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Avoid Sports Injuries and Heal Your Spine with Dr. Brendan Murray

Transcript

Dr. Mike Moreno: Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome back to Wellness. I’m Dr. Mike Moreno, taking a deep dive into all thing’s wellness after over twenty five years of practicing medicine.

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So we are fortunate, and I’m really excited selfishly, because I have had some musculoskeletal issues, to say the least, as of late. There’s so many directions we can go with this. You know, sports is a huge part of our culture, of our community. When you look at the ever-growing population of sports, in particular young athletes, you think of injuries, you think of pain, you think of inflammation, you think of trauma and its surrounding us. It seems to be growing at least a lot more than when I was a kid. We are fortunate to bring in an expert who can help us understand sports injuries and how to heal our spine.

Our guest today has an experience specializing as a sports medicine chiropractic physician for over 30 years. Long, long time. From volunteering at high school football and local sporting events for decades to listen to this, co-chair of the medical board for the United States Olympic weightlifting team. So heavy duty stuff. He’s treated a wide variety of sports related injuries. He founded the Institute for Spine and Sports Care in Santa Monica in 2006 and has enjoyed practicing ever since. This guy knows his stuff. He knows the body and how it heals, and I’m thrilled to have Dr. Brendan Murray here today. Dr. Murray, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Brendan Murray: I appreciate being here. I really do. I’m excited to have these conversations with you.

Dr. Mike Moreno: First of all, I want to say thank you for your field, because I think chiropractic medicine, I don’t know where we would be without it, quite honestly, and what makes me more angry than anything is when people are like, well, you’re a doctor, you don’t believe in chiropractic’s. I’m like, hold on a second, you’re crazy because I go to one regularly and I will tell you it has changed my life and I mean that. So thank you for your field and your efforts and all of the accolades that you’ve had. It’s amazing. What drove you into chiropractic medicine to begin with?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Actually, injuries. So I had a fairly significant injury when I was playing sports, growing up. I was playing soccer. I had a bad ankle injury, I had fracture dislocations. I had to have it repaired. They basically told me at the time that because of the type of injury I had, it was probably going to barely be able to ever run again and I was going to always have a limp. So I was playing high level sports at that time and that was kind of devastating. To the credit of the surgeon, did a great job repairing me. I worked my tail off with a great physical therapist. Just did a fantastic job with me and six months later, I was on the field playing again.

Dr. Mike Moreno: I mean, that’s amazing. We see sports and its’ so many injuries. I mean, kids are being pushed to such a high level of expectation in terms of performance in sports. So I would imagine, and I know you’ve been doing this a long, long time, decades, you must have seen sort of an evolution of what the field has done, say, 30 years ago to now in terms of not just sports, but everything. What if you noticed or what’s been sort of eye raising to you about this whole transition?

Dr. Brendan Murray: The year round sport has been the most transitional thing for me. We’ve seen an increase in catastrophic injuries in young athletes as a result of sports selective. They play one sport all year round. No more cross training really going on, multiple sports being played, and then the heavy competition that these kids play. There’s no development anymore. It really goes into these kids go from tournament to tournament to tournament without a lot of skill development when they’re going through periods of growth, when they need more skill development.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Yeah, and there’s such a huge psychological component to this, too. I think, you know, when you look at just, there are injuries, obviously, as you unfortunately suffered and that you probably see, but then there’s also just this overuse. You know, overdoing anything, it can be harmful to the body. So do you see a lot of sort of overuse as opposed to injuries or both? Or what would you say has sort of matriculated in terms of those things?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Well, I think the only way you could get an injury is overuse. What typically happens is, is if you put more force [00:05:00] through a joint restructure than it can tolerate it simply at some point breaks. That’s where every musculoskeletal injury comes from. The worry is always what level of failure is going to occur. Kids and younger athletes get different injuries then adults. They’re not little adults. They get completely different ones because the growth plates, the tissues are different, they’re not as mature. So you don’t have stable joints for some kids and what happens is you start putting these kids on repetitive loads. Repetitive stresses, they fatigue. They go through growth spurts and all of a sudden, as we went through growth, we suddenly became a little less coordinated. We weren’t as moved as well as we normally would. So rule of thumb we had is if you move poorly going into a growth spurt, you’ve got to move even worse coming out of a growth spurt and then we start to see these catastrophic injuries occurring.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Do you see a lot more or do you see an increase in surgical rates?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Sure, and that’s something we’ve never seen before, and that’s we’re talking about the catastrophic. We’re looking at you know, we have 12 year olds who are getting hip surgeries. We have 13, 15 year old kids getting multiple knee surgeries and it’s not that the surgeries are not warranted, it’s literally because these kids are being pushed or not moving well enough and it causes a failure of the tissue and they have to go and repair these tissues. So we see these catastrophic injuries. We see Tommy John surgeries in kids.

