Lori Esary: Wellness is a practice, not just a word.
Kelly Engelmann: Welcome to the Synergee podcast where myself, Kelly Engelmann and Lori Esary shed light on powerful tools and topics that nourish your body,
Lori Esary: and most importantly, feed your soul
Kelly Engelmann: Hi Synergee listeners, we are so excited to be back in studio. Lori and I are together today with Dr. Bart Precourt down on 30A. Lori and I have had the opportunity to visit his practice many, many times for chiropractic care, acupuncture, massage, acoustic wave therapy, and so we are so blessed that he joined us today in studio.
Lori Esary: And we are so excited to kind of dig into the value of having a wellness plan and who is on your wellness team. So, Dr. Bart, we wanted to start out by just kind of talking a little bit about your story, and we know you transitioned your practice from Atlanta to 30A. Tell us a little more about that.
Dr. Bart: Yeah. Well, thanks for inviting me and I’ve been practiced now, I guess it’s about 27, 27 years. The first about half of that I was up in Atlanta and I had a chiropractic practice up there, pretty straightforward just when I say straightforward, just chiropractic for the most part. And, where we are now in Florida, it’s about a four and a half, five hour drive. So my wife and I would pack up almost every weekend, go down to the beach. Fell in love with the area and eventually we said, well, why don’t we just move there? And that was a little bit of a transition because we couldn’t move the practice. So we had a beautiful run in Atlanta, we loved Atlanta we just want a little bit of change in our lives. Found that the beach probably was just a little bit more conducive to the way that we live. Being active, being outside, all of that and Atlanta had that as well don’t get me wrong, but there’s something about that beach area, which it’s just conducive to literally wanting to do healthy things, which is pretty cool. So we packed up our bags, moved down there and, really started again, but this time it was a lot more intentional. We were able to incorporate. A fair amount more that we thought about would be better serving to the public and and also our personal lives. There’s always, I think, in health care, if you’re a health care practitioner, half of what you’re doing is always somehow evolving around what you personally need. So a lot of what we bred there, so we have a yoga studio. We now have an organic cafe next door and all of these things were part of our personal lifestyle that we thought would be great offerings to the public.
Kelly Engelmann: Yeah, that’s what I’ve loved about watching you develop, balance, and then now Prima the cafe, and now the farm that you have, right? It’s just been a process of evolution for you guys, and it’s just a beautiful thing to watch.
Dr. Bart: Yeah. So now to kind of add on to that, as time went by, we opened up this organic cafe, which, we’ve never been in the restaurant business before. We really had no idea what we’re doing, but we knew good food. We knew what you should be feeding a human being. And that’s how we lived and so we decided, heck, if we can’t go out and get it, why don’t we create it? We saw a little bit of a void there. So we had our business caps on when we were thinking about that. And we also thought about what an amazing opportunity to bring to the community something that is kind of desperately missing. So that happened, and then we decided. We needed a farm in our lives and yeah, so somehow now I’m here today. So if for some reason, the audio isn’t great, I apologize yet, nonetheless, we’re at the farm today and you might hear some chickens in the background and we have chickens in it, and this has been an incredible journey in the sense of one to just get grounded, to get in life, to get back to the basics, which I think is therapeutic for every one of us and to watch and be able to nurture a life feeding life. Which is really amazing. Yeah. And so now we have, our chickens are producing all the eggs for our cafe. And it’s been a nice learning curve and really nice observation of just the way that everything works together.
Lori Esary: Absolutely. Kelly and I being in functional medicine practices and having done it so long, finding that balance is hard because I think we all have that entrepreneurial spirit. We want to grow and we want to build and we see holes and we want to fix it and oftentimes that can take us on a tangent right away from sometimes, what our intention at the core needs to be, which is finding that balance today we wanted to spend a little bit of time if you don’t mind kind of talking about 1 of the things that we really encourage our patients to do is, have a wellness plan. Number 1, right? What do they need to do on a daily monthly quarterly basis to live? Well, but, more importantly, who do they need on their wellness team in order to make that happen? And you do offer so many things there and we want to talk a little bit, if we could start about chiropractics. Why is chiropractic care, right? Why is chiropractic care so important in a person’s journey to wellness and having a qualified chiropractor on their wellness team,
Dr. Bart: Two great things there. First, I want to go back to the idea of kind of having a strategy of where you’re going with your wellness, this is critical, practicing along as all of us have often you see that people don’t have a plan moving forward. We have a plan for our careers and our finances and our relationships often, we want to have grandkids or whatever maybe there’s some kind of plan where I’ll tell you, it’s so critically important. If you haven’t sat down and thought about what is the next 5, 10, 20, 25, 30 years look like so I’m 53 right now and I’m starting to think what’s going to be like when I’m 85 or 95 years old because if I don’t start planning now, you don’t get the, I won’t say you don’t get the opportunity when you’re 85. Yet the cards are stacked against you. So for that reason, starting to create a plan or at least a vision or a goal or a dream of where you want to be one of the bigger challenges, I think, in health generally, is that people don’t see beyond today. And when we look at the big challenge, I promise I’m going to tie chiropractic into this in just a moment, bigger challenges, we see that what I call the four horsemen of disease, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, all of those are chronic conditions. And if we’re paying attention, especially, we know this in functional medicine, if we’re collecting the data, if we are paying attention, we see them all coming. If we’re not collecting the data, we’re not looking into the today to see what’s coming on in the future we’re getting a lot of trouble. All right, so really important to make sure that we have some everyone listening to this. It’s so critically important. Ask yourself, if I keep doing what I’m doing today. What am I going to be like in 10 years physically, like your range of motion, how strong are you? How, what’s