Andrew: So, because you’re chiropractors, you know, you’re both used to, you know, quite hardcore medicinal diagnostics and treatment paradigms, what’s so different about your treatment philosophy that you’ve embraced?

Jaxson: Yeah, so the difference being that we’ve just added in a couple of dimensions to health. So both of us have had our own realizations along the way, working with patients and also, you know, being patients ourselves that just looking through the lens of the physical body isn’t enough. And oftentimes, there are biochemical or emotional aspects to people’s health and even biochemical and emotional aspects to the breakdown of tissues or the production of symptom science and conditions. So that’s what’s led us down the track of integrating applied kinesiology with chiropractic and using that on our patients.

Andrew: Gotcha. Hilary? Anything to add?

Hilary: Not too much to add from that. It’s just rather than coming in nice and close to the problem, we take a much broader lens so that we have the bigger picture because the bigger picture is underlying the hows and the whys the tissue was able to get to that state in the first place. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. You know, one thing that used to stun me when I was nursing is they’d talk about preventative medicine and it was never, ever preventative medicine. It was early intervention. Really interesting…

Jaxson: Exactly.

Andrew: …concept and definition, but…so when we really do look at embracing holistic medicine, it really should be encompassing all that we can do, but also all that that patient needs, whether it’s from other ours or some other practitioner.

Hilary: Exactly.

Andrew: It’s a really interesting concept that isn’t well grasped.

Jaxson: Yeah, that’s right. And I think, you know, not all of us practitioners have had, you know, the structure or the foundation to look at that. And I love what you say about preventative care being also early intervention. That makes so much sense as well. And having tools that are sensitive enough to pick up on things before they turn into anything is, you know, life-changing for a lot of people.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, let’s discuss these lenses. So what exactly is the triad of health?

Hilary: Yeah, so the triad of health essentially is just the tool or the explanation we use to speak about how our body is made up of obviously our structural components. So we have our bones and our joints and our muscles and our nervous system. And it’s also made up of our chemical components, the big chemical soup that we are as humans, our nutrition, our hormones, our gut function, all of that kind of stuff. And thirdly, our emotional health. So how our body copes with stress day to day and how it’s able to process what we go through in such a way that allows us to grow and heal.

Andrew: It’s almost like a dah moment. Like, it’s things that we know, isn’t it? You know, but how often do we see… I just saw it the other day in a patient, how often do we see one specialist not talking to another specialist? And so the patient’s ailment is compartmentalized to a point where there’s no communication even between the health professionals.

Jaxson: That’s exactly right. And it’s such a good example of how disjointed we’ve become when we look at patients, rather than looking at them as a whole being with a whole…all these different aspects. We have kind of gone down the road, especially medically, where we’ve sort of even just divided people up into their five fingers, you know, and, looked at each one individually rather than it being attached to the hand. And we see it all the time. And, you know, we make an effort to try and connect people with the right people because it’s right, like, we look at things throughout holistic lens, but there’s also so many referrals and so many things that can be done outside of what we do as well. And it’s important to remain interconnected. It’s like complimentary and integration and comments on all that too.

Andrew: Yeah. Hilary?

Hilary: Yeah. As you’re talking about this, I’m so reminded of how we’ve moved through society, from our roots thousands of years ago to being so connected to the earth and so connected to each other. And then as medicine has developed, it’s kind of shrunk down and into its small components and become very disconnected, very mechanistic. And what we’re finding now is that you know what? Great for saving people’s lives, that’s so good. But when it comes to healing a whole person, we need to look at the whole person, and we need to be able to identify what’s missing, what kind of help do they need, and who is the best person for those different parts of each person. So it’s kind of like from coming out and to slowly coming out with greater awareness, I think, [crosstalk 00:06:19].

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s delve a little bit into this lens. So, you know, you’re trained as chiropractors, but then you’ve learned applied kinesiology. Let’s talk about how applied kinesiology can help and indeed the cautions that we have to be aware of with applying that. So how important is it to treat holistically and how often does kinesiology change your clinical suspicions?

Jaxson: Yeah. So, applied kinesiology is the tool that we’ve used to integrate into our practice to be able to have access to holistic healing, right? So, with our chiropractic degree, we have an amazing background and excellent foundation in common conditions, biochemistry, and all that. But to apply it properly and to open our scope up from just treating the physical body to also assessing and treating the biochemical body and the emotional body, we have used applied kinesiology. And applied kinesiology is the use of muscle testing techniques to measure the change in the nervous system or the tone of the muscle that’s controlled by the nervous system as it responds to different stimuli. So those stimuli might be physical stimulus, it might be using different biochemical markers, and it might be using different words or semantics to bring up emotions, and also muscle testing, anything that the body kind of has.