Dr. Mike Moreno: I remember I did a show for a sporting event for baseball, Major League Baseball a few years back, and for those you don’t know, but Tommy John surgery has to do with the elbow. It was it’s amazing to see what is being done, like the level that people are going to now. There’s a lot of sacrifice. Let me ask you for a second, let’s kind of deviate. Having been in practice for decades, as you have, you have, and we’re going to get to this, in a way an approach to going through with your patients, the injuries or whomever you’re treating, what have you noticed in terms of the mental impact on some of these kids? I mean, you’re talking high level athletes at high level. Some of these kids are still growing up mentally and physically. What have you seen in terms of that devastation, in terms of the mental elements as well as the physical?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Most of the kids are pretty resilient. The one thing we do find about these kids is they’re so driven most of the time, they’re so driven to play these sports. They want to get back to it and they’ll do things sometimes at costs that are not going to benefit them. They’ll try to get back sooner than they should be or sometimes we don’t do a good enough job in our fields that we actually train them to get back in fields, so they don’t get injured. We start to see reinjury rates, especially in young females with knee injuries. We’re seeing three to five surgeries on a knee in a female in their career once they’ve had one.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Wow.

Dr. Brendan Murray: That doesn’t fall that the surgeons not doing a good job, literally. These kids are going back on the field and they’re still not moving well. These injuries keep happening and that’s when they really get frustrated. They’re like, oh, my God, here I go. I have to go through another I’ve got to get another knee surgery. It’s heartbreaking when you see a kid come in and this is all stuff that’s not necessary. If they learn to move correctly, we don’t need to have the surgeries, but the people are rushing, the coaches are rushing these kids back on the fields and the kid kind of gets caught between, I don’t really want to do this yet, but my coach really wants me to or some other outside factors that are pushing them, giving them stress and they’ll do it because they want to make somebody happy.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Right, and I think you see this in kids in college, even in professional athletes, you see people and you wonder and I’m sure they’re doing the best thing for these players, but you wonder, like, is this guy really good to go or not? There are so many things you think, how can this person just get up, go into a tent, and come back out and be good to go? So you wonder and a lot of it is the athlete themselves, because they’re so driven. They’re so competitive. They’re just like, yeah, I’m good and I think they figure out ways to manipulate whoever it is that may be sort of making that decision and to your point, it leads to more injury re injury and ultimately it could be really career ending.

Dr. Brendan Murray: Yeah, and think of the difference remember, when you’re dealing with a professional athlete that’s a matured athlete, for the most part. That’s an athlete who is adaptively changed every level and they keep getting better. So college athlete, same thing, they’ve adapted adaptively got stronger and stronger and stronger so they can withstand more stress on these joints. You have a young athlete who’s playing as many games as some of these college or pros are doing, and they’re breaking down. They’ve not built up this adaptational stress that they can tolerate. So these tissues are breaking down. You’re seeing a whole different thing. So you can have a professional athlete or college athletes who can take some type of injury or blow, and they can bounce back quicker because one, they’re young and they’re healthy, but two, they’ve built up some stamina. They built up some strength in these joints because remember, as we start getting older, our hormones kick in and everything else. So we get stronger, we become more powerful. We can tolerate more. Our joints can be stabilized by these big muscles, but we’re young, we don’t have that hormones kicking in yet. Those muscles are not strong enough to protect the joints.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Let [00:10:00] me ask you this, so after 30 years, what would you say is the leading injury that you treat?

