#ASKDRHETLAND - Pain Relief Advice from M.D. vs. D.C.

Hey Dr. Ryan Hetland here. Welcome to today's 3-minute video. I wanted to answer a question that patients have a lot of and that is "Do chiropractors and medical doctors get along?" And the answer is "Of course, they do."

It's just that there's this kind of thing when you go to a medical doctor for back pain or neck pain, they're going to probably recommend medicine and really what do you expect that when you go to a medical doctor, they went to school for medicine, so they're really good at what they do.

They're really good at prescribing medications. They're really good at the surgery side of things, and especially if they specialized in an area, maybe pediatric surgery or orthopedic surgery or general practice medicine, they have so much content to learn and know about for their own patient set so when a patient comes in for this back pain problem, they prescribe morphine or an anti-inflammatory.

They have to know the side effects and they have to know everything about it, what they're prescribing, because they'll have malpractice suits otherwise. They need to know what they need to know and they only have so much time in a day, just like you and me to learn this stuff; so they have families, normally they have lives and they have what they need to be good at.

So it's interesting topic because when you look at the courses-- I just have this cheat sheet here about medicine versus chiropractic as far as just classroom hours, we're both going to study anatomy and physiology and pathology and chemistry and neurology and X-rays, but we're going to have differing numbers of hours that we spend in different topics. For example, in X-rays we spend twice as much time because we're usually, most chiropractors should or--at least I do--take X-rays on most of my patients. I need to evaluate those.

Neurology, we spend an average of 320 hours and a medical doctor, that's just in the general course, might only spend 112 hours. Anatomy is pretty similar, but if you'd just look at the amount of hours spent studying different things, chiropractors in general are spending their time in natural courses for pain relief because that's what we're good at and medical doctors are good at medicine and surgery.

So, my kind of answer to patients when they're surprised that their medical doctors were only prescribing drugs and recommending surgery, I kind of my answer is "What did you expect because that's all they're mostly good at?"

If they're good at or know anything beyond that, it's because they self-taught themselves or they spent extra time outside their general degree, so just think about that.

When you're looking for a solution for neck pain or back pain and you're wanting natural health advice for your neck and back pain relief, you're going to want to look for a Naturopathic doctor or chiropractic doctor like me to give you that sort of advice.

I wouldn't normally recommend you go to a medical doctor or a general physician or a surgeon for natural health advice. If you get it there, you're lucky because it's not very common to get it there.

So, hopefully, this topic helps and I might hit a nerve with some of you but have a great day, I'll see you at the next video.