Why Chiropractic Care Is So Important

The episode opens with Christine’s introduction. The transcript below picks up as the conversation begins.

Christine: Dr. Matt, welcome to the show. I’m happy to have you here.

Dr. Matt: Thank you so much for having me.

Christine: Well, you and I go back to, I think, 2020. And I found you because I had actually been injured by three chiropractors, and I was really nervous to go to one. Maybe I shouldn’t say injured by. Maybe I should say I got injured, and we won’t put any fault there. But I was just a little skittish about chiropractors, but I also suffer from headaches and jaw tension, and chiropractic generally has helped me. And I heard about you, and I heard about your no crack method. And we went in and we met, and you started talking about nervous system and just the way you adjust, and I was like, “Oh, this is so my jam.” And you helped me all the way through my pregnancy, and now my daughter goes to your office as well. And so you’ve just been a big support in our life. So first I just wanted to thank you and acknowledge you for that.

Dr. Matt: Thank you.

Christine: And I wanna dive in, ’cause I know you, but one of the reasons I have had you on the show is because I feel like… I mean, we have a lot of coaches, we have a lot of healers, we have a lot of people that really wanna be in integrity and do good work, and they think if they get sick or if they get injured or their life isn’t perfect and they’re a coach, that they’re out of integrity, or their imposter syndrome comes up, or whatever it may be. And there’s always this expectation that in order to be a doctor, healer, coach, you kind of have to have everything in order. And I know you have a pretty profound story of what got you where you are today, including, for lack of a better term, your own health crisis. So could you start a little bit with sharing your journey?

Dr. Matt: Sure, yeah. You know, I think going back to chiropractic school, just even mentioning probably the stress of that. And I think a lot of health practitioners, I mean people in general, but health practitioners could really relate to this, ’cause the irony of going through becoming a health professional can be some of the most daunting and intense tasks that we’re faced with. So I think just the intensity of chiropractic school. And I did an accelerated program because I get bored easy, so I did an accelerated program, and I went through thousands of hours of training over the course of three years. And then that, with the combination of, I’d say, right after that, my first job out of school was a job working 75-hour workweeks as a chiropractor. And I was really inspired by the work that the clinic was doing, and they were incredible chiropractors, but what I overlooked as a 27-year-old at the time was how taxing that would be on my health. And I thought, “Oh, I can shoulder it. I can do this.” And I think while they were digging their graves, so to speak, working those long hours, I was right there with them. I actually got diagnosed with Graves’ disease after three months. I had all these signs coming up that were not normal, and the symptoms got very loud for me before I took action. My hair was falling out. I got really fatigued. I had a hard time focusing at all. I remember watching the clock, being ready to go home from work, and that’s not like me at all. I wasn’t sleeping through the night. So there were a lot of little things that showed up for me, and I got concerned. I went to a functional medicine doctor that was there in town where I was living at the time, and I found I had Graves’ disease. And I remember thinking, you used some words here, imposter. I felt like an imposter. How am I this health professional with this diagnosis? And I felt like I had to be perfect, and it was a huge shot to my identity, honestly, as a new chiropractor, new health professional. And I actually quit my job, and I moved to the desert for about eight months to completely rebuild my life, really based around foundational principles. I had very, very little money. I had probably $200 in my bank account, and I had $270,000 worth of student loans. And I didn’t have many resources at all. So I was pretty much forced to get back to the foundational health habits, and I slowly, as I say, stepped my way out of the grave, from the Graves’ disease to remission, and I didn’t realize that was possible. But that took me about a year or a year and a half to get back to a remission status, and it was little by little that my life kind of came back to life. And I was able to build a business like you’ve seen in Austin that works for me, and it’s more in alignment with prioritizing health and relationships as well, so that I didn’t have to sacrifice my friends or my family or my health in the process while doing this all.

