She did everything right and still got missed

0:02 I want to start today with a woman who walked into my office having already done everything. Now, when I say I mean everything, I mean everything. She'd seen the rheumatologist. She had seen a naturopathic doctor. She had done peptides. She'd done therapy after therapy after therapy. She had a drawer full of supplements and a calendar full of appointments. You know how it is. She was the most proactive patient you could ever imagine. Nobody could say she didn't try. Yet, she was still in pain. Migraines, a deep, excruciating pain right at the base of her skull, numbness running down her arm. She'd torn the labrum in her hip.

0:45 She'd had surgery on her knee already. Her body was coming apart one joint at a time. And every expert she saw looked at their one piece they focus on and said in one way or the other that's not my department or we can't figure it out. But here's what nobody had done. Nobody had looked at the one place where all of it connected. And that's what today's show is about. Not a disease but a pattern. A pattern of the person who did everything right and still got missed. If that's you or somebody you love, stay right here. This is the Dr.

1:26 Lazar Show. Welcome back. I'm Dr. Lazar and this is the Dr. Lazar Show. Whether you've been with me for years or you're tuning in for the very first time, I want to start by telling you what this show is really about and what it isn't and why I think it matters. This show is about the people who fall through the cracks, not the people with a clear problem and a clear answer. You know, if you break your arm, you go to the emergency department, they set it, it heals. Beautiful. The system works. I'm very grateful for that every day. This show is about the other person, the person whose problem doesn't fit neatly into one box.

2:07 the person who's been to four or five, 10 different professionals and every one of them was smart for sure and every one of them was trying and doing their best, but they're still not better. If you're that person, I made this show for you. Here's what the whole show is built on. It's going to come up every single week, so I want to lay it out clearly right at the start. Modern medicine is brilliant at dividing the body into different departments and parts and sections. You've got a doctor for your head, a doctor for your joints, a doctor for your nerves, a doctor for your gut, a doctor for your hormones, for your mood.

2:53 Each one of them trained for years to become an expert in their place. And when your problem lives inside one of those places, then that system works beautifully. But here's what happens to a certain kind of patient. Their problem doesn't live in one department. It started in one place, but then it spread. It showed up as a headache over here or numbness over there, a sore hip, a bad knee, poor sleep, a stomach that just doesn't feel right, and the exhaustion that nobody can explain. And because every specialist is looking at their own square of the board, nobody is looking at the whole board.

3:38 Everybody checks their place. Everybody says, "Well, uh, your piece here looks okay, or your piece isn't the main thing." And then the patient walks out with five opinions and zero answers. And then something sad happens. They start to think it's them. they start to think, you know, maybe I'm just getting older, or maybe I'm just one of those people, or maybe it's all in my head. I want to stop right here and talk directly to you if you're feeling that way because you might be in your car right now or in your kitchen or watching online. You might be listening to this on a walk because walking is one of the few things that still feels okay.

4:20 I want you to hear this really clearly. This is not in your head. And just live with it. Well, that's not a diagnosis. Just live with it is what we say when we've run out of our own ideas. It doesn't mean you've run out of options, though. And I want to say one more thing to you because I think you need to hear it. You have not failed. I know it can feel that way. You've done the diets and you've done the exercises like you were supposed to. You've taken the supplements. You've done all the appointments. You've read everything you can get your hands on at 2:00 in the morning when you can't sleep.

5:02 And yet, here you are. You're still here. So, the voice in the back of your head says, "I must be doing something wrong. I must not be trying hard enough." Here's what I believe, and it's going to be the theme for this show. Effort isn't the problem. bad information is. The people I see in my office are some of the hardest working patients on the entire planet. They're not lazy. They're not quitters. They've put more effort in than most people ever will. What they haven't had is the right information. The the one piece that ties all this together.

5:44 So, you've been trying and trying and it's not working. And I don't want you to try harder. I don't want you to struggle more. I want you to get better information. So what's the thing? Almost nobody checks your structure. What I mean by that is how you're built, how your frame is carrying itself, the alignment of your spine, and especially at the very top right where your head sits on your neck. That spot matters more than almost anywhere in the body and more than almost anyone realizes because that's the one place in your body where your master control system, that's your brain stem, the very top of your spinal cord, the nerves that run your whole body, it's passing through a very small, very mobile, very exposed part of your skeleton.

