Animal Chiropractic Clinic Chatter host, Dr. Bill Ormston sits down with Dr. Drew Henderson, a chiropractor in North Georgia who has been practicing since 2006 to talk about how removing interference can improve an animal's quality of life.
We originally met at DE. Not the state but Dynamic Essentials. It is becoming aware, humble, and obedient to the voice of God inside you and then when you do that you become dynamic and that is essential to every success you'll ever have.
For somebody who knows nothing about dynamic essentials, tell us why everyone, no matter what they do in life, should come to at least one DE in their life.
It's dynamic essentials that are a hotel just down from the school when I was in school and the Dynamic Essential is becoming aware, humble, and obedient to the voice of God inside you and then when you do that you become dynamic and that is essential to every success you'll ever have. It doesn't matter if you're a garbage man, the mailman, a chiropractor, a vet, or a farrier, it doesn't matter, we all need that. Another thing that we teach at Dynamic Essentials is the lasting purpose and that's giving, loving, serving, and doing, out of your own abundance with no expectation in return, just for the sake of doing so. And the no expectation in return is a big thing because it's easy to give if you're going to get something but it's a whole lot harder to give when you know you're not going to get anything back or don't expect anything back.
We get so much back but we're not focused on that. We just give for the sake of giving. And so we showed up these two vets to our first DE.
That was awesome you and Amy, I think you hadn't been married too long then for like a year or so and I think your youngest son has a little puppy.
The dog was my oldest son's service dog and we had our youngest boy with us too. A Border collie and so there was some trepidation at first from some of the DE members about why we would be there.
Animals have a nervous system they need to get adjusted too. It's the same across the board. If you have a nervous system, hard bones, and soft nerves you don't function the way God created us to.”
So we adjust the spine. And you told me one day I asked you a question and kind of maybe offended you a little bit but I asked about extremity adjusting!
I don't know anything about extremes, you don't have a spine in your wrist. you know what I mean. But if you want to mobilize some stuff, that's cool and I know it has benefits. Animals are a different thing too. You see these horses, they get everything looked at but we just mainly focus on the upper cervical region here in my office.
You told me a story about a gentleman with a knee issue once, you said a guy came in and wanted to know if you were going to check his knee and you said “Last time I checked there wasn't any spine down there”.
Yes, that's right. But when you get this cleared out, you get the spine cleared out so often your extremities get okay too. Because every organ, every joint, everything is controlled by that nervous system that's under our hat. You clear this out and we have the best chance to be as clear as we can be. I’m just cutting up, I don't care if chiropractors check extremities. I just like to cut up.
I know but I just thought that was funny!
Some people get offended, but I don't. I just like cutting up.
So to put you on the spot, did you have a chance to read the book?
Yes, it's right over there on my desk. It's awesome. I've got maybe 20-30 pages left in the back. I know the first time I saw you at DE, I was like, "he's all right" and we talked and I still think about this as introducing chiropractic to the food supply just to see how that would work. Adjust these 50 cows, and don't adjust the others and see how the meat is different whenever the other perimeter is the same.
Well so now you know we've done it with chickens at our farm, our ranch we've done a study with chickens and we know that adjusted chickens gain faster, go to market sooner and five-star chefs preferred them in a taste test versus unadjusted chickens. We have a food animal program every once a year for doctors who are certified in animal chiropractic and come and learn how to adjust food animals. The anatomy is a little bit different so we were all about specificity as principled animal chiropractors, it's all about specificity.
Because if it's not specific it's nothing.
Yes, so it's all about specificity and bang for your buck. A chicken laying hand needs to have two things that are working, her atlas and her sacrum. If the sacrum is out of whack eggs ain't coming out right.
I tell that to people a lot of times and they're like “Are you a preservative”? And I'm like well I would like to think of myself as more parasympathetic top and the bottom. You clear out the sacrum throughout the atlas and you're 90% there. I know there are those rare cases but I don't think a T8 adjustment changes a whole lot of lives. There was an eye doctor who sent us a patient last week. He had double vision and had all this stuff going on. They couldn't really figure it out. They’ve done MRIs and CT scans everything! Nothing was there and they couldn't find anything. They said you needed to go to a chiropractor. In less than a week, the double vision was gone and we don't treat that. We just removed interference of the nervous system to his brain stem and the double vision went away. And it's good to see the eye doctor and the vet gets what we do.
