Listen or Read Dr. Rubinstein’s Monthly Podcast Interview!
Topic – Top Benefits of Chiropractic Care
Below you will find an easy to read transcript of Dr. Gregg Rubinstein’s interview on the razorcast™ monthly Podcast. You can either watch the video to listen to the podcast or simply read the easy to follow transcript below. Enjoy!
PodCast Interview:
RC: Hello everyone, this is Liz Harvey coming to you from our razorcast™ studios in New York City where we are dedicated to bringing you top quality advice from many of the leading industry professionals across the United States.
In today’s episode we are speaking with chiropractor, Dr. Gregg Rubinstein. Dr. Rubinstein is the founder of 57th Street Chiropractic located right here in the heart of midtown Manhattan where he has been practicing since 1993. He specializes in pediatric and family care and Dr. Rubinstein is a long standing member of the International Pediatrics Chiropractic Association. He also serves as a board member of Friends of Fresh and Green Academy, a nonprofit organization that does extensive charity work in education in Ethiopia.
Dr. Rubinstein is widely considered to be one of the top chiropractors in the U.S. and is also a contributing member of our national network of industry professionals.
RC: Dr. Rubinstein, how are you today?
Gregg Rubinstein: I’m doing just great, glad to be here!
RC: Thank you so much and we are so glad to have you with us as well! So today we’re going to talk about a very important topic which is the benefits of chiropractic care. So let’s get started!
Question 1 – Why should someone go to 57th Street Chiropractic vs to a medical doctor?
RC: I’d like to start with a pretty general question, why someone should go to your practice, 57th Street Chiropractic versus to a medical doctor?
Gregg Rubinstein: You know that’s a great question and it really comes down to the basic distinction that most people make. If you ask nine out of ten people on the street, you ask them what a chiropractor does, pretty sure you’re going to get the answer that they are going to talk about neck pain or back pain. Most people, the common perception think that I’m a chiropractor so I’m a back doctor.
There’s a big distinction to be made because yeah it’s true that we help a lot of people with back pain and neck pain, but being a chiropractor is really being more of a nerve system doctor. We use the spine as our avenue of approach because the spinal bones actually protect your central nervous system, but if those bones are out of alignment, they’re going to irritate the very same nerves they are designed to protect. When you have irritation to your nerve system, which is a primary communication system in the body, your body is not going to function and have a coordinative effort of health happen at that given time when there is interference to the nerve system.
A medical doctor typically is someone who treats symptoms. Medicine focuses on symptoms, sickness and disease. Whereas if you have a disease or you have a pain they are going to give you a pain killer. If you have inflammation they are going to give you an anti-inflammatory. So they do whatever the opposite is. They’re usually going to prescribe some type of medication to try and alter what is affecting your body, whereas a chiropractor looks at the body as a whole. You might have heard the term that chiropractic is holistic, affecting the whole body, and how we do that is by eliminating nerve interference from the body by getting rid of the subluxation or misalignment that’s putting pressure on the nerve. So when you clear the nerve system your body is going to function better as a whole.
That’s an important distinction because medicine will continually start to look at a body and break it down into these different specialties. Where this guy is a cardiologist, this one’s a pulmonologist, this one’s an immunologist, and they work on little sub-sections of the body rather than treating the body as a whole. So the big difference in chiropractic versus medicine is that chiropractic is a holistic approach to the body. Where medicine is typically only going to be treating specific symptoms not necessarily the cause, because if I drop an anvil on my foot it’s going to hurt and the doctor will give me a pain killer and that pain will go away but it doesn’t address the initial cause as to why that anvil fell on my foot.
RC: Right!
Question 2 – What can you, as a doctor of chiropractic, do that a medical doctor cannot do?
RC: Now you talked about how chiropractic approaches medicine differently, and you talked about the holistic approach. Is there anything as a doctor of chiropractic that you do that a medical doctor cannot do?
Gregg Rubinstein: There are many differences and you know the primary thing is of the approach, because chiropractic again focuses on health. We want to find out what makes the body be healthy, what is the physical state of the body and how can we make the body healthier, not just alleviate symptoms. We really want to look at the cause and if they cause is coming from within the nerve system, if it’s irritated, then if we can remove that interference the body will restore back to normal homeostasis. By you taking medicine or pain killers, those only cover up the symptoms and never really deal with the cause of the problem.
RC: Right, That’s great!
Question 3 – Can both adults & children be checked for subluxations and how often?
RC: Now when it comes to treating your patient, can both adults and children be treated and checked for things like subluxation, I have trouble with that one. Is that something you can tell us a little bit more about?
Gregg Rubinstein: Absolutely, and that word subluxation, a lot of people trip over it and it’s really good to get the definition of that. A subluxation is when one or more of the spinal bones is misaligned into an abnormal position, and when that bone is out of place, because of its close proximity to the nerves, when it’s out of place it will irritate the nerve structure and actually choke off the flow of nerve energy through the body.
Now to answer your question, of course both adults and children can be checked because children have a nerve system just like an adult does and that nerve system is responsible for every stage of growth and development in a child and in an infant, and it’s also responsible for coordinating the healing effort of your immune system. Your immune system is directly controlled by your nerve system. So if your nerve system has interferences, being choked off, do you think that that child’s immune system is going to work the best that it can?, absolutely not!