Dr. Brendan Murray: We treat a little bit of everything. It all depends on what we have. You know you can go through runs where you have spine stuff, you have hip stuff, shoulders, knees, elbows, it depends on the sport and it depends on if there’s any past history. Those are all things that kind of give us better ideas, but the blessing I’ve had is we get a chance to treat everything, and we can see everything. Everything from the disk injuries or fractures to dislocations, labral tears, hip and shoulders to the meniscus injuries, ankle injuries, you name it. We see it at this point.

Dr. Mike Moreno: You know, it’s amazing, as I was mentioning, I’ve gone through some stuff personally with this hip condition that I have and I’m a swimmer, so I have a lot of shoulder injuries and a lot of just overuse type things. I shouldn’t say injuries, but overuse, and I’m amazed. I’ll tell you, like, I love going to my chiropractor because it’s amazing how much better I can feel when I come out of there almost immediately and it brings me to what I love your three treatment phase thing. I’ll tell you, you know, the condition I was diagnosed with was avascular necrosis of the hips. Fluke thing. I’m fifty two. I’m a swimmer. I’m really fit, and I always have been. Was having this sort of hit back pain. Dealt with it for so long because I’m like, I’ve never had an injury, never had trauma. I’m like, how could there be any sort of issue going on.

So long story short, as I went through the workup, lo and behold, I get a call from my radiologist and he says, hey, do you know about your hips? I’m like, no, I have no idea what you’re talking about. It turns out I have avascular necrosis of the hips, which simply put, I don’t get good blood flow to the part of my hip that attaches, or I should say the part of my femur that attaches into the hip joint and thus result in a lot of groin pain and back pain. I was frustrated because I was taking Motrin and Tylenol and all of this and that and doing all of the stretches that I thought. I was just sick of it and I was miserable. When I start seeing my chiropractor, it was amazing to me, within a few visits how he was able to figure this out.

My point is that so much of pain in the body musculoskeletal comes from the spine, at least in my experience. I’m curious, what are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Brendan Murray: It was all body mechanics. There’s no question about that, and even some of the most recent research starting last year, some point in twenty, eighteen, nineteen even into this year, it’s being supported that we believe that most of our hip injuries labral tears, labral injuries, impingement syndromes stem from dysfunctional loss of control on the lower back and pelvis, and that leads to the hip injury. So if you want to get rid of our hip injuries, we go to the back. We go to the back. We changed his function, made it move correctly, and then took the pressure off the hip. That has become the new norm, because now the research actually supporting this is the cause of these labral injuries.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Yeah, with my shoulder, that’s exactly what he did as well. I’m telling him, you know, this issue of my shoulder and I’m like, I know I didn’t tear rotator cuff. That can’t be the case and certainly it wasn’t, but it’s exactly what you just said. He goes back to the spine and the manipulation that he did, it was very distant from where the actual pain was, yet I really, quite honestly, got better so much quicker than I thought to the point where I don’t take really anything anymore.

When I fall off my routine, when I don’t do my homework, as I tell him, I start to get aggravations with the groin or with the shoulders, but it quickly, I go back to doing what he’s taught me, and I’ll go in for these adjustments. I’ll tell you; it’s changed my life. I don’t take anything anymore. Am I pain free? No, but I think most people nowadays will say, yeah, we have a little back pain.

The key is, does it affect your life? Does it really affect your ability to function, to sleep, to move, to work, to do all those things? And for me, I will tell you, it’s been lifesaving. Let me go through something that I really love about your philosophy and it’s very much in alignment with my chiropractor’s, so it resonated quite a bit with me. It’s this three treatment phase. Elimination of the pain, unwinding and stabilizing and then functionally strengthening. So talk a little bit about that sort of three treatment phase and maybe a little bit in each particular category, because I love this philosophy and I love this approach.

