554: Functional Movement: The Natural Cure for Back Pain

Highlights:

• Low back pain is common but recoverable. Around 80% of people will experience it, but the spine, discs, joints, and muscles are highly adaptive and capable of healing.
• Surgery is often unnecessary. Studies show that 97% of people with back pain don’t need surgery, yet many undergo procedures that can make things worse.
• Imaging can be misleading. MRIs and X-rays frequently show “issues” (disc bulges, arthritis) even in people without pain, leading to unnecessary fear and invasive treatments.
• Movement and education are the best treatments. Functional movement and pain science education consistently outperform surgeries, drugs, and injections for long-term recovery.
• Beware of financial incentives in healthcare. Hospitals and surgeons often operate under quotas and profit motives, which can push patients toward unnecessary imaging or surgery.
• Choose your practitioner wisely. Chiropractors, physical therapists, and DOs generally receive more neuromusculoskeletal training than MDs, but skill still varies. Look for evidence-based, movement-focused providers.
• Emotional and mental health impact pain. Stress, trauma, and unresolved emotions can amplify or even trigger chronic pain. Healing requires addressing both body and mind.
• Failed back surgeries are common. Many patients continue to struggle with pain after procedures, especially spinal fusions, which have particularly poor outcomes.
• Psychological messaging can create or worsen pain. Patients told they’re “broken” often experience more pain, while reassurance and positive framing lead to faster recovery.
• Proof-first approach. Dr. Elliot’s program gives patients measurable results before asking them to commit, with assessments showing an average 37% improvement in one hour.

Intro: 

Hello True Health Seeker, welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast.

This episode today is for everyone who has back pain, chronic pain, acute pain, newly developed back pain, or something they've had for many years. Please share this with those you care about. Share this with family members, friends, co-workers, anyone you know who is suffering from back pain.

My guest today is a doctor and specialist who has an outstanding, almost 100% success rate when it comes to helping people, within a matter of months, get their body so healthy that it is functional again, that they're able to regain function and, most of the time, become totally pain-free. These are people who have been around the block, have seen all kinds of specialists, many of them have received multiple surgeries, they've lost a lot of function, they have lost a lot of quality of life, and he's able to help so many people. So he's here today to teach us what we can do now, who we should go see, and what we should start doing to support the structure and function of our back.

I want to let you know that I created a resource for you to support the structure and function of every aspect of your health, every aspect of your being, and it's free for you. You can go to learntruehealth.com/free, check it out. It's one-third of my book I'm giving to you for free.

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It is an accumulation of over 500 interviews that I've done with holistic health practitioners and experts around the world, as well as my 20 plus years of experience working with clients and supporting them in taking their health not only physically, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and energetically. Taking their whole being in every aspect of their life, enriching it, bringing joy into every aspect of their life, and taking their life to a whole new level.

That's what true health is. True health is gaining health in every aspect of your life, so this is an accumulation of my life's work, teaching you, boiling down the fundamentals. When you start doing it, it's all action-based. Everything you learn from my book you will immediately start to get results.

Within a week, people notice a tremendous amount of more energy. More energy is the most common thing people notice. Then better mental clarity, better sleep, better digestion, and the list goes on and on. The first thing you'll notice is that you have more endurance, more energy, that you bounce out of bed in the morning and you feel you can go all day. Some people even report quitting coffee or reducing the amount of coffee they need, just because they're feeling they have so much more energy.

That's just from the free part of my book that you're going to get by going to learntruehealth.com/free. So check it out.

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We have a whole wonderful, holistic community that is learning from each other and has been for so many years. You can even use the search function in the Facebook group or you can use the search function on my website, learntruehealth.com, because we've got over 500 interviews, so there are lots of resources. These episodes are transcribed there as well, so you can go and read the transcripts or read through when you want to check out a certain thing—oh, what did that doctor say? You can use the search function on the website and then you hit Control + F to find something. Or you can go up to your little edit button on your browser and grab the find. Then you type in what you're looking for and it’ll pop you all the way down, halfway through the interview or wherever it was when they mentioned that thing. Then you can read the transcript. It's really helpful.

We wanted to make—by we I mean me and my husband—we both wanted to make this podcast that I do accessible, so you can use the transcripts on my website, learntruehealth.com, to dig into these resources that I'm bringing you.

Enjoy today's interview. If anything you learned today helps you, if you get out of back pain, or if you help a friend get out of back pain, or if you even gain more functionality and have less pain just from the exercises he talks about and the resources he talks about today, please come back to me and share. I would love, love, love to hear from you.

It really makes a difference. It makes me want to keep doing this work, knowing that what I'm doing makes a difference by bringing you this information. So please reach out. I'd love to hear from you. Again, that's support@learntruehealth.com or you can join the Facebook group and just say it in the Facebook group. We'd love to hear from you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, and enjoy today's interview.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 554.

Ashley James (0:05:46.758)

I am so excited for today's guest. I have Dr. Grant Elliot on the show, based in Tampa, but you teach people worldwide how to end back pain, how to rehabilitate their back. I'm really excited to talk about this today because so many people are under the myth—the medical myths of back pain. They go to the wrong doctor, and the doctor only has a set of tools.

Have you heard the saying, if you go to a carpenter, every problem looks like you just need the hammer and the nail? That's all they're going to use. I totally butchered that by the way, but you get the point. The point is: know what the tools are of the expert you're going to, because those are the tools that they're going to say you need.

So if you go to a surgeon, guess what? They're going to want to cut you open. If you go to an MD, they're going to want to prescribe drugs. It is very rare that you would go to a standard medical doctor and they're going to say, well, what? You're in pain, but I'm going to recommend some ice packs and arnica. I want you to go do some stretches and see your chiropractor. It's unheard of. If you go to a typical MD, they're giving you muscle relaxants, steroid injections.

Is this going to support your body's ability to heal itself? We have to ask that. Sometimes mitigating the pain is what we really need. We really need something to help mitigate or just calm things down so the body can do the resting and the repairing. But I guarantee you there's a better way.

How many people walk into a hospital with excruciating back pain and end up doing a surgery that makes things worse? I have a friend who's only 35. He is bedridden practically. He is in excruciating pain. He lifted something pretty heavy at work a few years ago. I think it was two years ago, maybe two, three years ago. It got worse and worse, the pain over a month or so. So he went to the doctor.

They said, we see here in these results, you've got a slipped disc or whatever, this needs surgery. He ended up doing several back surgeries over the last few years. He did two years of PT. Now he has excruciating constant pain because the surgeries caused everything to be much worse. It caused scar tissue to form around his nerves in his back. Now he has shooting pain from his low back all the way down his leg. He's lost function of that leg.

He's only 35. He doesn't see a way out. He's in constant pain, he's on multiple medications. This is not an unusual or unheard-of circumstance. I'm excited for you to jump in, but I'm laying the foundation of this conversation that the people with back pain, the outcome really depends on who you go to.

That's why I'm so excited, Dr. Grant Elliot, to have you on the show. What you do as a chiropractor specializing in low back injuries and supporting the body's ability to rehabilitate itself—you are looking to not do any long-term damage from surgeries, injections, drugs. You're supporting the body in its ability to heal itself.

Now, there's a myth that we cannot heal once we have a disc that is ruptured. There's a myth there. My chiropractor says no, she's seen it. She has seen people heal, completely heal those kinds of injuries. You can, but you have to go to the right doctor because the MDs believe your body can't heal itself, that you need drugs, injections, surgery, maybe some PT after.

So you've got to make sure that you go to the right doctor that believes your body can heal itself. With that, Dr. Elliot, so excited to have you here.

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:10:10.118)

You nailed it, laid the foundation very well. To just touch on the first point you were making, it's not the typical MD's fault because they're only trained in medicine. So when someone comes in with a medical-based condition that needs those types of interventions, then they're great. Then that is who you should see. By no means am I blaming those providers for not knowing something that they were not trained in. That's not fair.

What needs to be clear is to educate the public that that is not the go-to location. That's not the go-to provider for these types of issues. The mistake that that provider could be making is if they are attempting to manage conditions that they are not trained in, that they do not have solutions for, then sure, that could be shame on them a little bit. They should make the appropriate referral to a provider that does understand how to manage these conditions.

Something I kind of say often is if you have low back pain and you go to a general medical provider, it's like having an eye issue and going to a dentist. It's not the right provider. You're going to the wrong person. But the vast majority, vast majority of the population with low back pain, they go straight to a general medical provider as their point of entry.

To connect that to the second big point that you stated—at least in my opinion—is that your first step, your first experience, the first thing you do when you experience low back pain can totally change your outcome. That could not be more true. That is so crucial. That's something that I preach a lot about all over my content. I've grown over 3 million followers across social media for a reason. Rehab Fix is the name of the channel.

What you'll see in a lot of my posts is about the fact that you can heal. Back pain is common. It's highly recoverable. Disc herniations can heal. You can avoid these without surgery. There was a massive study in 2020 where it analyzed 280,000 people with disc herniations—97% recovered without surgery. Ninety-seven percent of disc herniations recover without surgery. So that's the stat.

Let's take two people. Let's just pretend, for the sake of the example, they're the same person. So they have neutral expectations on all things in regards to medical care, interventions, back pain. They're the same person.

Person number one, let's say the first thing they do is they interact with someone who is conservative. They say, hey, you're dealing with low back pain. Don't worry. Low back pain is common. You don't need to run straight to imaging to see what the problem is. You don't need to run to injections or drugs. You'll be okay. This is really common and really recoverable.

Okay. So good comforting message. That person now has confidence in their experience. They're going to go see a provider. Then now let's say that provider says a similar message. Let's say that provider says, with your low back pain, what you're experiencing doesn't sound like anything serious is going on. This is a common bout of lower back pain. Keep moving. Keep continuing your daily life. Don't be afraid to move.

You come back and see me in a week or two if it's persisting. But I recommend maybe these gentle stretches or exercises. It doesn't even have to be anything in-depth or specialized. Let's say that's it. Let's say that's person number one's experience.

But person number two's experience—let's say now they interact with someone, and the person says, my gosh, you have back pain. That's not good. You need to go get imaging immediately. You need to go talk to a surgeon. I heard this can get really bad. I heard there's some people who they'll never heal.

Person number two immediately gets scary, catastrophizing messages. So then they go to a provider, and then that provider does the same thing. My gosh. You have low back pain. I'm going to send you for an MRI right now. We all know MRIs and imaging have asymptomatic findings, which are finding–

Ashley James (0:14:25.076)

I want you to explain that because this blew my mind

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:14:28.012)

Asymptomatic findings are findings that are not presenting with symptoms. So asymptomatic means absence of symptoms. It means you can take an X-ray or an MRI of someone's spine or anywhere on someone's body, and you can see things on it that do not cause pain, don't cause a problem.