your mind doing today? Because it’s not going to get easy. I promise. We think it gets easier as we get older. Does not. All right. So let’s talk about chiropractic because I think this is a missing link in a lot of people’s journey toward health. And I’m going to break it down old school and make it as simple, but, really it’s clear as I possibly can, because this is a real key in all of our, even all of functional medicine. So the way the things work is that our bodies are either taking in or sending out messages nonstop. And all of that boils back down to your central nervous system. The ability for our body to communicate, is the key link here. So generally a good qualified chiropractor and I mean, I’m going to say that they’re all qualified, hopefully they’re all that just qualified. Hopefully that’s the way it’s shaken down. Anyways, the goal, all of us, we all have different strategies and techniques and how we’re going to do it but the end of the day, when we deliver an adjustment or an alignment to someone’s spine, we are taking pressure, off of the nervous system to allow the body to communicate better with the brain, that communication, just like anything in life communications at the root of the effectiveness. If the communication is inhibited because of poor postures, because of misalignments, because of any type of stress, and I think that’s important to recognize these different stresses. We can go there in just a moment. But if there’s any interference, whatever those nerves were supposed to go out to all of a sudden, now they don’t have the communication. I’ll give you a simple example. All right, let’s just say that someone comes in and they got pain in between their shoulder blades, this is a classic chiropractic example that they got pain in between the shoulder blades your chiropractor palpates down T4, T5, T6, which is your thoracic vertebrae, 4 5 or 6. They find that there’s some kind of dysfunction there, a misalignment, maybe a little bit of edema. Those same nerves got your gallbladder. So when someone sees me, I practice functional medicine and functional nutrition, and I know that they have a gallbladder issue. They have burping, they have gas, they have bloating right after they eat. My brain immediately goes, gotta check T4. Got to check T5 and for a couple of decades now, often you adjust that and all of a sudden they breathe a little bit better, it takes because we’re removing the interference and establishing a better connection between the mind and the body. So do I think that nutrition and mindset are improved? As a result of getting these adjustments and the answer is heck yes.
Lori Esary: Absolutely. Right. And I would think over the past 3 years, as many of our lives have become, unfortunately, more sedentary, right? Walking through this, of course, this change in our society, more to working at home over the computer and not over the last two years. I think just in general society as a whole has become more sedentary. I think that is contributing to that issue as well. Right? Just our posture and sitting long periods of time in front of a computer.
Dr. Bart: Yeah, well, sitting is a new smoking. It really is.
Kelly Engelmann: Yes.
Dr. Bart: And again, just like I talked about the four horsemen, it could fall into that category. I could say that posture is one of the most predictable. Components of your future, when I see someone’s posture, I know what’s taking place. I know.
Lori Esary: I’m going to say ouch for a minute. Ouch. Because, that reminds me to sit up because you’re exactly right. Wow.
Dr. Bart: Yeah. So there’s so many things we know that when you start to roll your shoulders forward and compress your thoracic cage, your rib cage down, your heart has to work harder. It makes sense, right? Everything’s getting compressed. Your digestive system, your stomach, the way that your body is going to release hydrochloric acid. All of those things are impacted by your posture. So when we see poor posture and this is a critical component of health, and we all grew up in an era where we were told sit up straight, stand tall for many reasons. And now we see it as, I don’t even know if it’s dressed anymore. Like, I don’t know, other than a chiropractor, quite frankly, I don’t even know who would talk to a patient about posture.
Lori Esary: It should actually be a vital sign. We do heart rate. We do blood pressure. I’m thinking based on how critical it is to a person’s health. Why aren’t we looking at it? Why aren’t we assessing it? And we should be. Yeah, absolutely.
Kelly Engelmann: Yeah, I had a patient that I took on a few years ago. He was 75 when he joined my practice and his posture was terrible. He was an accountant and he sat at his desk forward posture. Brain was still really good. He was still very active. He hiked. And I said, listen, there’s a lot I can do for you, but I can do even better if you’ll get a good chiropractor and start really working on that posture. And I didn’t see him for like three months and when I saw him back, he had been working with a chiropractor and I’m telling you, he reversed his age by a good 20 years. Like, just the way he didn’t look cognitively intact before, even though he was, but once he got that posture adjusted, I mean, it was just amazing the changes that happened with him.
Dr. Bart: Yeah, I think I’m a little spoiled because I’ve been seeing that for the last several decades. And you said, you talked about cognitive function and absolutely the more the head goes like out forward, we’re sitting at our desk and we literally is putting tension on the spinal cord and it’s pulling on the brainstem. As a result of that, your body has to go into defense mode, which means it has to go in protect mode. And once we do that, we’re now in more in recovery phase than we are rebuilding phase. And that is the, pretty much the opposite of when we talk about anti aging. We’re always in recovery. We’re always trying to fix what’s broken. We’re not moving toward the future. We’re literally, we’re sinking ourselves deeper into a hole.
Kelly Engelmann: Absolutely. I want to get into something that Lori mentioned earlier and she used the words qualified chiropractor and I just have to explain that a little bit because we oftentimes will suggest that a patient go see a chiropractor and we get this look like what? And I’m always amazed at the look because I so appreciate, what you guys do and in my mind, if we can preserve memory, vision and mobility, then we have done amazing things at preserving function and quality of life. But oftentimes we get that look like you expect me to go see a chiropractor. I don’t know where that started. But I want to dispel that, help us do that, Dr. Bart.
Dr. Bart: All right, so I’ll do the best that I can. So I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing it because often that’s how you dispel it. Another health care professional, says to their patient, there are some other tools that would effectively help your life.
Kelly Engelmann: Yes.
