The foundational principles of chiropractic philosophy, emphasizing the body’s innate ability to heal itself when supported by natural, holistic practices. The approach focuses on identifying and addressing root causes of health issues—such as hormonal imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, and lifestyle factors—rather than relying on synthetic treatments to suppress symptoms. It highlights the body’s purposeful design, advocating for solutions like repairing gut health, optimizing hormones, and incorporating weight-bearing exercise for overall wellness.
Contrasting the chiropractic perspective with conventional medical practices, the discussion underscores the importance of treating the body as a cohesive system designed to thrive on natural processes. By understanding and enhancing the body’s natural mechanisms, individuals can achieve lasting health and vitality. The philosophy centers on empowering the body to function as intended, offering a sustainable path to healing and well-being.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:05 – Introduction to Chiropractic Philosophy
01:33 – Healing from Above, Down, Inside Out
04:18 – Addressing Depression Naturally
08:04 – Cholesterol and Body Function
12:40 – Chiropractic Focus on Root Causes
15:14 – Building a Comprehensive Health Team
16:15 – Closing Thoughts
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:05] So I made a comment through the day about just me, about chiropractic philosophy and how I was to my core chiropractic philosophy was kind of where I where I stood. And the question then came up is, what is the chiropractic philosophy and how does it differ from, say, medical? The chiropractic philosophy is very religious and in its core. So, for instance, in medical, it’s evolution and we are all just, you know, product of random chemicals that just happen to be or the chiropractic philosophy is that the power that made the body heals the body. So it’s very you know, your body is was created with a design and a purpose and an intent. And the only way to get actual healing is for that force to manifest itself inside of you and heal your body, which I would 100% believe. I’m not an evolution guy. I think there’s lots and lots and lots of obvious problems with evolution. The biggest issue is that with that is that if you were created and designed, then what that means is that you have a purpose. You’re here for a reason. If you’re, you know, which which would annihilate all nihilism.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:33] So yeah, that would be that’d be one of the major pieces. The other thing on on the chiropractic piece is that healing or health comes from above down, inside out. And so that’s the you know, grace comes down, fills the body, and then our health and our who we are and what we are comes from that. So from that philosophical standpoint, that’s I’m 100% aligned with that. The idea that the better understanding we have of the machine that we were that was created that we embody. The better. We can understand how that system works, the more efficiently we can heal that or repair that machine that leads to a physiological function, that leads to a studying of what is natural, holistic. And the more that we find out about the way medicine functions, the more I think this is, at least for me, is ingrained. When we find out that, you know, the vast majority of medical function is based around synthetic things to alter the way that the physiology normally works, specifically to maintain illness, maintain suffering for profit is, I think, probably the worst possible way you can treat somebody.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:55] So, for instance, the easy, easy example of this is SSRI. So the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are a daily medication that you have to take to alter neural brain function. So what normally happens is that your body produces serotonin and then your body kind of, you know, squirts into the cleft and there’s, how the activation, the new body sucks that back up and kind of resources that to recycle it music and later SSRI block that and so there’s more serotonin left over in the cleft because the idea was is that hey, we need 100 units of serotonin and we’re only throwing 70 out there. And so if we made it stay there longer, maybe it would help. And we’ve known since about day one that was trash idea. It was just never going to work. The chiropractic or the holistic option on that would be, how about we fix the gut so that the gut can produce more serotonin because it’s for all your smartphones made, which is, you know, Yeah. And then fill the body with tryptophan and probiotics and my gosh, look, the body made all the serotonin we don’t need as a surprise. We don’t need to take something on a daily basis. We have everything we needed inside of us to begin with. We just needed to recognize how the system worked, rebuild the system, design for us, and then boom, everything’s fine, which is what we see over and over and over again. And it will stick with depression because it’s a big cheese, especially now on the holidays.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:18] Well, how else do we fix depression? Well, there’s all sorts of medications for it. The top three things we know for a fact research and go look this up is testosterone, because that’s how the body functionally repairs and regenerates. But exercise physical exercise, especially a weight bearing exercise, has there is no research study where a healthy individual exercised and it did not alleviate some depression symptoms or all of them. So the two things we know of the best well, the two the three the three big things we know best for for depression are testosterone, exercise and repairing the gut, restoring the probiotic flora so that we can produce more serotonin. And this is also why when you’re looking at really research and the medical guys hate this so much about the instances of depression preceding or after you’ve had antibiotics is substantial. The research on that is ridiculous, as it should be, because from a physiological standpoint, you understand. If I take an antibiotic and kill the things in my gut that produce the serotonin and serotonin is directly linked to depression. All right. So we take a drug kills that kills the good four in the gut, don’t produce the serotonin. And then we have depression, which is like of certain.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:41] So, I mean, it’s a pretty obvious path, which would then be, okay, we’ve got to fix the gut. So we’re talking probiotics, we’re talking fermented foods and things like that, which, you know, again, are hated by Western medicine because, you know, all that’s nonsense nutrition crap. So that’s that’s the other piece of it is the body heals itself, which again, is why they you know, we’re I’m such a big, big, big fan of testosterone. Testosterone is the hormone your body makes to tell it to heal, regenerate, repair. That’s the thing. So that’s why you always want to have your testosterone up from any any issue you’re looking at, especially because it helps so much with muscle tissue. And again, I’ve been saying this for a long time, but the new research that’s coming out is starting to show that in the battle of obesity, the number one thing we can do is build muscle tissue because muscle tissue creates all the ATP. So in utilizing the fat it also produces it takes away from the hormones the fat produces. And so it just basically resets and rebuilds the entire body. But here’s the thing. Weight bearing exercises, like I just said, radically rebuilds the brain.