That’s why it’s important to get kids checked, kids walk around with scoliosis. You ever watch a child learning to walk, they fall ten, twenty times a day. They get older, they play sports, they rough house with their brothers and sisters. Accidents, stress, tension, all these things will add up over time and create these misalignments which will then start to irritate the nerve. So I don’t care if you’re a newborn or if you’re ninety-nine years old, there is probably a benefit available to you by getting pressure off your nerve system.
RC: That sounds great!
Question 4 – What happens during a visit to your office?
RC: What happens during a visit to your office? If parents want to bring their children in to see you, or if anyone at any age wants to come in. What could they expect when they get to your office?
Gregg Rubinstein: Well the first thing that we always want to do is we want to make sure that the person that I’m sitting with is actually someone I can help. So what we want to determine is, whatever their presenting health complaint is, is it related to a subluxation or a misalignment in the spine. So the first thing we do is we take a careful history, and that’s just like in any medical office. You go in there; they’re going to take a history. They are going to find out what brought you in today, how long have you had it, what makes it worse, what makes it better, and we are going to use that information to kind of draw more information from the patient. So initially I want to learn why they are here, what they are looking for. I also like to gain a little bit of an understanding of what do they really know about chiropractic and why they’re here, and why did they choose a chiropractor appose to a physical therapist or a medical doctor or an acupuncturist or whatever. So I like to draw that information first.
Once we have a clear idea of what they’re hear for and their understanding of chiropractic, the second thing we do is a physical exam. I want an examination done that determines does this person have a subluxation? Is there a problem I can help them with? So we go through the exam. If we determine that there are subluxations present after the initial screening, we’ll do a complete examination which includes range of motion assessment, some orthopedic and neurological tests to make sure there’s no complicating factors. Then in many cases, not all, we’ll take some x-rays, because on the x-rays that helps us grade and gage how long they’ve had the subluxation, what type it is, if it’s acute or chronic, and it also lets me know, what does it really take to get that problem corrected. That’s all information gained from those x-rays. So those are a really important part of the tool, but we’re not going to x-ray every single person, obviously an expecting mom is not going to get an x-ray. A newborn baby is probably not going to get an x-ray unless we have a really good reason for it.
That’s what we do on the initial examination, that’s the first visit. The second visit obviously we’re going to come and we’re going to explain everything to the patient. Most people on visit two want four questions answered. They want to know, what’s wrong with me? Can you help me? How long will it take? And how much money does it cost? And that’s what we answer on the second visit and then from there we go into the spinal adjusting or the correction of the vertebral subluxations that we find.
RC: Great, it sounds like you customize each visit depending on the patient and I think that’s fantastic. A lot of people are defiantly interested in that in today’s day and age for sure.
Question 5 – What is the biggest benefit that chiropractic care can offer for pain and overall wellness?
RC: So lastly, for our last question today. What is the biggest benefit that chiropractic care can offer just for pain and overall wellness?
Gregg Rubinstein: You know that’s a really great question and you know I’ll admit that the majority of people come to my office seeking treatment for a painful condition. But the thing that is so interesting to me going back to the fact that we’re really nerve system doctors and we’re trying to affect the nerve system. Sensing pain and moving muscle is really only 10% of what your nerve system does. The other 90% of what your nerve system does is control your heart, your lungs, your kidney, your spleen, your intestine; it controls your immune system. Every single cell in your body is connected to your brain and your brain monitors what that cell is supposed to be doing. If you have subluxations interfering with the flow of nerve energy or choking off the nerve flow, that cell is not going to get the proper information and the information from that cell isn’t going to go properly back up to the brain if its distorted, and that breakdown in communication causes the breakdown in your overall health. That’s truly where the overall wellness component of chiropractic comes from. By maximizing the function of your nerve system, getting pressure off the nerve, it allows your body to do its job more efficiently and better.
That’s the most important part of the overall wellness, treating pain. Look if there’s a pinched nerve and it’s pinched hard enough; of course it’s going to cause pain. We remove that pressure and in many instances the pain does go away. So it’s very simple, but what I always find so interesting is that many people come in and they only want to use the 10% of chiropractic deals with pain and ignore the other 90%. They just don’t get the full benefit from what we do, if you’re only focused on pain or symptoms. So teaching people about overall wellness and the big picture in chiropractic is really important in our office.
RC: Well that’s excellent, thank you so much! That is all the questions that I have today. Thank you Dr. Rubinstein.
Gregg Rubinstein: It’s an honor to be here and I really appreciate having the time and the opportunity to share what I know.
RC: Well it is an honor to have you for sure and we know you’re very busy, thanks so much for your time today and for our listeners across the country:
If you’re interested in speaking with Dr. Gregg Rubinstein you can either go online at www.chiropractormidtown.com or call (917) 534-6484 to schedule an appointment.
On behalf of our entire team at razorcast™, we want to thank you for listening and we look forward to bringing you more top quality content from our country’s leading industry professionals.
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