Podcast

Revitalizing the Brain and Neck: Insights from Dr. Jonathan Chung

Healing the Brain and Neck with Dr. Jonathan Chung

Embrace the incredible ability of your body to heal, and you'll unveil a world of boundless potential. In this captivating episode, the esteemed Dr. Jonathan Chung takes us on a journey through the fascinating interplay between the brain and neck.

These areas, though distinct, intertwine in ways that unlock our body's powerful capacity for healing. Dr. Chung reminisces about his personal voyage—from a budding interest in upper cervical care to groundbreaking revelations in chiropractic neurology.

He delves into conditions like POTS and BPPV, elucidating how their management merges upper cervical care with functional neurology, significantly enhancing life quality for those grappling with neurological challenges.

Furthermore, Dr. Chung highlights the transformative effects of specific therapies. He elaborates on how repetitive exercises, focused eye movements, and sensory integration play pivotal roles in brain reprogramming and hastening patient relief. Dive into this episode to truly grasp the unlimited transformational abilities of our bodies. Don't miss out—tune in and discover the magic within!

Listen To The Episode Here

Healing The Brain And Neck With Dr. Jonathan Chung (Transcript)

Welcome, everyone, to a new episode. We have one of my favorite upper cervical doctors on the show. It was my first time sitting down with him, Dr. Jonathan Chung of Keystone Chiropractic and Neuroplasticity out of Royal Palm Beach, Florida. Dr. Jon is a phenomenal upper cervical chiropractor. He is also phenomenal at functional neurology. He marries these two chiropractic practices very well in his clinic. He is a wealth of knowledge on a lot of neurological disorders. It's always fun to sit down and learn from Dr. Jon. He’s a very brilliant doctor. I was so excited to finally have him on the show. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. Please welcome Dr. Jonathan Chung.

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We have such an amazing guest. It's an honor to have him on the show. Dr. Jon Chung is an upper cervical chiropractor and a chiropractic neurologist. It's very rare to have those two combinations. They get a lot of people better. He is located in Royal Palm Beach out of Keystone Chiropractic. As I said, I’m honored to have him on the show. Please welcome Dr. Jon Chung. Jon, how are you?

I’m great, Kevin. Thanks for having me on the show.

I love hearing how people got into chiropractic, especially upper cervical chiropractic because it's such a niche within the field. Where are you from originally and how did you get into chiropractic?

I was born and raised Floridian, so I grew up in South Florida my entire life, besides my three-year stint at Light University. Generally, chiropractic was unremarkable. I was an undergrad. I was actually preparing to go to medical school because when you live in a Chinese household, you have a couple of choices of professions, and one of them is going to be a doctor. I thought I was going to become a medical doctor because that's what I knew healthcare to be. My good friend at that time, Matt Westheimer, wanted my help starting a chiropractic club at UCF. We are best friends through our baseball playing days. I didn't have any interest in chiropractic at that time, but I wanted to support my good friends.

We go to these chiropractic club meetings and talk about the self-healing philosophy of chiropractic, which was much more in line with how I saw myself taking care of myself and other people. Once that became a part of me, I realized that medicine wasn't the right path for me because I wanted something congruent with my values and beliefs. I ended up going to chiropractic school. During that time, I had every intention of being a full spine chiropractor because that's all I knew of chiropractic. In the tenth quarter, I took a knee-chest elective with one of the Anderson brothers. Although I didn't love knee-chest, I really embraced the idea that the chest doctors tended to be strong.

He was like, “If you take care of the upper cervical spine, you need to do almost nothing else to the body. You don't need to adjust people very frequently and their body is going to be doing great.” That vibed with me at a really high level because I wasn't necessarily fully in on this idea that someone needed to be adjusted every single week for years. It didn't fit with my vision of what chiropractic was supposed to be. When upper cervical told me, “If our patients were adjusted 3 or 4 times for years, that makes sense that people can hold their adjustments.”