Christine: What do you think was the… I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t just one thing, but for anyone that’s going through any kind of diagnosis or anything like that, what do you think were the things, especially in terms of your thought, that helped you most?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. You know, I actually outlined this. I was inspired to write a guide for people. So earlier this year, I wrote a foundational health guide. It’s actually on my website, and those foundational pillars we use clinically now to help people balance their body, really their nervous system, at home. And those four things, sleep is number one, I think, in that sequence for sure, and stress management. There’s a lot to say about all these. I’m just gonna make it really simple though. Movement and toxins were all of them. To give a little bit on each, sleeping at least seven hours a night, non-negotiable, and there’s a concept called sleep debt. So when we push through it and don’t get enough sleep, we actually accumulate this almost debt. We get a negative balance, and it can take a while to get out of debt, so to speak. And then I think, using myself as an example with stress, we’re really good at being stressed and living in stressful conditions, so I think, again, we tend to normalize that. It’s fine until it’s not. Movement, a lot of us think, “I went to the gym today. I got my movement in,” but we’re meant to move continuously throughout the day, and getting enough steps, I think, is really even more important than being in the gym. And then toxins. I think a lot of people who have been on your show have heard your podcast before. You talk a lot about lifestyle factors, and you think about the household products that we use, or you and I have talked about in Austin things like mold or environmental toxins, environmental factors, and our food. Our food is probably the number one, I’d say, what we put in our bodies.

Christine: So can you go over those four again? Just say the four.

Dr. Matt: Sure. Sleep, stress, movement, and toxins.

Christine: Yeah, simple, right?

Dr. Matt: And health should be simple. I think we’re sold on this idea of, I wrote about this recently in the blog, supplementing. We love the new things or the novel things with health. And I like supplements. I think supplements are great, but not as a foundational practice. I think we supplement with pennies while we’re losing dollars. And I think we lose dollars, we’re getting robbed of our health, it’s like people stealing money from us based on these foundational health principles, the four that I just mentioned, but then we try to buy our health back with these little things, manage our symptoms or work with supplements, and we get pennies back while we’re being robbed of dollars.

Christine: Right, right. What do you see for people that think they’re healthy and then kind of get, like, an autoimmune diagnosis, or any kind of diagnosis? Out of those four, what do you think is the culprit?

Dr. Matt: Oof, that’s tough. I guess it’d be stress. Yeah, stress, I think, is number one. They call stress the silent killer, right? And the concept of this, I think I’ve talked to you about this, the illusion of health. We think we’re healthy because we look healthy on the outside, and this was me at 27 years old. I looked really fit, but underneath the surface, I had no pulse on the function of my body underneath the surface. And I think stress tends to be the biggest driving force behind it. But then it’s so tied to something like sleep that I’d put sleep as a really close number two to that, because it starts to affect our sleep quality and quantity.

Christine: Yeah. What I’d love is if we could talk a little bit about chiropractic, because I kind of skipped over that ’cause I know so much about it. But a lot of people might be like, “Chiropractors are quacks, and they’re not real doctors,” or, “It doesn’t do anything,” or, “I’m scared to get adjusted.” Can you talk a little bit about chiropractic medicine, the history of it, even going back to how it was kind of taken out of medical school back in the day?

Dr. Matt: Sure. Can we go down that rabbit hole?

Christine: Let’s do it. I would love that, yeah.

Dr. Matt: So I think a really good place to start, you’ve said a couple things here that are really good. You used the word quacks, and I’m really happy that you did. There was a court case that people should look up at home. It’s Wilk, W-I-L-K, versus the AMA, the American Medical Association. And this court case, it was a lawsuit. It went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and I believe it was settled in 1980, but the suit started years prior to that. And in this court case, the AMA was found guilty of conspiracy to disband the entire profession of chiropractic. And one of the tactics they used was even language like this, like calling chiropractors quacks, and they’d falsify information. And this is well-documented, so you can look this up. This is out there. And falsifying information that what they were doing was not effective, and they were teaching it at the source, in medical school. So they were saying to new doctors coming out of school, “We’re not to refer anyone to chiropractors, and we’re not to work with them, and they’re ineffective, what they’re doing, and they’re actually quacks.” And they put it in libraries too. So when you spread the word, you get it out there, then it’s this game of telephone for years that has happened, and that’s largely what has happened. And you can guess why. If you see any profession as a threat to your own, or, “Hey, they might be helping people too much and competing with us, let’s get rid of them,” and that was the case. And chiropractic has been around since 1895, formally, when it was discovered, and the development of it really happened in the 1920s. There’s a family called the Palmer family. People might have heard of them, or there’s a school called Palmer Chiropractic. D.D. Palmer is the founder, and then B.J. Palmer, his son, was the developer largely of it. And through time, it’s become more and more refined, but the original core basic principles are really what I still use today in my clinic: that we look at the health of the spine and its relationship to what’s underneath it, the brain and the spinal cord, which is the central nervous system. And this system is the system that controls everything in our body. Every cell, tissue, and organ in the body is controlled through this nervous system. And when we are out of balance in our nervous system, through largely the lifestyle habits that I just mentioned, right? Lack of sleep, or high stress, or not enough movement, or toxins in our body, it alters the function of our nervous system, and then symptoms can show up. Pain is one of those first symptoms we might experience. And I hate that chiropractic has become known as a pain profession, and a lot of it is geared toward managing symptoms like pain rather than restoring health through an optimally functioning nervous system. That’s what chiropractic was founded on. People used to go to their chiropractors when they had a cold or when they had a flu, because they knew the influence of an optimal nervous system on the immune system. And if our immune system is working better, then we have a better chance to fight something like that.