6:43 When the top of the neck is off, it doesn't cause one problem. It causes a cascade of problems. The head shifts, the body compensates, the shoulders tilt to hold your head up. The pelvis twists to keep you level. One leg starts carrying more load than the other. And the nervous system, which is threaded right through the middle of that top bone, is working now under stress every hour of the day. A cascade like that doesn't show up as one problem in one department either. It shows up as a dozen unrelated problems in a dozen different departments.

7:24 So here's the thesis of the show. One sentence if you remember nothing else from today. Remember this one structural cause can wear a dozen different masks. Now every week on this show I'm going to take one of those masks. migraines, numbness, dizziness, joint pain, exhaustion, the stuff that gets passed around from office to office. And I'm going to show you what might be sitting underneath it. I'm going to tell you real stories about real people. I'm going to be honest about what we can help and what we can't. And I promise you this, I'm never going to tell you your doctor's an idiot.

8:06 That's not who I am. And it's not what the show is. And quite honestly, it's probably not true. I'm going to add a lens. One more thing worth looking at. The thing that usually gets left out, and you'll hear me say it a lot, we miss 100% of what we're not looking for. So, my hope is that with this information, you'll start to know what should be looked for. And today, I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like in one woman's story. Let me take you back to the woman from the top of the show. When she first sat down across from me, she did what a lot of people do and have been through the medical mill, if you will.

8:53 She apologized. She said, "I'm sorry. I know I'm complicated." Now, think about that for a second. She apologized for being complicated and like as if it was her fault. as if the fact that a dozen smart people hadn't connected the dots, that was something she thought she owed me an apology for. I hear that sentence a lot. I'm sorry. I'm complicated. I'm sorry. I know this is a lot. I'm sorry. I've been everywhere. I'm sorry. I don't mean to cry. And every time I hear it, I want to say, you don't owe anybody an apology. You're not complicated. You've just been looked at in separate pieces.

9:36 So, she told me her story and it took a while because there was a lot of it. It started with migraines. And I want to be clear, I'm not talking about a headache you take something for and just push through. I'm talking about the kind of migraine that takes you out of your life, out of commission. The kind where you're in a dark room with the shades drawn, a cold cloth on your face, every sound is too loud, every light is too bright, and you're just waiting for it to pass, and you're losing a day or two, and you know another one is coming. You just don't know when it's going to happen.

10:16 If you've had migraines like that, you know exactly what I'm describing. And you know, the worst part isn't even the pain. It's the fear of the next one. It's cancelling plans or not being able to commit to anything. It's your whole life getting smaller and smaller around the thing you can't even control. That was her life. Then there was the pain at the base of her skull. She'd put her hand right back here, right where the head meets the neck, and she'd say, "It's right here. It's it's always right here. this deep, relentless ache that never fully went away.

10:56 She's telling me this with tears running down her face. And then there was the numbness. It run down her hand. Some days it was tingling and some days it was just off, dead, wasn't working. Like her hand belonged to somebody else. More than one person had kind of waved it off. probably just how you're sleeping or probably your computer or probably just stress or hormones. Then there was the hip. She'd torn her labrum, that ring of cartilage that cushions the hip joint. And if you've ever had a labrum tear, you know that is not a small thing. That's really deep. It's a grinding pain.

11:39 It changes the way you walk entirely. And then there was her knee. She had already had surgery on that. And underneath all of it, holding it all together like glue, was the exhaustion, the sense that her body was working against her, the autoimmune diagnosis. She was fighting her own body every day just to get through it. And at this point, not really getting through very much anymore. Now, here's the part I really want you to hear. She did not sit back and wait for someone to fix her. She went after it. She researched. She looked online. She went to the rheumatologist and that made sense.

12:18 You know, when you've got pain in multiple joints, a rheumatologist is the doctor, the exact doctor you'd want looking at that to make sure there's no autoimmune disease, which she was diagnosed with, but no inflammatory arthritis, um, nothing like that driving it. That's that's good medicine. That's prudent. She went to a natural medicine provider because she wanted to do things the gentle way without a medicine cabinet full of prescriptions. And I respect that. She did peptides, several different peptides. She didn't feel right about it, but she tried it anyway cuz she didn't know what else to do.

