’s a great segue into what you had started to say before. There’s a big difference between not being sick versus being healthy. And that fear of the unknown. Can you expand a little bit more on that? What is the distinction to you? What is the mark of a healthy person versus someone who’s not sick anymore?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 12:31
Yeah. Well look at it this way, a lot of people think they’re healthy, because they do one or two health related things like some of my toughest customers are athletes, particularly runners and or people that exercise every day, right, because they’ve got all the feel good hormones going on. They look good aesthetically. But if I was to check a couple things, I would find some things that are a ticking time bomb that would go undiagnosed if you didn’t relate it all together, right. So just because you’re there’s too many aspects of health. And that’s why I felt overwhelmed going through all these different doctors getting 20-30 blood vials taken. Nobody’s saying there’s anything wrong, having every diagnosis under the man and you’re just like, I just want to be normal. So I found that to be very frustrating. So when we came up with what we do here at advanced alignment, I wanted to simplify for people. And a lot of times some people come in that are chronic going towards permanent or health, whether it be in their neurology or their metabolic health, we’re gonna talk about both here. I need to keep it simple. I know, to meet all these people that are going to functional med, there’s nothing wrong with functional med, medical doctors, they’ve saved my life, they saved my father’s life, I’ve worked with them, and I have no qualms with what they do. But if you’re gonna offer someone’s thyroid medication, but on the surface, they’re drinking really crummy water. They’re not exercising, they’re eating a poor diet. So similar to your story not to pick on you. But you didn’t have the basics of nerve flow exercise on water, right? So it doesn’t matter what I do downstream to fix the problem, because I’m still going to yoke down in that murky water. But if I could fix the upstream problem, and everything clears out, Hey, we’re in a really good place. Now we’re healthy. If we clear out the big things, and we still have some things lingering now we can take a deeper dive and really get into what else needs to get fixed in that situation. But if we keep plugging, putting tape on the water hose, it’s eventually going to keep breaking. So I think a lot of people quit because they’re trying to be healthy, but they’re just missing a few key elements and they wind up even though it’s on the natural side and still want up and symptom based care.
Katie Wrigley 14:42
Yep. And you can totally pick on me. I’m just going to let you know that right now because I use myself as an example on the show because you’re right that when I got into disability, I was doing all the things that hey, guess what, we’re going to lead me to disability and now I’m fully functional and don’t have pain. It’s been a journey out of here. And you’re right. So I want to circle into those three pillars of wellness here in a moment, the nerve flow, high quality water, and exercise. And I hurt so bad I was low on the exercise side, I was great with water. I’ve been great with water for years. But I wasn’t doing the exercise. And I wasn’t really doing much to get my nerves flowing until I started practicing the modality I do. But then once I started to do that things shifted. So can you expand on how you’ve identified those as the three pillars of wellness? And what exactly do you mean by like, what is enough exercise? What kind of exercise like what are the elements in there?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 15:41
Yeah, I mean, big picture, people need to understand there’s no substitute for proper joint motion. It’s the only reason I have a job on this planet. And I don’t want to undermine my profession, but my role in health care is very small, but it’s the most vital and the reason it is it’s because of your what you’re just explaining to me, you find yourself in between a rock and a hard place like you are motivated to do one thing. And then you can’t do it consistently. And what is preventing you from doing consistently is that your joints are moving. And because of that your brain isn’t getting the right information through itself, to send back out to your body to do things. Because what we know is motion drives cognition. So that’s why we’re upright standing an extension base to the legs fires up our frontal lobe is our executive center for decision making. Well being like, Oh, there’s the answer. When our frontal lobes get weak, we wind up in our temporal lobe like a temper tantrum, right where kids crawl on the floor, they have Kinesia, they can’t get to things, there’s rigidity in the system, everything is overwhelming, very emotional. You know, their amygdala is running while they’re just using inductive reasoning on things. But if I do this 10 things are gonna happen, right? Every time I talk to someone that doesn’t feel well, they’re afraid to do one thing for five things down the road that aren’t even there yet, right. So what we find is if we can restore the proper motion to the spine, especially in the cervical bottom, uhm, the cervical spine, that will give the brain better information, we’ll see improvements on their balance to start.We see a lot of people come in with balance problems, they can’t even stand on one leg, even though they look fit and healthy. And that right there tells me that there’s something locked up in their neck right? Never mind when we start looking at the brain and the cranial nerves and how that looks. So we can start firing up the frontal lobe so they can stand up upright, bipedal and get better information, and we get better output to the body. So that’s one of the most vital things that we would want to check for people. But we’re also looking at your vital stats, we talked earlier about the lungs, but more or less get your oxygen saturation rate. Bosox, right, that’s something that’s very important because it dips 4% at night. So people that have sleep apnea, sometimes have low pulse ox, but it’s because their spine is not moving. And it’s the body’s trying to offset that and they lost the curve and the next they lost the air patency of how it’s supposed to be because their neck is not opening up properly. Or what we learned in cranial work, the cranial bones are distorted in the airway, as well. So you want to check balance, you want to check pulse ox, heart rate, respiration rate to see what they’re under, we even want to check their ribs, see how much the ribs are breathing. You know, so many people come in with anxiety. But yet the ribs are moving in a half inch when they should be moving two inches. So they’re taking two to 300 times the amount of breaths