Christine: Well, I even like, if I’m sick or Athena’s sick, we come in, and I love that. I mean, I remember calling one time and saying, “Athena’s really sick. I’m sick. You know what? We don’t wanna come in.” And you’re like, “No, come in. That’s what we do.” We’re not scared of this whole thing, and the chiropractor really looks more at terrain theory than germ theory necessarily, and we don’t have to go into that conversation. But to me, it seems like over the past hundreds of years, so much of our own healing power has been taken from us. Sounds dramatic, but it’s almost like we’ve been programmed a certain way and don’t have the knowledge that we need about how our body really works and how we can really heal. So you mentioned nervous system, which I feel like is a buzzword. I just got a training in neurosomatic intelligence this year, and so I’m geeking out on nervous system. But I’d love for you to explain a little bit more, ’cause, right, the nervous system is the brain and the spine. It’s like a big part of the nervous system. How chiropractic is not just about, “Oh, I have a sore neck, so I just need to get cracked.”

Dr. Matt: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. That’s a really good question, too. I think it’s important to differentiate here. There’s chiropractors that focus on different things, and we have a branding problem in the profession. So I just really wanna say that, because I’m a chiropractor rooted in the foundational principles of chiropractic, and my focus is to restore health through an optimal nervous system. But if you go down the street that I practice on, there’s many other chiropractors, right? You probably pass 50 chiropractors, no joke, Christine, on your way to my office. And of those 50, there might be 5 of them, I hate to say that, or even less, that focus, at least in Texas, on that. Others are truly helping people, but they’re helping people in different ways, and their focus is in, I’d say, a much more shallow pool. But pain is very real, and I don’t wanna minimize pain and people in pain. Pain sucks, right? It robs us of our vitality. But there’s so much more to health than just pain. And our nervous system, maybe a way to visualize this is if you have five different light bulbs that are out in your home. You can change each individual light bulb, and if those light bulbs keep going out, you can keep changing those light bulbs. Or you might go to the circuit breaker and flip one switch that controls all of those light bulbs. And it seems almost magical to people when they see these things change in their body, because they’re thinking there’s no way that this controls this. And you think of a kid, right? You show a kid that you flip the switch and boom, the power goes on. It’s like, whoa, that was a cool magic trick. That was fascinating. But until we see it, sometimes we don’t really believe it. And I’m the biggest skeptic, and I would say the same thing. I wouldn’t believe half of the crap that I’ve seen as a practitioner if I wouldn’t have experienced it, and if I didn’t get a chance to see these true miracles happening in our office every single week, and now I’ve come to expect it. And our approach, with all that being said, as a nervous system-focused chiropractor, we start with measuring the health and the function of the nervous system. So we use something called INSiGHT scans, and many people are probably familiar with heart rate variability. And I don’t wanna nerd out on this too much. Stop me if you wanna go down anything.

Christine: No, this is good.