There's something happening to them like getting hit in the head or taking a neck injury. Enough time has passed for the chronic stresses to finally overwhelm the body. That made more sense than needing to adjust someone repetitively over and over again. That made my transition towards the upper cervical paradigm, and then they chose NUCCA because that's the style of adjusting that seemed to resonate with me the most.

I want to back up a little bit. Was that a tough conversation you had to tell your parents about not wanting to go to medical school and switching to chiropractic, or was it pretty easy?

It was a difficult conversation. It was one of those things where when I told my mom especially that I was going to get to chiropractic school, she had lots of reservations because she would tell her primary care doctor, and her primary care doctor didn't have nice things to say about chiropractic. It was my last couple years of school where she would say, “What's your major again?” I was like, “Micromolecular Biology.”

She’s like, “What can you do with that degree?” I was like, “I could do just about any healthcare profession that I want.” “You could become a doctor, right?” “I am going to become a doctor in chiropractic.” “Are you sure that's the direction?” “I’ve never been this sure of anything. I’m very sure that this is the direction I want to go.” That was a repeated conversation that we would have the last couple of years.

I’m sure they are so incredibly proud of you now with it because they probably didn't know much, especially about upper cervical, and the amount of people that you get better in your clinic, the amount of complex cases, and the lives you are saving. They must be so proud.

They love chiropractic now, especially once they start getting adjusted. It changed their mind to what is possible with this. Just having them experience it, which is such a big part of chiropractic, so much of it is such an experiential thing. It's one thing to know something intellectually, but it's another to feel your life and health be so much different when you have had the experience of getting a great adjustment.

What was your experience like with upper cervical? It sounded like you fell in love with it before being adjusted. Would that be safe to say?

I was intellectually stimulated by the idea of upper cervical. I’ve not necessarily experienced it for myself but I experienced being inside of an upper cervical office as part of an internship. That's where I was like, “This is incredible.” I remember interning with Dr. Bryan Salminen in the Atlanta, Georgia area. He was my first experience training for NUCCA. I remember being in his office and seeing a patient with Parkinsonian tremors. They would walk in for their new patient consult with tremors, and they would walk out of their first adjustment and the tremors were gone.

I would see patients where they would walk in with canes and walking devices. They would walk out without those devices, and this was a regular event. It was blowing me away as a student, but for Dr. Salminen, it is like, “This is a Monday.” That leaves such a strong impression on you where you are like, “This is what I want to do. This is how I want to be able to serve and help people. It is to create things like this on a daily basis for people and not necessarily take it for granted but have this conception that this is an expectation that we have that this is supposed to happen.”

The story doesn't end there. You did find upper cervical. What made you want to join it with upper cervical neurology? For our audience, what is chiropractic neurology?

When we talk about chiropractic neurology, it's a way of observing the body from a brain-based perspective. When we look at the body from a brain-based perspective and understand from contemporary neuroscience how the brain operates and works, we can devise how we assess the patient in such a way that we understand what's happening inside of the brain. We can then start to develop therapeutic approaches to address any deficiencies that are occurring in the brain. It's not necessarily a technique but it’s a way of looking at the brain from a very functional standpoint.

Whereas a medical neurologist, their job is to observe pathology. It's to identify pathology diagnosis. If there are effective ways to treat that pathology than to prescribe those treatments for it, it’s going to be identifying brain cancers, identifying places where someone might have had a stroke and being able to intervene early, or following someone towards getting neurosurgery if they have aneurysms and things of that nature.

That leaves a huge gap between identifying something that is an objective pathology versus a loss of function in the way that the nervous system is operating. They might not be able to diagnose a loss of function in the nervous system, even though it's very clear that the person's brain isn't doing that well. Chiropractic neurology is about being okay with their shades of gray where something isn't pathological, but it's clear that there's decreased function.