per minute that they need. And they wonder what it’s like basically, you’re hyperventilating in the back. Right? And in a nutshell, what it really comes down to is pain and proprioception. So our spinal cord, you know if you ever seen someone sprained their ankle, or have you sprained your ankle, yeah, twice. The body automatically wants to offload the weight to the other side, right? So that’s an acute injury and why it’s healed that doesn’t want to put the weight on there. It’s not designed to do that forever. Right? Right. But in our body, proprioception, our posture, a lot of people talk about posture, but it’s really about proprioception, like where our body is in space, our jaw, and then our pelvic bones in the back of our foot are the three biggest proprioceptors in the entire body. The brain does not care where the rest of it is, as long as the jaw is leveled in horizon. So that’s why people have postural distortions because the jaw can’t be on level and you chew and talk. Did you ever see someone talk with their head tilted, you can’t do it. No, it just does not feel right. Right. For years, they thought his eyes were the jaw. So when you watch people it is the jaw trying to stay level and the rest of the spine contorting, to try to balance that out. So when that ankle sprain happens, you get a response to the spinal cord that goes back to the joint it says offload, okay. And we want to keep that there and that’s the traditional acute chiropractic care, you hurt your back, get you adjusted, the weight bearing situation is nice and even. Now, when people don’t take care of an acute thing or don’t get the right care for that, or numb up the symptoms, the pain response starts going up until the jaw and you hear people have trigeminal neuralgia, you know, like they go as far as to get the nerve cut in their jaw, it’s so bad, right? It’s your cranial nerve number five, well, that’s the last part in the spinal column that can handle the pain before the brain starts to mediate the pain through your endocrine system. So once you get into that, you know that ankle sprain hurts a lot, right right away. It’s like, oh, it’s like it stops you in your place, right. But when the brain mediates the pain, it’s like this long, slow pathway. It’s kind of like you were talking about when you’re chronic, you’re just like in this low, dull, hazy thing, like you want to move, but you don’t feel good. Yeah. And it’s there’s peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys, there’s like no consistency from day to day, hour to hour. And any of that. And the loud term downstream effect of brain mediated pain control, is where I think we see a lot of our mental health disorders, because I see so many people come in on SSRI inhibitors for anxiety and depression, that when I talk to them, they don’t really have that, because they’ve had an accident 10-20 years ago that never got corrected in their neck, brain or spine. I’m never here to tell them to get off their medication as it’s like, things are going to change. And your brain is going to start calming down. And you’re going to need to talk to your practitioner, though, maybe adjusting your dose a little bit, if you start feeling some symptoms on medication, because your body’s going to start reacting differently. So we still have to rebuild those hormone pathways that have been chronically depleted for chronic pain. But that’s what the downstream effect is in the mental health world of fixed plugging the bottom, but not looking at the whole case history of what happened to this person. I’ve had people that fell off a swing at seven, you know, now they’re 30 and have all these health problems just happen overnight, you know, they wack their necks as a little kid, nobody got it checked out. They don’t have the vocabulary to explain it to somebody, but when you talk to them they got headaches, vision problems, their heels hurt, you know, they can’t exercise or comprehend. They just all these twos and threes everywhere to be that big life effect of inhibiting them of what they want to be in their life. So we have to really work hard to figure out what got them there. And then see where they’re at, and then start working backwards and restoring the motion to the spine, getting them back reintegrated to proper movement patterns, because if your body’s offloading joints that are hurt, you can’t physically move right? So you’re not gonna be very competent. You can just blatantly say okay, now go exercise a very dangerous prescription for someone you know, I could drive my car across the country on flat tires but it’s not very good for the car by the time I’m done, right? In athletic training, an athlete myself, I call it being fit for duty. Before you take on anything, everything in your body is working right for you to put that much stress into it. And that’s what we really want people to come in as preventively. They kind of want to take on this exercise program. I haven’t moved in a while. I had a couple injuries, can we just see what’s going on? Before we do that, it’s a big decision for people daily nevermind New Year’s resolution to want to commit to their health. But if you don’t have the right assets built up inside of you to support the network, you’re going to fail, and most of them will fail or get hurt by failing within three months. And then they quit for another year because it takes that much longer to heal. It’s a perpetual cycle that never gets broken. And they’re just so disconnected. You know, they’re not even back to their normal. They forgot who they are. Have you ever heard people say they just lost who I am? I don’t feel my body. Right. So not only we want to get them back to where the injury occurred. But we want them to start taking on new things like what do you want to start doing that you couldn’t do? Or what do you want to do more of the life effect is a real problem. They couldn’t care less if they got a headache every day after doing what they want to do. I would like to see them do it all with no headache. Yeah, but that’s what we’re trying to restore for them and the people are open to us bringing them on that journey. It’s just such a beautiful thing to see. And that’s what motivates me to come to work every day. And I just chuckle on the inside because when I meet someone, it’s not really who they are. It’s just how they’re presenting to me. And not until a course of care comes at a start smiling or they walk different and start opening up and sharing and you know, they have new relationships, new jobs, new homes, and it’s very provocative when you really get into there and I guess for lack of a better term hack into somebody’s system and reorganize everything to where the body is supposed to heal because I’m not doing anything. I’m just pushing the button that we use through the analysis. So they can be who they really are or more of it for them and their family.