Dr. Matt: We look at heart rate variability, something called paraspinal thermography, which is a really sensitive thermometer looking at skin temperature along the spine. Johns Hopkins Neurosurgery in 1980 is saying this is the best measurement of nervous system dysfunction. That’s neurosurgery saying that. So we use that as an indicator, or a measure, of health. And then we also look at static EMG, which is looking at energy expenditure. It’s the neuromuscular signal going to the postural muscles, and posture takes up about 80% of our brain’s resources. So it’s an efficiency measure. If we’re efficient in that, then we don’t have to waste so much energy in other areas. It’s like having a leaky bucket. So I’d say the HRV is more of, like, how much charge is in the body, like if you plug your phone into a power outlet. What we find on people, oh, it may not be charging up as much as it should. The sEMG is how efficient is this energy that you do have being utilized. And then the thermography one is more of where are some of these symptoms potentially showing up, or where are we seeing this nerve dysfunction specifically, at what levels within the spine. And we look at a few different views of that to kind of get a better sense, too, of how long has this really been there, or how deeply rooted is this.

Christine: Yeah. And talk about the importance of doing this in kids.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I think of Bruce Lipton. He was one of my teachers in school, and he’s very famous also. People have probably heard of him if they’re into health. Biology of Belief was a really good book that I nerded out on years before he was ever one of my teachers, and I was so excited that I got to learn from him. And something he used to talk about comes to mind here, is that we can’t be in growth and protection mode at the same time. I think that phrase is so beautifully put and so simple, so profound, especially when we look at kids growing, right? If we wanna develop and grow, we can’t be in protection mode, which we’d say is like a fight or flight state or an alarmed state. Otherwise, it is going to be detrimental to our growth, and we’re not gonna have optimal development. And I truly believe that with our world the way that it is, and how we live our lives, at least in a city, and what we’re exposed to, without some kind of help, it’s really, really hard to not be so stimulated and to not be in that sympathetic dominance that we so commonly see. And when you talk with kids, the birth interventions, again, I could go on about this. I’m gonna try to simplify it, but there is a documentary even called The Business of Being Born. And there’s so much fear behind it, and I’ve taken care of moms for years that have been scared out of their mind by things their practitioners are telling them, or trying to plant seeds of doubt, or trying to schedule a C-section far too early without much education on the options that they have. So birth intervention, we’re seeing more and more C-sections. And even in an ideal vaginal birth, if anyone’s ever seen one, they are stressful to the spine of a child.

Christine: Yes. And the mother, both.

Dr. Matt: Yes, for sure. And then you have the emotional stress tied in, too, of maybe some obstacles or some challenges that might be showing up. So I think early detection of things and being more proactive in health is always better, and you’re able to prevent so much in kids if you catch these things early. And there’s so many symptoms that are normalized, like colic in babies. “Oh, they’ll grow out of it.” That is such bogus. Kids don’t grow out of things. They grow into things. And it’s very predictable. If they have problems in their early stages of development, they don’t just go away. They’re gonna show up in the later stages of development, and then they’re gonna have movement troubles, and they might have speech delays or milestone delays. And these things are predictable, and we use these same INSiGHT scans on babies and kids as well, because of this. And this is really something that’s important to us in our hearts, is catching things early and helping people really find healthy practices early on in life.

Christine: I agree. And even my daughter, who was born at home, and we had no interventions, still had a long labor, came out with her hand on her cheek and her umbilical cord wrapped around twice. And it was stressful for both of us. And so I think just getting at this nervous system early. And what I love, too, about the chiropractic model, and especially your practice, is that an ounce of prevention is more valuable than a pound of treatment.

Dr. Matt: Ooh. I love that.

Christine: And it’s just so true, because when we are consistently tending to that nervous system and spine, we’re rewiring and programming our body. And in the work that I do, I work on the emotional level, the mental level, the spiritual level, the psychological level. But sometimes I tell people, “You actually need some work on the physical level.” And when we think of our body, we are not just one thing, right? We are so multidimensional, and if we’re doing a lot of work, but we’re not doing anything to care for our physical body, then we’re missing something. Can you talk a little bit about, and now the name is escaping me, your method?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, sure. No problem. So the TriChord Method. I created that method more recently, but the TriChord Method is really three layers. We work on the nervous system. We say the nervous system’s the star of the show, but then the extremities and the ligaments of the body. And the extremities, it talks to and works with our nervous system, but it’s our mechanical system. It’s our feet, our shock absorbers. And it interacts and dances and plays with our nervous system. And then the ligaments I like to think of like a safety belt that kind of straps things in. And oftentimes physical injuries can create, or autoimmune things, there’s many things that can influence this. But influencing the health of our ligaments, oftentimes we find them overstretched or hypermobile, so that’s why really a traditional cracking method, it’s not inherently bad, and we still do some of that. But over the course of my career, maybe 50% of people, in my opinion, should not be receiving those. And we’ll just use simple logic here. If something’s overstretched, think of a Slinky. Would it make sense to put a quick stretch on something that’s already overstretched? I don’t think so. And there’s only one way to really screen for this, and they didn’t even teach this in school. This is something I had to dig through, and I’ve compiled years’ worth of research, and I’ve taken a lot of influences from outside of my own profession to develop this. And I was able to just put a name to it this last year, this last summer, as the TriChord Method. And it’s been incredible, the results that we’re seeing with people. I haven’t taught it to the profession yet, but at some point it’ll be there.