The cool stat for you is if you take an MRI of all individuals, the average age range of the population, 50% of individuals will have a disc bulge on an MRI that do not have pain. So 50% of people without pain will have a disc bulge.

So now here comes the mistake with imaging and MRIs. All this, I'm only reporting what the current evidence states. This is not my opinion. This is the evidence. But yet, when I talk about this on social media, on the internet, of course all of a sudden a bunch of people are smarter than I am and tell me why I'm wrong with imaging.

What the evidence and what the facts show us about imaging is that premature imaging, unnecessary imaging, almost always can make scenarios worse because it adds in the layer of fear. So if there was someone who would have been fine, but now they go get an MRI from a provider that is not educated on this, the provider gives the message: my gosh, we got an MRI. I see you have a disc bulge. You have arthritis. You have stenosis. It looks like you have a slight tear in your glute med. They start giving all this scary language.

That's what the MRI and X-ray are designed to do. They're designed to find something. So that radiologist, they're going to put down whatever they see. That's their job. So then you get the scary imaging report. Now the provider tells you you're broken, you have all these issues, and now you believe you're broken.

Now your optimism in regards to your situation is in the gutter. So now you're of the belief that something's really bad, something's not going to heal. Now you're being told, hey, you might need injections, surgery. That person's going to go down a very bad path. They could end up getting totally unnecessary, unneeded imaging, injections, surgery. That surgery could go wrong, could warrant other surgeries. We know the more surgeries someone has, the worse their outcomes are.

So they go into this spiral. I know that was somewhat of a long-winded response, but I think it's necessary.

Ashley James (0:17:01.395)

No, that was great. It's so important to understand that. Back in 2005, I read the book Healing Back Pain by Dr. John E. Sarno. I was blown away. Totally recommend it. It was written in ’90, ’91, but it is so relevant.

He worked in the hospital system. He had access to, I believe, multiple hospital records, and he wanted to see, on an administrative level, the success of back surgeries. So people would come in, they complain of back pain. They've had a history of it because it's not like you have back pain on Wednesday, you're in surgery on Friday. There was some level of responsibility: OK, well, these people have a history of bulging discs in their imaging. So they've experienced back pain for months. We're going to cut them open, remove that thing that offends us. That is probably the root cause.

He found, I don't remember the numbers, maybe you do, but it was dismally low success rates, something like most—it was 80% or most of the people that had back surgery still had the same level of pain, if not more, after the surgery. After they recovered from the surgery, not just pain from being cut open, but the surgery didn't fix the problem. In some cases, it made it worse.

So when he looked at these dismally low success records, as in someone has chronic back pain, they get a surgery, bam, they're amazing, they're out of pain, it's wonderful. That was such a small percentage that it led him to pursue for the rest of his career an understanding of what does cause back pain.

If people who have no back pain—if, you said, 50% of the population that we image has zero back pain, yet they present with what looks like disc herniations or some stenosis or some curvature—that when someone has pain, the doctor points at that and says, look, that's the cause of your pain on the imaging. But we have half the population with no pain with the same artifacts on their imaging.

So when they do this imaging, are they just looking for evidence to support? It's not really scientific. They're just looking at imaging going, well, that thing, that thing clearly is the cause. But 50% of people don't have back pain and they have that. That can't be the cause. So then what is it? What is the cause?

He came across the concept that we—I'm not saying this is for all back pain—but it's pretty remarkable that when we have unresolved negative emotions that are pretty strong, that we are suppressing, the unconscious mind will create ischemia in certain muscles, typically quadratus lumborum, this nice kind of squarish, rectangularish low back muscle. It causes it to squeeze and tighten. We don't really notice that, but it's almost cold and hard to the touch.

When the person becomes conscious of these emotions, finally allows themselves to feel what they've been suppressing, or shoulding themselves—golden handcuffs, “I should do this job” or “I should stay in this marriage” or whatever it is—when they stop doing that, they allow themselves to actually feel, then the back pain will resolve within seconds.

I have personally seen it with clients for over 20 years now. I've seen this happen. So that's just one possible cause of back pain. But if you go to the wrong doctor, they're cutting you open. Then it could also be needing some, you said, stretches or some ice or supporting the body's ability to heal itself.

But we should not disregard the fact that health is not just—we're not a physical meat sack. Health is emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, energetic. We should look to heal on all levels and look for the root cause of our pain on all levels.

So anyways, that's my experience. But I'm here today to learn from you. We're all here to learn from you and your experience. So when someone comes to you with back pain, especially persistent back pain, what do you first recommend? What do you do? Don't say, go get an MRI. What do you recommend then?

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:21:45.007)

The first step for anyone is an appropriate assessment because the assessment drives the direction always. That's what kind of flabbergasts me, Ashley. I thought it was normal to provide a good detailed evaluation earlier in my career. I did not realize the majority of providers do not assess people with low back pain.

I didn't realize that until a little bit later in my career, which I just thought everyone was good. So there's my mistake. But the first step is a proper assessment to determine, okay, what direction do we need to go? So what does that mean? What is a proper assessment? If you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, have I had a proper assessment? How do I know if I'm going to get a proper assessment? I'll spell it out for you.

A proper assessment is not a five-minute Q&A. That's not a proper assessment. A proper assessment takes time. It's going to be primarily your history, an in-depth conversation about if you've had past experiences with low back pain, what preceded this bout of back pain. Then you touched on something really good, Ashley: what else is going on in the individual's life? So, okay, you have back pain right now, but has something else recently changed in your life? What else is going on? Did you change jobs? Is your work very stressful or physically stressful? Have there been significant shifts in your life that could disrupt your routines?

I'm not saying we would get this in depth on the very first visit, but there are definitely scenarios where individuals’ close friends or loved ones have passed away, and that amount of emotional stress is being released through either a present or past injury. So there are instances where people might've been struggling with low back pain two to three years ago. They've been pain free, it's been gone. Then something tragic occurs in their life, and immediately all of their low back pain is back.

They could be freaking out—my gosh, I re-injured, everything's wrong. Once again, to your point Ashley, they go to the wrong provider. They then take an MRI. They see a disc bulge that had been there for the last three years, never causing a problem. But then they blame that disc bulge. Without taking a good history, they say, yup, this is the thing causing your pain. Even though it has been there for three years, we need to cut this out in order for you to feel better.

When in reality, it was a spike in emotional stress that made the nervous system more sensitive. Now that person is basically releasing their pain through a past injury. These are very, very real scenarios that happen all the time. So if these types of things come up, or maybe they're hinted at throughout that history or evaluation process, it should definitely be emphasized. Pain education should be a large component.

Now, included with history should be detailed questions about what the symptoms are. So where do you feel it? How does it feel? What are the symptoms that you are experiencing? Common questions that would ring bells for individuals with back pain would be: do you notice the longer you sit, the more you feel this? Do you notice when you bend forward or you pick things off the ground, those types of bending motions, do those trigger your symptoms? What about coughing or sneezing? Does that increase your symptoms?

If you've been sitting for a long period, do you notice if you go to stand up, it's really tight, takes a few steps to stand up straight? Maybe you have some radiating symptoms down the leg, some numbness or tingling. These are all very common symptoms. These are not alarm bells or anything to be concerned about.

If that individual is saying, hey, I have low back pain, and let's say they report no to all of those questions—hey, no, there's no movements that trigger it. There's no symptoms that trigger it. I just feel back pain all the time. My position or my movement doesn't change it. Well, then that's going to be a different approach. Or maybe they say, I only feel this at night. No other time, I only feel this at night. Then that's going to be a different approach. These would require a different direction, different forms of testing.

But the most common is going to say yes to the symptoms I mentioned a moment ago. That tells us it's a movement-based, mechanical type of lower back pain, meaning your mechanics affect it. The movement of your spine, the movement of your body, the position of it, the mechanics. So that's common mechanical low back pain.

Okay, great. We have that identified. So now we should take that individual through movement testing. A proper assessment should involve testing. Just to make it simple: different ranges of motion. Bend forward, bend backward, bend to the sides, rotate, do a squat, do various other orthopedic tests that involve movement of your body and spine to test different nerves and different triggers.

You should have a thorough movement-based evaluation to see what movements trigger your symptoms and what movements do not. Because if you can find movements that increase your pain, then you can find movements that decrease your pain. The movements that increase tell us information about what is causing it. So then, okay, great. We know the movements that trigger. This gives us clues.

Now based on these clues, let's do these exercises. Based on these clues, we should do these exercises. So then we perform different movements and different exercises. Find the ones that feel good based on the clues. Then after we perform those exercises, we should always retest your initial movements to see if those clues now feel better.

If you can see immediate improvement in movements or things that triggered your symptoms, then you're on the right path. The exercises that you prescribed were the right ones. That will confirm a diagnosis. It will confirm the general direction that we need to go. Then that is what should formulate the treatment plan, at least the initial plan of how to navigate this.

Ashley James (0:28:05.343)

You mean people shouldn't just immediately go into surgery after getting imaging, bulging disc, quick, let's cut it out. My pain started a week ago, but I jumped into surgery. It's crazy how when we go to an MD, now there are MDs out there who, after they graduated, became a medical doctor, then they sought further training in sports medicine, further training.

But a standard MD doesn't have adequate experience or training in doing these types of assessments. This has not been my experience. This is one of my questions I'm going to pause to you in a moment: which type of doctor should we go to, to expect who has the education, the full breadth of education, to be able to do an appropriate thorough assessment? A regular standard run-of-the-mill MD won't. A surgeon is looking through the lens of what can I cut out? What can I drill into you? This is their wheelhouse. Those are their tools.

They're not likely going to say to the average person with back pain who has some supportive artifacts — remembering 50 percent of people do on their imaging — they're less likely to say, “No, no, no, you don't need my services.” It's more times than not, because a surgeon works for, who do they work for? Who's their employer? We got to follow the money. Surgeons, they're not independent. No, they work under a hospital system. The hospital system has quotas.

You learn about this. You should not speed near the end of the month. I know this sounds silly, but think about it. People typically get more tickets near the end of the month because policemen have quotas. They have certain quotas. I don't know when they have to meet them. Maybe they have to meet them by the end of the month. Maybe they have to meet them by the middle of the month. But there are certain quotas. So there are certain times where you don't see policemen out in the first two weeks of the month. It's more the last two weeks of the month, giving tickets.