Dr. Brendan Murray: Well, one thing we’ve learned over the years is growing up, it was always the exercise, exercise, exercise, get out of pain, use exercise, and it never worked for any of us. So what we’ve seen in the research has shown us is that pain is inhibitory.

So if you have pain, whatever joint it happens to be, that pain actually inhibits the muscles from be able [00:15:00] to stabilize that joint so it can’t work. So you can try to exercise through it. Problem is, the pain doesn’t allow the knee or the hip or the lower back, whatever area it is. It won’t work. So our focus is always get them out of pain first. If I get my athlete or my patient out of pain now, I can actually start to change how they function and we do that using different modes of manipulation, mobilizations to normalize the biomechanics based on that injury. Once we can get that, then we start to unwind. Basically, we start to teach them how to stabilize locally because every joint is going to be stabilized. We have, if we talk about core. There’s local stabilizers and there’s global stabilizers and the local stabilizers are going to keep that joint in neutral position all the way through. Every joint works the exact same way, whether it’s a knee, a hip, a shoulder, they have deep stabilizers, and they have mobilizers. So what we want to do is get those local groups of muscles working and then take it into a functional pattern. So if you’re a swimmer, we get you back in the pool with certain mechanical changes. If you’re a cyclist, we can get you on a bike and we’re going to use cycling as your rehab.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Right.

Dr. Brendan Murray: I’m going to use swimming as your rehab.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Which is a crowd pleaser, I’m sure. Like these athletes, I know when I first had my problems with my shoulder and they said my physical therapist said, well, you don’t have to be out of the pool for like six weeks. I’m like, what? I went nuts. It’s a huge crowd pleaser to get people out of pain. Pain is so debilitating. When I thought about how bad I hurt. I mean, every turn at night in bed caused pain, every rotation sticking a pillow under my leg, under my shoulder. It was just a nightmare. When you start to get good sleep, when you start to be functional, when you don’t focus on the pain that you have every day, it is life changing. I just, I love that. So it’s a crowd pleasing thing. So I know you were co-chair with the medical board for the US weightlifting team. So I’m curious, I’m not a weight room guy. We always joked around that swimmers hate going into the weight room because we just can’t stand being- we’re like fish. We don’t like to run. We don’t like to be out on land, stick us in the water and we’re good.

Dr. Brendan Murray: Swimmers and water polo people are not the greatest in the gym either. I’ve gotten the chance to work with USA water polo and they in the gym, they were not the best athletes. In the water, ridiculous, but on land, no.

Dr. Mike Moreno: That’s what it was. I remember even in high school when I was playing water polo in college as well, like I would go into the gym to lift weights and I’d be sleeping. I hated it. I just couldn’t stand it, but I think the work that you’ve done with the US weightlifting team, how can weightlifting, how does that sort of preserve the body and protect you or prevent injuries?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Well, movement is a movement, right? Now what happens is, is when you start to deal with weight-lift, it’s a whole different thing because that’s, those are really authentic movements. So in weightlifting there’s two lift called the snatch and the clean and jerk. So those are very athletic lifts, but even if we have an injured weightlifter, we’ll use parts of those lifts to strengthen and rehab them. The way our body is designed is, is it will learn during a slow, shorter move, a shorter range of motion fast. It’ll really learn that piece and then you can start to open that range up and you can put loads to it, and it speeds up the cortical motor learning aspect of it.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Interesting.

Dr. Brendan Murray: So you’ve heard the term for so long of motor plasticity. Our fastest way of increasing motor plasticity is to find a range and a load that they tolerate and then have them repeat it and they learn it very quickly. We start getting reorganization of the motor cortex so that they start learning faster. So we use weight training, even if it’s just a small five pound weight, something just to start changing motor plasticity as fast as we can. With our weightlifters, we get them doing movements that they can tolerate, and they move well within a short range of motion and start increasing loads. We get them back really quickly using weightlifting. We do it with all athletes. We use some version of load to speed up their healing.