Katie Wrigley 25:02
I love that to be more of who they are. That is just absolutely beautiful. And I do have, get to have a similar experience with my clients is what you’re mentioning with patients. And it’s so fun to just watch people come into who they are and really be themselves and do so without pain without trauma without all of the things that can come with life experiences. Um, I actually hadn’t planned to ask this question, but I’m curious, have you seen the impact of trauma, especially severe trauma, trauma in the spine? Does the spine tend to reflect trauma?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 25:41
The spine definitely tells a story, both in the bone structure and then also in the neurology of what’s happened for somebody and we tend to store memories for sure. You know, for me, I had main head injuries, right and went on the football field. So I will never blame football for my problems. And it’s it sounds sadistic, but it’s gonna make sense for a lot of people. And I’ve talked to a lot of people about this. And you know, people that I go run into other people for fun is not normal. There’s a, you got a couple of screws loose in there, like hitting people in football never hurt me. Like it actually made me feel better, because it relieves the pressure in my skull. And I could sleep like a baby after a game. So what happened was I had a few falls out of a shopping cart, got clotheslined by a guard rail. And what had happened not only did that top bone in my neck shift with the cranial bone shifted, okay, so that was affecting the airflow. So high school was having chronic sinus infections. And on MRI, it looks like your whole face is like the nasal bones are collapsed, but the skull bones have shifted anterior, or posterior or left to right. choking off those airways. Oh, wow. So you can go in there and get sinus surgery. I’m not against it. I had it done twice. But no one ever said stop eating inflammatory foods. And let’s get your skull corrected to see if the airflow comes back. Right? Or we could get to hear about the kids that are mouth breathers, getting tongue tie releases, and I’m not I’m not against that. Or if it’s advocacy, but you’ll even see it with kids. They get braces. You know, I had braces. Did you have braces?
Katie Wrigley 27:13
Oh my teeth? Yep.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 27:15
Yeah, was it an okay experience or was it painful?
Katie Wrigley 27:18
It was painful. They’re physically moving your teeth. It hurt.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 27:22
Yeah. Well, that some people don’t hurt because their skull is actually aligned properly that allows the teeth to move. Okay. But in my case, and in yours, I don’t know your teeth, did they stay in the right position or did they shift back? They shifted back. Okay, so that’s about 80% of the cases. So 80% of the orthopedic braces cases fail in five years. I was telling you that we’re going to pay 10-20,000$ per procedure that’s gonna fail 80% of the time in five years. Would you do that for you or your kid? No. No. So what I’ve come to learn is that in chiropractic school, they show you the skull, but they don’t show you how it actually moves and works, right? They teach you the spine and then the same thing happens in the dental world, they teach you the teeth, but not the jaw. Yeah. And that’s where chirodontics comes into play that you can’t take trying to make teeth straight and put them on a crooked skull. That’s a recipe for disaster. So you need to shift the skull as much as you can, and resolve all the other symptoms. And then cosmetically people need some Invisalign. Or if they still have an occlusion problem and the jaw is not closing right then they still have some dental stuff that needs to get cleaned up like that.
Katie Wrigley 28:37
So what exactly are chirodontics then how is that working? Like I saw a blip of it on the website. And intentionally like I mentioned, I didn’t read into it, because I wanted to really hear more about it from you first in this interview. But what exactly is this combination of chiropractic and?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 28:56
Yeah, so we’ve been talking about a lot here on the periphery. And you know, we talked about pain and proprioception. And we’ve talked about the skull and the brain and the spine and how that affects your posture. And there’s also inevitable we would call a descending pathway from going from top of the body down causing issues and there’s also ascending coming from the feet up causing hip and pelvic problems. So what happened Bob Walker, the developer of this, there’s a couple things you can do when you have brain problems you have in our field, there’s a specialty called chiropractic neurology, which are amazing practitioners, they do an extra 10,000 hours. My mentor Dr. Michael Hall taught me so so much like the whole physics exam I do and how to relate it to neurology versus like, assessing each part of the body systematically as opposed to what it looks like in a functional person is great, but what they’ll do is try to create new pathways through the brain where it’s not working right but the skull is still twisted as why they have to do that. And then you have osteopaths which I respect them very much. They are very closely related to chiropractic. I’ve worked with osteopathic neurosurgeons in Maine north are like unicorns of the world, some of the best health care practitioners you ever see. But they’re working on them and energies. So this gentleman, Bob Walker, what happened was he was an Olympic level wrestler and a chiropractor, but fractured his skull three times, and had relative chiropractic care, which is not getting rid of his headaches. So he took some time off and looked at the skull. What they learned is that when you breathe, your skull is actually supposed to move, flex, extend and open and close. All the bones, all the cranial bones are supposed to move like that when you have traumas like myself. And if we dug into your case history, I’m sure there were some trauma as well before you ever had symptoms. So in chiropractic neurology, they’ll say like, 90% of people have a right head tilt. That may be true, but in the cranial world, that’s like the third thing to go wrong. So there’s like three other things in your skull that have gone wrong before you show up with a postural distortion like that. Yeah, yes, that’s pretty wild, interesting stuff. And you can help people so much like people who come in here that have had strokes or have the trigeminal neuralgia because you have to remember in your brains 12 cranial nerves, so the skull gets torqued, those nerves get torqued. And on the sides of the skull is your jugular foramen. That’s where all the spinal fluid in your skull has to circulate through. Okay, we touched on this earlier, before we met with your mom what was going on, at the skull shifts, that cerebral spinal fluid doesn’t circulate and it gets dirty. And when it gets dirty, if you were to put them in a functional MRI, like stand up MRI, same thing is what we see when people in cushions, you build on top proteins and start expressing like you’re having a nerve genetic disorder, even though you’re not, it’s just a fluid in your head isn’t circulating, but some people get so bad, this thing we call cancers, your body’s intelligent in response to wall off toxins and put it into