Dr. Bart: Chiropractic has been around for over a hundred years. And here’s what’s so fascinating about it, that it hasn’t changed its course. The same message, the science, of course, evolves around the philosophy yet the fundamentals of what chiropractic has been from from day one. And I’ll dive deep a second here for you. So the entire profession is based on 3 things, a philosophy, which I will tell you right now. I think it’s 1 of the only professions, healthcare professions that actually has a philosophy. And the philosophy is real simple that healing happens from above down inside out, meaning that from our creator, we were given these gifts, these bodies, and that it’s a self healing mechanism, an organism that can heal itself, if we remove the interference. So most people would align with that to some degree, but the challenge is our health care system right now is not aligned with that, they believe that the provider creates the healing it’s an outside in an allopathic approach, so that didn’t really answer your question, but that’s kind of a neat part of chiropractic, anyways there’s three parts to chiropractic, there’s philosophy, science, and an art, and from day one, it’s always been, if there’s interference, a spinal misalignment, anything from the normal, ideal functioning human spine, there’s going to create interference. From that part of the spinal cord up to the brain and the message back and that interference could be caused by anything kill It’s what this is what’s interesting. You could eat the wrong foods, and you can have a visceral somatic effect meaning how many of us have eaten wrong foods and our posture changes our belly hurts and we move forward and that’s an aggressive kind of obvious acute situation, but how many foods make us tired and change our posture? How many foods make us full and blew? Didn’t we change our postures, our shoulders roll forward and we stay in this inflamed posture. So anything that creates interference, physical, emotional, chemical, any one of those can create interference and the beauty for the chiropractor, any one of us and there’s so many different techniques, all of them end at the same place, a spine that’s better aligned and better moving, that opens up the freeway the channels of communication between the mind and body. And listen to all the other fun stuff, you move better, you feel better, you breathe better, almost instantaneous, those are all givens the other parts of it, the communication between the mind, body, that’s the magic.
Lori Esary: Yeah, and they’re all wins, when you think about optimal performance, like you said, longevity looking at 10 years out 20 years out. If you spend the time intentionally to do that now, you’re going to be more equipped and that’s going to be your default patterns as you move forward to. I wanted to ask the question on frequency of visits because, that’s a challenge when I think about. Is it a one and done? Is it a treatment plan? What does that look like?
Dr. Bart: Those are gonna vary and those are the great questions so thanks for asking us because a lot of people get confused, well I went to a chiropractor and it sounds like I have to go for the rest of my life. I’ll back up by him to get a little more value to chiropractor in the sports world right now. I don’t know of a single professional team, baseball, football, hockey, soccer, anything that doesn’t have chiropractic. And then you might step back and be like, well, they’re athletes it’s right and they’re trying to perform, at the highest level they possibly can so there’s that reason there. So let’s talk frequency. So one adjustment is definitely better than no adjustments, period. Just like one good meal would be better than no good meals. And the more opportunity you have, to live a life without interference, the better off you’re going to be as a human being. Now, with that being said, some of my colleagues might get mad at me saying this, but I’ll tell you how it usually when someone first comes to a chiropractor, you have some unwinding to do literally the nervous system, the memory, all of that, the musculoskeletal system, the fascia, so some frequencies often needed. And we’re not just talking just pain modulation. So getting out of pain is certainly important and fun, but to really get to the root cause, we want to create better stability, better movement, and better posture to the spine, better alignment. And it’s not uncommon. Now, first month of care, you might go to your chiropractor every week, you might even go there two or three times a week for a couple of weeks. And then that schedule will fade as you go. And the reason that’ll be, cause your body will start to get used to it. It’ll kind of recognize where home is again. And as you do those things, hopefully you’re also incorporating a little better movement in your life. You’re standing, sitting in your chair a little bit better, maybe getting up more frequently so you’re retraining your body. Someone like myself, I don’t even know if I’m well, I guess I’m a good example. I’m a regular human being who asks a tremendous amount of my physical body. I like to function at a high level, so I’m probably getting adjusted anywhere from once a week to as little as once a month if my schedule is inhibiting me and I will tell you, the best version of our functions when I’m getting adjusted every week, I’m hard on my body. I’m playing screens, automobiles. I’ll put eight hours a day into the farm work and and whatnot and I still train jiu jitsu and striking and all those fun things and so it gives me an opportunity and I think this would be good for the listeners to hear this. Anything we do, that allows us to function better, gives us more opportunity to make choice.
Kelly Engelmann: Yes.
Lori Esary: Definitely. That’s powerful.
Kelly Engelmann: It gives us the space to do that. It gives us the space to really process things and make better choices.
Dr. Bart: The journey toward health. Is it hard work? Yeah, it is. I think it’s simple in concept. You got to move right, eat right, think right. And the process, the journey becomes easier as we practice it. But anything new in the beginning is disruptive and it’ll feel hard until it becomes normalized. I like to lift weights. Is it hard? I guess it is, but I still like to do it. So, because I’ve been doing it for so long, it now is part of my lifestyle. The idea of bringing chiropractic into your life for some would be this weird thing, like, well, I don’t have a lot of neck pain or back pain. You don’t even need it. It’s an opportunity for you to function better, and choice is the key here. My luxury, I would almost say, my ability to be able to make a choice to go get a chiropractic adjustment allows me to work hard on the farm. I don’t have to use the excuses of, Oh, I’m getting too old for this, or I used to be able to do this, I still love doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It’s hard on my body. It’s hard. And thank goodness after I trained, I get to go get my adjustments because it gives me another opportunity, another choice the following day, and maybe you don’t have a farm, maybe you don’t want to do jujitsu, the big one I talk about with people every day in the office, how about picking up your grandkids? How about carrying all that stuff down to the beach for your grandkids? Is there going to have memories for the rest of their life? Will you be the grandma that has to stay home? Or are you going to be the one that’s just, hanging with the kids. You’re 65 and they are five. And you’re keeping up with them.