Christine: I love that, because it’s just so simple. And what I’m learning in my life is that simple goes a long way. When we overcomplicate things, it goes a really long way. Who can benefit from chiropractic care? Like, who’s a good candidate?

Dr. Matt: That’s a hard… I mean, to me as a chiropractor…

Christine: Everyone?

Dr. Matt: I’m gonna say everyone, because if you want to live a better life, I mean, it can help people try to get rid of challenges they’re going through, but it can also help you optimize your life. And I think if you go to the right chiropractor, it’s life-changing. And most of the people that come into our office, that start seeing us, have a combination of things going on that they don’t even realize are related to the specialty that we do. It’s not every chiropractor, but the nervous system, and the chiropractor works with the nervous system. So we call this the specialist shuffle, ’cause most people are seeing at least a few specialists for something like sleep troubles or fatigue, pain, digestive issues. And there’s a specialist for all of these, but no one ties them together and says, “Well, actually, there’s one system that works with all of this. You just gotta flip a few switches, and all the power comes back on. And then we can get your body working or functioning well again.” So we love to talk about the specialist shuffle and trying to help people break free from that. And most of the time it’s people getting off of medications, ’cause they no longer need them as their body starts to work correctly. And it depends what goals people have, but I really think that everyone in their life could benefit from having a good chiropractor. And I also think a good chiropractor teaches you how to see them less over time, by doing things like the foundational health principles at home. Most of a healthy nervous system starts at home, outside of a chiropractor’s office. And I think probably the best gift or lesson that I got from my dance with an autoimmune diagnosis was that right there, seeing that it starts with the simple things, and it takes time. It takes time to accumulate a problem. We call it the accumulation effect, like the straw that broke the camel’s back. You see that in our adjusting rooms. But it also takes time to restore health, little by little.

Christine: Yeah, it does. And I think, like you said, those four tiers, especially stress. Well, all of them. I think my biggest dilemma, as you know, is sleep, mostly ’cause of my highly sensitive little daughter, who now is sleeping in my bed. And I’m getting kicked all night.

Dr. Matt: Yep, that happens.

Christine: Which is super fun. But I also try to remember, and this is the thing that I think is important with stress, there’s things we can’t control. Am I getting seven hours of sleep a night? Maybe broken. I’m really not getting good quality sleep. But I try to make up for it. Like, while I’m laying there next to my kid, who may be kicking me and may be slightly annoying, someday she’s gonna be 16. How precious to have my little girl here with me right now. I asked her, “Why aren’t you sleeping in your room anymore? Why are you sleeping with me?” And she said, “‘Cause I just feel really safe with you.”

Dr. Matt: Aw, what a good answer.

Christine: And I don’t believe kids manipulate. I don’t believe that.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I definitely believe toddlers know how to work it sometimes.

Christine: And they’re in a very egocentric phase. But I don’t think kids make stuff like that up. So I’m like, okay, if for whatever reason your nervous system needs this right now, it’s okay. So I try to compensate for it, and then just look at areas I can de-stress. Like, even today, I was a half an hour late, because I was like, I can either rush this appointment, rush driving home, risk getting an accident, or I can just text him and be like, “Hey, I’m gonna be 30 minutes late. Does that work for you?” And thank goodness I’ve gotten over my people pleaser Virgo, always have to be… And we share the same birthday, so…

Dr. Matt: Yeah, we do.