13:01 She did therapy after therapy. She was stretched and strengthened and she did all the exercises. She worked with a nutritionist on inflammation. Um, they looked hard at what she was eating and what she was cutting out and what she was adding in. And every one of those people is smart. No question. Every one of them was doing their job. Every one of them was doing it really well also. And every one of them was looking at a slice of the pie. And here's the moment that tells you everything about this story. She told me the nutritionist had worked with her for months on inflammation, months.

13:40 But she never looked at how she was built. She didn't look at her posture or um the way her head sat on her shoulders. She didn't look at whether one shoulder was higher than the other or whether her hips were level. She didn't look whether she stood with more weight on one leg or not. Now listen, this isn't a knock on the nutritionist. Not at all. That's not what a nutritionist is trained to look at. That's not that department. And that's the whole point. Every person she saw was doing excellent work inside their department, inside their lane. And the thing that was actually driving her problem lived in a place none of the other departments covered.

14:23 So, nobody saw it. And when nobody sees the cause, you get a little relief here, a little relief there, and then you keep coming back. And the list just keeps going. That's what happened to her. Year after year, the list grew. Migraines, then the neck, then the arm, but only when she was walking, then the hip, then the knee, and the hip surgery helped. She said, "I felt great after the hip surgery." But the rest of it wasn't addressed. And here's what I want you to notice about the list. On paper, those things look unrelated. Like a migraine is a head problem, right? And a labrum tear is a hip problem.

15:02 Could be shoulder, but hers was hip. Knee surgery is a knee problem. And arm numbness, that's a nerve problem. So, it sounds like four different problems, four different departments, four different professionals. But what if they're not four problems? What if they're one problem showing up in four different places? By the time she got to me, she wasn't expecting much. And honestly, I don't blame her. I mean, she had her hopes up before. She'd been disappointed before. And I think she was mostly there to cross one more thing off the list so she could say, "Well, I tried that, too. You know, I've tried everything now." And I understand that because when you've been let down so many times, hope starts to feel dangerous.

15:50 It's safer not to hope. at least then you're not going to be as disappointed again. So, she sat down and she apologized for being complicated and she handed me her history and I did something nobody in all those years had done. And I'm not bragging about what I did. I'm just telling you exactly what happened. I'll tell you exactly what I found right after this. Welcome back to the Dr. Lazar Show. Before the break, I was telling you about a woman who had done everything. The rheumatologist, the natural provider, the peptides, the nutritionist, therapy after therapy, and still had migraines, pain at the base of her skull, numbness down her arm, a torn hip labrum, a knee that had already been operated on.

16:43 And I told you that nobody else had done this. So, here it is. It's not complicated. I looked at her structure. I looked at how she was built, how she stood, how her head sat on top of her neck, how her shoulders were carried, how her hips were level or not, whether one leg was carrying more weight than the other, whether her shoulders and pelvis were twisted at all. Took precise images at the very top of her neck and then the rest of the way down her spine. And we did images of her moving her head as much as she could move it to see.

17:16 Cuz in my world, you don't guess. You measure. There's a lot at stake. And it was right there. You did not have to go hunting for it. The way her head was carried, the way her whole frame had bent and twisted and compensated around the problem at the very top of her neck, it was visible. You could see it in her posture. You could see it in her X-rays. To someone who looks at this for a living, it's it's really loud. Her head was sitting off center at the top of her spine. Not not by a lot. This is a matter of degrees and millimeters, but at the top of the neck, a little is a lot.

17:58 And her whole body had organized itself around that one problem year after year. Now, let me walk you through what that means because this really is the moment the whole list starts to make sense. So, start with the migraines and the pain at the base of the skull. At the very top of your neck is right where your head and your neck meet and right where she kept putting her hand. The area is packed with sensitive tissue, small muscles that work all day to hold your head up and nerves that feed right into that same relay station in the brain stem that handles sensation from your head and your face.

18:36 So when that area is under constant mechanical stress, the brain doesn't always know the difference between my neck is strained and my head hurts. It can show up as head pain or it can show up as that deep ache at the base of the skull. And for a lot of people, it shows up as migraines. Now, the numbness down her arm, the nerves that run down your arm into your hands come from your neck. And so, when the neck is carrying the head crooked year after year, those nerves end up working under pressure and tension. And that can show up as tingling or numbness or my hand belongs to somebody else.