Lori Esary: I love what you said about hard and choosing. I think it goes back to that statement of choosing your heart. Cause I think exactly right. It’s hard. It’s hard to get up each day, right, to get outside from the standpoint it’s a privilege to get up every day, but to get up and go outside and maybe it is hard to make sure that you budget your time to get to your chiropractor, to budget your time, to meal prep and plan and eat the right things. But at the end of the day, if we’re not budgeting our time to do that and taking that hard route, then it’s going to be hard to be sick because being sick is hard to right?
Kelly Engelmann: Yeah, not going to the beach with your grandchildren. It’s hard.
Lori Esary: Yeah,
Kelly Engelmann: that would be hard for me to be honest.
Dr. Bart: That’s often what motivates people for the 1st time. To go see the chiropractor to go see the functional medicine, new practitioner, because they are out of shortcuts, and they realize that something has to change otherwise, everything changes. I want to go back just a little bit to, picking your chiropractor as well. Fortunately, there’s a chiropractor on about every corner. Right? Which is a great thing. So we get to sample the buffet. So if you go to a restaurant and you don’t get a good meal, you don’t stop eating. And this is important to understand your health care. Yeah. And I know you both of you ladies get this 100%. Your health care, team members need to fit well with who you are. I would say to some degree, you should like them, you should like being their presence, you should enjoy gaining information and knowledge from them, they are there to help serve you to become the better version of yourself. If you dread an appointment, maybe you need a different office. Maybe you need a different approach toward that office. So don’t dread eating, right? Just cause you had a bad meal. You still got to eat, go find one that serves you, go find one that fits for you. I listen, I’m picky. I probably pass five chiropractors on my way, to go get adjusted.
Lori Esary: Yeah, as we should. And I think mutually too, it goes both ways. It’s a genuine bi directional relationship of provider to client, patient call it what you will. Right. And I think it is very, very important to be choosy. Who do you want to put in that space, that is giving you expert advice, and I think that making sure that we have kind of a list of what we’re looking for. We have to actually go to those appointments with an agenda as well. Like, what is our goal? And we have to be able to communicate what our goal is with that. And that goal has to align with what that practice offers and what that provider offers. Do you agree?
Dr. Bart: 100%. And I think that happens, it gets be more and more defined as you have a little bit more intention about what you want with your health as you move into the future. And that’s what I love when I love when, a client or patient comes in and they have tough questions. I know that they trust me enough to ask me those questions, versus holding them back because they’re afraid that they might offend me or maybe I wouldn’t have the answer, so I think it’s a great position when you’re starting to be able to ask questions that somehow reflect your values and your needs. Because every single one of us is different and every patient’s going to have different needs and values and as humans, as we go out, Kelly, so you for listeners out there, the reason Kelly and I know each other is because every time she comes to 38, this is where I practice.
Kelly Engelmann: Hey, I don’t want you to tell them that I come to your practice every time, multiple times, because then they’re going to want to book their appointments, I’ve had several come down to you from Jackson, Mississippi and book their appointments so remember, Dr. Bart, when you get too busy, I’m still going to call and try to get in.
Dr. Bart: We’ll always make that space for you. But I think to this conversation, this is a perfect example, of health isn’t a thing that we do when it’s convenient that we’re always looking for opportunities to level up. In the beginning that might be very difficult, but somewhere along the way, we didn’t know each other, and you took the risk, you took the hard opera risk of this could go bad, right? It’s possibility. I could waste my time. I could waste my money, but you take the risk, and you go out and seek out what you want, as a result, not only hopefully you’re getting the type of care and my intention is that we’re exceeding it always, that we’re exceeding what the patient’s expecting from us through education, through value, through intention. And then also we get the beauty of having a friendship as a result of it.
Kelly Engelmann: Absolutely.
Lori Esary: And I want to go back to living optimally is a pursuit. I want to say that again because it is it’s an active pursuit you have to be, it’s I like to say we’re either moving in a direction towards wellness or we are moving in a direction away from it. Life is not static. It’s very, very dynamic. So I love what you said, I had to just reiterate that.
Kelly Engelmann: Yeah. So Dr Bart, when I came to balance studio down on 30A, I came in for the yoga. Not realizing that you were there, right? And then once I realized you were there, I think I happened to be down there when I was having a challenge. And I thought well, like you said, I took a chance. I’m going to go in and see if he can help me out. And my expectations were exceeded. Since that time, I’ve done acupuncture with you. So I do want to get into some acupuncture conversation and some conversation around acoustic wave, too, because those are modalities that oftentimes, patients would tremendously benefit for having in their wellness toolbox, to pull from at times when they need those modalities or sometimes ongoingly for stress management. So I do want to get into some of that because I think it’s fascinating. Like I said, I’m just And all of what you guys have created down there, out of the need, you saw a need, you’re kind of developing that practice around the need that you’re seeing. So let’s talk about acupuncture.
Dr. Bart: So in the same philosophy as chiropractic, it is another opportunity so Chinese medicine is the oldest form of medicine in the world. We’ll start there. And fundamentally, it wasn’t necessarily just to cure, back pain or neck pain or anything like that it was to help the human body get your energy or what we call chief flowing. So you become a self healing machine. So very similar to the philosophical approach of chiropractic as let’s do this job from the inside out, let’s give the body an opportunity to function at its highest level. Let me sidestep for a second. I think the last three years especially as a practitioner really exposed something that we paid attention to the outside the bad guy was coming through the front door and we’re trying to avoid the bad guy. Well, I got news for us. We can’t avoid the bad guy. The bad guy is coming. What goes on inside determines ultimately everything that’s going to shake down. I would have loved to said that these last three years have really exposed and people have woken up to the idea that, well, wait a minute what if I just made myself stronger? I’d like to say that that’s been, like really a massive philosophical approach I don’t know that it has, and the reason I think is because it’s still not what the health care system is saying, they’re still looking for the magic pill from the outside.
