Empowering Women in Chiropractic - Empowering Health: Knowing Your Risk

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Hi everybody. Dr. Julie McLaughlin here with Empowering Women from ChiroSecure. Today we are gonna be talking about empowering health, the science between the informed choices, . Through knowing your risk. I don't want you to gamble with your health or with your patient's health. So we're gonna talk about how to figure out these risk factors and there's some things that we can do about 'em.

So let's get started. I have a few slides to share with you. So first of all, I want you guys to give thumbs up, lots of love, lots of hearts for ChiroSecure because they are awesome. Not only do they help us with our insurance needs, but they also give us so much education and so much support in our profession.

And I don't know what we do without 'em, so make sure we're giving them lots of thumbs up and lots of love. So what I want you to think about is as chiropractors, we treat people with pain, right? That's what we see all day long. And a hundred million people in this country have chronic pain, and as chiropractors we, we treat that, but yet there's an opioid crisis.

In our country, like what the heck is with that? How could there be this epidemic of opioid use and cardiovascular surgeons and cardiologists, they treat heart disease, right? But yet 50% of the people in this country are going to die from heart disease. But I want you to know there's a direct link between chronic pain.

Heart disease regardless of a patient's B M I. So prevention has to be our first line. We have to get in there and we have to educate our patients, and we have to help them prevent pain and heart disease and all these other chronic problems. But how do we figure out what they are? Traditional route, traditional medicine, they look at something called the Framingham Risk Score, and it was developed in 1948.

That's a long time ago, and it's still being used today. They look at gender, age, total cholesterol, blood pressure, and smoking status, and it's gonna tell you if you're gonna have a heart attack in the next 10 years, but there's a huge error rate. 82% error rate in women and 66% error rate. Error rate in men.

So it overlooks, it doesn't look at body fat, it doesn't look at B M I and it gives you a false sense of security. So if you go to the doctor and they say, oh, you're framing am risk score is really good. And you go home and you're a woman and you think, oh, I'm having a little bit of heartburn, and you think the doctor said my heart's good so I don't have to worry about a heart attack.

And you have a heart attack and we know women's . First heart attacks are mostly likely fatal. That's a really huge problem. So when we look at this, there's other risk factors that we obviously need to look at, but this is very deceiving too. There's four major risk factors, hypertension, smoking, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes.

Now, did you know that 62% of people who have heart attacks. Have zero to one of these risks, right? So we can't base it on that either because you think, oh, they have this, they're more likely to have a heart attack and it's not true. So what I came up with is my own risk assessment. It's 20 questions long.

I'm gonna go through 10 of the questions with you now. So if you wanna get out a piece of paper and write it down, but I'm also gonna give you a link where you can take it all 20 questions online. You just answer it yourself. You'll get the answers right away and the response right away. So there's nothing to it.

It's super, super simple. So let's take a look what these questions mean and what are the risks associated. Now, some of these things you cannot control, like family history, you cannot control. But there's most of 'em things that you can control. So the question number one is if you have a family history of early onset heart disease, Early onset means for a male relative before the age of 55 or a female relative before the age of 65, if they've had a heart attack, stroke, some major cardiovascular event.

If you have that in one side of your family, both sides of your family. You are gonna have double the risk for cardiovascular disease, and that's before the age. If they had the event before the age of 35, they're going to 10 times increase the risk of having heart disease. So if you have this in your family, you need to be super, super vigilant.

This is the number one red flag when it comes to heart disease. So we have to work on prevention and lifestyle to make sure you don't go down that path. So how about bleeding gums? Do you have bleeding gums? Like when you brush your teeth or when you floss, are your gums bleeding? If you do, then that doubles or triples your risk of a heart attack or stroke.

We know this is preventable. Going to the dentist, getting your teeth clean, making sure your brushing your floss, take care of your oral health. These are super things we don't typically think about, and our patients don't typically think about . Oral health and doubling or tripling your chance of heart attack or stroke.