If we know that there's decreased function, we could use exercises in different forms of stimulation to make parts of the brain work better again, whether someone has pathology or doesn't have pathology. That's where chiropractic neurology comes into play. What brought me into that was traumatic brain injuries. I started seeing a lot of concussion cases in my clinic because upper cervical care does amazing with a lot of concussion cases. I was seeing a lot of concussion cases that have been failing not only conventional medical care but also vestibular therapy was also failing, the chiropractic neurological treatment. They would come into my office with different aspects of POTS, dizziness, or headaches.

Within a few weeks, we were getting these patients better, especially in my community, where we see a lot of equestrian patients falling off their horses all the time. They tend to push through it, but when we start to see a lot of concussion patients, a lot of the equestrians were starting to see, “We don't have to live with these concussion symptoms.” That became my niche in my community. As I started to take care of these patients, I wanted to understand traumatic brain injury on a very fundamental level.

I started to take the Carrick Neurology courses because Dr. Carrick became world famous for a lot of his work. He’s working with people like Sidney Crosby and a lot of elite-level NHL players. It transformed my idea of how the brain looks and how traumatic brain injury is. It was a perfect example of what functional neurology is really all about because, in a lot of traumatic brain injuries, you don't see the pathology show up on an MRI. You don't see it show up on the scan, but it's very clear that the person's head trauma led to their current symptomatic state.

By using contemporary ideas in neurology, you develop these rehab strategies that help out. It became an intellectual passion of mine, even more so than anything else, because I wasn't necessarily worried about the results I was getting with upper cervical care, but having that understanding of all these different factors that go into how the brain can heal is something that I was very passionate about. I gradually brought more aspects of chiropractic neurology and got them into my practice as I started to see more complex cases.

As we both know, upper cervical is great at helping resolve post-concussion syndrome. We get these cases where maybe the upper cervical is only getting that person 70% better or 60% better, or maybe it's not moving the needle that much. How do you determine whether the problem of the brain injury is structural or it's coming from the brain where you want to implement more of the functional neurology aspect? Is it a good marriage where you always do both? How does that work?

We go through a pretty extensive exam process in order to figure out what is the likely symptom generator for the patient, but the truth of the matter is I put everyone that comes through my office basically when we are doing an upper cervical evaluation. For me, treating someone or adjusting someone with upper cervical care is about improving the status of the autonomic nervous system. No matter what a patient comes in with, I believe that the autonomic nervous system is going to be better off when we are doing upper cervical adjustments with them.

For me, it's a baseline autonomic rehab component for the patient that I’m going to stack on top of any other aspects that I have identified during the exam. I would say about 98%, 99% of my patients, unless they are coming in with just BPPV, I’m probably going to adjust them at some point because that's such an important piece of getting them better from traumatic brain injury. When I go through an exam with them, I’m going to look at how their eyes are moving. I’m going to test balance and assess their vestibular function and see what the status of that vestibular organ in the inner ear is doing.

Then you are going to look through their history and see how their autonomic nervous system is functioning. Do they have something like POTS? Do they have orthostatic intolerance? That will point me in the direction of which way I want to drive some of the brain-based therapy for them. Almost all my cases are going to start off with clearing the atlas and getting their upper cervical spine right as an initiation to improving their brain health.

You mentioned the condition, POTS. That can be very rewarding under upper cervical care, and I have also seen not much symptoms budge from POTS. Can you explain what POTS is and how you help manage it in your office?

POTS stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, and it's a condition where patients can often feel a lot of dizziness. They can feel rapid heart rate where it feels like they are having a cardiovascular problem, but it also has a high comorbidity with things like migraine headaches and chronic pain syndromes. POTS is pretty relevant across a variety of conditions. We know it is most commonly now associated with long COVID and post-COVID vaccine-type syndromes, but it's been around since people got manoed. That was probably the most common place people got it before COVID started.