the pouch to keep it away from your brain to won’t kill you, you know, eventually kill you won’t kill you acutely. So we can get everything flowing in the skull again, and the spine coupling, right, you have a much better expression of health both from the head down and from the feet up is what we’re trying to do for that. So we’re kind of bringing in the chiropractic world in the dental world working as a collaborative and we work with some soft tissue workers for intra oral fixations that people have, or some people have like big muscle or distortions of using big muscles to hold up, which they shouldn’t, we should be using smaller intrinsic muscles to hold our posture. And then also get into the functional movement stuff as like. And always make sure your exercises are progressing. You know, I go to train at a powerlifting gym. I love it. I’ve watched people warm up, I’m like the silent observer. And they’ve had an injury and they’ll keep doing the same warm up for 10 years. And I’m like where does that get harder for you? It has to keep progressing because what we’ll see is once the spine just started people show up with shoulder and hip problems. So they can’t move their shoulder as a condition both frozen shoulder or the muscles are shortened on the anterior bar they couldn’t even sit in good posture if they want and because the front of the lobe is weak and inhibits flexion so puts you in a fetal position that it’s wanting to put you on the ground versus standing up doing full extension. Yeah. So when we start breaking up the brain all sudden new injuries occur. This is why the unhealthy is not how healthy do you want to be right? Because are you willing to accept that there’s pieces to the puzzle here and at the end there’s a huge gift but you have to be willing to embrace to suck a little bit but work through it.
Katie Wrigley 33:40
Yeah, embracing the suck is that I like how you say that that is an integral part of getting out of pain is embracing the suck as it comes along. And knowing it’s not going to suck that much for very long. It’s continued.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 33:53
I say this all with a smile, you know, as an Irishman, but I tried to make the care fun because it’s if we had a dissertation, as we’re just on the tip of it here, it’s very serious. And you’d be very depressed hearing all that. Yeah. But people get great results from it. And they’re very appreciative at the end that you were able to bring them through that journey. And they learned a lot about themselves. I don’t think that if I was just to be Jesus of the spine and press on it once and heal you that you would actually learn anything and respect the gift that you got, you know, so you have to undo everything that put it in there and neurologically called dysplastic change. And people often get really upset with me, you know, I pre frame like, you may feel worse before they feel better. And they come in with low back pain and I adjust their neck and then they come in and be like all these things happen. What in, my back feels better, but why do I feel worse? Because there’s 10 other things that have gotten haywire as opposed to just putting stick them on your back in calming that down. We’ve got to look at the whole global picture of what is going on for you. And then they respect you for it. And some people, they don’t want to do that. And that’s okay too, you know, just eventually have to learn because it becomes a co have a codependent relationship because they keep showing up with the same problem. Yeah. And you know, how many weeks out of the year do you want your back to go out, you know, three or four times or do you want to resolve this and then not have to look back and worry about it.
Katie Wrigley 35:23
Yeah, I’m big on resolution for myself, like bad back days, that’s going to impact the entire day, just even the ability to lift up your feet to walk gets tough. If you’ve tweaked your back bad enough, and I’ve been there,
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 35:36
Think about what you’re missing out on, whether it be work or play with your kids and going to sports games, or just picking up your grandkids. And a little bit of commitment upfront. There’s not a lot to ask for to take away that stressor like the Grim Reaper, like when is it? Because you know, it’s gonna happen? It’s just you don’t know. Right? So we can reduce that risk down and free your mind up. What does that worth to you?
Katie Wrigley 36:00
Oh, I don’t even know that anybody could put a $1 amount on it, I certainly can. That’s that’s invaluable to me to be able to, to not have to stress. And that’s where I am now. But it took me a while to get there. But the fear around the pain spike coming back and the stress about being under a chronic condition using air quotes, those two factors, and I’ve seen it in other people, too, those tend to be some of the biggest factors in someone’s experience of pain is how much they’re fearing it and how much it’s stressing them out.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 36:31
Correct. Yeah. And it also affects your nervous system in chronic pain. It’s just you can’t relax. And, you know, early on in my career, I used this amazing analysis, we do video fluoroscopy to see the motion of the spine, it really gets into like the 90th percentile, what’s wrong, and I would see the spine get corrected. But their posture didn’t shift. And I was like what is going on. And that’s when I started realizing that there’s more to the cranial bones that need it. And then I’ll have some people to hear, I’ll adjust their cranial bones, but their head totally shifts as I’m talking to them. They can’t hold it. Oh, wow. Just like when we have bone fractures, some people get a rod or a plate on there. There’s a device called an output device, and slate wire functional by Dr. Nordstrom. And it works as an internal fixator to help them hold the cranial correction and keep changing spine and keeping because what we don’t want that didn’t realize is that we swallow 2500 times a day. So if you are not in good position, you will undo all the work. So some of my worst people, they’re amazing people but they can’t go to work because they, or vacation because after three days, they go out and then they can’t move. And so they’ve designed the life to have all these safe things, I just want to go on vacation and you get them properly fitted as they are needed for the Alpha device along with the chirodontic care and traditional chiropractic and they’re like different and different person. And the nice thing about this, this also applies to young kids. So some kids that you know had some cranial birth problems or tongue tie, possibly, this is a great next step for them, their parents to consider. I’m not telling you, it’s for you, you might just need to go to the braces, when parents should be educated to understand both because what happens with braces, they’re gonna lock you into a pattern. And that’s why I have a lot of adolescents that come here and man do they get some neck pain sometimes because their skulls are stuck and they can’t move. And the neck is what’s going to break the neck and the lumbar spine or the weak links to the skull and the torso. Right, they’re kind of hanging out on their own. So that’s what people come in with. But sometimes we have to dig a little further and see what’s going on for them.