Christine: Or very close, it’s a day apart, right? So I know you get that. And so for people that may be going through just a high stress time, what would you advise in terms of the frequency of getting nervous system support?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. So if we can measure it, we can manage it. That’s where I would start. I think in the ideal world, right, if we created the time and had the financial resources, going into a nervous system focused chiropractor, you’re gonna get better a lot quicker and a lot faster, and you’re gonna have the guidance, and it’s gonna be profound in how fast you can restore your function. But without that… Again, I’ve had the opportunity to do that, and a lot of practitioners have a healthy bias. They’ve never gone through that, so they don’t know how long it takes, but also even how to do it, and I have. So the things I would start with is finding some kind of data. It doesn’t have to be an Oura ring. It could be one of the knockoff rings. I have tested a bunch of them too, to see. A lot of them are good out there. You can find, like, a $100 smart ring and just start tracking. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal is not perfection, but really the small changes over time, the small consistent changes. And when we get off track, that’s okay, but how do we find our way back to it? And I’d say trying to set goals around sleep. And then something I messed with this last year was a continuous glucose monitor, which was incredible. That might be the best $100 I’ve ever spent on health, and the brand I liked was Lingo. And you put it on your arm. It’s really easy. I hate needles, and it wasn’t that bad. It’s weird at first, but looking at what’s underneath the surface, looking at function. If we can measure it, we can manage it. And guess what? Our blood sugar is most influenced by sleep and stress. And it’s influenced by movement too, and toxins, by what we’re eating. So there’s an exact visual for $100 of how are my lifestyle habits influencing my physiology, and you can build habits around it. You can use that month to train what you eat, when you eat, in what order you eat it, how walking influences it, how limited sleep influences it. I remember one day, I ate a burger from Hopdoddy. And I don’t eat dairy and I don’t eat gluten, but Hopdoddy in Austin has, like, a gluten-free bun and then 100% grass-fed beef. So I was like, “You know, I’m gonna test it,” and I started testing all these restaurants, and it was fascinating to see how that still would spike my blood sugar. And I was more resilient when I would sleep better and when my stress levels were more contained. But it was just a guide to help me see how my lifestyle choices were impacting my health. And I think to make it really simple for people, even something like, if we wanna reduce our stress, I don’t even think we know what that means. Scheduling less in a day is where I’d start. Or scheduling rest into a day. Literally scheduling a time on our calendar where we just sit down, and it might feel like torture or punishment, but sit down and do nothing. Talk with a friend, call someone you love on the phone. I think as easy as that, scheduling less in a day is where I would start, ’cause I think we’re so over-stimulated. And putting our phone on do not disturb, that’s one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes it’s not answering people back.

Christine: Yeah. No, you don’t have to text someone just because they texted you. So true. As we start to wrap up, I know we have a lot of parents listening. We’ll do parents and then we’ll just do adults. What are some of the things, you mentioned sleep and things like that, but what are some of the big things that chiropractic can help kids with that parents might not know, and might be going to their pediatrician or doctor, and where chiropractic can be incredibly helpful?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, really great question. So I think some of the most common, I mean, to be really honest, it’s symptoms that drive us toward taking action. So I think in an ideal world, we would find our way into a chiropractor’s office if you have kids, that you really care about their health. You might go into a holistic healthcare practitioner’s office, great, for optimal health. That’s like 1 out of 500, usually, that most people actually do. So let’s talk about symptoms. I think symptoms that are most commonly resolved, and the most common cases that we get incredible results with, are things like colic, ear infections, constipation, sleep challenges, delayed milestones. Latching’s a big one. Movement troubles, so crawling or walking, or sometimes the torticollis, like a head stuck to one side. Those are all really common things that we see that we help babies, toddlers. And granted, an adjustment on a child looks very different. We don’t crack babies. They get a very light sustained pressure to a spot on their spine that will make, we say, an adjustment. An adjustment really is creating, like, an electrical stimulus that will change the brain. And if you just press in on a certain spot on someone’s body, it’s gonna do absolutely nothing. But if you know how to detect where there’s a problem, or where this imbalance is showing up, then the right contact point and the right angle and the right amount of pressure are really what’s needed to make that change and to restore the health of that nervous system.