And so it kind of really opened our scope up and allowed us to see more of the patient and the underlying processes that were going on for them. And what we found was in almost every person that walks through the door regardless of their condition, that there always seems to be a physical, chemical, and emotional aspect to their condition. And so when we have fully developed the tools, so we’ve integrated a lot of different protocols so that we can actually apply therapy, which will then change the muscle test so that we know it’s sort of worked. So the muscle test turns into this kind of continual measuring device that we can use to track the changes in the body as we’re applying therapies to see what’s working, or what isn’t working, or what’s affecting that person, and then what’s also gonna be good for them as well. And there are plenty of biases that we can have with kinesiology, right?

Hilary: Yeah, I mean…

Jaxson: That we’re mindful of.

Hilary: I think the first thing we learn when we learn how to muscle test is how to do it properly and how to be so neutral in the way we read the muscle test because it is so easily influenced. You can kind of make a muscle do whatever you really want it to do with the wrong intention. And so it is about being very clear and clinical and taking your ego and your preconceptions aside to get the right answer. Because I think, you know, the other part that you asked in that question was, how does it change what you think clinically? How does kinesiology change how you perceive what’s going on for your patient? And I mean, I’ve had so many moments through treatments where all of my clinical knowledge and expertise points me down a direction, “Ah, this is thyroid, this is small intestines, this is a parasite, for sure.” And the muscle test will take me in a completely different direction, and I’ve just gotta kind of trust that and then further back up whatever I find with the muscle test.

Jaxson: Yeah, that’s the beauty of the muscle test. It’s so easy to bias it. And that’s kind of the beauty of it because it’s so tuned. It’s the person’s body that you’re assessing with their own muscle. So we can’t really project our own expectations onto that. We are more in a receiving or listening place to hear sort of what the body is saying to us through the test. And that’s why it’s so powerful to use because we are just testing that person and their unique system rather than trying to sort of interpret through our sort of lens. So in that way it becomes this really powerful tool where it’s just the…it’s almost like if that person was their own doctor, they’ve been able to sort of bring that information to us. Yeah.

Andrew: Okay. See, that’s fine from the patient’s perspective, but just to take it back to a couple of medical examples, like number one, I can remember nursing back in the old days when blood glucose testing monitors used to have two gauges, like VU meters on your stereo, right? Two little needles.

Jaxson: Yeah.

Andrew: And you had to do the correct control and then priming and washing of the blood. And if you didn’t do that correctly, then you had user interference, user-created error for the reading for the patient. Second one was if you wanted to go recently, we’ve learned, you know, these robotic surgery devices can be either fantastic, or if you get somebody who isn’t quite competent at that, you can have extremely bad botched operations. We’ve seen examples of this. So there’s another user error. You see it in flight, you know, accidents all the time in passenger airline accidents, you know, flight user error, all of that sort of thing. So, again, it really does come down to the, I don’t wanna say a glib term, but how centred the practitioner is and how willing they are to let go of ego and just be present for the patient. That’s fraught with error. I’ve seen countless examples of arrogant practitioners and people who know it all and all that sort of thing. How on guard do you have to be there for to your own self, your own issues before you can be there for the patient?

Jaxson: That’s such a good question, an amazing question because I’d say that’s a daily practice. It’s been about being aware of what my expectations are and why. And, you know, as a practitioner, we all have a real strong desire to help people, we want people to get better, we want to fix them. You know, we can all feel insecure in our practice, especially, you know, with applied kinesiology, it’s not exactly fully accepted and integrated into the medical and chiropractic community anyway. So we are using something that’s a bit different, and it’s a constant practice. And I think that’s the beauty of it. And there’s some research that’s been done on people who have been trained in applied kinesiology. And somewhere between two and five years, the expertise level just develops to a point where the error, margin of error, is much lower.

And I think that’s got a lot to do with, one, developing yourself as a practitioner and, you know, getting good at muscle testing and listening to the body and understanding what’s coming up. But I also think it has to do with the fact that even if you project something onto the patient that you’re muscle testing, it still doesn’t always go in the right direction. You still always kind of…you know, the muscle test just doesn’t quite stick, and that particular substance you’re testing or body part you’re testing or therapy you’re applying doesn’t quite work. So, you know, even if you’re still doing it and you’re not aware of the bias, you’re not gonna get the results that you desire. So it is been an interesting journey working with this tool, but the results, I mean, have been great.