All the time people are asking Dr. Amy and me, "Can you adjust me?" Could I? Probably. Would I? No, because my specificity would not be there and like you said before without specificity we don't have anything.
A buddy of mine, he's a neurophysiologist. He was having pictures made with his baby for Easter maybe two years ago. She did it with baby chicks, like how they always do for easter. She grabbed one of them and ever since then, the chicken's big left head tilted. He talked to me last summer and he's like, “Do you want to come by here?”. We were thinking about killing the chicken but you want to check it first. Let's see what happens and after about a month, that little chicken is still jacked up a little but it is getting more orthogonal. I think a hawk finally got it so he didn't he didn't make it to see his complete healing but it's amazing just how a little bit of correction can change the course of somebody's life.
Imagine what that does to a chicken. And with chickens, we think of them as pretty low on the totem pole but they have a nervous system. They react to their environment and they eat. They are what they eat. So if they are under sympathetic stress, that meat's going to be tough.
And they can absorb what they need to. They can eat the best. But if they're subluxated and they're not absorbing the nutrients they need, it's just coming out the other end.
So you're wasting feed as a farmer and a producer. And as a consumer, you're eating substandard food.
And what you said about chickens being lower on the totem pole, they're not here because I'm in the chicken capital of the world literally. I'm about to go to town in a little bit. I have to go over there to eat and do some errands at lunch but we have a chicken statue on the town square. I'll send you a picture of it. And on Thanksgiving, we don't do tree lighting, we do chicken lighting. And in less than a half mile down the road, we have one chicken plant. We have dozens around here. One of them has right around half a million chickens a day going through there. The chicken industry has built this area and everybody relies on chickens somehow.
Just think what we could do if every one of those chickens, even what we found with beef cattle, and if we adjust them on the day or the day before processing, it decreases stress hormones and makes the meat tender and a better product to eat. It's not like these food animals need to be adjusted their whole life. That would be better of course. In fact, one of our students that came to food animals did a study with some pigs and found out that if you subtracted the cost of her adjusting in her small farm, I think it was like maybe 10 to 20 thousand, and subtract the cost of the adjustment, the farm saved over $1500 a year in feed costs.
Another thing, I grew up on a farm too, and every year we still kill two or three pigs and a beef or two. And the pigs, if you just feed them, if anybody's listening to this don't be offended, but you know you gotta eat. And let's feed them, aim their gun for their butt you're good. But if you ever miss, you know some people want to come to do that with us and they'll want to shoot and kill the pig and kill the hog, but if they mess up and don't kill the pig right then, it stresses it out and the meat is worth nothing. You can't even eat it because it's running around and it's stressed out, it's not humane and that pig is stressed out and the meat is totally inedible.
And that's just tipping away over the edge of that sympathy.
That's just right before you take them. But if you can keep them not stressed leading up to that, it's a big difference.
And so if we adjust their atlas and their sacrum and put them in parasympathetic dominance, think what that does to the meat and how much better that would be. And there are supplements out there that use PMGs or stuff that comes from animals. Imagine if those animals were all chiropractically adjusted into healthier animals
They would just function better, they produce better hormones to use. Everything's better when we're well adjusted and we’re living more the way God created us to.
That's really the crux of it. It's right for your shoulder pain or the low back or neck pain. We just live more connected and that's the key.
Connection. And the connection between the professions whether it be chiropractic and veterinarian or farmer and chiropractor and referring to each other.
And that's it! Because everybody has their skill set and just go utilize that. The way that we can take care of the nervous system is different from the way the eye doctor could. That's why she sent the guy over here because she knew you have to get that atlas fixed. When your head tilts over here and you're jacked up it's really good.