19:15 It's kind of that the way they describe that. Now, the hip and the knee, the spine is part of that, but it surprises people the most. So, your head weighs about as much as a bowling ball, 10 or 12 pounds. It's sitting at the top of a very thin stick. Um, think of a slinky or a stack of a stack of bricks. Now, when that bowling ball shifts even a little bit off center, your head doesn't let you fall over. It's way too smart for that. It compensates. Your shoulders tilt to hold the head back so your head is over your center and your pelvis rotates to keep your eyes level with the horizon.

19:57 And then one of your legs ends up functionally shorter than the other. That's because not necessarily the bone is shorter, but because the whole frame has twisted under gravity and now one hip and one knee are taking a lot more load than they were ever designed to take. So every step, every stair, every time you get out of the car, you know, you do that for a day, not a problem. Do that for 10 years, something gives. Maybe it's the cartilage in the hip or maybe it's the knee or the low back. It gives whatever is the weakest link, that's where it gives.

20:38 And then you go to see the specialist for that weakest link and they fix that link. But nobody asks why the link kept getting overloaded in the first place. Here's what we had. Not a migraine problem, not a neck problem, not an arm problem, not a hip problem, not a knee problem, one structural problem at the top of the neck throwing a cascade of symptoms off across a whole bunch of different departments for years. And every specialist had been right about their piece. And every one of them was blind to the whole. Now I want to slow down here and be very careful and very honest because this is exactly the point at the story where some people in my profession overpromise.

21:27 I'm not going to do that. Not on this show. Not ever. I didn't wave a wand. I didn't cure her. I can't do that. But here's what I did. I found the cause that everyone else was structurally not set up to look for. And we began correcting that. The correction is precise. It's very gentle. There's no twisting, no cracking, no yanking on her neck. We measure exactly where the head is sitting. We calculate the correction. We make that correction. And then we measure again to confirm it moved where it needed to move. And then this is the part that matters most. We watch whatever it holds because the goal is not a good day.

22:12 Anybody can give you a good day. The goal is a correction that holds. So your body can stop compromising and start reorganizing itself around a foundation that's finally where it belongs. And as that correction held, her body got to do what it had been trying to do for years. That's the miss. That's what everybody missed. And I want you to hear why they missed it. Because this is the part that matters for you. They didn't miss it because they were careless or because they weren't smart. They missed it because the system pointed every one of them at a slice, at a piece of the pie, at a part of the body, and nobody owned the whole, how it was working together.

23:03 I'm going to come back to this idea every week on the show in a segment I'm going to call the miss. Every week, one real person, somebody who'd been everywhere, and I'll I'll walk you through what everyone missed and why they missed it. because unfortunately her story is not rare. It just looks rare when nobody connects the dots. I want to take a few minutes and explain how this actually works because I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to understand it because when you understand it, you can start seeing it in yourself, in your family, in the people you love and care about.

23:37 So, picture your spine. At the very top, you've got the first bone in your neck. It's called the Atlas, named after the figure in mythology who holds the world up on his shoulders. And that's a pretty good name for it because the atlas holds your head, your whole world, really. Here's here's what makes that spot so different from everywhere else in your spine. Most of your spine is built for stability. The bones stack and interlock and they've got strong joints holding them in place and discs there. But the top of your neck is built for movement. It's what lets you turn your head and check your blind spot or nod yes or look up the stairs um to give you all that motion.

24:25 The joints up there are relatively flat and hold mostly they're held together by soft tissue ligaments, really tiny muscles. So that's a great design for motion. Really, really great design, but it's a vulnerable design for stability. And right through the middle of that area runs your brain stem and the top of your spinal cord. That's the cable that carries every signal between your brain and your body. Your heart rate, your breathing, your balance, pain signals, body awareness signals, muscle tone, the signals that tell your body which side is up and how to stand straight. So, you've got the most important cable in your body running through the most mobile, most vulnerable part of your skeleton.