Hilary: I will just add…I’ll jump in for a second and add, there are certain tests with kinesiology that are kind of like checks and balances. And so it’s never just a singular muscle test which will give the ultimate treatment or the ultimate diagnosis. It’s always backed up to make sure that whatever we are prescribing or whatever is showing up for the patient is really there. It’s never just, “Oh, that this one thing happened and so this is what’s wrong.”

Andrew: Got you.

Jaxson: Yeah. It’s painting a diagnostic picture. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. So you cross-reference it basically.

Hilary: Absolutely.

Jaxson: You got it.

Hilary: With also further testing, we’ll send the patient out when we need to. Yeah.

Andrew: Right. So this was gonna be my next question about have you…particularly if you are using kinesiology, has taken you on to another strain, another direction of causation of what the yields would be, do you ever back that up and go, “This is showing up and it’s weird. Let’s validate that with orthodox pathology testing or something like that”?

Hilary: Correct.

Jaxson: Absolutely. Yeah.

Hilary: You have to.

Jaxson: And not just that. I mean, it’s so good for patient education to correlate results so they can see it as well on a piece of paper. And not just that. Sometimes it just helps us round out what we need to do for them, or we can call in…because we have a collaborative practice, so we can call in other professionals to help us out, or we can send them to the right person. I don’t know, It just opens… It does, it opens up. It’s an amazing part of practice, is further testing.

Andrew: But it’s also if you think about where the future can lie for applied kinesiology. I still don’t why am I stumbling over that. Once you get this validation of, like, a concordance with orthodoxy, then your gold standard is confirmed by kinesiology. That’s huge for the future of kinesiology. Because if we can get papers out there saying this and showing, yes, there’s concordance with this when you do apply kinesiology, then that will hopefully one day lead to validation…

Jaxson: Yeah, probably.

Andrew: …because this has always been my…

Jaxson: Yeah, I even think there are studies like that. But, I mean, it is one of those particular tools that can be difficult to evaluate in more conventional research ways. So, yeah, it’s a work in progress. There’s some really amazing people in the ICAKA, which is the International College of Applied Kinesiology Australasia. And they’ve been pumping out some papers and things like that. Some really good stuff coming out. Yeah.

Andrew: Good stuff. Okay. So, now, let’s just say honing in on an issue that’s not really…well, we say not related to, but it is. But let’s say not traditionally thought of as being under the realms of chiropractic, and that is gut health. So if we looked at how applied kinesiology can help your patients who might present with, you know, let’s say a mid back pain or leg pain, gastrocnemius pain, for instance, and we can tie that back into a link with gut pain…sorry, with gut dysfunction. How do you utilize kinesiology in that instance? What sort of testing would you do?

Jaxson: Do you wanna take that? You want me to start?

Hilary: You start?

Jaxson:  I’m just like jumping.

Hilary: You don’t have a lot to say.

Jaxson: Okay. So where to start? I mean, the first thing is it’s been shown in the research that…and, you know, clinically as well, that the low back and the bowel, large intestines, are associated. So low back pain is commonly associated with ileocecal valve dysfunction, and large intestine issues, bloating, inflammation in the gut. It’s common that autoimmune conditions that are centred in the gut, like Crohn’s disease and ulcer colitis can contribute or be correlated with a condition called sacroiliitis, which is inflammation of the SI joints causing low back pain, inflammation, nerve pain down the leg. So I’d say in clinical theory in our circles, it’s quite well known. If someone comes in with lower back pain, you’ve gotta check the gut because they’re so closely related.

But when it comes to midthoracic pain, headaches, or other physical symptoms or conditions, yeah, knee pain, the stomach, small intestine, liver, they all contribute to dysfunction in these areas. In kinesiology, it’s quite a complex relationship. However, it’s probably easiest talked about within two frames. The first one being that every muscle in kinesiology has an organ relationship. So if an organ’s in trouble or one of the organs is inflamed or in dysfunction, swollen, whatever, dealing with an infection, whatever, then it’s common that you’ll find that the muscles associated with that organ is weak. And so during our assessment as we’re testing muscles, if a particular muscle is weak on both sides, has to be bilateral, then we’ll be alerted, you know, from our education that we should check that organ as well.