Dr. Mike Moreno: You know, it’s funny because you hear a lot of people talk about core strength, core strength, core strength. That’s like the buzz word. I will tell you, I’m a believer because I became obsessed with engaging my core constantly and I had my homework that I would be given, my exercises and stretches, but even just engaging your core, even when you’re sitting or even when you’re standing, it’s amazing to me as well. Like my shoulder used to bother me so badly that even brushing my hair or putting a shirt on was painful. What I noticed is that when I would engage my core and again, tell me what you think about this, maybe it’s I’m in my own head, but when I would engage my core, I didn’t feel that shoulder as much. It was almost as though engagement of the core took whatever sort of pressure or tension on my shoulder from literally not just swimming, but like putting a shirt on. When I would engage my core and I still do this, it would really offset and take away the pain of the shoulder. I mean, what are your thoughts when people [00:20:00] talk about core strength and things like that?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Well, there’s two things we talked about with core. There’s actually two levels of core. There’s an inner core and an outer core and most people don’t get that. Whatever we get injured, say a spinal injury. The first thing that happens, and the research has supported this now for almost 10 years, that those deep core muscles become inhibited and unless we reactivate those deep core muscles, we can’t get stability back in the spine. You can do all these outer ones and people have done them for years. We’ve seen people do core exercises in the back, doesn’t get any better, but if you’re taught correctly, sitting can be a core exercise. Like you said, if you activate the deep part of the core, that all works. Now, if you kind of think about the core, your arms and legs are attached to your torso. So if that torso is stable, your arms and legs produce more power, they can do what they’re supposed to do. So if you can keep that torso in neutral position, our core and neutral position, the arms and legs work off of that.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Yeah, it’s interesting because I noticed when I would swim, there would be times where I would start to feel my shoulder and I would be very cognizant of engaging my core. Like I said, I have to admit people would always say, I work with trainers and work with a lot of people over the years, that I know, that are friends of mine in the profession and that whole idea, I have a completely new respect when people say your core strength because that ability to engage and strengthen the core and take that pressure off other elements. Like you said, your arms and legs are attached to your torso and so when you can sort of engage that core and strengthen that core, it is incredible.

Dr. Brendan Murray: Yeah, and the real important part is how you strengthen the core. So you obviously were taught correctly, but a lot of people aren’t, and they do these generic core exercises and don’t get the response out of anything. All core doesn’t work. The thing is it really works incredibly well. It’s just teaching the right way of doing core.

Dr. Mike Moreno: So let me ask you this, decades of practice, and I know you stay up to date on all the latest stuff. What’s coming? Are there new things, new modalities, new ideas around your profession that excite you that make you kind of think, hey, this is interesting? Is there I mean, give us a little preview of what you’re seeing.

Dr. Brendan Murray: There’s incredible stuff coming out of the research every day, it’s fascinating. You can look at even going in towards prevention. You can start looking at this rash of hamstring injuries. Hamstring injuries are directly correlated to a particular movement pattern and what’s not working correctly. We now are going towards, we can actually predict these injuries and if we do this right, we can actually predict it and keep them from happening by looking for certain things. Looking at how we can actually get the core to work correctly.

So now there’s a type of way of evaluating the brain called TMS, where we can look and see where, it’s almost a representation in your- the motor cortex, the part of your brain where everything moves from. We can recognize muscles in the cortex and see if they’re firing or not firing. So we can get very specific to make muscles start firing when they’re supposed to, and we start fixing timing of things. So between figuring out how we can prevent injuries and that actually we have them corrected. You know, which muscles are not working and how to make them work correctly. That’s where what’s coming out right now and we’re doing this on a regular basis to get ahead of these injuries rather than always playing from behind.

Dr. Mike Moreno: I mean, that would be huge to have that crystal ball right, to be able to kind of get ahead of it. I mean, it’s huge.