I use that just as an example. Doctors in hospital systems have quotas. They need to fill a certain amount of beds. They need to use that MRI machine a certain amount of times. They need to use all the machines, the tools, and fill the operating rooms a certain amount of times. When you see that big billboard, I see downtown Seattle, where it says, they have a picture of one or two doctors, “We have the number one doctor or doctors. We have the top-rated doctors in Washington state here at our hospital.” Do you know how they score that? It's based on how much money they bring in.

So this is a money system. A surgeon's not going to be able to pay their boat payment if they're telling most people that come to them with back pain that they don't need a surgery. So this is why we started off this whole conversation with, yes, go see other doctors, but you have to understand what they're going to say to you, because this is the lens they look through.

So get a shirt, get an opinion. Before someone cuts into you, get five different opinions. From five very different types of practitioners. I always say, let's say you want a second surgical opinion, don't go to a surgeon in the same hospital system. Make sure it's outside, because they're not going to go against their coworker. Even if it's a different hospital, if it's under the same umbrella, you actually have to find an institution that's a competitor. Get different opinions.

Remember, you're the client. We tend to put doctors on a pedestal, then they have this authoritarian complex that we're supposed to genuflect to. That's the opposite. They work for you. You can fire them. You can hire them. You can interview them. You can build a team around you to support you. You're the one in charge. This is your body. You get to say. No one's forcing you to do this.

But they're going to try to manipulate you by using fear mongering, by saying, “If you don't do this really quick, then it's going to get worse, yada, yada.” So look at the statistics. Ask many different types of professionals. Let's say the person who's listening right now does have low back pain or has a loved one with low back pain, or honestly any kind of pain. What are the best practitioners that are appropriately trained in assessments, in full assessments, that they should go seek out help from?`

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:33:01.019)

Yes. So purely based on the subject matter of training hours being trained, we know that the medical-based providers have the least. The ones who have the most are chiropractors, physical therapists, and DOs, which are technically medical degrees, doctors of osteopathy. They will have more orthopedic movement-based training hours than their counterparts, MDs, will.

There are some DOs that do have some decent training, but you would need to consider it. This applies to everybody. I'm not saying this is just DOs. This applies to everyone, that the providers who are the best are always the ones who have gone out of their way to seek additional training. So let's be clear here. There could definitely be MDs out there who have realized the gaps in their training, who have gone above and beyond to go through shadowing and additional certifications to explore these types of things. They could be potentially way more qualified than maybe a not-invested chiropractor or physical therapist. That scenario is absolutely likely. It's just not common. So I just want to be clear about saying that.

Generally speaking, chiropractors and physical therapists are going to have the most amount of training in neuromusculoskeletal disorders, which are disorders related to the muscular system, skeletal system, and the nerves — nerve-based conditions, nerve pain, pinched nerves, all those types of things. On paper, we have the most amount of training in these areas. That does not automatically mean that every single chiropractor or every single PT has the same skill in these areas. It just means on paper, we have the most amount of training. So within that, you would still need to consider there's going to be good and bad providers in any industry.

That's the umbrella to look in. Then in that umbrella, you of course want to seek the best provider who manages and specializes in your primary complaint, who most importantly is not fear mongering, who is following evidence-based protocols, who is providing a movement-based solution and can get you results. These are the providers that you want to look for.

Keep in mind, although we've been saying a lot about MD typical practice with this — this is true for the majority — there are chiropractors and physical therapists out there too that also jump straight to imaging and jump straight to referring to injections because they don't know how to manage this, they're not skilled at it. So just keep that in mind. This is the umbrella, but you still want to find a good provider within that umbrella that focuses on all the various subject matters that we've discussed so far today.

Ashley James (0:35:51.491)

I've seen outstanding chiropractors worth their weight in gold. I've seen okay chiropractors that are good at general stuff, but they fall short when it comes to the more chronic things. That's why you shouldn't judge an entire profession based on one or two professionals that you've seen. You want to ask around. Ask your friends. Go to your Facebook group or community group and say, “What chiropractor that you recommend has helped you overcome something major?”

You get enough people saying, “You’ve got to go see Dr. Elliot, he's awesome,” then go check him out. You can interview him. A lot of times naturopaths and chiropractors will do a free meeting, a little 15-minute chat, or a phone conversation.

The chiropractor I'm seeing now, I've seen chiropractors since I was three years old. I consider them an essential part of my wellness. I see one on a regular basis for my overall wellness and prevention. Then I see them more often when I have an injury as needed, obviously, because they'll say, “OK, you could come back in two weeks. You can come back in a month. Or no, we need to see you three times a week for the next while because this is major.”

But my chiropractor I see now had so many recommendations. I couldn't believe it. From my mom groups, they’re just, “She's outstanding. She is the best chiropractor I've ever seen.” I've seen so many. She doesn't do any snap, crackle, or pop. She uses an activator and muscle testing. She does a thorough examination. So it looks very different. Honestly, if you had told me this isn't a chiropractor, this is something else, I would have believed you because it was so different from my snap, crackle, pop experience of the stereotypical rack and crack.

She's very specialized. She says, well, in her college they said, “If it's not specialized, if it's not specific, it's not chiropractic.” So you’ve got to get specific. You can't just go crack, crack, crack, crack, crack. But again, there are so many different styles of chiropractic under that umbrella. Most people don't even know that you could get a totally different experience seeing a NUCCA chiropractor from a Blair, just all these different kinds.

So it's exciting though, because it means that if you didn't have a good experience in the past seeing a chiropractor, that might not have been the right tool for you. That might not have been the right professional with the right experience. Maybe even that same chiropractor 20 years in the future will be right for you because he will have gained enough knowledge and experience. So we don't know, but keep looking, keep assessing, keep trying different professionals until you find the one who has the right tool set for you.

So first, make sure you understand that the doctor you go to — what were they trained in? MDs, very, very little training in supporting your body's ability to heal itself, especially when it comes to pain. They're going to help you suppress it, but they're really not going to have much other than telling you to go get surgery or go put an ice pack on it. Then you've got PTs, DOs, chiropractors.

Even under that umbrella, there are so many types, so many choices. Is there a style or a few styles of chiropractic that are your favorite? Or maybe there are studies around specific styles of chiropractic that do better than others, particularly for bulging discs?

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:39:33.550)

So within chiropractic are subclassifications and subtechniques. There are some chiropractors that choose to specialize in a particular technique. My stance is a little bit different. I like to follow purely an evidence-based path. I'm very movement focused and very rehab focused. I want to teach people how to fix themselves through forms of exercise and movement. I don't really rely on any particular technique.

Most of the time techniques usually require hands-on. I try my best to make it so that individuals don't have to rely on me, hence me creating a large online program. I like to take the stance of teaching people how to fix themselves. We know that based on the evidence, not my opinion, if we look at what's the number one approach for low back pain, it is education and exercise.

Education and exercise is hands down the number one treatment for low back pain. That's tried and tested over and over again. The evidence shows education and exercise is number one. So what I would say is I don't really care who you see as a chiropractor or if they like to focus on one particular technique or whatever. I don't really care, because what matters the most is if alongside that, are they providing exercise and education.

If they are doing other things but they're still keeping exercise and education as the core component of their treatment with you, the core lesson, then the other stuff doesn't really matter to me. That's the most important. As long as you're getting exercise and education, then you're probably seeing someone who's going to be getting better results than most.

When it comes to disc herniation — well, disc herniation specifically — you absolutely need the right exercises for a symptomatic disc herniation. There are going to be specific directions of the spine that are going to make a disc worse, and there are going to be directions that make it better. You want to know that you're doing the right movements for your spine that are improving your symptoms, that are regressing the disc herniation, that are reducing your nerve symptoms.

If you're doing the wrong movements, then your disc is going to be getting worse. Your nerve symptoms are going to be getting worse too. So a movement-based solution — back pain is a movement-based problem. It needs a movement-based solution. You want someone who's looking at education, exercise, prescribing the right movements for the right condition, and using that as a core component of their treatment with you.

Ashley James (0:42:17.826)

You said something interesting. Can you unpack that, saying that back pain is a movement-based problem, so it needs a movement-based solution? Can you explain that? That seems counterintuitive to people who were told to just go lie in bed and rest.

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:42:33.433)

Yes. Guess what? If we look at the top back pain research, we'll look at Lancet articles. It's shown that rest chronifies low back pain. Rest is not advised for low back pain. It can make it worse.

Now, of course, as with anything that I could ever say over any subject, there's always going to be unique circumstances where that doesn't apply. Okay. If someone got hit by a car and their low back hurts, they want to rest that same day. Okay. I'm not talking about that scenario. I'm talking about someone who has mechanical low back pain, is in the normal realm, and it is developing over time.

That scenario, rest is shown over and over and over and over again to delay healing, create scenarios of more chronic pain, to create fear avoidance behaviors—meaning I am fearfully avoiding doing things because I'm afraid it will make my pain worse. So we know that absence of movement makes back pain worse. That proves that it is a movement-based problem because the majority of back pain comes from—yes, there's emotional components, stress components, lifestyle components. Those are absolutely factors.

But when we look at the percentages of back pain, the vast majority of it is mechanical. Once again, mechanical being movement. If there's someone who is not moving enough, that can increase back pain. If they're doing too much of the wrong movements, then that can and will increase back pain. If someone is doing too much of the right movements, that can increase back pain. So movement is typically the number one predictor of the incidence of back pain, once again being all those different types of movements. There's many different ways to analyze that person's movement.

So the vast majority of low back pain—90%, 90%—is non-specific low back pain, which means you can't trace it back to one singular thing. It is a combination of that person's movements and lifestyle, typically tracing back to a muscle, joint, or disc. So if we know the vast majority is triggered through movement-based influences, once again, either too much or too little, then that's a movement-based problem. Therefore, it needs a movement-based solution.

So we need to move more. We need to do less of the wrong movements, more of the right movements, and have a movement plan to get us out of the stuck place that the absence of a movement plan put us in.

Ashley James (0:45:13.909)

You would think that pain is an irritation of the tissue. So we should just leave it alone. But what you're saying is by guarding it and resting it, it persists. Why is that?

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:45:32.715)

There's various reasons. One, let's use a simple example I think a lot of people would relate to. Blood flow. We know blood flow is good. That's very common knowledge. Okay, blood flow is good. If you're laying in bed for 12 hours straight, you think there's much blood flow? No, absolutely not.

Now there's also synovial fluid flow and movement, lymph movement too. So movement of joints increases synovial fluid. More synovial fluid through a joint is a good thing. It brings more nutrients to the joint. It keeps the joint healthy. So if someone is experiencing some pain, okay, well, how would movement, how could that be good? Well, it's bringing fluid to the joints that are within that region. This particular example being lower back pain. It's bringing fluid to all of the joints of your lower back. Great. If joint pain is involved, that's going to be a good thing.