So, for example, the popliteus muscle, which is found behind the knee, and is a primary stabilizer for the knee, that is associated with liver and gallbladder. And so if people come in, which we see a lot of patients with bilateral knee pain, or bilateral knee dysfunction from whatever, then we will be alerted to muscle tests, the popliteus and then check the liver if it’s weak. The other way that we view the connection between the two is if there’s a gut dysfunction anywhere in the gut from the esophagus all the way down to the rectum. There are these nerve reflexes called viscerosomatic reflexes. So, from the spine to the organ, there are reflexes that if the visceral is talking, so the stretch reflexes are firing, or if there are those receptors they’re firing, except they’re usually on the membranes on the outside, or if there’s any kind of trouble in an organ, it will sort of travel back to the spine where its nerves originated, and then whatever part of the spine that is, the muscles that that somatic nerve innovates, they will start talking, or you can get patterns of pain as well. And so you get these kinds of patterns in the body through these viscerosomatic reflexes too, which is a great way to link the spine and organs together.

Andrew: Yeah. Hillary, anything to add there?

Hilary: Yeah. I mean, in the context of the guts and kinesiology, just exactly what Jaxson said, he said it really well, I would say the biggest thing in clinical practice linking the two is being able to communicate that with a patient. Because, for example, if you have someone coming in with chronic low back pain, they’ve got an inflamed disc, and they’ve tried every manual therapy and, you know, nothing’s worked, actually, you’ve got, you know, large intestine inflammation for whatever reason, and there’s no way your back pain’s gonna go anywhere, it won’t matter what I do mechanically to your back. Unless we address your gut, we’re not gonna get anywhere. And so I guess really just being able to explain to the patient the connection, like Jaxson’s just said, between your visceral and your body, your musculoskeletal body.

Andrew: You know what’s interesting is, you know, you’ll get naysayers. And I’m like it, I’ve been sceptical myself. But you’ll get naysayers who will just go, “No, it doesn’t exist.” But hang on, we already accept referred pain from the gall bladder to be shoulder tip pain. That’s an accepted orthodoxy thing. We’ve already elucidated just recently, like within the last, say, what is it, five years, that there’s these mini-brains in the peripheral nervous system which we never knew about. I mean, it’s only been six months since they elucidated these new sinuses. Like, nobody’s ever thought. So we think we know all about the human body, but, yeah, nah, we’re still learning even about the anatomy of the human body, let alone the physiology. So part of this thing about this, that some things are accepted… What’s another one, you know, when you’ve got referred pain along the [crosstalk 00:25:10]?

Hilary: Cervicogenic headache.

Andrew: Yeah, you got it, cervicogenic headache, but, you know, referred pain along the dermatomes, TFL referred pain from ovarian cancer, blah, blah, blah. There’s already these accepted things. These other things are dismissed automatically out of hand without saying, “Hang on, what could be the relationship? That’s where the interest for me lies.

Jaxson: A hundred percent. I think that it’s really dangerous to just completely shut out a perception, especially when it comes to treating patients. And I think it’s so important to stay open, especially as a clinician because we don’t know everything. But what we do really understand quite everyone would really understand is that every single patient is very unique and very different. You know, their body makes their medicine, and they use different compounds to, you know, treat their own issues and stuff like that. And so, you know, it’s up to us really to be able to assess someone appropriately and to apply the right therapies. It’s up to us. It’s negligent not to, and it’s negligent to dismiss. Because what we’re really doing is we’re dismissing a patient’s reality, and that’s essential to their healing. And I think we’ve lost touch with that a little bit.

And when I was going through chiropractic school, I was a researcher. I was a very healthy sceptic of anything that sounded a bit out there. And what struck me was that…I’ve lost my train of thought. What was communicated to me from this evidence-based practitioner place was that we use the evidence we have, and we stick to it, and we don’t dismiss that. And then anything that is outside of that scope that we don’t yet understand, we pull on our education, current events, current research, and other mentors in the community, and we also pull on our clinical perception. So we are in the room with the patient, and what we’re seeing and how we’re interacting with that, it also has information. And so I kind of pull on that a lot when it comes to naysayers and stuff around using applied kinesiology to assess someone is that I’m like, “Well, this is the stuff we don’t know yet and this is the stuff we don’t have a lot of reliable tools to measure. So I’m gonna use something that I know I can use well and that I’m always checking and cross-reference as much as I can to get as much information about this person and what’s going on for them as possible so that I can apply or help them find what they need to improve themselves.

Andrew: Gotcha. Hillary, what’s been your experience from learning about, you know, the sort of hardcore pathophysiological process to checking with patients and things like that?

Hilary: Look, my experience is just that we are such complex beings. And I’m so grateful for my medical background in terms of all of the education I received from university. It informs my practice, obviously, daily and immensely. But there’s so much more to health. And the triad of health is always gonna be the lens for me to address each and every one of my patients because it’s the most responsible way for me to do that. If I have someone coming to me, and they’re in immense pain, and they’ve tried everything except somatic healing for emotional pain, I feel bound to help that person where I can in my clinic, with the tools that I have, and to send them on for the right kind of care for that component. It just creates much more of a whole picture. And I think it covers more realistically who we are as humans living this human experience. It’s a no for me, it’s a no-brainer. Yeah.