Christine: And I imagine for adults, again, it kind of comes back to, it’s anyone for everything. It can help and be supportive, because it’s treating at, like, the circuit board versus the light bulb level. It’s really treating at the nervous system level and reprogramming. And the thing that I have had to learn too about chiropractic care, just like personal development work, is it’s not a one and done. It takes a while. Especially if you’re 40 years old, it’s gonna take a little while to rewire your nervous system and have different patterns. And it’s been cool for me to see on our scans, both Athena and I, how things are shifting and how things are clearing, and how red zones aren’t anymore, but how things are flipping sides. So just, as we wrap up, can you talk a little bit about the healing crisis and the healing journey, and how sometimes symptoms can get a little worse? I know back in June, when we accelerated Athena’s treatment, her sleep got worse for a little while.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. The neuro detox.

Christine: Yeah. But then it got better. So I don’t want people to get discouraged if they feel like that, and I see it with coaching too. People come in, they wanna feel better, and I’m like, “Well, there’s all this stuff that you’ve brushed under the rug that we have to deal with.” And they’re like, “That was kind of a downer session.” I’m like, “Well, it’s not gonna be like that forever.” So can you just talk about that journey?

Dr. Matt: Sure. Yeah, I think that’s a great question too. You used the word neuro detox. I like that phrase also, or neural retracing. Something we talk about where the body essentially, think of it like going back in time to the state we were in, let’s say if we had a traumatic experience. It could be something emotional. And you talked about earlier, in a chiropractor’s office it seems everything is physical. It’s not, if it’s nervous system focused, because it’s anything that affects the nervous system. And if we’re naming stress as the most important, that means actually that emotional is the biggest influence in it. So our mental health really is the balance of our nervous system when it comes down to it. But there’s a lot to say, and I know we’re probably wrapping up here. It takes time. Healing can be uncomfortable. It’s worth it, I think, in the end. But there’s something that people should know, that the effective dose, so to speak, is really important. If we move slowly with health, then it’s gonna be more comfortable. If we move really, really quick, it’s gonna be uncomfortable and sometimes even unhealthy for us. I think of my therapist here. Polyvagal and attachment theory is the lens that she uses. She’s incredible. I’ve been seeing her once a week for three years. We move at a slow pace. She’s big on mindfulness, and she brings things in. It’s probably similar to the work that you do, and we’ve talked about your work before, and I love it. And the pacing is important, because there’s also things out there like EMDR, which are really fast, or some of the trends in health are really fast to try to, quote-unquote, heal something right away, and that can be really uncomfortable and sometimes problematic for us. Not to mention, I think it’s important to mention here, is we’re never broken or fixed. So we never really get to a place of, okay, well, I’m fixed now, and we’re never broken to begin with. Our bodies swing one way or the other, but they’re meant for equilibrium, so they’re looking for that center balance. They’re looking for health. And I think as long as we retain more of these good practices, right, those foundational things, if they’re not in alignment, it’s gonna rob literally dollars from our health bank, but then we try to put pennies back in to fix it. So I think moving slow and intentionally is really important, and if it’s too much too soon with anything, whether it’s a detox, whether it’s chiropractic visits, it could be a blessing or a curse. And there’s a phrase we say in the office, “Miracles happen in the plan.” And that’s what it’s based around, is to come up with a plan for someone that paces it correctly. How frequently do you wanna see them? For what length of time? And what are they doing at home, too? All those things are really important.

Christine: Yeah. Well, I’m so glad that you came on the show, because I think these conversations are really important. And sometimes the big flashy things, like intermittent fasting, cold plunging, sauna, those are all great. I do all of those to some degree sometimes. But treating our body at the nervous system level is important. And a lot of people may have insurance or may have flexible health plans. I know that every chiropractic office is different, but are you seeing that more offices are able to help people through insurance, so that it’s not so out-of-pocket, so this isn’t just a luxury item, it is something that people can get reimbursed for?