25:15 Now, what knocks it off? Life does. A fall on the ice, a car accident, uh a little fender bender, a hard hit as a kid, you don't even remember. And for some people, it goes all the way back to that difficult birth. Sometimes it wasn't one big event. It's 10 years of looking down at the screen. And there's the thing, a lot of people don't connect it because the symptoms don't always show up right away. Sometimes they show up months or years later. Slowly, one at a time. Now, here's the part I really want you to understand because it's the heart of what I do and it's different from what most people picture.

25:53 Most people think this is a bone out of place type thing. like there's one little bone that slipped and somebody just needs to pop that right back in place. That's not how I think about it and it's not how the work I do approaches it. I think about the top of your neck as a lever. When the head sits off center on the top of the spine, the whole body has to reorganize around it. The neck shifts, the shoulders tilt, the rib cage twists, the pelvis rotates, the legs change how they carry the load of your body. It's a full body pattern, a whole framework that's been pulled out of balance from the top down.

26:33 So, the correction isn't just about one bone. It's about using that one spot at the top of the neck as a lever to bring the whole frame back toward balance. You correct the top precisely and the whole body has a chance to unwind that compensation that it's been carrying for years. That's the method I practice. It's called QSM3 or quantum spinal mechanics. It's very specialized, very precise upper cervical approach. There are only a handful of doctors in the world certified to do it. And the reason I trained in it is exactly what I'm describing.

27:13 It addressed the top of the neck as the lever for the whole body, not just a sore spot in the neck. Let me give you a picture that might help. Think about a tall building. If the top floors are leaning, you could keep patching the cracks that show up on the walls in the fifth floor and the 10th floor and the 20th floor. Um, you could paint over them, you could reinforce them, and you'd be doing good work on every one of those cracks. But if nobody ever looks at why the building is leaning, then the cracks keep coming back. new ones show up and the people patching the cracks start to wonder why this building is so complicated.

27:59 That's what happened to her. Great people patching great cracks. Nobody looking at why the building was leaning in the first place. So, let me give you a way to think about it. If you've got one problem in one place and it started from something that happened right there, that might be just that. But if you've got a list, you know, you've got you've got problems that seem unrelated. They're spread across your body, they've built up over time, they keep coming back no matter how many times they're they're addressed. That's a sign that it's time to look at the foundation. [snorts] Not instead of everything else, but in addition to it.

28:41 Up next is the way I see it. We're going to take a short break and we'll be back right after this. Welcome back to the Dr. Lazar Show. I want to introduce you to something that we're going to do every week. I call it the way I see it. Here's how it works. Every week, I'll take something that's in the news, a head that he's talking about, and I'll give you one more lens on it. Not the final word, a lens, the way I see it. And before I do the first one, I want to make you a promise about this segment. I'm not here to tell you your doctor's wrong.

29:18 Um, some of the best people I know in this community are physicians. Some of them send me their toughest cases and I send them mine. And when somebody comes into my office and what they need is a surgeon or a neurologist or a cardiologist, I'm the first one picking up the phone to get them there, right? We we need each other. So, this segment is not about tearing anybody down. It's it's about adding something to the picture that usually gets left out because when you're making a big decision about your health, like a surgery or a long-term medication or an injection, you deserve every lens available.

29:56 And that's what this is. So, here's this week's. If you pay attention to health news at all, you've seen the headlines about chronic pain, about how many adults are living with pain that never really goes away, about how often that pain is managed with one medication and then another and then another to deal with the side effects of the earlier medication. And people who have had procedure after procedure and they're still hurting, sometimes worse. And when I read coverage like that, I'm grateful people are talking about it because chronic pain is real. It's exhausting. The people living with it deserve more attention than they get.

30:40 And here's the lens I'd add to it. Almost all of the conversation is about what to give the patient. Which drug, which dose, which injection, which procedure, which device. Ask your doctor if this is the right one for you. But almost none of the conversation is about one basic question that comes before all of that other stuff. Is the structure underneath this problem sound? Let me put it this way. Pain is just a signal. It's your body's alarm system. And medications can be very good at turning down the volume on that alarm. Sometimes that's exactly what you need. If you're in agony, turning down the alarm is merciful, and I'm all for that.