Jaxson: And I think it expands on, you know, we have all this medical information, and we have all this great education, all this great research, and I think applied kinesiology just allows us to put that to practice. It’s a tool that we can use to actually apply functional health to people.

Andrew: You know what? I was actually thinking about this just the other day, and I was thinking…and forgive this stereotypical explanation, it is, but in the olden days of nursing and, you know, we see it in medicine, things like that, you know, you came across the arrogant professor. And in actual fact, I’ve seen very few of these arrogant professors. I’ve seen one or two. Most of the professors that I’ve actually seen, and this is how I was differentiating between a professor, one who professes, and an expert, one who is truly into what their specialty is, and that is that the professor just wants to tell people. Whereas a true expert delights in being surprised by new information and going, “That’s awesome. Where can that lead? That doesn’t fit with anything I’ve done before. That’s so exciting,” rather than automatically shutting it down and saying, “That doesn’t gel with my paradigm, so, therefore, it can’t exist.” It’s what I did. And I’m not a professor, but I was that person. I was that it can’t exist, therefore, it won’t exist, therefore, it doesn’t exist.

But the people that I’ve met through podcasting and all these conversations I’ve had are these people who delight in new information. They will never shut it out. They’ll test it, they’ll be sceptical about it, but they won’t shut it out. They’ll see where it lies. Can I ask just one last quick question, and that is I can truly see your care for your patients, I get it. Your devotion to your patient is overwhelming. It glows from you. But I have to ask, from a purely business point of view, you’ve got to invest a certain amount of time by checking, cross-referencing, making sure that you’re on the right track, and then even suspecting and saying, “Am I? Am I on the right track?” So then you’ve got time, and you’ve only got a certain amount of time per patient. How does applied kinesiology and looking through the lens of the triad of health, how does affect per-patient episode versus time?

Hilary: Yeah, I’m gonna jump in.

Andrew: Please do.

Hilary: It’s actually super time effective.

Andrew: Really?

Hilary: Yeah.

Jaxson: Because of the expertise, right?

Hilary: There’s a lot less guesswork. I’m not like, “Oh, I wonder what is going on with you.” I’m gonna ask your body, “What do you need? What is your body missing? Exactly how can I help you?” And the proof is in the results ultimately. So I expect results quickly, not to be egotistical. But if I’m on the right track, I’m going to see a difference, and I’m not gonna waste time doing the same thing without a result. And so we’ve refined our skills in the room. We’re very time effective. We’re able to get a lot of information out, and we’re able to prescribe what we need to prescribe really effectively within that space. But because our feedback comes from the patient, if they’re getting better, we’re on the right track and things are happening a lot quicker than perhaps what would have for them in the past. If it’s not progressing in that way, we’re always gonna ask why? We’re not going to do the same thing over and over again. We’ll refer, we’ll do a different approach, whatever we need to do. But I must say the results that we get in clinic when we apply the triad of health are very time effective.

Jaxson: Yeah. And we’ve really had to create a lot of protocols and designs. You know, if a particular thing does come up, well, then what kind of therapy is really good for that? And how do you clear that or how do you move someone from being in that state to this state, you know, within the timeframe that we have in a consult? I mean, we had to learn a lot of business skills, like how to schedule appropriately, how to create treatment plans for people, how to give them the right expectations and work together as a bit of a team with the patient. And that has helped a lot. So, yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. Guys, as I said, you know, I can plainly see that you hold your responsibility for the health of the patient in the highest regard. Indeed, I would say more than patients. I’m gonna go one step more and go society because you are already there. You’re already looking outside of just the person in front of you, but how they interact with their family unit and others, their significant others. So well done to you. But it’s also telling about how you view your responsibility to their health. It’s not just this sort of a little business sort of…how do I say it properly? It’s not like a business tool that you are referring this applied kinesiology tool. It’s actually like truly heartfelt responsibility and care for that soul in front of you. So well done to you. I applaud you…

Hilary: Oh, thank you.

Jaxson: Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: …for looking just further than what a tool can do, but how you can help that person in front of you? Well done to you both.

Hilary: Thank you so much.

Jaxson: Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew: And thank you, everyone, for joining us today on “Wellness By Designs.” Remember, you can get all of the show notes for today’s podcast and the other podcasts on your favourite podcast app, and, of course, the Designs for Health website. I’m Andrew Whitfield-Cook. This is “Wellness by Designs.”