It's going to bring blood flow to the muscles. If muscular injury is involved, that's going to be a good thing. This also promotes movement throughout the discs as well. The more movement we get in, the more fluid we get into the disc, the more nutrients we get into the disc as well. So just the general concept of movement—that's what our body responds to. Our body needs movement to heal and to recover.

Even going off the path a little bit, we look at a lot of sports medicine, exercise science-based studies that look at common sprains, common ankle sprains. It's super clear that those that follow purely rest and icing have extremely delayed recovery as opposed to those who actually begin moving the ankle or loading it, walking on it earlier than later. Tons of studies show other areas of the body.

The quicker you implement a movement-based plan, the quicker you implement exercises and rehab into an injured site, the faster the healing. Not the slower—the faster. Because it helps your body adapt quicker and get more nutrients and recovery-based processes beginning and continuing throughout that recovery phase.

I don't know if I answered it super clearly, but that's the best way to summarize it.

Ashley James (0:47:58.121)

I'm reminded of how the body creates connective tissue, scar tissue, when it's healing an insulted or injured area. Scar tissue, this type of connective tissue, it starts to form a three-dimensional spider web. No, it doesn't align perfectly with the tissue. 

When we start to move the joint in the appropriate direction, now that encourages this chaotic spider web of new scar tissue to align in the right direction. If we rest it and we don't move it enough, then when we go to move it eventually, all this chaotic scar tissue, which again, it's adhered to everything, further tears and creates more inflammation and stimulates more scar tissue to build.

So if you don't do rehab fast, soon enough, you're going to end up stimulating more and more scar tissue being laid down chaotically instead of supporting the scar tissue to align with the direction of the movement of the joint. Does that sound accurate?

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:49:15.057) 

Absolutely. You're referring to tissue dysfunction. Tissue dysfunction. So you're spot on. I guess a good mental imagery here would be to imagine you're seeing a bunch of strands of tissue flowing in one particular direction. Then you injure it. Then it's this. That kind of patch of misdirection is laid in the middle of it.

If you leave it there and don't touch it, it's going to stay there. But if, as soon as it's laid there, you start trying to glide it with the other tissues that are all in the uniform direction, it's going to slowly mold that to begin to look like the rest. It will reshape it. It will remodel it. Remodel is the ultimate term for tissue dysfunction.

So you take tissue, tissue that isn't adapted, and you can remodel that tissue through load, which is accomplished through movement. You have to move in order to load something. Loading means putting stress or force on it to some capacity in a designed way.

So it could be the weight of an exercise or even just walking. Walking could be load. But you load the tissue, and the tissue then remodels to become healthy tissue.

Ashley James (0:50:25.733)

You can do this with your movement, but you can also do it or further help it along with specific types of rehabilitation—friction work for PTs or massage therapists or Rolfing. I've seen a man here in Seattle who's a PhD in Rolfing. I just blew my mind. I'm like, you can have a PhD in Rolfing? For his thesis, shows—I don't know, I can't remember the kind of microscope he had to use. I don't know if it was an electron microscope. Crazy, crazy, huge microscope.

So the connective tissue that goes through our whole body, the fascia that connects everything from the tip of your nose to the tip of your toe. It's all this one long interconnected amazingness of our body. He shows that in this area of injury where it's chaotic tissue, then shows after 10 sessions of Rolfing you see the tissue is in completely different alignment. I'm just scratching the surface of an explanation of his thesis, but it's wild what we can do to support our body through movement and through these types of therapies.

If you can compare that to the cost, the emotional and financial cost of getting a surgery, and then of course the very, very statistically poor outcomes of surgery. Again, I'm sure there's someone listening going, “I had a surgery and it worked great.” I'm glad for you, but 97% of people don't need surgery. Most people have bad experiences and now need more rehabilitation after surgery. Surgery is pretty extreme for the body, but with the right practitioner, the right set of tools, like going to see a Rolfer.

So my husband helped build Safeco Field here in Seattle. He was a foreman union carpenter for 20 years. He's right-handed—so with his right hand, he had to drill into the concrete for weeks. Drill over and over these holes, over and over. That was, I don't know, 20-plus years ago they built Safeco Field. I don't remember when. But his shoulder ever since then had bothered him, been crunchy. Not great. I'm not going to say arthritis, but just, it was so irritating to him.

He actually can't brush his hair on that side. He doesn't have full range of motion. I was seeing a type of massage therapist-–not Rolfing. It's different. I'll remember the name of it, but it's a very specific type. She hardly touches you, which is wild, because you think, well, what am I paying you for? You're hardly touching, but she's dealing specifically with fascia.

He saw her for one session and he got full range of motion back and was out of pain for years—years and years and years—just from one session. It was wild. The things we don't know that are out there. This is why I love having practitioners like you on the show, because most people have heard of chiropractic, but they don't know that you can heal your back. That these are the specialists we should be seeing.

The specialists we have been taught our whole lives have marketing campaigns, have Hollywood behind them. More than 50% of advertisement spending is pharmaceutical industry. We have been indoctrinated since birth to believe there's only one type of medicine. So you come along saying, “They get really bad results. You’ve got to hear about this stuff that gets great results.”

Now people around the world learn from you how to heal their pain. So a lot of people aren't seeing you in person. How can you do that? How can you help people with typical back pain learn to help their body heal without ever seeing you in person?

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:54:28.209)

The amazing fact is that low back pain is primarily a movement problem. For that reason, once again, I'm not saying there aren’t certain scenarios where some form of manual therapy could not be beneficial. There's always going to be a scenario for something, but once again, exercise and education is the number one treatment. For a majority of individuals, the majority will not need more than the right education and the right exercise. That will help a majority of people.

We know through a proper assessment, a thorough history should be taken, which you take by talking. You can talk to anyone in the world through the various technologies. We do all of our calls and everything through Zoom. If you can talk with someone, then you can take a proper history. So we do that.

Now let's assess someone's movement. The only thing needed to assess someone's movement is your eyes. You’ve got to be able to see them. If we're with someone on Zoom, we just simply ask them to stand up, back away from the camera to get a full view of their body. We will take them through a very thorough movement-based evaluation, guiding them through different movements, different testing, different orthopedic tests, different special tests to help them do self—well, it's guidance with us, of course—but self-diagnostic throughout that.

Then we can very accurately tell them: “Hey, based on these movements, based on these triggers, based on what you're experiencing with these, this is likely what's causing your pain.” Then we guide them through the right exercise based on—referenced it earlier—those clues: the clues, what movements hurt, what symptoms they produce.

So then we do different exercises with them and we just simply guide them through: “Hey, here's the movement we're going to do. Here's how to perform it. We’ll do it with you on the call.” Then we retest to evaluate the results to confirm our assumption, to confirm the direction we should go.

Since movement is what the majority of people need, as long as you know how to coach movement, then you can identify the right movement, the right exercises, the right rehab for that particular individual. As we see results with something—or lack of results with something—that gives us the right information to tailor their rehab plan, to make the necessary adjustments, to then begin to experience results or further progress so that we can continue to tailor it and make the right adjustments for them.

Ashley James (0:56:57.998)

When should someone go see an expert? So let's say they're doing this rehab, either their pain's not getting better or maybe it gets better but then it keeps coming back. Maybe they go six months without pain, then, you said, some stressor happens. Now their pain is back. It just kind of comes and goes in different scenarios.

When should they go, “Okay, I tried the movement thing, but I should really start seeing a professional”? What professional would you say? I know you already said Cairo, DOs, PTs. Is there one that you would say is better over the other, or just go to any of them?

As someone's going through trying out movement as a therapy, at what point should they say, “Okay, I need someone to actually help me”?

Dr. Grant Elliot (0:57:44.340)

So here's my response to that. The vast majority of our clients, I would confidently say probably 98% of our clients—we have around 200 consultations a week. Okay, so around 200 consultations a week—probably 98% of our clients that come to us, they've already tried all the in-person therapies. They've already seen in-person chiro, in-person PT, massage, needling, acupuncture, scraping, PRP injection, stem cell. That's 98% of our clients.

So I'm going to rephrase your question just a little bit, which is: we are elite. We are producing results that most individuals cannot get, that most people will not get with all the in-person things at their disposal because the majority of back pain is once again a movement-based issue. If you don't have the right movement-based plan, then it doesn't matter what you're doing in person, or soft tissue work, or whatever. It's not going to work if you don't have the right movement plan. That really needs to be the key component to things.

So the way I'm going to rephrase your question slightly is this: if you are getting the best rehab program for a particular condition, when should you realize or determine that you need to begin producing more in-depth testing—not pursue massage or other things like this. There are scenarios where we might recommend, “Hey, we think there's some tissue dysfunction going on. Go see a manual therapist.” That should be very simple and very straightforward. But if someone is non-responsive to conservative therapy, the question becomes: is there something more sinister going on? Is there something more in-depth? Can I fix this without further procedures? That's more so the delineation. That's the bigger line.

It's not so much, “Okay, I'm doing movement, now I need manual therapy.” That's not really a big line. Very few people will need manual therapy in addition to movement. Lots of people will need movement in addition to manual therapy, but not many people need a ton of manual therapy. The biggest difference is, “Okay, I'm trying rehab. Grant, I'm listening to this podcast. I feel as though I've had an in-depth movement plan. I've done rehab. I've done a lot of exercises. Let's assume that to be true. I've done all these different manual therapies as well. Is this a condition that can be resolved conservatively?” I think that's a better formula for people to consider.

So when do we start to draw that line? When do we start to say, “Okay, this is not a conservative case”? Ultimately, if we know that we've exhausted all the appropriate directions—and there are a lot of different directions to go with rehab, so many different approaches, so many different subgroups of conditions that you can attack. I'll just use myself as an example, best to use myself. If someone has gone through our program, we typically work with people for six months. The vast majority of our clients are completely pain-free within three months. Then the second phase is focused on bulletproofing individuals, getting them back to squatting, deadlifting, running, doing all the things they want to do.

If they've done a full six months with us and they're in the exact same position, based on our specialty in the degree that we help people, we know that if someone is in the same situation, there is something deeper going on. That is something that we will then thoroughly investigate and consult with that individual about. So maybe in that scenario, imaging would then be recommended at that point. Okay, you are not responsive to conservative therapy. You are not responding to anything. This condition is not responding as a movement problem. There's something else going on. Let's pursue imaging. Let's get an X-ray, let's get an MRI, let's get a CT, let's get blood work.