These things we just mentioned are chiropractic, acupuncture, nutrition, for that matter, a sound wave, which we’ll talk about. The reason they all work is because they’re allowing what’s on the inside to work better. What we forget is that there are viruses, there’s bacterias, there’s parasites, there’s infections in our body every single day. And if we’re not strengthened from the inside out, if we’re not giving our body on a cellular level, an opportunity to heal better, we’re always going to be in defense mode. So, when we look at something like acupuncture, if I was to simplify the 60 second version here, we’re trying to get energy to flow through the body unencumbered, so not too much would might show up like a muscle spasm, it might show up like anxiety might show up like irritable bowel syndrome. It might show up like, Oh, you might have some numbness and tingling, or we don’t want too little. Where we might have a weakening core, we might have depression, we may have an ability to break down foods, we have blocked energy, or what we call blocked chi. So it’s very simple, we’re just trying to use these old techniques, and the techniques are using acupuncture needles along these meridian points, there’s about 400 different meridian points in the body, we use these little points to get the chi to flow. And the beauty is that every session you get with acupuncture reminds the energy of the body of where balance is. That gets lost a lot of times in modern, era of acupuncture a lot of people using for pain management, which is great because a muscle spasm is blocked chi. And chronic muscles that don’t heal and they’re really tight. Those are block chi. There’s not enough chi going to those so when we balance those out, they heal so those are wonderful, but I would say the most common reason I see patients for acupuncture right now, probably anxiety, stomach issues and infertility.
Lori Esary: Wow.
Kelly Engelmann: So you’ve said a few times that the body is an amazing, creation that has the capacity to heal. So I want to say that again, because I think everyone needs to understand that fundamentally, that is the truth. And the things that get in our way of healing, are the foods that we’re eating, the thoughts that we’re having, the way we’re moving our body or not moving our body, our lack of sleep a lot of those are lifestyle driven factors that are getting in the way of the body’s ability to heal. And then using these modalities, like chiropractic care, and acupuncture, and sound wave therapy, can be modalities that help us speed up the process or eliminate the challenge or bring our chi back into balance so that healing can be expedited.
Dr. Bart: Yes, that statement. I think we could say it a thousand different ways and a thousand different times, and every time it would be as important as the first, that the body’s a self healing, self regulating mechanism that it is literally designed to heal. And once we have some level of consciousness of that, I think that’s where the game starts to change. And with those evidence every day literally you cut yourself today, you do something or nothing the body’s going to heal. Right, and we so we see the evidence of healing all the time. The challenge is, is as we age, it’s not even aging that it is the inhibiting factor it is the amount of interference that we’ve had. You mentioned nutrition for a moment, often and I mean, often I’ve had patients come from other doctors offices and they say, well, it doesn’t matter how many vitamins or supplements, what you eat it won’t matter in this scenario, because this is serious stuff to them. I always say, okay, it doesn’t matter. Don’t eat for the next two weeks. Don’t eat for two weeks and see how that shakes down. See what your relationship is like, literally how well you’re going to communicate with the people that you absolutely love, see how well you’re going to perform at work when you don’t have nutrients in your body. See. Well, your body’s going to feel you will be a different human being in two weeks without eating, and it won’t be a better one. You will be deficient, you will be down regulating everything, how you move, how you eat and think will all be in destructive mode, and that’s just because of eating. So when someone tells me it doesn’t matter if we have deficiencies or we don’t need supplements, we don’t need herb food, I say, unfortunately, someone is not just telling you the wrong information, they are lying to you and I think a lie happens when we have a truth that we’re unwilling to face, so we continue to spread our weakness. And I know that sounds kind of hard, but I believe that because there’s people who have, don’t want to put that hard work in, they keep to some degree spreading that same message that there’s a different way and easier way there’s hard work, listen to eat good on a regular basis, especially in the beginning, not easy but the rewards 100 percent.
Lori Esary: And don’t you think there’s also this confusion about dis ease versus disease. I think too often we’re waiting for that ownership of some sort of disease versus understanding that dis ease and dysfunction can be occurring for 10 to 15 to 20 years prior to that manifestation of a disease they were up hands in the air, now you have diabetes, now you have alluded to that in the very beginning of this conversation is, let’s interact and let’s respond sooner.
Dr. Bart: Yeah, that’s a hard message I’m in practice for a long time, and that right there is still 1 of the hardest challenges I have to help educate people about, recognizing the dis ease and the dysfunction that is taking place, even though it’s not painful on where it’s had I think we all have inherently like, I feel good today, I’m good to go, I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing. And that is where I really love this approach for functional medicine practitioners that we might say, listen let’s not wait, until everything’s bad let’s collect some data about your lifestyle, about how you move, eat, and think, and let’s also collect some data about your hormones are doing, let’s collect some data about what your blood work is doing, your iron levels, your endocrine system let’s check it all out. And then with that data, we then get to see where are we headed? What’s on its way? I would love to say, Lori, that yes, it’s easy to just tell people we’ve got to listen to the dis ease or understand the dis ease before the disease comes in, because you’re right where most people, I don’t even like saying that way but oftentimes people wait for that label, before they take the action, and those four horsemen and I just mentioned their cancer, diabetes, especially type two, heart disease number one cause in our country and the neurodegenerative diseases, that’s Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Dementia’s. All four of those are 20 plus year diseases, 20 plus years and we run labs right now. And if I only ran your insulin resistant markers and your lipid panels, and I got to see your triglycerides and hydro, high density lipoproteins, if I saw those right now, I know the writing on the wall for all four of those,
Lori Esary: Right? Absolutely.