It's prevalent in patients with concussions and MS, and patients that have things like fibromyalgia, also patients on the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome spectrum. POTS has been around for a while but it hasn't been paid attention to accept in the last couple of years, mainly because COVID has been driving up a lot of these types of cases. What happens in POTS at the simplistic level is the brain is not talking to the internal organ systems very efficiently.

We could talk about what happens when you stand up. When you stand up, your blood flow needs to get to the brain effectively, even though the force of gravity is going to pull blood flow away from your brain. In order to compensate for this, your brain constricts your blood vessels so it pushes blood into your brain faster. It also makes sure that the blood flow from your legs doesn't pull in your legs. It gets back up into the heart.

When this does it effectively, we stand up, and we don't experience any problems with that. This system should be working very efficiently, and it starts to work even before we get into the standing position. When patients with POTS go to standing, their system acts inefficiently, and blood flow isn't getting into the brain very quickly. It has to compensate, and the way that it compensates is by rapidly increasing your heart rate. When people get this rapid heart rate while they are getting blood flow up to the brain and getting very little amounts of blood into the brain with each heartbeat, that becomes a very inefficient type of situation.

That leads to a lot of other symptoms that are a result of that, namely light-headed types of dizziness. They can feel a lot of headache issues. There also tends to be some autoimmune consequences of that as well, where patients will have knots that are going into their hands and feet. They may have small fiber neuropathy-type symptoms. The variety of symptoms with POTS can vary quite significantly. We have seen very dramatic improvements in POTS with upper cervical care. Some patients may not get that much improvement because they might have this strong autoimmune component that is limiting their ability to get better.

When we evaluate the patients with POTS, we want to see if they have any markers of autoimmune disease because we want to get that addressed, whether it's someone like a functional medicine type of practitioner or a cardiovascular type of doctor that can help manage their symptoms. That's going to be pretty helpful, and then we will use functional neurology to help improve the tolerance that the autonomic nervous system can handle. The big characteristic of POTS is that their sensory sensitivity levels are very low, which means they are very easily overstimulated. Getting them to do a little bit of exercise causes them to crash. Shining too bright a light in their eyes can make them feel pretty poor and start a migraine.

Getting them to initiate too much exercise too quickly may make them feel poorly because their small fiber neuropathy may initiate a lot more pain with that. We have to assess where each POTS patient is at, and what the driving factors for their symptoms are, and then we create a care plan or code management plan to figure out how to address the things that I’m not necessarily going to address. I don't do functional medicine, but if I have a patient who has POTS and has clear autoimmune signs, I’m going to get them to someone who's going to manage that inflammatory autoimmune component of it too so that we can get the most results out of the upper cervical care and then neurology that we prescribe for them.

Is the care plan a little longer with the POTS patients because they have so many symptoms going on? How does it work with just managing that type of case?

There are a couple of variances to that. If a POTS patient is local to us, it's going to be a longer-duration care plan. We will see POTS patients sometimes that will fly in to see us or travel ways to see us because it's about getting them over this bad hump that they are at. If they can't overcome the plateau on their own, they will come to see us. We will use neuro to do an intensive style treatment with them, get them over the plateau, and see if they can progress themselves after that. There are a couple of ways that you do it, but in terms of managing POTS, most patients with POTS, unless it’s from a concussion, it's probably going to be for a long period of time because we have to balance the autoimmune components of it as well as the potential genetic aspects of it that contribute to the condition.

You mentioned a condition called BPPV before. What are your thoughts on where everything is coming from with the vertigo, dizziness, off-balances, and sensations? A lot of people say the crystals in the ears are not aligned properly. A lot of times, in our office, we see it's coming from the upper neck. Is it a combination of both? Many people are seeking upper cervical care for this now because they are going to their neurologists and ENTs, and they are not getting many answers with decreased hearing, tinnitus, off-balance, and vertigo issues. What are the mechanisms that you find these are coming from?