Sometimes we'll be working with clients and they are not responsive to rehab throughout six months. Based on further questioning, we realize this could be an autoimmune condition driving this. This could be more of a blood, hormone, functional medicine-based condition. So we'll refer them to a functional medicine provider to get blood work and take a deeper dive there.

Sometimes it is very deep rooted in psychological patterns—how their body, how their nervous system has memorized pain. We'll recommend a pain psychologist, more so brain rewiring approaches for that individual. Either way, we've determined at that point, “Hey, you've done your work. You don't need to continue to do more rehab or exercises. There's something else that's missing and these are likely the things that you're missing.” We'll get them to that direction.

To summarize, failed conservative therapy—a good bout of conservative therapy—is an indication for more in-depth testing. But then also, there will be more concerning signs and symptoms that can tell us to do that quicker. So the type of person we would not enroll into our program, the person where we would say, “Hey, don't give us your money. You need to go somewhere else,” would be if someone had a call with us.

They said, “Hey, I have back pain. I have pain radiating to my legs.” Okay, not a big deal yet. That's a common scenario we hear. But then if they say, “Over the last few days, I've experienced a significant increase in weakness in my toes, weakness in my foot, also numbness, rapid increase in numbness. Two days ago, my toe was numb. Yesterday, my whole foot's numb. Today, my whole lower half of my leg is numb.”

Okay, that's a rapid increase in numbness. But then also if there's significant fluctuations in bowel or bladder symptoms, this tells us there is significant impact on the spinal cord, which can happen with disc-related issues. These are more emergent signs and symptoms. This is a scenario where we would say, “Hey, you're not appropriate for conservative therapy. You need to go maybe get an injection immediately, or in those scenarios, go get surgery depending on the situation.”

So it's important to know: are you a rehab candidate or not? It's important to know the signs and symptoms associated.

Ashley James (1:04:06.216) 

It sounds like most people that come to you—which kind of happens in holistic medicine—most people that come to you, it sounds like they have tried, you said, everything else. They've tried injections, they've done all the other stuff, then they find you.

It sounds like it's rare that someone has back pain, hasn't tried anything else, then goes to you first, unless maybe they had a referral. So the majority of people that come to you have been working on this for quite a while.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:04:39.352)

Oh, yes. There's kind of two types of people. I'd be fairly confident in saying 90 to 95% of our clients are of the camp who have been dealing with this for at least a year and a half to two years straight. So usually you're going to have two years or more. They typically have seen one to two Chiros, one to two PTs, usually an injection or two. They've tried massage, needling, things of that nature. That's 90 to 95% of our clients.

Now there is probably 5%, maybe 10% where, “Hey, this injury just happened within the last month and it hasn't gone away yet.” They're in the mindset of, “You know what? I don't want to dance around and try the cheap fixes first and prolong this. I just want to go with the best, most in-depth option first to just ensure this doesn't progress, it doesn't get worse. I know I can resolve this the right way from the start.”

That's kind of the other. There's not a lot of people in the middle. That's really it. So people who have had pain for two years or more—we've even had clients who've had back pain for 20, 30 years, who did not believe anything could help them—and they were able to get pain free. Then, once again, on the other spectrum, “Hey, last week deadlifting I felt a pop in my lower back. Based on your videos, I think I'm dealing with a disc issue. I do not want to go to traditional medicine. I don't want to get an image. I don't want to get an injection. I don't want to be pushed to surgery. Can you help me do this?”

Absolutely, we can, and we help that individual resolve it as fast as possible so it does not progress.

Ashley James (1:06:13.888)

You just reminded me, I don't know why this popped into my head, but I have a friend who has the type of joints that are double-jointed. She can twist into a pretzel. She's hypermobile. Stretching for her is hard because she's so hypermobile. She really can't get to the end range of her muscles. She's very active. She's very physically fit and active. She does lots of movement, stretching, and hiking.

I never see her sitting down. She's just one of those people. She has a standing desk at work, does not sit, doesn't want to sit. Sitting in her car is too much sitting. It's just, she's go, go. I've known her for five years. She developed chronic debilitating sciatica. At first, my initial reaction was, have you heard of the stretch for your piriformis? She's like, “Yes, let me show you my piriformis stretch,” and she becomes a pretzel in front of me. I'm like, okay, that's not your problem.

What was really interesting, it got so predictable. Her pain would turn on and off based on the proximity of her husband to her. She ended up having to move into a motel because the only way she'd be out of pain—they're going through a divorce right now—the only way that she could get out of pain was to be away from him.

It became quite obvious that it was the conflict, the emotional stress, the conflict between them that was actually the root cause of shooting pain down her leg from her back. Very stereotypical sciatic pain. Isn't that fascinating that an ongoing emotional stressor would come and go based on his proximity to her? Whether she's on the phone with him, it would come back—the conflict between him and her. But when she moved out, it went to zero. She'd be able to get a good night's sleep.

At first, for the first year or so, she wasn't conscious of this pattern until it just kind of ramped up and ramped up. But being aware of when do you have this pain, who's around you, what are you thinking about—being in emotional stress triggers inflammation in the body.

You said you're going to go get blood work with someone who has persistent pain or maybe just hasn't been recovering as fast as you'd expect them to. You can see inflammation in the labs. There's always the typical asking about their diet: are you eating fried food every day? All right, well, you're not here eating a diet that's causing inflammation in your body. But inflammation can be exacerbated from other stressors as well.

I love that you are looking at every aspect of their lives. I interviewed Dr. Ellen Kamhi. I'm not sure if you heard of her. She's a nurse practitioner and a master herbalist. In episode 536, she shares what got her to become interested in herbal medicine. This was about 60 years ago.

This was a bit ago, so I'm not quite sure I'm remembering the story exactly. I think she was kicked by a horse. I might be wrong, but horses were a lot more common 60 years ago. She had a very bad accident as a teenager, and the doctor wanted to do surgery. So she was resting at home, discovered some books, was seeking out information, discovered some books on herbal medicine, and had to write away with a check, mail off for some mail-order herbs. She started treating herself with herbs. A month later, she walks into the surgeon's office. He's expecting her to be wheeled in for her surgery, and she walks in.

She says he was so angry at her for healing her body because that's his boat payment or whatever—that's his mortgage payment. She remembers how upset he was. He wasn't happy. He wasn't excited. She thought he'd be excited: “Oh my gosh, I can't believe you healed yourself. Tell me everything.” But he was angry at her because he had to cancel her surgery. That was what stuck in her mind. She thought, wait a second. These people who we put on a pedestal because they have so many years of education don't have our best interests at heart. They have money, dollar signs in front of their eyes.

Their education costs half a million dollars, they have a mortgage, they always have payments. Then they're hired by a medical system, a clinic, a chain of clinics, or a hospital system, which pushes quotas on them. If they don't meet those quotas, they might not get a bump in their salary, or they might get fired. Whether they admit it or not, they've got dollar signs in front of their eyes. We just have to be aware of that whenever we go see someone.

We have to know there is a money motivation factor, especially with the bigger-ticket things—surgeries. I love that you talk about the conservative approach, because I personally would rather be in pain for three months while helping my body heal itself than jump into something that causes lifelong pain.

The people who come to you, though, I'm sure there's a percentage who have had surgeries and are still in pain. Do you take those people as clients, the ones who've had surgeries and it was essentially botched, or they did the surgery correctly but that wasn't the root cause of the pain, and now they're still in pain? Do you accept those people as clients?

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:12:11.778)

Absolutely. I'm going to touch on that in just a minute. I want to rewind to something you said. That's really important. You gave the scenario of the woman who would feel more pain around her husband. That is psychosomatic pain. So psychological stressors could be related to multiple things that then manifest as physical pain. That's just so important. I had to rewind. I'm not dodging your question about helping people with surgery. It's just so, so, so important.

I want to provide two stories on that. I'll make them very short. One, I had an amazing client. She's incredible. She was out in Brazil, classic disc issue, sciatica down the leg. I had her completely pain free within six weeks. Completely pain free. She went from scheduling surgery consults to pain free. She's about three months into our program. She's been pain free for six weeks, cruising, easygoing. She sends us a message: “Oh my gosh. All my pain is back. Something happened.” She's highly, highly, highly concerned.

We're like, wait, how did this happen? You were an extreme success story. You were pain free within six weeks. You've been pain free for the last six weeks. You’re doing amazing. What happened? So we asked her: did you do anything different? No. Did you work out longer? No. Did you change anything in your routine? No. Did you drastically change your diet? No. She said no to all these things. So we said, okay, we need to dig deeper.

We get on a call with her. She's crying, saying, “Oh, I must've done something. I re-injured it. I'm back to square one. I'm never going to heal.” She's falling apart, and I understand that. So we asked the same questions again. Did you do anything different? No. Did you fall? No. Were you in a wreck? No. Okay, so if you did not do anything different, if you didn't fall, if you didn't have some incident occur, then we know you couldn't have further damaged your back. We know you could not have done that.

So then we started asking more personal questions. Has anything happened in your life recently? Anything at your job? Anything with a loved one? Then we get a look—her best friend had passed away the day before her pain came back. So her best friend dies, next day, all of her pain comes back. That's the connection.

We educate her on this gently and tactfully. She understands. It all clicks. Within 24 hours, 100% of her pain goes away. Completely disappears again within 24 hours. So that is psychosomatic pain that can flare things up.

One other quick story. Another success story. A guy canceled a surgery, was doing amazing in our program, then gets in a car wreck. He's okay. It wasn't a chaotic, brutal car wreck, but it was moderate, I guess I'd say on the scale of car wrecks. I don't know. He's immediately called by an attorney. The attorney is pushing him very heavily to go to a particular chiropractor, to get a particular image done. I'm setting this up because we realized what the play was later.

They were really pushing him—“No, you need to. Don’t go anywhere else. You’ve got to go to this clinic. Don’t see anyone else.” So he goes to this clinic. Immediately they do an MRI. Doesn’t even get an exam, just walks in. “Attorney, whoever sent you, let’s go do your MRIs.” They do his MRIs, get the report back, and they're putting the fear of God into him: “Oh my gosh. These are the worst images I've ever seen. I can't believe you're walking. I can't believe you're not paralyzed. That car wreck destroyed your spine. You need to go into surgery now.”

Keep in mind, this is our client who we had completely pain free. He was pain free prior to this appointment. He has the appointment, is torn apart based on image findings, walks out of that appointment crying, now in pain. We don’t hear from him for two weeks. He goes completely off the face of the earth. We don’t hear from him, we’re getting concerned: “Hey, are you there? What's going on? Did something happen?”