Adjust first, drug second, and surgery third. Now we’re not saying that you shouldn't necessarily adjust me while you're waiting for the ambulance to get there but go ahead and adjust.
That's the thing. Just take care of them so you can best adapt because that's what it all is, adaptation, so you can adapt to whatever. Because if we can adapt we're going to be healthy. Sometimes there are symptoms or adaptations that we don't like. You get cold and you start getting shivers. That's your body adapting to warm yourself up. You sweat and your blood gets flushed and goes to your face. The evaporation cools you down, and you don't need Botox injections to keep you from sweating. It's just your body adapting. Maybe it's not adapting as well as it should, that's why you need to get checked.
He probably had a headache!
It didn't even phase him!
But if his atlas was out.
When you're 12, you don't really know. What do you do? And I always wondered if we could have gotten a hold of Jack and just how he would have been because we've had other bulls now that's awesome. They're just good old lovers. They just lean on you. You walk out and don't say anything to them and they just start bawling. They just want you to say something to them.
I bet he had a headache.
He did afterward after that two-pound hammer, he did.
That might have felt good for a little bit.
It might have un-subluxated him or just a little bit because B.J Palmer said “you could get a shovel, hit somebody on the back of the head with it, and roll them down a hill. And some people will get better”. But it's just not reproducible. And that's the thing we want, reproducibility.
That's right, we do! We want it to be that way. So above, down, inside-out, keep everything with the spine adjusted. Make sure your chiropractor is specific. Whether it's an animal chiropractor or a human chiropractor and make sure they're congruent, that's the biggest thing.
You got to be good. We're not bragging or anything, but we have people coming from other states regularly. When we do close to go do a DE meeting, I always have to call 10 or so people to let them know because we don't do appointments. It's all walk-ins. We're not gonna be there. Don't drive two and a half hours one way to get here because we're gonna be gone. It's not us, I've even tried to find them, other people, to go see but they just know they get cleared out. We're the least important people in the office and we just want to clear them out. And that power that God put in them in Genesis 2:7 When He made us, he brought life in us that works un-interfered with and then they can function the best they can. It's just a wonderful thing. We're so blessed. We always talk about how Monday is our favorite day of the week and it is. Because we miss people, we miss getting our hands on people, we miss seeing life coming back to them. The revivification of the body, we love seeing that so well
I hear not only people talk about the title of the book “Yes, it's really a thing” because people would ask me all the time “Animal chiropractic, is that really a thing?”. I’ve even been to Chiropractic meetings, and principal chiropractic meetings, and people are like why? Also, I can't tell you the number of people that we see and I even have a family member who has this: “Go see a chiropractor.” “Why?” to make sure they're clear.
Everything like where they're dealing with cancer, diabetes, they're living life or whatever. If you're alive, you need regular chiropractic care. You need regular good nutrition. You need a regular good shower. It's just the way it is.
Go see a chiropractor.
We just talk to people, our students and chiropractors, that you've got to know the elevator speech and you've got to have an elevator speech.
30 seconds spit it out.
You can't be afraid. You can't be afraid to tell somebody you need to go get checked.
Everybody needs to get checked. It doesn't matter what's going on, everybody's got to get checked.
People ask me all the time, “Have you ever seen an animal that didn't need to get adjusted?” and well yeah. They got adjusted earlier today.
That's the thing. It's the ones that have been adjusted regularly for a while that do so much better. And people are like “Man he's such a good dog”. He takes his training better because he's clear. He listens. You can leave a hamburger on the coffee table. I tested this when he was about a year old, I left, had the camera so I could watch and he didn't touch it. He looked at it, he wanted it but he knew, he was just more connected like “he's going to take care of me. I don't have to get that hamburger. And when I came back and he got the hamburger they gave it to me” because you got to reward them too.
It's all about being in a sympathetic parasympathetic balance.
And to see innate intelligence, that power that he put in us really works. Just look at a new baby or an awesome dog and you can see it.
If you are or know a veterinarian or chiropractor or a student of either of these professions, visit our website Animal Chiropractic Education Source to see how to become certified in Animal Chiropractic. Start improving the lives of the animals around you.
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