Dr. Brendan Murray: We have it. That’s the great thing. The research is out there, we have it. We can actually predict many of these injuries ahead of time and say if we do these things ahead of time, we don’t get the injuries and we’re trying to pass this information along. Just, you know, it’s a hard push, but you’re going to make people change things they don’t like.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Let me ask you a question. So this is always a discussion with my patients and like I said, I send my patients to chiropractors all the time and some that I’ve had experience with. I’m such a huge supporter and believer in what you do in your field, I can’t even tell you. One of the things that comes up often with patients that go to a chiropractor for their needs, this went through my head when I was going through it is, when am I like sort of when should I be a little bit more aware of, we use the term red flags, right? When is it that you, as you’re working with a patient and I’m sure it varies with injury to injury, but when do you sort of say, you know, this is a time frame where it should be getting better or it’s not? Or you need to kind of look at the next level, whether it’s imaging or whatever it may be. What’s your sense that you have there and how do you work around that process?

Dr. Brendan Murray: We look at every injury. There’s a mechanism behind every injury. So if our first thing is diagnosis. If we diagnose the injury, we should have an idea at this point saying this is the injury, this is how it came about. Now, if they have [00:25:00] a meniscus, for example, I have a good idea what caused a lot of meniscus injury whether it’s the front or back of it. The medial meniscus, I have a good idea of what causes those things and then I can sit and look at them diagnostically, this is what I have. Knowing this tissue, I should be able to unload it and start to see symptoms very quickly or symptom changes very quickly. This should be getting much better very quickly, so we can actually mark it out very quickly. This is our expectation. Our first thing we tell our patients is within this number of visits, you should see this change.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Gotcha.

Dr. Brendan Murray: If we don’t see that change, then the next step would be imaging if I think there’s a possible tear in there or is there a time, we may use medications to help decrease the pain so that we can get a handle on this?

Dr. Mike Moreno: Gotcha.

Dr. Brendan Murray: So we keep it a very short leash on the patient. Especially athletes, because we know we have to move them along quickly knowing that pain is inhibitory. We really have to get them out of pain first and we have to know is that tissue failed to the point where I need to get imaging now or is it stable enough for me to do something with it or do I need to get it repaired and then go back to it? Or is it just really irritated? I’m going to use medication to bring the irritation down and then we’re off the meds and fixing all the rest of it. So it’s a really short leash we keep people on. I need to see change. I typically tell my patients within three to four visits I want to see a 50 percent improvement in their symptoms.

Dr. Mike Moreno: That’s a good, that’s a really good sort of threshold, and I’ll tell you, that’s exactly what happened to me. It wasn’t like it took months. It was really a few visits. I was going twice a week for about two, and on the third week I felt considerably better. My quality of life for sleep and energy. I mean, being in pain is depressing. It really drags you down. You know, when you think of all of these people, I mean, we can go on and on about the opioid crisis and all these things, that people that take pain, that being in pain is miserable when you can’t sleep, when you can’t function and you can’t work, it’s a miserable thing. So I will tell you the relief that you have when you start to get better is priceless. So I have a burning question I have to ask you about this. Do you do cupping in your office?

Dr. Brendan Murray: We’ll do versions of cupping. So sometimes with our soft tissue mobilizations we do sometimes it was called moving cupping. We’ll do static cupping and the whole purpose is, again, we’re trying to change what the muscle is doing, how the muscle is doing it, and just trying to get some change. You can do it with instrument assistance. Instrument assistant type of movement with hands, we can do with vibratory tools. So it really is based on whatever we feel like we want to do, that we’ve done a little bit of everything with it because it’s really effective. When we look at if we’re trying to change the muscle length or try to change how that muscle is functioning, we’re just using those tools to help it. So They’re all just additional tools to get to an end result.