Katie Wrigley 38:44
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And just so the listeners know he was holding this little wire device that looks similar to a retainer that would imagine it looks like it goes on the either the lower upper teeth I’m not really sure.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 38:56
It looks exactly like a retainer but it functions a little differently. It’s totally adjustable. So each month or every few weeks you’ll get an adjustable to match the shifts that need to take place either in the palate in the forefront of the body or the mid skull shifts that need to take place it’s pretty amazing design it’s cost effective, minimally invasive, and kids do very well with it as well as adults.
Katie Wrigley 39:24
Hey, that’s important. Absolutely that’s that’s just incredible how much is coming together in the world of medicine now especially when we get out of the what I feel personally is very limiting within traditional medical of the you know you have a symptom take a pill like To me that’s very limiting your your band aiding it like you said, you know, it’s like putting tape on the garden hose. It’s going to rupture at some point it’s going to blow so you may as well figure out how to get a new hose or how to cement that permanently or why the hoses working blew leaking in the first place so that you get it working properly without it blowing later down the line.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 40:00
To be honest, if you would have told me about this little health device 10 years ago, I would tell them, you’re crazy. But even to my defense, when I went to chiropractic school, I had a worldview of a certain type of chiropractic. And, you know, they would adjust everything in your body, and I would go back each week, and still the same symptoms of acute but it’ll go away. And I’m like, I just figured that’s how it is. And then when I went to chiropractic school, my intern was terrible, and didn’t give me care for two months. And I was like, really sick, like, I couldn’t pick my head up at the end of the day. I felt nauseous from all the pain that was going on. And that’s what we’ll see a lot of people have chronic pain, they’re bloated, or they feel bloated, because all the neurotransmitters or, you know, the cortisol down there is really irritating them. And luckily, someone showed me an analysis that I use now. And now I get care every one to four to six weeks. And I have a curve, I had a curve in my neck, you know, I could touch my hair to my shoulder. But I was still getting these ice pick headaches in the back. So I kind of knew that something else was going on. And that’s where the cranial work came in and made sense. And I’m thankful that I got this device for myself because like I exercise, I drink good water. I had good nerve flow. But there’s still something else as well. How healthy do you want to be? Right. And the changes that this thing occurred, like when I first put this in my mouth, like I have a huge pain tolerance from playing sports and asthma attacks. Like nothing fazes me, I’m totally desensitized. Like, I’ve been near death many times, and I say, jokingly, but it’s just something that you get used to it. And as a medic, it’s just, yeah, it happened in time, there’s 1000 pounds of weight on your chest and your 100 degree of million degrees in your body. Nothing’s worse. I put this thing and I couldn’t talk or swallow for like an hour. Wow. What happened was because my skull shifted so much, the oral tissue was so tight. I couldn’t do that. And once I got a little bit of inter oral work, I could breathe and function better. So it just goes to show you even though you might have some of the parts of health, you know, there’s always gonna be a little something more for it. Sometimes there’s not those are my best days, like every now and then the wellness patient walks in, they get a curve in their neck, their blood pressures. Great. See you back in a year. Nice. You know, but for the other people out there, this solves a lot of problems having this comprehensive analysis. And kind of keeps you from the yo-yoing to get started having some consistent health, which is always going to be motivation anytime.
Katie Wrigley 42:27
Absolutely, you know, and you’re kind of touching on something that I’ve seen as a pattern with myself and other people coming out of pain is when we have a good day, we go do a lot. And then what usually happens is we’ve overloaded and we’re doing a lot. Yeah, you’re grinning, you’re doing a lot of muscles that aren’t used to it on a structure that may or may not be in alignment, because you’ve been so sedentary. And then you wind up spiking the hell out of your pain. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what I call earned pain, meaning you’ve done something with your body to make your muscles sore like and that’s a distinction I made. As I was coming out of pain, like, oh, I earned this. This is an injury, this is good. This is good. And it helped me shift. But next thing you know, you’re beating yourself up and I see posts about this all the time like, oh, you know, little miss chronic pain decided to go do something today, because she hurt now she’s in bed. It’s like, well, why are you beating yourself up for that? Like you did it you went out there. But that tends to be the cycle? Have you seen that?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 43:29
Enough education on the next step. You know, it’s sometimes putting things into perspective, just because you should doesn’t mean you should. Probably learned as an athletic trainer, just because I could get your ankle to heal faster, doesn’t mean you should go back out there yet. And some people come in here that I could buy some time to go into a powerlifting meet to hit a PR because they can handle it. And other people would be like, Hey, that’s a really bad idea that we need to shut this down and rebuild some patterns and pathways for you. Because you’re exactly right. And I really want people to understand this, the brain doesn’t know the difference. It doesn’t know the difference. Either one. I often joke with people, once they’re healed, I don’t want them to come back with new problems. I actually encourage it. But I’ve had a few brave people, you know, a few visits in the Gulf out to the ninja Park and don’t stick the landing or, you know, I had a fireman in here that you know, it’s hard to tell someone that runs into buildings to slow down. Right, right. So we get a chronic condition healed in a short period of time, and then they go right back at it. And then they wind up in that cycle again. And it’s you’re fighting the brain. Tell them this. Now we got into that long, slow mediated response. And now I have to consistently see a little more until we can get the reflex back to the spinal cord to the joint where everybody’s happy because then it’s like, doesn’t suck so much life out of you.