When a patient says they have vertigo, it's probably the most misunderstood diagnosis that I know of because a lot of people will say something is BPPV when it's not. A lot of people say something is vertigo when it's not vertigo. We have a couple of definitions. When someone says that they have vertigo, it means that they are having this false sensation of movement. This means that most of the time when you have true vertigo, you are going to see a spinning type of activity.

When the layperson says they have vertigo, it can mean anything because they don't know what the definition is. It's not their fault. It's because medical doctors, chiropractors, and all sorts of people don't define it very well. If someone is feeling the swaying feeling or being off-balance, that doesn't necessarily mean vertigo. A lot of people say they have vertigo when they feel the sway.

When you have vertigo, you are feeling this spinning sensation, or you see the world moving around you. That's your classic vertiginous type of symptom. BPPV is unique. When you look at their history, when they have this aggressive spinning and swirling sensation, that's generally only going to last for about 30 seconds to a minute tops. If they are spinning for more than that, very likely that they don't have BPPV. The other thing that is unique about BPPV is that it is initiated by head motion, meaning if I turn my body towards one direction, that initiates the spin. If I turn my body in the other direction, usually it's not going to initiate that spin.

We need to see that if it's BPPV, it's activated by motion, and it's going to be a very short duration or objective vertiginous type of motion. If you test for it, you are going to see nystagmus in the eyes when that happens. When that happens, that's when someone should get an Epley Maneuver or one of those canalith repositioning maneuvers. The success rate with treating that is extraordinarily high. It's 95% of patients that fit that bill are going to get almost, not to say cured but, for practical purposes, their vertigo get cured at that moment in time using those maneuvers.

X-ray human view of upper cervical region with neurological concerns

Those maneuvers, are they really realigning the crystals in the ears? What makes that maneuver so effective?

That's the main theory of it. There are some aspects of that theory that leave it a little bit open to doubt, but from a very practical standpoint, yes, it's taking crystals that are stuck in the wrong part of the ear. You are helping to maneuver those crystals into a part of the area where it's going to be more stable and allows for movement without creating that vertiginous sensation.

The evidence suggests that it is likely moving those crystals in that manner. Although there are some autopsy studies that would suggest that maybe it's not moving as much as we think it is. When it comes to other forms of dizziness, people can feel this equilibrium-type sensation where they don't feel steady when they are moving. They can feel quite off-balance or they need to hold on to walls. I find that upper cervical knocks these cases out of the ballpark.

I also notice that when patients have other forms of vertigo, the actual spinning sensation has gone away, which is classic for things like vestibular neuritis, where an infection gets into the inner ear. After that, they feel an acute spinning sensation, which could last hours. If days have gone by and a lot of the patients feel unsteady and off-balance, that's where upper cervical and a combination of vestibular exercises can improve the patient's quality of life even though they have lost the activity of that vestibular nerve.

There's dizziness that's associated with head and neck trauma and all those other types of things which the upper cervical also tends to excel at. BPPV is one of those things where we are like, “I haven't found upper cervical to make that big of a difference.” You should get these patients in Epley Maneuver, and that takes care of the overwhelming majority of those types of cases.

Is there anything with the functional neurology that you implement eye exercises? Some people use lasers and everything. Is there anything on the functional neurology aspect of it that helps vertigo patients?

A lot of it will depend on how their brain is compensated. If you or anyone has ever gone through intense vertigo, it can feel terrible. For some of those patients, their brain never compensates for the recovery after that spin has happened. The brain is creating what's called negative plasticity. When patients have negative plasticity, we think of plasticity as a good thing because the brain is able to learn how to overcome things and processes that are beneficial, but just as easily, the brain can learn maladaptive patterns. When someone has this acute vertigo spell, their brain might learn the maladaptive patterns, which makes them persistently dizzy.