Dr. Mike Moreno: I remember it was mostly in basketball, I think is when I first started seeing these athletes with like the spots on their backs, I’m like, what on earth is it? I mean, I have no idea. This was a few years ago. I don’t know when they started really doing that. Of course, any time I see something like that I start to read about it and research it a little bit and talk to my friends and my colleagues and say, hey, what do you know about this, that and the other? I was like, very suspect. So when I was with my chiropractor and he wanted to do this, I thought, OK, here we go. The idea was sort of having to do with the healing and blood flow. What’s the process of that exactly?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Well, it all depends on how you want to use cupping. So there’s traditional Chinese cupping, which I don’t do that, but they’re going to have a different outcome. They’re looking to change; they have different diagnostic criteria. So they’re changing things that I’m doing. If I’m doing it for a cupping, we’re trying to change the myofascial attachments and how that muscle skin interface starts to work. You’re actually trying to change that and as it becomes more restrictive, the muscles can’t work where it’s supposed to be. We’ve all had soft tissue done. So if it’s done correctly with a light enough touch, we can actually open those muscles up and get those muscles to elongate and get rid of some of the facial attachments or the facial restrictions and using the cupping just to do that. That’s what we’ll do in our office. It’s not a traditional trying to change blood flow so much as actually we’re trying to change the length and how the facial attachment is going on to the muscle itself.

Dr. Mike Moreno: What I love about the whole world of chiropractic medicine is that when you look at musculoskeletal, I’m a primary care guy, so I deal with tons of musculoskeletal stuff all the time and I end up sending a lot of them to you because, you know, or chiropractors in my area, because I know my limitations and I know you have to have that idea. Is this an injury where you need to look towards imaging or red flags or so much that comes from the history from a patient? But, gosh, your field is just evolving so quickly. There’s I mean, research and so many new things. It’s got to be exciting for you when you look at how you practice now compared to how you practiced twenty five or thirty years ago. I mean, what’s [00:30:00] it like to kind of reflect and think about that?

Dr. Brendan Murray: Oh, I mean, what we knew twenty five, thirty years ago when I first came into practice is ridiculous. Now what’s become evident is that every musculoskeletal injury comes because, again, I talk about force exceeds what the tissue will tolerate. So somehow that tissue or that joint will change positions because of the injury. So every musculoskeletal injury, now we all know that there’s a mechanical part to it. So if you don’t change the mechanics, it keeps coming back. We’ve all had things, most of us have broken things. I broke a lot of things growing up, but you get a cast on, they put it back together and it heals in that position. If you don’t get it casted or whatever, then it kind of heals off.

Well, the musculoskeletal systems are so different if a joint is moving abnormally because of an injury, unless you change it back, it’s not going to fix itself. The pain may go away, but the joint is going to continue to function, but in a poor position before, it’s actually starts to erode and that’s what we’re starting to see, is these arthritic changes. We’re seeing these hip replacements and knee replacements going on. Wonderful surgeries, but they don’t have to be if we can get ahead of it and actually normalize joint motions, we don’t get arthritic changes.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Right, yeah, I love what you were saying earlier about these new ways of getting ahead of things to prevent injuries. Everything is about prevention and primary care. We say the same thing. You know, if we can prevent these heart attacks, if we can prevent strokes, if we can prevent cardiovascular problems through lifestyle interventions, whether it’s diet or exercise, weight management, smoking, avoidance, whatever it may be, it’s a lot easier to take care and cost effective to take care of a healthy person than it is a sick person.

I have a very, I have a relationship with my patients where I tell them, you and I are partners and there are going to be things you’re going to ask of me and there are going to be things I’m going to ask of you when you’re down and out, you need medicine. You need an x-ray; you need some guidance. I’m going to be there for you and I’m going to be there to help you get through what you need, but there are things I’m going to need from you. I’m going to need you to move. I’m going to need you to take care of your body physically, nutritionally.

All of these things are important. I think the body is magical to me. When you look at how it works, when you look at the organ systems and everything, how it functions in unison for decades, I mean, in some cases, 80, 90, 100 plus years. It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating that it just happens. It’s what drew me to medicine, and I would imagine probably drew you into medicine as well and I will just tell you, we are fortunate to have chiropractors. I can speak volumes of my chiropractor. He’s just been fantastic. He and his partner both have done work with me. So, again, as I said at the beginning, I have to thank you, Dr. Murray, for your field and for your expertise and the work you do, because it’s made such a change in my life and I cannot really even express to you the gratitude that I have.