Katie Wrigley 44:55
Yeah, yeah. And that takes patience and time and awareness to learn how to pace yourself wherever your body is at that point in time. And that’s just something I’ve started to tell clients is like, look, as you start to move more, chances are you’re going to spike your pain, because you’re going to do too much. And I want you to celebrate that when you do it. Because now you know what was too much. So then you’ll do a little less next time and you won’t spike. But just even starting to understand that and understanding even, at least in my experience, I’ve heard it with others, too. The last thing that changed of, of my mood went up, my energy went up, my moods stabilized, I had much more joy and everything. But the last thing that I really noticed changed was the actual physical pain state. And there’s a few reasons for that. One of those is learning a different way of changing the signals from the brain, using it and seeing that as a different interpretation. Like, I remember one day in particular, where I thought I had been fooling myself that I had made any progress, and then sat there and recounted everything I had done to make my pain spike that day. And I’m like, well, I just did 10 times the amount of things that I could have done three months ago, like this was earned pain, you are feeling better just put on your big girl panties and quit your pity party and get on with life again. But I really struggled at that moment. And I share that because I’m not alone in that, literally every person I’ve ever worked with in pain, has had that moment and then starting to go, Hey, you’re right. I am doing more and I am feeling better. This is working. But until you see it, getting the buy in is can be incredibly tough not just from yourself, but like other people you’re trying to work with.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 46:34
Well, I think that you know, we talked about different parts of the brand new merch that goes towards negative emotion. So sometimes people come in here with a list of 10 things that’s wrong. Seven of them can be better within nine visits, yet they have a day where they overdo it and they are in a tailspin like us and they’ll start asking questions like, well, what about this other thing I’m like, look at all the things you have to be grateful for. So just the fact of being able to try to overdo it is a win on its own. And now we just have to find a way that you can overcome, try to overdo it, but not irritate what’s going on. Right? It’s just another place, we hit a plateau. Now we’ve got to find a different way up the mountain for you. It’s not oh my god, here it comes again. But you know, the newest connections in the brain have the weakest neural links, right. So they’ve got a bundle of nerves that are wired together to fire. And as soon as they feel that sensation that’s going to light up their brain. And that’s what we’re trying to do: adjustments and good consistent exercises to rebuild those new patterns. So eventually you forget. But then the next part that you’re talking about is when we try to take on something new to learn it, we forget how hard it was to learn breaking the boss pattern. Yeah. And then it gets mad that we’re not learning anything so fast. And, you know, that’s the fear of the unknown and unknown. And then we get immersed with playing with the golden string and we’re fearful of also being fascinated with. And that is the, I think part of our human existence is that little, little step of the pool, whether you put your toe in or deep end of fear to fascination.
Katie Wrigley 48:14
Yeah, the same thing. Absolutely, it is, it’s really its perspective, you know, and learning to be able to be a witness to what’s happening in your body can be really hard because you’re you’re going to get pulled in your nervous system is going to respond, your fear is gonna go up, your stress is going to go up, being able to teach yourself how to breathe through that, you know, and that’s one of the things that you said on your site. And an introduction that I love is that you’re not just helping people, but you’re teaching them how to do this for themselves. And that’s something important that I teach my clients too, like, you’re not going to need me for life, you’re going to need me for this season. And I’m going to teach you how to keep doing this for yourself so you can continue to help yourself long term like you don’t need to keep paying someone for this, you can figure this out. And I’m going to show you and I love that that’s what you bring into your practice too is that you’re teaching them how to be healthy, how to continue to strive for higher levels of health and what they can do to get there. And that’s just awesome.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 49:14
But the last thing we want is a codependent relationship and you know, on the surface, and to my colleagues, it looks detrimental to my business. But it’s really not because I can get you a good result in a short period of time. And then you’re way more productive than you are in my office three times a week for 50 visits if I could do that 18 visits in the year. And now I just have to find two new ones once or twice a month or every couple of months depending on how your body needs it or what new stress you put on it. Everybody’s happy and then you’re going to tell your friends about that. Ya know? And there’s just so many little things that you could help people with like the other day at the gym somebody was complaining that they have a hard time staying hydrated. You remember how much water you drink? Sometimes you’ll feel thirsty.
Katie Wrigley 49:58
Umm, not, I am actually on top of water. But yeah, yeah, I do notice sometimes I’m less like, why am I still thirsty?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 50:05
Yeah, and they’re going people go as far as to go get IV therapy and just keep putting all the electrolytes into the water. But what they don’t realize is that the water source is contaminated. So just like we talked about the fluid in the brain, you know, the fluid in the body itself can be contaminated, of having too much toxicity, or what we call acids, or total dissolved solids. So even though you’re trying to be healthy and drink good water, it’s still sucking the minerals out of them to make it an alkaline number for your body to absorb it, you know. And if they were to just change the type of structured water that they drink, they wouldn’t feel so dehydrated all the time.