Dr. Bart: All four of them. And I mentioned that because that’s what all four of them have in common, they all have one thing in common, which is insulin resistance. So it’s not getting measured you guys know that no one’s you don’t go to your hospital, your doctor doesn’t check it. It only gets way down the road as you have all the symptoms of type two diabetes, maybe then maybe someone will run insulin resistant marker. But that’s just a good example of, if we wait for disease wait for the label, and it means you’ve probably waited 10 and 20 years and way many of us are practicing now we can, and there’s no guarantee, like it’s no guarantee even if we’re doing the right things, but there’s a likelihood, there’s a likelihood of the direction you’re headed into.
Kelly Engelmann: Yeah. One of the things that we’re doing, Lori and I both in our practices, we’re using a lot of those continuous glucose monitoring for patients. We can’t see insulin, but we can see the effects of insulin by measuring glucose, right? So, even people that are running low. Right? That’s dysregulated insulin production all day long, right? You don’t have to have high glucose or type 2 diabetes to be experiencing stress, physiological stress related to insulin, poor insulin management and that’s creating an element of stress in the body that will eventually lead to disease, right? And so, we could spend a whole hour or really honestly a whole day talking about why patients, why people, why individuals don’t take action until there is a disease state, right? I think that’s multifactorial. I had a patient in my practice a couple of weeks ago that came in and said that she called my office three times to book, it was her fourth time calling before she actually booked on her drive into the office almost did not keep the appointment because she felt like her struggles were not really legitimate. She wasn’t sick enough, to come in and be evaluated. Her labs were a mess, a complete mess and that was sad to me that she had not been given the message that self-care is okay, that self-care is essential to taking care of your body for the rest of your life, so I’m so proud that she did come in and she did invest in her health and were able to make a plan for her but, how many people don’t?
Dr. Bart: Yeah, and I think I started off by just, I meant to comment on that because that’s real. If I had a magic wand right now, it would be somehow to lift that veil. To somehow show the things that as practitioners and humans, we’re practitioners, but we’re humans first. Who’ve experienced challenges with our health, with our bodies, and we have so much this broad experience to be able to sit back and look. If I had a magic wand to lift that veil, and really help people see if we don’t change our ways, the future is not as pretty as we want it to be. Let me back up a little bit because we mentioned soundwave in terms of you peeps listening to this have another opportunity of thinking, well, there’s other things out there.
Kelly Engelmann: Yeah.
Dr. Bart: You all have Soundwave therapy.
Kelly Engelmann: Yes, we do.
Lori Esary: We do.
Dr. Bart: We introduced to our office probably six, seven months ago and again, based on my personal needs, toward my meniscus and my knee kickboxing, and I was running out of options until I looked farther and this is a perfect example. If you’re not looking, you won’t find. But when you’re looking, there’s a lot of wonderful things, a lot of wonderful human beings out there to assist in your journey of health. So Soundwave Therapy is one of the most probably significant therapies out there that is non invasive, extremely, extremely safe, and the effectiveness is incredible. If I can, I’ll just real quickly kind of share what’s really taking place. I’ll simplify it. There’s a sound wave therapy it looks like a an ultrasound, there’s a gel and there’s a head and you kind of rub it on there and you go over certain body parts and, in the body wherever there is connective tissue, which is fascia, muscle, tendons, ligaments, bone, all of these things, any of it that has changed over time and become less vascular, it has built up some scar tissue, or maybe you have arthritis, maybe you have an old scar. And listen, you could have had a knee surgery every time you cut into the body, you affect the entire fascist status of the human body. You have a knee surgery, you’ve changed if you have a right knee surgery, you’ve changed what’s going on in your left shoulder. And we see that cross crawl so the left shoulder starts to fold forward because of the tightness in the knee. So any one of these areas where there is connective tissue dysfunction, what happens to that, meaning that the tissue itself is not breathing as well. It’s not exchanging blood like it used to, and the blood carries the nutrients, oxygen and hormones to heal, but it’s not doing it anymore. So now we’ve advanced the aging process and here’s the beauty. That soundwave therapy goes in there and it starts to bounce off and remodel that connective tissue dysfunction. We start to revascularize that tissue. So we see things like arthritis, we start to see things like connective scar tissue, start to break up people that have frozen shoulders, knee issues, heck, I was just talking to a practitioner yesterday, they’re helping women with endometriosis, which I haven’t done in my office yet, but excited to go back and utilize it for this. We’re seeing these things happen in the beauty, here’s the healing component. So the machine is not doing the healing, the machine, that remodeling is eliciting a stem cell response. And this has been going on since the day that we were born as your body breaks down because we’re self healing mechanism as the body recognizes tissue damage. Which it is remodeling that tissue, it’s breaking up again, it elicits stem cells and we have plenty of stem cells and I know stem cell therapy is really popular and a little bit unknown and super expensive. We don’t lack stem cells. We got billions in our body. It’s the eliciting of them is the key. So when you use that sound wave therapy, we’re only talking a couple of minutes, a couple of minutes of a noninvasive therapy, maybe a couple of times a week, maybe not goes in there and you start to remodel. And next thing you know, your shoulder moves better immediately, you get back into doing what you’re doing maybe you’re playing tennis, maybe you’re walking on the beach with your kid. And as you start to reutilize and use and get better function back into those joints, the results, I’m sure you guys could say the same thing are phenomenal.
Lori Esary: And when you pair that with nutrition, right. And you pair that with better sleep mindset, water, all of those things, activity, oxygenation, nutrients and then maybe even peptides, right. Peptide therapy so there’s all those tools in that toolbox to really help that performance for sure.