Dr. Brendan Murray: Well, it’s been a pleasure for me to do this, and the fun thing is the more I learn, the less I know because I learned so much more about the body every single day. Like you said, it’s magical. The amount of the things it can do to repair itself and to keep going is, it’s mind boggling. I can’t even understand it sometimes and the more I understand of it, the less I go, how does this really, this has been going on for centuries before I ever learned this? I got the chance to learn it now, but it’s been going on for centuries.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Right.

Dr. Brendan Murray: How has this happened? It’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

Dr. Mike Moreno: It really is. Listen, I think we’re going have to drag you on for a part two, maybe part three, because I got loads of questions, but I have to thank you again for spending time, for educating me, for making me feel better. Your entire community and then the work you guys do in your field of medicine is, we couldn’t get along without it, quite honestly. Where do I send our listeners to find you? Where can we find you?

Dr. Brendan Murray: You can find me at our office called the Institute for Spine and Sports Care or Dr. Brendan Murray, either one of those. I’m on Instagram. Dr. Brennan Murray or Institute for Spine and Sports Care. So we’re all over the place. We have our websites, Instagram. So look us up. You can find us.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Dr. Murray, thank you so much for coming on and spending some time and educating us today. I really, really appreciate it.

Dr. Brendan Murray: It’s my pleasure. I’m very excited to be able to do that.

Dr. Mike Moreno: Again, I want to thank Dr. Murray because I can go on and on about how much happier I am not being in pain all the time. I want to get to the weekly RX. I’m going to borrow some from the good doctor because I loved it and as I was kind of reading about Dr. Murray and his philosophy and his practice and all his accolades and achievements, I love the three treatment phase. Eliminating pain, unwinding, and stabilizing and functionally [00:35:00] straightening. I mean, these are the things when you give the body what it needs from nutrition to movement and activity, the good doctor talks so much about all these surgeries and all these wonderful things that we do, but if you don’t get the body back in check, if you don’t get the body moving the right way, you could still end up with the best surgery and having chronic problems.

So that’s it, guys. Stay active, move, reach out to chiropractors, because I will tell you, they’ve made a difference in my life. They make differences in millions of people’s lives.

Thank you so much for spending some time with us. That’s it for today. Don’t forget to subscribe for free. Download and listen to Wellness Inc. with me, Dr. Mike Moreno on Apple podcast, or wherever you listen. Follow me on social media at the 17 Day Diet. The Wellness Inc. with Dr. Mike Moreno podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and is not intended as a replacement or substitution for any professional, medical, financial, legal, or other advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This podcast does not constitute the practice of medicine or any other professional service. The use of any information provided during this podcast is at the listener’s own risk. For medical or other advice appropriate to your specific situation, please consult a physician or other trained professional. Thank you.

About this Episode:

Dr. Brendan Murray has over thirty years specializing in chiropractic sports medicine backing up a progressive prevention and treatment protocol developed at his Institute for Spine & Sports Care that is a unique and powerful approach to healing.

In this episode Dr. Mike and Dr. Murray discuss why young athletes are suffering from an increase in catastrophic injuries and surgical rates, re-injury rates, long term pain and the negative mental impacts that come with a physical breakdown. They discuss how to build real joint strength that can minimize serious injury and prolong a life of healthy activity.

From high-level professional and Olympic athletes to those engaged in everyday activities his protocols are specialized for individual clients. This show could be the key to ending injuries, long term pain and staying out of the surgery room!

About Dr. Brendan Murray:

Bringing Olympic level care to the community, Institute for Spine & Sports Care continues to serve Olympic and Professional athletes and has been recognized for applying this specialized and personalized program to all individuals.

For more information: https://www.isscchiro.com.