31:22 But if the alarm is going off because something is mechanically wrong, you know, something under pressure, something out of balance, something wearing wrong, something carrying a load it was never built to carry. Well, then turning down the alarm doesn't fix what set it off. You can quiet the alarm forever if you want, but you'd never fix the fire. And here's what concerns me about that. The alarm gets quieter. A lot of people assume the problem is getting better. And sometimes it is, but sometimes the structure underneath keeps doing what it was doing. The compensation keeps building and the load keeps landing on those same joints.

32:05 The nerves stay under the same stress and the problem moves. Then now it shows up somewhere else. Now there's a new department and a new specialist and a new medication and a new list of appointments and new tests. That's how lists get long. So the way I see it, before anyone accepts the pain they told is permanent, before anybody says this is just your life now, somebody should ask whether the structure has been checked. And I mean really checked. Not does your neck hurt when I press here. I mean, how is the head sitting on the spine? Is the frame balance? Is one side carrying more weight than the other?

32:45 Has anyone measured it? If the answer is yes and it's sound, then great. Now, you know, cross it off with confidence and keep going. But if the answer is no one's ever looked, I don't know, then you're making decisions without the full picture. And here's the other thing I'll say. If you're facing a big decision right now, maybe surgery's been recommended or you've told that's the only option you have, maybe uh being moved to a stronger medication. I'm not telling you not to do that. Sometimes surgery is the right answer and I'll I'll tell you that to your face if that's the case.

33:25 What I'm telling you though is it's reasonable to ask before a big permanent decision whether every lens has been used. A good doctor would never be offended by that question. The best ones I know ask that questions themselves. That's the way I see it. Not instead of your doctor. In addition to I told you at the top of the show that one structural cause can wear a dozen different masks. So today you met one person and her mask was migraines with neck pain, a numb arm, a torn hip, and a bad knee. But that's just one mask. I want to show you a few others because there's a very good chance that somebody listening right now is wearing one of those and has never once thought it might be connected to the top of their neck.

34:18 These are not specific patients. They're patterns. Patterns I've seen walk through my door over and over again since I started this office back in 2008. And every one of them is going to get its own episode this season. The first mask is the dizzy one. The room spins or the floor feels like it's moving or there's a constant ringing in the ears that never shuts off. Uh maybe some hearing loss on one side. The person's usually been to the ear, nose, and throat doctor. They've had the hearing test. Maybe they've had the balance test. Maybe they were told there's nothing structurally wrong with your ear and sent home with a pill for nausea.

34:57 And here's what I want them to know. Your balance isn't just run by your inner ear. It is run by your inner ear, but also your eyes and a constant stream of signals from the joints and the muscles at the very top of your neck. All of it being organized in your brain stem. And your brain stem sits right on right inside your atlas. So when the top of your neck is off, the balance is one of the first things that can go sideways. The second mask is the one fall. That's the person who can point to that exact moment. I slipped on the ice in the driveway.

35:33 I got rear-ended at a stoplight. I fell off the ladder. I took a hit in a game. And they'll tell you I was fine before that. And after that, nothing was ever quite right. That's when the headache started and the sleep got worse and the fog rolled in. Things they used to do are now really hard. They didn't have to think about it before and now it's really hard. And because the symptoms came on slowly over weeks or months, nobody went back and connected them to that fall. The fall got treated, the bruises healed, the X-ray was fine, but the top of the neck took a hit and nobody checked it.

36:15 Third mask is the exhausted one. This is the person who's tried uh every way to sleep, but it doesn't fix it. Now, brain fog, uh, pain that moves around the body, poor sleep, maybe they've been given a name for it, like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue. And here's what they'll often say to me. They gave me a name for it, but they didn't give me an answer. They didn't tell me why it happened. When your brain stem is under constant mechanical stress, it can affect a lot of the systems it helps regulate, like your sleep, energy, how loud your body turns up pain, where your body is in space, and whether you're clumsy or well-coordinated.

37:00 So, a confusing cluster of symptoms that doesn't fit any one department can sometimes trace back to that one spot. And the fourth, the fourth mask is the face. Jaw pain, clenching, grinding, pain in the face that comes out of nowhere. This person's usually been to the dentist or maybe a few dentists. They got a night guard and maybe somebody talked about surgery on the jaw. And here's something most people don't know. Your jaw joint and the very top of your neck are next-door neighbors. They work together every time you chew or talk or swallow. When one of them is off, the other one pays for it.