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:53] So like, if you look at any like dementia protocols, exercise specifically says exercise to rebuild the brain. That’s what it’s set up for. What we see is that when you do specific movement exercises, we get lots of flooding information to the cerebellum, cerebellum and fires to the frontal lobe to process and make sense of everything you just did. When that happens and then suppresses the temporal function, which is fear, which has the amygdala, which is fear, hate, anger, terror. And so everything starts calming down. But we start activating and spooling up the frontal lobe. Now, if we have all the other chemicals where it’s supposed to be, you can start regenerating neuro tissue. You can start working the psychedelics. In the psychedelics, Specifically, DMT from Hiruscar has been shown in research to radically increase neural regrowth neural tissue healing. But again, you’ve got to go through the gut for this. So you’ve got to get the got accurate needs to be and then you have to give it you’ve got to give the body the thing it desperately needs to function. Cholesterol. You know, statin drugs are have been shown again. Again, we knew these things to be absolutely zero help as far as heart attacks and strokes go.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:04] That’s what the research has shown, which obviously we knew that from the 80s and 90s with the discussion about free radicals and antioxidants. But we for sure knew it in 2009 when the UCLA study came out that hundred and 36,000 patients who were in the hospital because they had a heart attack in over 75% and had good cholesterol levels, because it’s not about the cholesterol. It’s about the damage to the cholesterol. And so when you restrict cholesterol, you restrict everything made from tests, from cholesterol, which is all your hormones, which is your brain. And the number one fuel source for your heart, which is cholesterol. So, you know, that’s that’s the big issue that we’re getting into, especially because if you really look at the metabolic function of how the body is supposed to work or where it works most optimally, let’s put it that way. We run on cholesterol. That’s that’s our main fuel source. We make the two fuel sources that we that we use, we make cholesterol and we make sugar. That’s our body makes the two subsets that we then turn into ATP.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:08] So that’s actually what’s going on is if you go back to, well, let’s look at what the body was designed and built to do. It’s it’s to produce ATP in this manner. It’ll make it from glucose, it’ll make it from fat or cholesterol, which is what you’re running on, which is why when you’re on a keto diet or when you’re on like a carnivore diet, even if it’s not a high fat diet, like it’s a high protein diet, low fat zero carbs, your cholesterol comes up. Why? Because that’s the fuel source your body’s actually running on is cholesterol. And so people are going, your cholesterol came up. Now, that’s good. That’s good. You want your cholesterol to come up again. This is why I always talk about this particular piece as why I always talk about, you know, no athlete should go see a non-athlete doctor because you can have the same bloodwork. But it says two totally different things depending on who you’re who you’re working with. I tell this story a lot. I had, you know, one of my patients is like, Hey, my buddy, his wife’s freaking out. His doctor told him he’s going to die. You know, he needs to come see you. He sends me his blood work and his blood work. She said, I’m just looking at. Isn’t that great? I mean, there’s lots of stuff in the red. The guy walks in and, you know, six too jacked, you know, 250. And I’m like, you’re totally fine. There’s like, what? The doctor said I was going to die. Okay, look, yeah, your taste is high because you work out real hard.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:32] That’s something we see with exercise your creatinine in your be you in or both high because your nitrogen positive, because of all the supplements are taking you how hard your working out credence high because you’re testing your turn out muscle tissue so that’s a that’s an obvious thing know your testosterone is high. Those are on testosterone. You’re nature’s, you know, on the higher end because, again, you’re on testosterone, which is fine because it’s more oxygen, you know, And the reason why you’re fasting glucose was high. They didn’t pull insulin. But the reason your fasting glucose is high is because it’s the dawn effect. You’re in a cathartic state. Your body is producing sugar for your blood in the morning. This is normal things that happen. So he’s not diabetic, he’s not in liver failure. You know, he does have all these other issues. This is how the body is supposed to run. If you’re a high end athlete. And so, you know, I use this example a lot. You have to understand how the body was designed to function. And if you’re running on carbohydrates, it’s like running a gasoline engine. If you’re running on fat, it’s like running a diesel engine. Both make the cargo. Both are hydrocarbons, but the engines are radically different.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:36] And if you don’t understand that, you’re always going to be giving people bad advice. And so when someone comes in, I take their blood work and I prefer like we’re going to go for blood work. I prefer to zoom with them so I can see them. And I have a little bit of a quick, you know, how often you work out what your dietary function, that type of thing. Because again, who the patient is. Matters a lot when you’re going over the bloodwork. So if I look at their bloodwork, I’m like, well, obviously it looks like this because you’re you’re in a, you know, fat burning state. You’re in a fat oxygen state or a Quito state or a low glycemic state. There’s 15 different ways of saying that. But you’re using fat as your fuel source instead of using sugars. So again, those two metabolic functions are radically different. And that’s probably the biggest the biggest piece of it is if you start going again, you make this carbohydrate philosophy of, you know, the body was designed and built for a purpose. If you understand that, then you go, all right, what is the purpose that was, you know, designed and built for? And, you know, how is the long term function working?