Katie Wrigley 50:38
So what kind of water should people be drinking then like, is there a certain system they should be looking for is this something like that, you can get
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 50:46
There is a couple things you want to look for, you want something that has a good pH potential hydrogen of like, eight points or higher, you want some that has a very low total dissolved solid, which you’d have to get the water tested to see that but you know, the tap water here in North Carolina is about a 30. But out in California, it’s 500. There’s a lot of times where the water starts versus the change of the system that you’re using. Right? Now, a lot of people are, everyone tries, because I asked what kind of water people drink, I don’t care how much you drink, I want to know what type of water as well. And you know, they have a little Brita filter or the carbon block filter on their fridge. And there’s not enough pressure over time to take out all the toxins in the water, because there’s not enough pressure. So you want something that’s connected to the mainline to your house with like a 10 step filtration system. So all that pressure keeps each filter taking it all out. Or sometimes there’s certain systems that they’ll call reverse osmosis. So take out everything, which is great. But then you got to remineralize the water and someone there the other day, that cancer survivor that has an Ouroboros system I’m like well what do you put the minerals back in there? They’re like no. I’m like you’re gonna have a health problem down the road, if you don’t put the minerals back in, because it’s going to suck it out of your own body. We want to make sure you’ve got the appropriate minerals being put back into the water after a filtration. Usually bicarbonate minerals are the best at the way nature intended. And you can think of like, there’s like a waterfall, you know, the waters, very turbulent, right? It’s going over rocks, and it’s twisting and turning. So it’s catching oxygen and it’s getting mineralized from the rock. So you want something that’s gonna actually add more oxygen to your body too. If we learned anything in the last couple of years about health and hypoxia or lack of oxygen or cell anaerobes live in your body. So the more oxygenated you are, the more energy you have, the more ability you have to fight off pathogens and your body.
Katie Wrigley 52:41
That’s important. Very important.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 52:43
It’s basically the fuel that you’re putting in there, you know, it’s almost what you don’t put in, that doesn’t hurt you. So that you can be trying to make a healthy choice by drinking water. But if it’s the wrong type, you can hurt yourself at the same time, and you hurt your capacity to do more work or be as healthy as you want to be down the road.
Katie Wrigley 53:01
Yeah, and I’m so lucky here. So I had my water tested. When I first moved in, I had a bunch of water problems moving into this house. And as we were resolving, I’m like, oh, that just makes sense. And so my water is actually really healthy. It has a lot of different minerals in it, but it has all sorts of big particulates in it. So I have a big carbon filter that comes right out of my well. And then I have another filter on my fridge as well too. And I change that big carbon filter every six months. And so the water actually tastes really good. But it actually has a lot of the minerals and stuff that you want in water just just naturally. So I’m very lucky in that regard. That has not been the case in every place where I lived. Like, think it was yeah, Colorado, the water out there wasn’t where I lived, it wasn’t the best idea to drink unfiltered. There was a lot of stuff that was coming in there. One of the things I watch for is our manganese, there’s a lot of manganese up here. And that’s a soft form of iron and I have hemochromatosis. So I really want to make sure I’m getting that out of the well before it’s coming in. So I could do more. I actually plan to do a bigger filtration system that will clean it even more. But I was glad that that was all I needed for now.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 54:18
So your scenario, you got all the right things going for you, you got the huge carbon filter on the house, you’re trying to filter the drinking water, you probably could upgrade the under the sink drinking water system, or even what some people do is put like a vortex pipe on their showerheads and things like that. So the gray water of the house is actually not as toxic either for your clothes and stuff like that. But you touched on this briefly and we’re probably running short on time, this would be another dissertation but when people have iron problems, there’s typically no shortage of iron in the body. It’s just not in the blood and caught in the tissue and that creates a ton of pain that people are misdiagnosed with the fibromyalgie all day long. Um, and that’s what got me interested in your talk because this came up with a mutual friend of ours. Metabolically, you know, there are things that we need to look at and understand better, but looking at the blood work differently, and how that structure looks because you can get the wrong type of care that could cause you to lose an organ.
Katie Wrigley 55:21
Oh, yeah, yeah. And I get my iron checked every three months. So it’s been under control. And what’s interesting is my never actually goes into the tissue, my saturation goes high, but it never actually goes into my ferritin. It’s very odd, like and I’ve, doctors have marveled under like, wow, nor this isn’t normally how hemochromatosis presents, like, whatever it means less harm, and they’ve done the test on my liver. And there’s very little fibrosis there. And they’ve said that it’s not going to actually it should not impact my lifeline, my lifespan at this point. So yay, actually, with the amount of use to abuse my body, the drug use I used to do was probably much more likely to have damaged me than the iron. But that is something that I keep an eye on in the diet. I’m trying now, one of the results is supposed to be a better liver function. So you’re actually processing out iron and other things much more effectively, by utilizing this diet. So we’ll see. I haven’t had lab work done yet to find out. There’s one last thing that I want to make sure that we’re touching on and that’s something called a Morton’s toe. So what is a Morton’s toe? And how does that play into posture and someone’s experience of pain because this was new to me, and I have a Morton’s toe on my right foot.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 56:44
You’d be surprised how many people that have chronic low back pain have a more than still there’s a difference of a neuroma, which is like nerve pain on the bottom. And then the Morton’s toe, basically, the second toe is longer than the first toe. Yeah. So when our foot hits the ground, and it goes through heel straight, we’re supposed to come down and push off the big toe. But in the Morton’s toe, it pushes off the second toe, and it causes your pelvis and hips to rotate all day long, which, like I said earlier, back to start the job. The SI joints in the posterior part of the ankle, the biggest propria receptor. So all day long, you’re getting an ascending problem from the floor into your pelvis, nevermind any structure misalignments and they kind of meet in the middle. And a lot of people have chronic low back pain, because the Morton’s toe isn’t giving the right support to the foot. And I could adjust your pelvis tone blue in the face but if I don’t get the information to floor to the foot properly, they’ll always have that misalignment going on in there.