He reaches back out to us two weeks later, explains the situation, how he just feels distraught and discouraged. So we get on a call with him, unpack the situation. We very clearly realize there's a monetary strategy here too, because this is in Florida. With Florida, there's a really big issue with PI cases—personal injury—because you can rack up a very high payout. That's the play. There's a lot of corruption with attorneys and health clinics in Florida. It's not good, because the people who pay the price are the people.

We quickly realized he was being pushed to do these things because that's what they were doing. They were trying to inflate the value of the lawsuit. We explained to him the reality. We explained to him: “Hey, you are not your image. We already fixed your back. You're feeling fine. That's the only thing that matters. You’ve got to forget about what the image says.”

Once again, 48 hours later, completely pain free. It's all gone again. This is the stress and the impact that these types of psychological messages and emotional stressors can have. Maybe one day you're having an incredible life, and then the next day you lose your job. That could trigger an onset of pain. You don't want to go down the spiral of, “Now I need imaging, now I need all this.” There are other things going on. It's really, really important to understand those things.

I was just really happy that you brought that up, because it's a really important example, and I wanted to relate it to those other two stories.

Ashley James (1:18:10.707)

Absolutely. Just taking it seriously—I really dislike it when a doctor says, “Oh, it's all in your head.” The root cause can be emotional or mental. That doesn't mean the pain isn't real. That doesn't mean it's not spilling over into a physical experience. Your emotional and mental anguish can trigger what we can see on blood work. It changes hormones, changes inflammatory markers, it changes sleep patterns. They are all interconnected. You cannot have one without the other. You can't have physical health without mental and emotional health. For complete, true health, we have to look at every layer.

You still need the movement. You still need to support your physical body. But we have to honor and take seriously the emotional and mental side. I think we're, as a society, just creeping up on respecting that a bit more. I think we have a long way to go still. I don't think we're fully healthy as a society in terms of mental and emotional health. But I think it's a lot more acceptable, especially among millennials. It's a lot more acceptable to go seek therapy. There are so many different types of therapy.

Coming back to that, I feel that's the theme of this interview today—choose your practitioner wisely. It's okay to go interview a bunch of different kinds. Find the type of therapy that has the highest results. I've got an interview actually about that where they assess the different types of therapies. They found talk therapy, Freudian talk therapy, had the lowest outcomes in terms of helping people heal from physical pain. It's 200 hours on some dude's couch talking about your life.

It's the least effective. For some people, just doing that is great because they just need to get it off their chest and process. But in terms of healing pain, it happens to be the least effective.

What, in your experience, have you seen be the most effective types of emotional and mental therapy to support them to no longer be in chronic pain?

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:20:29.871)

So this is where I'm going to be very clear. We are not the greatest specialists in this category. We are the best in regards to rehab programs for low back pain. We are absolutely the best. When we get into these types of finer details—emotional healing, trauma healing—this absolutely requires a different specialty.

Will we help individuals who are showing that this is a component that needs to be addressed in our program? Absolutely. To the degree and to the appropriateness of our training, which is better than the average Joe. But I just wanted to be clear in saying that.

So I'm going to answer your question. My answer is not the only answer. There are definitely steps beyond my answer. The extent that we want to help and feel appropriate to help is always starting with pain education and pain science. The majority of individuals are under the impression that when something hurts, then something is simultaneously being damaged further. So just educating on that is huge. Just this one topic.

Ashley James (1:21:51.407)

So just because there's pain doesn't mean it's continuing to injure. I'm sure there's exceptions to that. I've got a broken bone, I'm walking on it—that is probably making things worse. Right. But we're not talking about breaks. We're talking about that weird burning chronic back pain or neck pain or something that's going on.

Just because you're moving, just because there's pain, doesn't mean when you move you're re-injuring or further injuring it.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:22:24.483)

Yes. This one lesson, this one topic, helping someone to truly understand this can be monumental for their mindset in overcoming pain. Once again, if you are in a lot of pain and if you're under the impression that every time you feel pain, every time your pain increases, that you are hurting or damaging your body further—think about the further fear that is created as a response to that.

You're not going to want to do anything. You're going to be afraid. You're going to be afraid of all movement. You're going to be afraid of doing everything. You're going to be in a constant state, believing that your body is broken because everything's triggering pain. That's the fastest way to be stuck—to have the belief that anytime you feel pain, something is being damaged.

So if there is someone, let's say, who has an emotional stress that's connected to their workplace—let's say they hate their job, they're super stressed at their job—every time they go to work, their pain increases. They believe, “My position at work is the reason for my back pain. I'm damaging my back at work.” If we can separate that and go, “No, maybe the position at work, maybe that's not helping, but that's not causing your pain. You're not stuck. It's because of your connection with your work.” If you can help that person understand that just because your pain is increasing does not mean you're damaging anything, it helps them mentally takes this scary monster that they have no control over, this massive beast that's floating above their head called pain, and it helps them put it into a bottle, isolate it, compartmentalize it, and no longer see it as a threat. They say, “Hey, I know you're there. I know you're present. I know you're more awake right now, but I'm not afraid of you. I understand you. I'm not going to let you spiral me again.”

That's essentially what it helps individuals do. Understanding that there's a difference between hurt and harm is one really important lesson in pain education that we will discuss with these clients who need maybe more of this than others. Every individual we work with, there is going to be some mental component. The question is just how much. Some people are more, some people will have less.

So pain education on this subject matter is extremely important. Understanding when there is too much pain, when there are triggers that they should respect, and understanding once again that hurt does not equal tissue damage. This is a huge, huge, huge component for the vast majority of individuals. This can help a lot. If there are, of course, scenarios beyond this that we are not qualified for, then we will refer to a pain psychologist or a trauma expert or something along those lines.

Ashley James (1:25:24.687)

Got it. So it was episode 513 with Dr. David Clarke. I'm not sure if you've heard of him, but he specializes in drug-free supporting people and healing pain when the root is on the emotional mental level. He's created this whole organization. They graded, they studied the different types of therapies, and discovered which types have the best outcomes to support people overcoming pain when the root is emotional.

It's not just pain though. He's worked with people who have basically mystery illnesses. Every single test cannot explain why this person has chronic diarrhea, for example. No surgery. Nothing is working. No medication is working. Why is their body creating this? Then they do this type of emotional therapy, the person gets better. According to the MD, “mysteriously”, because it's, “Well, the drugs didn't work, so I have nothing for you.”

So it's kind of for the people who’ve already been around the block to all these more traditional, drug-based therapies and nothing worked for them. Then they find his organization or one of the practitioners who work on the emotional mental side. That interview was super interesting, because how many people are walking around in some state of chronic illness or chronic pain, and they feel they're crazy because every doctor they see or every specialist they see only looks through the lens of their type of medicine.

So, it's not in the labs, it doesn't exist. Drugs don’t affect it, this doesn’t exist. They don't have the tools to help this person. That's why I love what you're doing—because you are looking at every aspect of a human, every part of the human's life, to help that person overcome it.

So getting back to my question, though, about people who've already been through surgeries. What if, because I'm thinking of my friend here in Florida, who has scar tissue? This is the explanation—I don’t know—but the explanation is now the scar tissues from the surgeries are causing him to have all this chronic pain.

What if someone comes to you and they're now psychologically thinking, “I'm broken from surgeries. How could I possibly heal?” So that's their psychology going into it, either consciously or unconsciously. I'm sure you attract these types of students or patients. What's your success rate around those people? Do they do the exact same program? Is there a different program? What do you recommend for people who've been through surgery and still have pain or even worse pain?

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:28:29.563)

Yes. So we get a lot of individuals who have had failed low back surgery because the failure rates of low back surgery are sadly so high. Now we have really good success rates for people who've already had surgery, but that depends on what the surgery was. The worst success rate we have is with fusions. Fusions are not good. I would recommend someone does absolutely anything on earth before a fusion.

Now, once again, is there going to maybe be someone who's heard this that says, “I got a fusion, it changed my life”? Maybe. I'm happy for you, just as Ashley said earlier. But statistically, the rates of fusion success are incredibly low, and the rates of chronic worse pain after fusion are incredibly high. Super high. Not good clinical outcomes.

So if we have someone that comes to us after a fusion, we're very honest with them. We don't say this in a way to dampen their spirits, because we know mindset is so important—obviously, based on this conversation. We won't discourage them, but we will set realistic expectations. First we'll say, “Hey, what are your goals? What are your goals?” If they're saying, “I want to be pain-free within three months,” we say, “Okay, that's a good goal to shoot for. Would you be happy if you had 50% more function in three months? Would that be positively impactful?”

If they agree, if we can agree that better function could still be extremely valuable to them and we can set realistic expectations, then we feel—on my side, on my business's side—we feel ethical and moral in those expectations in taking that person on. The last thing we want to do is set unrealistic expectations. So we can agree there.

If they're saying, “No, I want you to get me pain-free in three months. It's that or nothing,” then we say, “Okay, then this isn't the right relationship,” because we don't want to do that. We're not here to lead anyone on.

The most common low back surgery is going to be a microdiscectomy. You have a disc bulge, you have a disc herniation, they go in and they essentially just cut it out. Failure rates for this are still pretty high. The good news is though, that the post-surgical reactivation, re-injury rate can still recover with rehab, and that's really high.

The most common timeframe for someone to re-herniate a disc after a herniation surgery is actually six weeks. Most individuals re-herniate the disc within six weeks. Yup, that's why the rates aren't good. So depending on when the person comes to us will change their program.

We do have some individuals where they're, “Hey, I was developing these severe symptoms, so I needed surgery.” We might agree with them. We might say, “Yes, that was the appropriate thing to do.” They say, “Okay, my surgery is in one week from now,” or maybe they say, “My surgery was a week ago. When can I begin?” We've started with individuals as soon as 30 days after a microdiscectomy. Usually four to six weeks is when we begin.

If someone has started with us that early, absolutely their rehab program with us will look different than if they were a year or two years post-op. If they re-herniate it, the approach will be different. So whether it's that soon after surgery—this is to be proactive, great, we've helped those individuals—or whether this is someone who had it a year ago and they're still flaring up every couple of months, it's obvious that it didn't work. That's more of a routine scenario where, just depending on their presentation, we can handle that pretty much normally.

The surgery does not affect the stance that we take, but yes, post-surgery we can help for sure. Just because a surgery failed you does not mean you cannot get better. It does not mean you are hopeless, no matter what the surgeon's saying.