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:40] You know, you start to kind of go back to how do I fix the system, Not how do I put a drug in to alleviate a symptom or to suppress a symptom. It’s why do we get this symptom in the first place? Where in the physiology did the body break down? So if you start thinking of it that way, this is the this is the real reality of holistic healing. It’s how did your body cause we have to assume the design was perfect. Like the design at the end of the day was perfect. We might have genetic genetic issues that we have to then find and repair, like MTF, HRT, just give the body fluids like B vitamins. That’s fine. But again, system was designed perfect. There’s going to be flaws along the way, whether it’s nutritional or genetic, where the break in the system. And then I go back and we pit we we fix the issues in the system. That’s kind of the whole idea is fix it with natural things, because that’s how the body was designed to function on natural things that are freely occurring. And so you go back to that philosophy of, okay, it was designed for these specific things. Where’s the gap? Where’s the nutritional gap? Where’s the hormonal gap? And then you go back and you fill the gap and the body works the way it was designed to work. Which is, you know, like I said, entirely based off of the chiropractic function. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:14:00] There’s a make an appointment to find the broken system, But that’s it. That’s legitimately it. It’s so much. It’s so funny to me because people come in like I don’t feel good. Like what doesn’t feel good? I have low energy, low energy and come from a lot of things. You know, the things I miss, the thing that people miss the most is, are you breathing at night? The amount of people who have not had a sleep study or who have not had, you know, their insulin pulled or have not had their, you know, diet discussed with them or their exercise discuss with them. And, you know, I guess the hormone is the vast majority of people. And so I make this comment a lot. You know, as a health care provider, it’s what is health like? Like, what do you think of what is health? Do you think, I got to get the pharmaceutical? Like, do you think the little orange bottle that’s health. I doubt it. Most people think diet supplementation, exercise, sleep, you know, you know, alter hormone function there. Most people don’t really recognize that. That’s the chemistry. That’s the hormone function and then stress, and that’s what health care is. And so what we do from a health care standpoint is I go back through to make have we found the gaps, the easy gaps, the low hanging fruit in all of these areas and the 90% the time We haven’t like people haven’t done that because their doctors are not trained to do that.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:15:14] The medical doctors are trying to find a symptom, suppress it with a drug that’s you know, that’s what they’re taught to do. And to a degree, that’s not necessarily bad if that’s what you want, great. Go get it. But the other option is why don’t we fix the problems that are creating the symptoms so they don’t become worse over time. But again, that’s the chiropractic philosophy versus the medical philosophy. So that’s what I mean. And I say, you know, the kind of philosophy is where I where I come from is the the idea that the body was designed and built for a purpose. And if we can just figure out how the body was designed and built, we can fix it and help it, repair it back to original design. And that’s the best we can do and then let the body heal itself. So that’s kind of where that is. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with a whole lot of adjusting. However, the adjusting is so much fun and the neurology function is super awesome. So if you guys are trying to figure out how to do that, if you guys are trying to figure out where to go with that, find somebody who’s built a big team.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:16:15] I’ve spent eight years building a team of God, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, nutritionists, DNA specialists, blood work specialists, hormone specialists. Like everything we’ve needed. I even have hair stylists. So when people come out, call me and they’re like, Hey, I need X, Y, Z. My hair dye is causing me problems. I have people I can call me like I have. Obviously, I have no idea the hair dye I like. Give me some options on this. And so, yeah, but that’s kind of what we’ve done. So if you’re looking for a team, you’re looking for cities already built that pillars want a second hook, you know, give us a call. We’ll kind of walk you guys through whatever you need to do to figure out where you’re at and figure out where you need to go. But that’s kind of the difference in the chiropractic philosophy versus the medical philosophy. And that’s why I tell people that I am philosophically directly aligned with the chiropractic stuff. So. All right, you guys, some of the questions to stop otherwise, see you later. Thanks for your time.
As always if you have any questions, please send them to [email protected]
Check out Chalmers Pillarsofwellness.com for Wellness updates! And ask me any questions you have at [email protected]. I answer all of them and look forward to hearing from you.
The Chalmers Wellness Stubstack just launched. Comment, Like, and Interact with other people on their wellness journey. Communities can make a difference. DrChalmers.substack.com
Dr. Matt Chalmers
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only. Before taking any action based on this information you should first consult with your physician or health care provider. This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health providers with any questions regarding a medical condition, your health, or wellness