Kelly Engelmann: So you mentioned something earlier, Dr. Bard about you get a cut, and regardless of what you do, that cuts going to heal because the body is a self healing mechanism, but the quality of that healing. Right? It’s dependent on all those things Lori just mentioned. And so that’s what we want to really affect is the quality of that healing. So Acoustic Wave has been a tremendous tool, we started using it first for male sexual health. We used it for erectile dysfunction in the very beginning, then female sexual health and then we realized what it could do to ligaments and joints and mobility and that kind of thing, we’ve had frozen shoulders that have just completely, one that was about to go to the OR for manipulation that we were able to get resolution on. So again, we’re stimulating that body to produce stem cell and recruit circulation to the area, neovascularization so that healing can take place and the body can heal in a better way.
Dr. Bart: And that’s a great point that you both made there that. As you can, you fill in all of these opportunities that if you’re not hydrated. So for the most part, it’s predictable. So when someone comes in, I can kind of predict the level and the rate that they’re going to heal, because of the other things, how well hydrated are they, are they using the rest of the other muscles in their body? Are they creating nutrients to flow through their veins and pump out into the tissues? What is their sleep? What is their food they’re putting in their body? Is their nutrients, are their nutrients fighting and competing against chemicals? And that’s what people forget sometimes that the chemicals you put in your body are taking up spaces and places. And if you’re then putting in some good nutrients, those nutrients somehow have to navigate through all those chemicals and all the guards that are up, all the inflammation that’s been produced to try to get to the joints. So if we are better hydrated, we are moving, we are sleeping, we’re taking out the chemicals, we’re reducing all the inflammatory agent. We’re good, we’re healing at a much faster and a more complete way than versus just sitting there and watching it.
Kelly Engelmann: Right.
Lori Esary: Yeah. I was just wondering if we could go back for a minute to something that was said earlier and I know this is a common question that many of our listeners would think about, but there’s so much good and mostly bad information online around spine health. So what are the common inaccuracies that you hear from your new clients that you simply hear and maybe even disagree with.
Dr. Bart: That’s a great question as well, so I think there’s some ideas that I’m going to take that in two directions. One, I think people think that we can separate like our neck versus our back. So our spine is one continuous movement. Any movement you make, it’s just like a bicycle chain, you can’t move one link without moving all the others. Everything, whether it be your cervical spine, your lumbar spine, your thoracic, there’s a natural flow that takes place, we’re not designed to move one vertebrae at a time. In fact, we can’t, everything works together. So if you have neck rim limitations, there’s a good chance the rest of your spine is tight as well. So there’s that. The other one, Lori, I think when, as soon as you say that comes out is very much like in other parts of labeling that people think that, well, I got arthritis in my neck and they just accept it, boom label. I have this thing. There’s often not much association to one. What did I do, that might’ve created this arthritis and what can I do to correct it? And that is a huge part of it, people tell me they have arthritis. So what do you know what that means? And usually they just say no. No, it just could be any boogley, boogley label. That’s what arth just means joints means you have inflammation of joints so, you just spent a fair amount of money and testing and x rays and MRIs to tell you that you have inflammation in your joint, but that’s what you walked in there telling them. So when it comes to our spine, it is our lifeline. That would be the first message I would tell everyone that you live by the way of your spine. No one will ever feel old or say that they are old until they wake up one morning and it’s hard to put their shoes on. The only time people talk about feeling old is when it’s hard to move, your range of motion in your spine is your lifeline when it comes to range of motion. And when it comes to just moving through life so if there was one thing to put an emphasis on is how do I improve the status of the health of my spine. It is our lifeline.
Lori Esary: Yes.
Kelly Engelmann: So, Dr. Bart, can we go into some practical applications? We’ve talked about, the wellness, building your resilient plan or your wellness plan. We’ve talked about who’s on your wellness team, some modalities that could be part of your wellness journey, but what are some practical things so People come in, they have adjustments, what are some things they can do in between adjustments to help improve, limit the amount of adjustments they have to have number one, but also improve mobility.
Dr. Bart: I’ll answer this on kind of the physical component of our bodies, and I’ll break it down this way. So there’s three things when it comes to our physical body, it is our range of motion, it is our strength literally our muscle, and then our stamina. No one get mad at me for saying what I’m gonna say next, but hear me out. So ladies, here’s typically the order that you work on. You typically work on stamina, which is cardio and you have no strength, especially as we age. Men, you work on strength and you have no range of motion and typically no stamina. We have to know which one of those is our strong point and which are weak. So generally I just broad throw it out there, I can say this, men, you got to get involved with yoga ASAP, right away. You’re all too tight, born tight, the tighter you are, the more risk for injury, period. That’s it. Ladies, you have to get stronger, especially if you’ve entered menopause as your estrogen goes down, your ability to make strong bone tendons and muscles get harder and harder every single year. So you have to be involved in gaining strength. So ladies, you got to get stronger many have become more flexible. The rate order Cal that this should go is that we should be working all of us on our ability to move 1st, then developing strength and then stamina, so we should be able to move freely out here at the farm in your offices at your desk chasing your grandchildren. So we’re going to get our body stretched out. How simple is that? Is there one stretch? No, where you start a yoga class, and there’s a yoga out there for everyone. If I can on my website, can I mention my website. On our website, which is balance30a.Com. So that’s the number three zero a. com. To answer this question, there is a spinal flow video, that I created probably 15 years ago, tell how I healed up my own discs. I had three bolts and discs in my spine and pretty much everything in my life was inhibited because my spine, I couldn’t move. So I started to try to figure out how I was going to heal up these discs, which you can do. So on this, if you go to balance30a. com, there should be a tab, I haven’t been there for a little bit. So I think there’s a tab that says Dr. Bart and videos. In those videos is one called spinal flow. That is where I start. Everybody.
Kelly Engelmann: Okay.