Ashley James (1:32:29.375)

What if there's a bunch of scar tissue now? What if there's stenosis? What if there's further damage from the surgery and the person is just at their wits end? What can they expect? What can they do? Obviously, functionality—you said we can get the person being more functional. But if scar tissue is what is perceived to be a big problem, is that something that through movement, proper movement, can be supported?

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my belief system is that the body can heal itself. What we’ve got to do is figure out how to get out of our own way, how to stop doing the things that are hurting ourselves, and how to do more of the things that are helping ourselves heal. At the root, the body can heal itself.

But there's maybe a medical myth, maybe a medical truth about scar tissue—that it's very tough, it's grisly, it causes a lot of things to gunk up. When someone has a bunch of scar tissue, especially from surgeries, can we get them to the point where they're pain-free?

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:33:41.987)

So not every surgery will cause significant scar tissue. Some will cause more than others. The most common scenario where someone does have surgery-based complications in regards to these scenarios that we're discussing—let's say a microdiscectomy—they're going to get a disc off of a nerve. There is a sub-classification called an inherent nerve root. An inherent nerve root is essentially scar tissue that has developed around a nerve root as a result of surgery.

Now this scar tissue, imagine it's kind of webbed and molded to this nerve root. So now when you do certain movements—let's say I'm sitting down and I'm stretching my leg out in front of me, or I'm sitting on the ground and I'm bending forward, stretching my hamstrings—well, when you stretch your hamstrings, you're also stretching your sciatic nerve. Your sciatic nerve is being stretched at the same time.

So if you're stretching your nerve, but there's something holding onto it at the nerve root not letting it move, you're basically playing tug of war with your nerve. Nerves do not like tension. Nerves do not like compression. Those are the two things that will increase nerve pain—tension and compression. So if you have scar tissue on one end and then you're pulling on the other end, that's tug of war. That can cause a lot of nerve pain.

So that is the scenario that you are describing. There aren't many scenarios outside of that. Now, if that happens—my gosh, there's tough scar tissue in there—can you do anything about that? Well, rewind this podcast about 30 minutes. We were talking about remodeling tissue, loading tissue. You can remodel tissue dysfunction around the nerve by loading the nerve.

Now, the frustrating part is this is not a fun process. This is typically a painful process, because what you have to do is you have to isolate where the tension is on the nerve, and you essentially have to tension it enough to stimulate some pain. Because if you stimulate some pain, it means you are loading and pulling on that scar tissue. But you don't want to do it too much to completely flare up your symptoms and make you unable to walk or sleep.

So it's essentially—this might not be the best imagery here—but kind of like picking a scab. You're just picking a scab a little bit, a little bit every day, to get that scar tissue around the nerve to remodel. It takes usually three to four months. It's a boring process. It's a painful—not incredibly painful—but it can be a slightly painful, boring, long process.

But even in that scenario, if you have the right diagnosis, you have the right movement plan, yes, you can still remodel that tissue. Even in that type of worst-case scenario, you can still get pain-free. We've done that very thing.

Ashley James (1:36:47.999)

That's so cool. General pain. People who are listening have that general low back pain or something between their shoulder blades is burning or some kind of pain. Not severe, but nagging. What movement could they do today that they would start to see results? What would you recommend day one?

For the listeners, do you have any exercises that you could give us? I know we have to describe visual, you don't have the video, but could you describe something that they could do today that they would start to feel they're moving in the right direction?

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:37:34.005)

Yes. So the best way to answer this is movement principles. Here's what I mean by that. Obviously, I would prescribe a very specific movement based on a specific scenario. I can't do that because you're asking me a broad question for a broad audience. So the best way to answer this is to help each individual listening evaluate their movement, then determine the right movement for them. Here's how I do that.

We always want to be balancing the movement stressors in our body. So if you imagine—this is a silly scenario, but I think sometimes silly scenarios help—let's pretend there's a tree in the backyard. Let's just pretend there's always high winds on your property, and they're always blowing one particular direction. You notice over weeks, over months, that tree is starting to lean that direction. It's starting to stay that direction because the winds are always blowing that one way. So you think, okay, winds are always blowing that way, the tree is always stressed that way, now it's starting to lean that way. How would I get that tree up? I need to start blowing the wind in the opposite direction. We’ve got to start reversing the direction, the shift that has occurred over time.

Your joints, especially your spine, operate the same way. So what you need to think about is: what is the position or what are the movement stressors that you are giving your body more of than the opposite? This principle I talk about is called do the opposite.

So let me give you a few scenarios. If I have a mostly sedentary lifestyle—if I'm sitting most of the day, if I'm sitting while I'm at work, sitting in the car, sitting while I eat, sitting while I watch TV—what position does that put me in? It puts my spine in flexion. Flexion is a rounded forward position. It puts my hips in flexion, meaning my knees are up closer to my hips. It looks like I'm sitting down.

So if I know that my spine is bent forward most of the time and my hips are up most of the time, that's the tree getting blown one direction. I need to therefore take my spine and my hips the opposite direction. So if I get a lot of forward, I need to start implementing more back. I would want to perform extension-based movements.

We could consider the classic Cobra pose in yoga—laying on the ground, hands are under the shoulders, push your chest up off the ground so you're putting your back into an arched position. So I'm getting a lot of forward, I need to reverse it and balance it by giving me some back. Same thing with my hip. Okay, my hip is in flexion, my knee is up close to my waist the majority of the time. Let me get my hip behind me. Let me get into hip extension. This would look like a classic hip flexor stretch, except we're focused on me, the hip joint itself. So I would want to lunge in and out of a hip flexor stretch repetitively to restore hip extension—the opposite motion of what I'm getting too much of.

Now, the opposite of that is true. Here's another scenario. Let's say I'm a painter. A lot of painters are painting ceilings a lot, painting walls a lot, and the way that they're on ladders, they're typically in an extended position. They're usually leaning back or looking back. So that person might be doing that for 10, 11 hours a day. That person might need to say, hey, you get too much back extension, you get too much hip extension, you're not getting enough flexion. You should take more sitting breaks, or you should be doing these exercises that involve bending forward or bringing your hips up. That might be the stress that needs to be inputted on their body to balance things out.

So this also applies to shoulders. I'm getting geeky here, but let's say if you're typing most of the day on a computer, your hands are in front of you, your shoulders in front of you, your elbows are in front of you. Okay. So how often are your hands, shoulders, and elbows behind you? Not that often. Okay. So imagine you're putting your arm straight to the ground. You're pointing your fist to the ground. Now just slowly point your fist behind you. You're bringing your shoulder into extension. Get into that position more. You restore your shoulder range of motion that way.

So the best way is to think, okay, what are the movements and what are the positions that my body is getting the most of throughout the day? I probably need to start doing the opposite to equal out the balance. That's the best approach. Most of the time, this is extension-based movements when it comes to the spine the majority of the time. So going into Cobra pose, arching the back backwards, arching the thoracic spine, getting backwards motion into it.

Ashley James (1:42:26.379)

I love that stretch, stretching out my hip because I spend a few hours in front of the computer. Then I need to get up, I do those wonderful hip flexor stretches. Women with diastasis recti, so if you've had pregnancies, you got to watch out. Don't just jump into Cobra because there are certain precautions you need to take. But definitely, I learned how to stretch from Jane Fonda.

I know I'm aging myself. I'm 45, but my mom had all her exercise tapes. Man, did she have some really cool stretches for the hip flexors. So I love that. I feel so much different. When I go for a walk, I can tell if I haven't stretched. I feel like I'm a puppet, the strings are still attached to me. 

So my husband is almost six foot seven. We kind of for the longest time rounded up, but now he's, no, no, I'm six, six and three-fourths. I'm like, just shut up, you're six-seven. But he's very tall, he's got legs for days. He always has to slow down when he walks. I am five-ten, I am not short, but he's so tall that his gait, his one step takes one and a half of my steps to catch up with him.

So the first time I went for Rolfing—this was years, years ago, over 10 years ago—we had to park a few blocks away. I can't remember why. So we walked, and I was like, hey, come on, slow down, let's walk together. Then we went in, he did the Rolfing on me. Rolfing is really cool. You don't have to take your clothing off. So my husband, he hung out in the room. We talked with the guy, neat guy, name's Sterling. He's in Bellevue, I think, or Redmond.

So he did this work on my legs. Then as we're walking back to the car, my husband's behind me and he's like, hey, wait up. I just almost burst into tears of joy because that's when I got it—how we kind of don't get fully in our body, fully aware of our bodies sometimes. I snapped into awareness. I realized that it was the first time in my life I felt like the marionette strings had been cut. Finally, the IT band was just wonderfully mobile.

My legs were just able to do their movement as fast as they wanted to. My gait was faster than his. I was speeding ahead of him. He had to kind of jog to catch up to me. That was that first moment. I was like, wow, that was one session of Rolfing. What if I stretched every day? How many—think back, the average listener—think back, when was the last time you stretched? 

When was the last time? You got on a mat and just gave yourself a full body stretch. When my son is at Taekwondo, I'll go on the mat because they have another separate area that's empty, I'll go do some stretches. I feel so good after. I can go unconscious in my life, and it'll be weeks to months that I'm like, wow, I have not really taken care of myself. I've not really done the hip flexor stretches. Then when I do—it's like I can feel it for days.

I could do one stretch session and for days I'm walking faster, it just feels smoother. But if I don't stretch my hip flexors, as I'm walking, my low back starts to ache, cramp up, get tighter and tighter and tighter. I'm like, okay, I seriously need to just stop and do the stretch right now.

I love having that level of body awareness because how many people would have gone to muscle relaxants? How many people would have gone to a pill, a potion, an injection, a surgery, instead of just finding a bit more education about their body? Not a point of guilt or shame, because we're all learning, we're all in this healing journey together.

But just know that there are options—options available to you that you can support your body's ability to heal itself. So that's why I love the work that you do. 

So how can people work with you? I know you've got the website, therehabfix.com, you're all over social media providing great information. What does it look like to work with you, to work with your clinic worldwide? Because you teach, you educate people.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:46:59.797)

So I described it earlier, but the first step that anyone would go through is obviously a thorough evaluation. We offer a free initial consultation for everyone. I mentioned this earlier. We do this—we provide a free 15-minute Zoom call to simply go over the individual scenario. This is to confirm that they're the type of person who should be looking for conservative therapy, who can be helped with rehab.

We also provide a lot of value on that. Honestly, we go through: hey, what have you tried? What have you not tried? Here are some things that might be missing. Here are some indications to look for. If we do hear things that stand out, then we will make the appropriate referral on that call too. So we've helped a lot of people get direction just from that free call.