When those situations arise, we can use functional neurology to change how the brain is interpreting a lot of the sensory environment. We can use eye exercises or balance training exercises where you get people standing on foam pads. We get people looking and catching balls while they are walking around. We could use different types of stimulation, like electrical stimulation around the ear. Some people use lasers. I think lasers can be helpful, but the rehab aspects are going to make the biggest difference for a lot of those types of situations.

What's the reset process like to almost realign those pathways to function properly with the exercise and everything? I know it's different for each patient.

When we look at a patient, we will see and try to identify where they perceive a vestibular weakness. As a quick test, if we had someone standing still, we had them close their eyes and we looked at their sway. If someone is fairly dizzy, they might notice that they sway in a particular direction. For example, someone sways to their right, which gives us a soft indication that maybe the right cerebellum isn't doing so hot. We will then do other tests to confirm that, so we will have them do something called a Fukuda Step Test or they hold their arms in the air in front of them, and they will march in place with their eyes closed. Some of these patients will spin and almost do a full 90-degree, sometimes 180-degree rotation when they are doing this test.

They have no idea. When they open their eyes, they will notice that they are looking at a completely different part of the room, and this blows them away. It's because their brain is not getting great feedback about what their body is doing in space. Usually, if we have a good sensory system, we will know when we are leaning toward one direction or if we are moving in one direction. If we see that, we get another confirmation that this person's cerebellum might not be doing so hot. If we know, let's say, that their right cerebellum isn't doing well, we will give them exercises to increase the level of activity of that right cerebellum. That might mean we will have them do saccades to their right side, or we’ll have them do figure eight complex movements with their right arm, or do smooth pursuits to the left.

We will have them do any variety of things that bias the activation of the nervous system to feed into that right cerebellum. It's about repetition. We get them to do that over and over again. Repetition is what drives neuroplasticity. We can do enough repetitions at an intense enough stimulation that doesn't overwhelm the nervous system. They then could create positive neuroplastic changes in their brain as a result of the repetitions that we do. We check in on them periodically and make sure their balances are getting better, and their subjective feelings of dizziness are getting better. We can look at their eyes and see if they are more stable, which gives us nice markers that tell us that there's a positive neuroplastic experience that is happening.

How does it work in your office when people come in with all these neurological issues? Do you go straight to the neck to see if the atlas is holding? Do you jump into the functional neurology aspect of it first? What does that process look like for some of these cases we have been talking about?

For a lot of these neurological cases, I usually have a good idea that I’m probably going to do functional neurology with them, at least on some level. At the very least, I’m going to evaluate them from a functional neurology standpoint so I can get an idea of what parts of the brain might not be doing so well. The first thing from an intervention standpoint is almost always going to be upper cervical chiropractic care with them. That's the first thing that I will do with the patient, and that's the only thing that I will do, especially when it comes to the first adjustment.

I will adjust them. I will leave it alone unless I’m going to do an intensive with someone where I only have a week or two weeks to work with them. Once I had gotten a good amount of confidence I made a great adjustment on them confirmed by thoracic post X-ray. If I see that I got a good post-X-ray on them, the next visit, I expect them to be holding their adjustment, and then we will start to do some of their neuroplasticity exercises based on what their deficiencies are. If I know that their eyes don't move so well to the right, I’m going to design eye movement exercises that practice going to the right.

If I know they are having bad coordination with their right arm and right leg, I will guide them on exercises that are going to do that. We might add a little bit of electrical stimulation to help facilitate some of the activity to that limb. Everything is garnered by what we found on that patient's exam and what sensory system we feel is the best for improving their brain status based on their exam.

How many years have you been implementing functional neurology to this level?

Six years. I have been dabbling with it for close to eight years, but I have been doing pretty solid functional neurology for at least six years.

Do you notice that people hold their upper cervical adjustments longer with this great functional neurology care? How are they holding?