Dr. Bart: Even if you feel like you’re doing good, that is getting your spine mobility, the connection between your sacrum, the cerebral spinal pump in your brain every single morning. This is spinal maintenance, about two minutes, I don’t even call it a stretch. Just pumping the spine to increase the height back into the discs. We shrink as we go, not because our bones get smaller because the discs become essentially squished down, and that is a dehydration of nutrients of movement. So that first part of getting better range of motion back into our lives, that’s probably other than inactivity, the number one thing that inhibits range of motion is a bad diet.
Lori Esary: Say it again. Say it again.
Dr. Bart: Yeah. And Lori, I can’t loud as I try to people walk around in pain and there’s, oh, I got back to the shoulder pain, neck pain, everything. Clean your diet up. You’ll clean your pain up. That’s it. All pain is telling us, what you’re currently doing is not working.
Lori Esary: Yeah. your engine lights going off. Right. So what are you going to do with that?
Dr. Bart: Yeah. You don’t get out of the car and cut the wire, right? You don’t show up. I don’t like red. You want to listen and I’ll listen, I understand pain’s not fun, but getting out of pain because you’ve taken action, a lot of fun gives you a lot of empowerment. It makes our futures look a lot brighter versus disempowering,
Lori Esary: Right? You have left us with so much to think about today, I want you to know I have taken a ton of notes. I just think reiteration of a lot of concepts not only that we have heard and we teach, but also just that I think we need to hear them again and again in different ways, right? And in different seasons of our lives, some of the things I’m walking away with, I want to go back to as we, because I could spend all day talking with you. I just think you’re encouraging, inspiring, you just have an energy about you that I just feel that people are very blessed to be able to come to your practice, and I encourage you to keep going with what you’re doing but I wanted to just say, you live by the life of your spine that’s something that I wrote down and I wanted to say it again, you live by the life of your spine. Defense mode is very expensive. I heard you say that being in defense mode is always very, very energy expensive. You need a plan, a strategy, because if you’re not working your plan and you don’t have a strategy, and I think James Clear says that very well in his book, we basically it’s not our goals really it’s the strategies we have in place, and it’s the systems we have in place to reach those goals. It’s work, but it’s worth it. You also said that the body really wants to heal. It has the ability to heal, we just have to provide it what it needs to do that. And then I’m going to leave out of here saying there’s an athlete in all of us, right? You said the NFL and the NHL and all of them have chiropractors, but there really is an athlete in all of us if we get down to it, we want to perform well, we want to live well, we want to be able to do the things that we love to do.
Dr. Bart: Lori, that’s a fantastic summary right there. And you’re absolutely right. Even if you don’t consider yourself an athlete or professional athlete, every one of us is, we want to move. We want to be able to pick up the grandkids, we want to be able to walk the dog success, we want to be able to literally lie on the ground for me a thing that brings joy is being able to lie on the ground, my dogs and roll around and not feel like an old man getting up off the living room floor. Those are things that if we’re not paying attention, we lose them. The qualities of life so absolutely every one of us is an athlete and that was a beautiful summary right there.
Lori Esary: Well, I got some homework to do, and I think that it reminds us that we all, despite, again, and I think so many times us in the practice of functional medicine and you as a chiropractor, I think sometimes people come in and say, you must have it all together, right? You must have it all together because you’re teaching this and I just want to remind everybody, it’s not about perfection, it’s about progress and these are the foundational principles to living well, but at the end of the day we all have different seasons of our lives and challenges and things that that do kind of interfere and we have to go back to those basics, we have to constantly re-innovate and we have to constantly re-evaluate that plan to make sure that we are doing what we need to do to live well, so thanks for the reminders today for sure.
So, Kelly, I just wanted to give Dr. Bart an opportunity to kind of give us the website and such.
Kelly Engelmann: Yeah. Also, Dr. Bart go into some information on Prima. You mentioned the cafe, but I don’t know, do you guys have a website? I didn’t look for that before.
Dr. Bart: Yeah, we had a couple of different websites here, so again, I mentioned a little bit balance30a.com is kind of a, what do we call our brick and mortar to where I do the chiropractic and acupuncture. I do some concierge services as well. People want to check out, it’s just my name, Dr. Bart at drbartprecourt.com. And that’s kind of in line with all my speaking schedule and whatnot. And then we have this incredible cafe called Prima Organic Cafe and that’s P R E M A organic cafe, so if you’re ever in this area, we’re in the panhandle of Florida. If you’re ever near seaside or Rosemary beach or Destin or Panama city, we’re in that area. We like to brag that it’s the best beaches in our country. It’s a beautiful oasis and we’re very blessed to be able to be there and we have an incredible community that overall has this real nice approach toward a philosophical approach toward health, like let’s get it even though we’re in our forties, fifties and sixties, there’s no reason we can’t still enjoy life at its fullest. And I think that’s kind of the message today as well, that if you’re thinking about and planning for those things, the opportunities are certainly there.
Kelly Engelmann: Awesome.
Lori Esary: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, because I know that you are busy and doing it from such a beautiful place that background behind you. I know that there were so many nuggets that you provided to us and to our listeners, so we appreciate you.
Dr. Bart: Well, thank you for having me you guys keep doing your thing, you’re changing lives and I appreciate you having me here today, just an opportunity for us all just to kind of work at this thing together.
Lori Esary: Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. You can find more information about Synergee at Synergee for life. That’s S Y N E R G E E the number for life. com.
Kelly Engelmann: And then Synergee Connect is our Facebook. And then please make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app so that you make sure you get future notifications of episodes.
Lori Esary: The purpose of our Synergee podcast is to educate. It does not constitute medical advice. By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others, including, but not limited to patients that you are treating. Please consult your own physician for any medical issues you may be having.
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