Get relief from pain at Speer Chiropractic & Acupuncture
By Ashley Puderbaugh
Published January 2010
Women’s Edition magazine
The American Chiropractic Association estimates that 70 to 85% of adults will experience significant low back pain for two weeks or longer at some stage in their lives. From sitting too long at a desk, to straining in the garden, hoisting your little ones up and down, suffering a sports injury, or just being stressed out, low back pain is a very common ailment. The majority of low back pain cases improve over a few weeks, though some cases remain chronic and debilitating.
One of the ways you can relieve low back pain and other types of pain without medicine is with the help of Speer Chiropractic & Acupuncture in Lenexa, Kansas. The clinic provides chiropractic care and acupuncture to treat everything from sports injuries to sciatica. The clinic’s specialties are the diversified adjusting technique and the Specific Prone technique, which provide gentle adjustment and correction of the spine. When necessary, the clinic will use both acupuncture and chiropractic to treat your conditions.
Speer Chiropractic & Acupuncture opened this past July. Dr. Gerrad Speer is a native Kansan, growing up in Scott City. He then moved to Baldwin City to play fullback on Baker University’s football team. After graduation, he moved to the Kansas City area and received his Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Cleveland Chiropractic in Overland Park.
Dr. Speer says he was taking biology and chemistry classes and was thinking about going into pre-med. “But about junior year is when I decided I didn’t really want to do that, and I was in limbo for a while,” he says. “I was considering laboratory work, but when I needed a job between junior and senior year, the chiropractic job just fell in my lap.” He interned for his cousin, Dr. Jeremy Rodrock, in Baldwin City for five months following graduation. While there, he gained experience from working on clients and Dr. Rodrock himself. “Dr. Speer helped my mid-back out tremendously,” explains Dr. Rodrock. “I’d been having a lot of mid-back problems, and he definitely helped relieve that. Gerrad’s a great chiropractor and very passionate about what he does. And he’s a quick learner. Being a new doctor, experience helps, and my patients said he has very good hands and made good adjustments.” When the internship was over, Dr. Rodrock encouraged Dr. Speer to open his own office and helped him to procure a state-of-the-art digital x-ray machine.
Chiropractic works for a number of neuromuscular conditions, according to Dr. Speer. For instance, sometimes pain develops in a certain area of the spine, resulting in numbness or tingling anywhere in the body. Sciatica, or inflammation of the sciatic nerve, can result in low back pain. Headaches, for example, can be a sign of a sinus condition. By using chiropractic techniques to relieve pressure on the nerves, Dr. Speer says he can help boost your immune system so that it is better able to fight pain in other parts of the body. He analyzes the body for misalignment of the vertebrae in the spine, which causes nerve stress. Using his hands and analytical tools, he is able to isolate the problem and use a spinal adjustment to correct the stress, he explains.
When chiropractic work isn’t getting the results he would like, Dr. Speer says he integrates acupuncture into the treatment. There are three ways he can use acupuncture. The first: “Needles, the old-fashioned way,” he says with a laugh. “It doesn’t hurt much, but if someone doesn’t like needles we can do electro-acupuncture (the second way), which has a metal tip and puts a little electrode in you. It’s not very stout, so it doesn’t hurt.” The third way is just by using his fingers. The latter method is what he uses most often because he can easily combine chiropractic and acupuncture together, he says.
A natural treatment for a variety of conditions is therapeutic acupuncture, which uses needles and/or a small electrical impulse to alter the flow of energy (or Chi) in your body, which is believed to treat disease. According to the belief, when Chi is interrupted, you experience pain that could be caused by organ malfunction or disease. By stimulating acupuncture points in the body, it helps relieve pain and restore energy flow so that your immune system can do its job.
Acupuncture is a 5,000-year-old Chinese system of natural healing that is known to help hundreds of diseases and ailments. There is some research that suggests acupuncture increases electrical activity in the body as part of its healing process. Dr. Speer says he uses acupuncture to treat all types of injuries and to promote wellness. He also uses it to handle pediatric problems and to boost the body’s immune system pre- and post-operation. Acupuncture is also used to keep the body’s organs and systems working as optimally as possible.
Pregnant women can especially benefit from acupuncture and chiropractic, Dr. Speer says. For example, when a baby is in the breech position, by stimulating acupuncture points, the baby will turn to the proper position, he states. Sometimes a mother’s posture results in aches and pains from the weight of her unborn child. Acupuncture and chiropractic can relieve the pain without medication, he reports. Dr. Speer admits that he was a bit skeptical when he first learned about acupuncture, however. “I thought I’d go for at least 25 hours of the 100-hour course to see what it was like. I took a gamble.”
During class one day, the teacher asked for a volunteer who had a specific problem to treat. A couple months prior, Dr. Speer had hurt his knee playing flag football. He could walk, but he couldn’t run on it. He’d had chiropractic work done and it wasn’t helping, so he volunteered and the teacher treated his knee in front of the class that day. A month later, Dr. Speer was running again. “Needless to say, I finished the course,” he says. And now Dr. Speer is certified in acupuncture.
If you’re interested in having chiropractic work or acupuncture done but are worried about the cost, Dr. Speer says he takes ACC and Signa insurance, in addition to Medicare. “We can also reduce the price a little bit for people and put them on a cash-based treatment plan,” he notes. “They can pay monthly or upfront or at each visit—whichever’s easiest for them. So far people have really liked it.”
To find out more about Speer Chiropractic & Acupuncture, visit www.speerchiropractic.com or call 888-880-0619. The office is located at 13624 W. 95th St., and is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday.
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