So we start with a free call to go over your situation, to ensure that we can help, to provide some initial guidance. Then from there, we do a one-hour full evaluation. That would be all the movement testing, all of the ranges of motion, orthopedic, to provide an accurate diagnosis movement-wise, then go through exercises with you to actually get real-time results. Not everybody gets results, but on average—we track this—for around 300 calls in a row, we average around 37% improvement in that first call.

That's kind of what tells us the expectations for speed of recovery. So when someone asks, hey, how long is this going to take? That's what kind of tells us—are you on the higher end of improvement in one call? Are you on the lower end? What's your severity? That can give us a very clear estimation for how long this would take and how long you can expect until getting back to the things that you love, as well as customizing and determining the appropriate plan.

So that's what that does for us—it helps us ensure we can help you, that you're in the right place, how long it will take. Then we use all of that information from that one-hour evaluation to customize your plan and build out the appropriate plan.

As we go through the plan together, it is all one-on-one. We have a physician working one-on-one with you the entire time. You have unlimited communication with us every day. We're in your back pocket. You have a daily routine to follow specified to you. You can leave comments, questions. You can send us videos of you doing the movements. We can provide feedback. You can book unlimited Zoom sessions with us.

We have weekly check-ins so that we can continue to tailor and adjust your plan as much as needed in the right directions to ensure that you are seeing progress every week. Once again, the vast majority of individuals see significant improvement within just a couple of weeks—the majority of our clients. This includes people who can barely move, who are being told they need surgery, who have radiation all the way down to their foot, who have numbness in their foot, who are being told all kinds of scary things. Even individuals in those scenarios—majority of our clients are almost or virtually pain-free within those first three months. 

After that, we want to ensure that you're not just pain-free and then, all right, see you, you're on your own. There's no further plan. That's not smart. We get you pain-free, then there's a bulletproofing phase to ensure that we can now slowly grade your body, get you bulletproof again, re-strengthen your hips, spine, core in all directions.

So that you're not susceptible to movements you haven't done in a long time, but rather you are strong and confident in all movements. You can get back into the gym or back to whatever it is you want to do—golf or tennis or whatever it might be. We want to ensure that you're fully back to those things with no pain, no fear, no worry, and you have a long-term plan that you can carry with you so that you never need to come back for our help again. That is our goal, and that is what we do.

Ashley James (1:50:49.739)

Awesome. So TheRehabFix.com is the best place for them to go to check that out.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:50:53.545)

Yes. That is where you can find some more information about just our message. I don't think you're going to find any more information than what this podcast provided, but the website is a great place to submit an application for our program. Our number one source of social media is my Instagram, which is just Rehab Fix, where I post free daily videos. You can also message us on Instagram to schedule a free initial call.

One thing I would like to provide your audience, especially those who continue to listen through the entire thing all the way to the end, is specifically for this. I actually created a step-by-step do-it-yourself assessment. This would be a variation that we would normally take you through, but I actually recorded it and I provided guidance. It's about a 30-minute video.

If your audience goes to my Instagram and messages me the word podcast, then my account will automatically send them a link that will go directly to this. That will be a do-it-yourself assessment that will help people learn more about their movement, learn their triggers, learn what's going on based on what does trigger. Then I actually prescribe in that video: “hey, if these tested this, then do this movement. If they tested this, then do this movement. I provide guidance and prescription on that.”

Of course, if you do message me podcast, I'll shoot you a follow-up to check in, see how it went, see how you're doing, and see if we can assist you further.

So if you want to take advantage of that, just message me the word podcast on Instagram.

Ashley James (1:52:24.481)

Very cool. Now, you said that you checked with 200 of your phone calls. This was during the initial assessment phone call. You said 30 percent improved. You mean that 30 percent of people saw improvement, or that across the board they felt that it was an average of 30 percent improvement in their pain?

Does everyone feel they're getting some improvement, or was it just the 30 percent people went 100 percent out of pain? I just didn't quite understand that comment.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:52:56.557)

Yes. So we tracked for around 300 assessments in a row. We tracked on every one. The average of all of them was that the individual experienced a 37% reduction of pain or reduction of their symptoms. So 37% improvement.

Now what that means, the way averages work of course, is that some people have experienced no improvement. Others have experienced 70, 80, 90, 100% improvement in a single call.

So the average of all of those, of some people experiencing none and some people experiencing a lot, we see on average 37% improvement in that one-hour assessment.

Ashley James (1:53:36.833)

It's the assessment, meaning it's not meant as therapy, but it proves your hypothesis. I don't know if the word hypothesis is correct to be used here because it's been proven, but it proves what you're saying in that movement is the healer, that we need to do the functional movement to support healing, and we need to stop doing the maybe dysfunctional movement or lack thereof that is adding to the problem.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:54:07.909)

I pride myself on saying this because I don't know anyone else that does this. We give you results before we ask you to sign up for my program. That's how we do it, because we want it to be proof to you and to us. It's equally important to us, because once again, we want to know that the people we bring on—we have a very, very, very, very, very high chance that you're going to be a success story. That's what makes us happy. That's what gives us fulfillment. So we deliver results first, so that you have the proof and we have the proof that you can get better with the right movements. So that you're going to get the life change you're after before you're committing to anything.

Ashley James (1:54:46.785)

I love it. I am nothing if not thorough. I know how you said you probably couldn't find more information than what's covered in this interview, but I love being thorough. I took that as a compliment, Dr. Elliot.

So, usually I like to wrap up interviews by saying, is there anything else you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview? Considering you already said we've probably said everything, but is there anything that you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview? Possibly some homework beyond what you've already given us, or are you just going to say that's it, go to my Instagram, get that video, we're all good.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:55:23.791)

Well, of course I do that, but I always do just to give kind of a world message, if you will, about back pain. This might not seem shocking to you, Ashley, but this can make a big impact to a lot of people. Sadly, the way society has created a narrative about low back pain and the way the medical industry, the traditional healthcare system has created a narrative about low back pain.

The biggest thing I can impart on people is that if you listen to this and you got something from it, the biggest thing I want you to get is that low back pain is common. It is 80% of people in the world who will experience low back pain at some point in their life. It is the number one disability, but low back pain is also highly recoverable. Your spine is not fragile. You are not weak. Your spine is highly adaptive.

Your discs can heal. Your spine can heal. Your joints can heal. Your muscles can heal. Your body can recover. You're strong and adaptable. You're not fragile and you're not weak. So do not be intimidated by back pain. I know it can be tough. I know it can be scary. I know it can be frustrating. I know it can put you in very dark places sometimes, but it all starts with the belief that you can get better. I hope that this podcast created the belief that you can, because you can. You can. 

Low back pain is a recoverable condition. So as long as you believe you can get pain-free, you take steps to getting pain-free, you understand that you are strong and resilient, that you can get better, then you will find the solution. As long as you put one foot in front of the other, you're of course willing to invest into your health and put in the time and the dedication it takes. You can get there too. Do not let society or the medical providers you've seen so far trick you into thinking otherwise.

Ashley James (1:57:13.479)

Exactly. Thank you so much, Dr. Grant Elliot. It has been wonderful having you on the show today. The links to everything that Dr. Elliot does are going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com, including RehabFix.com and, of course, your Instagram.

It was exciting having you on the show. I'd love to have you back in the future when you have more to share or any new information comes out. Please come back and go down that rabbit hole with us. We'd love to have you.

Dr. Grant Elliot (1:57:41.555)

Absolutely, my pleasure. This was awesome.

Outro:

Hi, my name is Jennifer Saltzman, and I am the head coach at TakeYourSupplements.com. I wanted to share with you a testimonial that I received from a client of mine—one of the many success stories that I have—but this one was very close to my heart because she's young, has struggled so much to regain her health, and has had such a phenomenal, overcoming testimonial that I really wanted to share it today.

She writes:

My name is Angela. I am 25 years old. I have been on a health journey that consists of an autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, and other issues that left me feeling defeated and debilitated every day. For 15 years, I have seen eight different specialists and many doctors, and have been in and out of physical therapy, dealing with symptoms I thought would leave me wheelchair-bound and in diapers by the time I was 30.

Well, I am now 25, and after everything I've learned through Jennifer at TakeYourSupplements.com, that definitely won't happen.

Some things doctors have said to me have crushed my hopes. I was told to lose weight and that my pain would go away. So I lost 90 pounds—and the pain was still there. My days were short, and after a five-hour work shift or even a day of running an errand or two, I was left debilitated. So the doctors told me the pain was all in my head because I was previously diagnosed with fibromyalgia—the only diagnosis so many doctors agreed upon because they couldn't think of anything else. Despite me having some form of an immune disease, I felt hopeless and as if life was going to pass me by.

There were times when I tried hiking one or two miles and I was unable to walk or function for days after. I was missing out on trips and adventures, and as embarrassing as it sounds, I was having BM bathroom emergencies so frequently it was ruining my daily function. I could go on about the ways I was ill and what it kept me from, but honestly, after the progress I've made, a long list of symptoms I used to have has become a blur of the past.

When I finally decided to check out TakeYourSupplements.com, recommended through the Learn True Health podcast, I was immediately connected with Jennifer, who kept track of my overwhelmingly long list of complex symptoms and thoroughly created a personalized, step-by-step plan.

Her recommendations have changed my life, and the changes were practically instant. She put me on a complete digestive activation complex that has taken away all of my stomach pain, unnecessary bloating, and gas. She explained to me that the formula supports every stage of digestion—from breakdown to absorption—designed to optimize stomach acid, bile flow, and nutrient assimilation.

She recommended a cellular repair-focused diet, which not only has helped my stomach, but the food gives me energy and makes me feel really good. It reduces inflammation in my body—something no doctor ever told me about.

When I first started with Jennifer, I took the TakeYourSupplements.com health evaluation and scored a negative 32. I just retook it and scored a 69. That's 100 points better in five months.

Still room for progress, but my life nevertheless has been changed, and I am so happy. My days have been much longer and full of adventure. I have hiked the 4,000-footer mountains of New Hampshire—something I never thought I would be able to do. I have had successful days of workouts, errands, and work.

The Learn True Health podcast and Jennifer at TakeYourSupplements.com have done more for me than any doctor ever has, and it all started with validation.

I am now 25 and feel my life is just now starting. It's really hard to put into words just how much has changed for me, so I'll keep on living as actively as possible and learning as much as I can so I can finally take part in the beautiful things of life.

I can't wait for the adventures to come with the hope I've been given through this program. If anyone out there hears this and feels their doctors are taking more than they're giving, give this a try.

Thank you, Ashley and Jennifer. Your knowledge and expertise is a gift I cherish every day.

Learn more and book your free health consultation today by visiting TakeYourSupplements.com.

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