What about sleep patterns? If you're not sleeping, you are at risk four times at risk for diabetes and obesity. And if you're sleeping less than seven hours a night, if you're less than seven hours a night, you are at four times the risk. That's huge. So we wanna really get your sleep hygiene up and really help our patients with that as well.

So we know a lot of times people snore. Now if you don't snore, but maybe your spouse snores or your friends snore, somebody, that snores, right? This is a huge cause of heart disease and hypertension and snoring. Just snoring alone. Is it has more cardiovascular risk than smoking or obesity combined.

So we always know. We know smoking's bad, we know obesity's bad, but snoring is worse than those two combined. So these are things that we wanna look at and try to work on prevention, so we're not going down those roads. What about you have any kind of autoimmune disease, or is it running in your family?

Anyone with autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis or Celiacs or Hashimoto's, any of these type of things, you get a 40% increased risk of cardiovascular disease. So we wanna work on trying to reverse these type of issues. How about vitamin D? Have you been checked for vitamin D? Now I can say the one good thing that came out of Covid is really made people aware of their vitamin D levels.

You want your levels between 60 and 80, if you're running below that. You're 40% more likely to have high blood pressure and 30% more likely to have a heart attack. Vitamins super inexpensive. It's easy, and it can make a huge difference in your long-term health. How about migraines? Do you have a history of migraines?

If you have a history of migraines, specifically with auras or those visual disturbances like flashing lights, at least once a week, you're more than four times likely to have a stroke. How many patients do we see as chiropractors with migraines, with these auras, we see a lot, right? We don't want these people stroking out, let alone ever let alone in our office.

So these are things that I want you to start asking patients because it's gonna make a big difference in their life. And what about. Stress. Everybody has stress nowadays, but how do you cope with it? How do you manage it? People are stressed, have two times the risk of heart attack and three times the risk of stroke.

So we wanna do things like meditation. We want to do things to lower that stress. Look at your adrenal function. How much time do you spend sitting? Are you sitting a lot? Are you sitting at the job behind the desk driving sitting more than nine hours a day? Has a 40% increased risk of dying in the next 30 years.

That's huge. Three years compared to those who sat less than four hours a day. So if you have to set a little alarm on your phone and get up and move every half hour we need to make sure that we're not doing the sitting right. How much formal exercise are you getting? I'm not saying like talk, walk into the mailbox or just walking around.

I want you to actually do formal exercise. If you're not doing that, your risk, a sedentary person's risk of dying is 50 times higher than the risk of somebody who exercises five times a week. Now those are the first 10 questions. There's 20 altogether. I want you to go to the link and you can take . The test yourself.

You can also take it on paper if you want it or you wanted to give it to your patients, but it's at dr julie mclaughlin.com/risk. Go ahead. You can answer the questions and it will give you all those risk factors underneath like I just showed you on these questions and you'll know. You can target what you need to work on or what your patients need to work on.

This is a great way to get more information about your patients if you're thinking about doing functional medicine in your practice. But it's also a great way and a simple way to change these small things that really can impact our longevity. Once you know your risks, you know what they are. You're gonna minimize the things that you can't change, right?

So if you know you have that family history, you're gonna make sure you're exercising, make sure you're eating the good diet, make sure you're getting checked regularly with your blood tests, so you're not going down that road. You're going to change the things you have control of. You can control how much sleep you're getting.

You can control the things you're eating, whether or not you're exercising. You wanna know your numbers, you wanna get your labs checked on a regular basis, minimum once a year, and you wanna look at everything. And I know as docs, we are the last person that we're taking care of. We're taking care of everybody else.

But I really want you to do this because so many of us are getting these chronic diseases. They're really preventable. So look at your labs. We use Cleveland Heart Diagnostics in our office. And if you're interested in that, let me know. I can get you set up with them as well and make sure you're looking at your labs and your risk factors.

So that's it for today. I'm Dr. Julie McLaughlin from Vital Health Protocols and thank you so much ChiroSecure for empowering women. And be sure to join in next week when we have another episode of Empowering Women with ChiroSecure.

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