Dr. Matt: Some offices do accept insurance. I love that you asked this question. On my website under the “Why Choose Us?” there’s a tab that is named Our Most Common Question, and I wrote an entire page on this, because I think it’s so important. My personal belief is that if you accept insurance, you are no longer in alignment with a function-based approach, ’cause insurance is not based on function, it’s based on symptoms, and they won’t care for someone proactively. The entire model is around reactive health. And I took a stance early in my career. I actually dabbled in it for the first couple months, and I thought, “No, I can’t do this.” Most clinics that take insurance, you gotta dance around, “Well, how many times can I see this person?” Or, “What services can I do that their insurance will cover?” And I really make a case for it, even with a graph on that page, that in the long run, not using insurance, I believe, will actually save someone money, because you get better health practices, and it’s investing early on in these things. And you can use things like an HSA or an FSA, because those things you can use toward out-of-pocket coverage. But one of the things I look for when I refer someone to a chiropractor’s office is actually that they do not accept insurance. That’s really important to me for that reason. Because then I already know where their philosophy’s at. If they don’t accept insurance, I know they’re in the business of healthcare. If they accept insurance, they could still be really good. There’s some really incredible practitioners that take insurance. But it can complicate things, because they may not be health first. It might be more what’s covered, or what services can I do for this person where either they can get reimbursed or I can get reimbursed. And I don’t think that should be in our head at all when it comes to health.

Christine: Makes sense. And when someone’s interviewing a chiropractor, what are some things they should be looking for?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, I think a good way to measure health is really important. I said earlier, if you can measure it, you can manage it. I like the INSiGHT scans personally, because it looks at the health of the nervous system. That’s the most foundational, as it even develops in the body, it’s the first thing. So I think if you really focus in on the nervous system, you’ll see incredible results. I think there’s a website, nervoussystemchiro.com, where people can find a nervous system-focused chiropractor in their city. I don’t love that site, though. My practice is on there, but I don’t love it, because not everyone knows about it. Not every chiropractor knows about it that’s working in that way. So I think just generally looking for that is important. I would read their Google reviews. I think Google reviews for anything tend to be pretty accurate, right? A restaurant you go to, or whatever it is. And if their focus is really on chiropractic… You know, if you go into a restaurant and they have 100 things on the menu, they’re probably not gonna win any awards. But if they have three dishes, they’ve probably won many awards for those three dishes. And in my office, we only utilize chiropractic. We don’t do anything else. We see the importance of other services, so we refer out for massage, for acupuncture, for functional medicine, for therapists, and many more, and we use our community to rely on that. But all of our focus is in how do we become better chiropractors and practitioners of this, so we’re really mastering this art. And I think if people keep that in mind too, when you look for a chiropractor: are they really focused in on the chiropractic work and how that relates to your health, or is it more based on maybe selling you five things on your way out the door?

Christine: Yeah. It’s important. And for people in the Austin area, how can they work with you? And I would say all the doctors in your practice are amazing as well. We actually live nearly half an hour away and went to another chiropractor who was lovely in so many ways, but Athena just did not love it. And I’m like, wait, I’m trying to de-stress her nervous system. But she does not like this office as much. I can tell. She’s such a little empath. Even though it’s a five-minute drive. And she just loves going to your office, and we often sit in the waiting room after the appointment for a long time.

Dr. Matt: Oh, I love that.

Christine: But yeah, any ways that people can work with you, work with someone in your office. I don’t know if you’re doing anything virtually yet. I know you have a book coming out. Tell us everything.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I have limited availability, and most of my current schedule is really based around people that will travel in to see us. We get people that fly in to see us, which I love doing. I think the complex cases mean so much to me, because I think a lot of people have so much information at their fingertips but very few answers. So we’re really dedicated to giving people answers and trying to simplify health. I have a very limited number of spots that I keep available on my schedule personally, but the team that I’ve created is absolutely just miraculous and so, so, so good at what they do. And we use my technique that I’ve created. We train together every week, and we work on all aspects of how we communicate and how we design care for people, the techniques that we use. So we’re very similar in who you’d see in our office. People will be in great hands. It’s called Lifespring Chiropractic. It’s on South Lamar Boulevard, across from Matt’s El Rancho. You can find us online. We’ve got some social channels, Lifespring Chiropractic. Look us up. And, yeah, like you mentioned, I’m writing a book. I’m just finishing it up. Should be maybe summertime when it’s released. And as far as our mission, it’s really to help change the way the world views health, and I know that’s big, but there’s a health crisis going on, especially in our country, and we are truly on a mission to just help people find answers and navigate some of the challenges that they might be experiencing in their life. And I’ll be creating more and more free resources for people.

Christine: I love that. Well, thank you. Thank you for being such a huge part of our life. We appreciate it. I know I’ve enjoyed getting to know you on a personal level, too.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, thank you. I love the work that you do also, and thanks so much for having me on your show.

Christine: Thank you.