Katie Wrigley 57:38
So how do you how do you fix that misalignment then, because that was absolutely the case with
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 57:44
You’re gonna laugh . I literally go to the leather shop in town and make a little pad and put it on their foot and tape it. Really? Yeah. And some people have other problems, whether it be in the heel or the mid foot that may need an off the shelf orthotic with a pad built into it, you know, but nothing too serious. It’s usually a very inexpensive fix for most people. Some people just need a little bit of a different type of shoe to pieces based on their foot anatomy.
Katie Wrigley 58:14
So with the Morton’s toe, where would you put the extra pad? I’m not sure I’m following
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 58:18
The ball of the big toe. Okay. Yeah, and I like it because I tape it this way women want to wear sandals, it doesn’t look dorky. If you had like something over the top, you know, it’s very inconspicuous. Because, you know, if I say, oh, look at these orthotics. We’re like, what about sandals season? It’s a wrap, right? But it’s like, oh, if you just if you’re a candidate for it, if you just are able to just put the pad on and don’t need anything else in your foot. And you’re good to go. And everybody’s happy.
Katie Wrigley 58:45
Yeah, I’m totally going to try that. Why not? That’s an easy fix. And I mean, I’ve tried other things. I’m like, hey, and it wound up working. So I’ll give that a shot and see, I mean, I have to say that my back actually hasn’t been hurting me at all. So I’d like to keep it that way. So I’m going to
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 59:03
Do some postural shifts, you may need to get a you know, get your spine checked before and after, as you go through that journey. And I like it too, because you could work around the house, you got your socks on your slippers, it’s always on. And it just always gives me the support that you need.
Katie Wrigley 59:16
Yeah. And while I’m away from sandals season, it’s February 13th in Maine, so I’ve got a good three, four months before the toes are going to be seen by anybody else. So I’m clear on that.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 59:27
We have a little blog about it on our webpage, too. If people are interested in it, that’ll help give them some guidance of what we’re actually talking about.
Katie Wrigley 59:33
Yeah, I’ll make sure we link to that. So where can people find you, Chris? And what can you do with people virtually versus what can you do in person for anybody that’s in or near the Asheville, North Carolina area?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 59:45
Yeah, regardless of anything. We want to be a resource for people to give them good information to make educated decisions for their health. Whether it’s my solution today, tomorrow, or at least they know, someone told them the truth. We always do a complimentary consultation. People can either call the office you know, reach us directly at 828-820-2121, they can call or text or the best way is probably through the website. Just so that they get some texture to where they may fit into what we do. And we can set up a consultation for them. And you’d be surprised because where I practice in Asheville, North Carolina, it’s very tourist friendly. So people actually come from out of state for care, they’ll stay here for a week, a month at a time. And then we can continue care as they come back to town or give them a practitioner, then they can call finish up what we where we left off for them.
Katie Wrigley 1:00:34
Nice. That is awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I’ll make sure that the phone number and the website are linked in the show notes.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 1:00:41
Yes, advanced-alignment.com.
Katie Wrigley 1:00:43
Thank you. And is there any last note that you’d like to leave listeners with today, especially someone who may be experiencing pain right now?
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 1:00:52
Yeah, I’m going to use what I started and it’s I’m staring right out at this whole talk is that, you know, chronic does not have to be permanent. And I want people to realize this, that fortune favors the brave. And that’s why I do what I do. Because that’s what gets me to where I am. And I know that they can get there forever. So I’m here for you.
Katie Wrigley 1:01:16
Nice. I love that. Fortune favors the brave, and people who struggle with chronic pain are some of the bravest, strongest people I’ve ever met. So I want you to really hear what he’s saying there.
Dr. Christopher Boyhan 1:01:27
Oh, yeah. I mean, people come in with a hangnail and I got someone who has overcome, like, life changing events. And you know, they’re just like, trudging through here and then with their inner fight is what I admire about them.
Katie Wrigley 1:01:42
Yeah, Yeah, same. Same. Thank you so much for joining me. Very welcome. Thank you Dr. Boyhan and it’s been awesome to talk to you. And thank you, my cherished listener, for joining me as well. I hope you’re gonna come back again next week when we are going to be talking to one of the coolest people I have ever met. Her name is Lindsey Soprano. And she has had an incredible journey with pain herself, including a diagnosis of complex regional pain syndrome. That is how we got connected. She saw I used to be diagnosed with that myself. And we’re going to have a conversation about what her journey has looked like and what she has found to help her. So join me again next week to hear that and in the meantime, please never forget that chronic does not have to mean permanent.