When it comes to just holding, I don't know if that’s big of a difference in terms of the length of time that someone's legs are going to stay balanced and their posture is going to get better. I can make a case that for some vestibular patients, it might make a difference because if someone with a vestibular issue has this persistent head tilt, and if I could get their head tilt to get better, maybe it helps them hold a little bit better. What I see as the biggest benefit is if I give the patient enough time with their vestibular care, I have a high degree of confidence that they are going to get better within an eight-week period.

The benefit that I have seen with functional neurology adding to upper cervical care is that oftentimes, I could push these patients to start to have a symptomatic improvement much sooner. If something might have taken me eight weeks in the past for them to observe symptomatic benefit, then I might see that cut down to 3 to 4 weeks.

That's been the biggest benefit that I see, and that comes from a patient standpoint. Those signs that things are changing from a symptom-based standpoint sooner when I’m integrating functional neurology with their care. From my perspective, I have good confidence that upper cervical would have gotten them there eventually, but it may not have been as quickly as the patient desires.

That's huge because those people’s quality of life is so low. Even if you can move that healing process up to 2 to 3 weeks, that's a game changer for the patient and you.

It's a psychological benefit for all parties. The patients psychologically feel that maybe they are not fixed, but they are like, “There's a light at the end of this tunnel because I can start to see myself feeling better and functioning a little bit better.” It gives them a higher sense of confidence. It’s like, “If I stick with this, then I’m going to get to where I want to be eventually.”

At the end of every episode, I’d like to ask all my guests, what is one piece of advice that has resonated with you over the years that you would like to give the audience? It could be anything.

The biggest thing that has been an epiphany for me in many years is having this understanding that the things that we put into our minds play such a big role in our health and well-being because we can say things from a positive standpoint. Everyone knows that having a positive mental attitude is super important, but the most important thing when I’m educating my patients is the importance of not letting negative thoughts take over their brains. People can get negative thoughts even from well-meaning people. They get negative thoughts from their doctor, who gives them a bad prognosis about something that can be self-limiting. One of the big things that I have seen affect a lot of clinical outcomes lately is there are a lot of patients who have a lot of nocebic beliefs.

On one hand, there's the placebo effect. If you believe something is going to do you well, then you will get a positive effect even if there's no active effect from the actual treatment. The flip side is just as true, and maybe even more powerful, that if we have negative beliefs about a condition or treatment, then that belief is going to drive so much of our patient outcomes.

One of the things that turned me into a chiropractor is this belief that people are self-healing and the body has an amazing ability to heal itself. We need to keep that top of mind for people. We need to make sure that we don't put obstacles in the patient's way about what can interfere with that self-healing belief, even more so than the self-healing capacity of the nervous system itself.

When we convince people that spinal degeneration is killing them slowly, what do we do when we look at a post-X-ray? There's spinal degeneration as it changes it all, but their bodies are getting better. We sabotage our results by letting people think that spinal degeneration is the thing that's killing them, when the reality is that spinal degeneration is a byproduct of biomechanics gone bad. Do we wish we could have done it before? Sure, but that doesn't mean that they are going to be limited by that. I believe that if we can give people a belief structure that they can have health without limits, then we are already winning 40% to 50% of that battle for that patient by giving them a mindset of resiliency.

I would even say an anti-fragility to their belief system is like, “Not only am I self-healing but I’m strong and powerful.” By having that belief, you could overcome things whether it's pain, headaches, concussion, or even serious illness that we don't generally think of self-resolving, but your quality of life can be a lot better when you have this idea that “I’m resilient and powerful.”

Where can people find you on social media, website, name of the clinic, and all that good stuff?

My clinic is called Keystone Chiropractic and Neuroplasticity. You can find me at ChiropractorWellington.com. I have blogs, articles, and things I post there. I’m very active on Instagram. My practice Instagram account is @KeystoneNeuro. If you want to follow me from a personal standpoint, @DrJonathanChung where you can find me on Instagram and Twitter.

Thank you so much for coming on. I would love to have you back on anytime.

That's great. Thanks.

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