37:43 And the fifth mask, the one we're doing next week, is the hands and feet. Burning, tingling, numbness, feet that feel like they're walking on gravel or wrapped in cotton or like marshmallows or like a sock is bunched up underneath it. Hands that drop things. The person's often been told it's neuropathy. And a lot of them aren't even diabetic. So, they're left asking why. And nobody has a good answer. So, I want to be careful here, just like I was with her story. I'm not telling you that every one of these is caused by the top of your neck. That would be ridiculous.

38:23 And it wouldn't be honest either. Dizziness can come from a lot of places. Fatigue can come from a lot of places. So can numbness. Some of those are places that are serious and they need a medical doctor to look and they need one. Now, what I'm telling you is this. For a lot of people wearing these masks, the structure is the one thing that never got checked. And when it's the missing piece, finding it can change everything. So, that's the season. Every week a different mask. Every week the miss one real person we've uh talked to that's been everywhere. every week the way I see it and every week a win of the week to send you home with hope.

39:04 If you see yourself in one of those masks, stick with the show. Your episode is coming. If you're just joining, this is the Dr. Lazar Show and we're talking about a bunch of stuff that shows up in weird places and people think it's unrelated, but a lot of times it's very much related. If you're interested in seeing if the root cause of your problem is at the top of your neck, um, text the word root to 734-274-5107. Text the word root and we'll send you an assessment you can take for free.

39:50 now because I never want this show just to be a nice story for you to hear and then you forget it in a few minutes. If you're listening and something about this is landing a little too close to home, if you're the person with that list or the person who's been everywhere or the person who has started to quietly wonder whether it's all in your head, I want to give you a few things to take with you. First, a quick self-check. Just listen and notice whether any of these sound like you. Do you have more than one health problem that nobody has been able to connect?

40:32 Have you been told your tests are normal, but you know something is not right? Do your symptoms tend to be worse on one side of your body? Do you get headaches or pain that starts at the base of your skull or at the back of your neck? Do you have numbness or tingling in your arms or hands that nobody's been able to explain? Have you had a fall, a car accident, a sports injury, a hard hit, even years ago? And if you're honest, things were never quite the same after. Do you notice that one shoulder is higher than the other or your clothes hang crooked or your shoes wear unevenly?

41:14 Have you worn out a joint, a hip, a knee, and nobody could really tell you why that one? Have you been passed from specialist to specialist and everyone says their piece and they say it looks fine? If you said yes to two or three of those, that's not a diagnosis. I can't diagnose you over the over the show here, and I wouldn't try, but it's a reason to have your structure looked at. Second, I want you to rethink the meaning of a long list. Most people think a long list of problems means they're a hopeless case. I've got too many things wrong with me. Nobody's going to be able to sort this out.

41:55 But I want you to flip that around. Sometimes a long list is actually a clue. A long list of these unrelated problems is exactly what one structural cause looks like from the outside. So, the length of your list might not be evidence that you're hopeless. It might actually be evidence that something underneath everything hasn't been found yet. And third, I want to give you one question to start asking. You can ask it at your next appointment. You can ask it at any provider you see. And here's the question. Has anyone actually looked at my structure? at how I'm built at the very top of my neck at the foundation.

42:42 If the honest answer is no, then you don't have a complete picture yet. You've got a stack of slices for sure, but you deserve the whole picture. And fourth, and this is just honesty, I'm not the answer for everybody. Some problems are not structural. Some problems need a different kind of doctor. And when that's the case, I'm going to tell you. I'm going to I'm going to look you in the eyes and tell you this is not mine. And I'll help you get to the person who can help. I'd rather tell you the truth and lose you as a patient than tell you what you want to hear and waste your time and money and give you a false sense of hope.

43:25 That's the deal here. It's always going to be the deal. So, here's the ask. It's the same every week, so you'll get used to hearing it. If today's show spoke to you, call the office. Tell them you and ask for a consultation. We'll look and we'll be honest, and if we can help you, we'll let you know that. And if we can't, we'll tell you that, too. That's a promise. That number again or you can go to drlazarshow.com.

44:07 734-274-5107. You can call or text or drlazarshow.com and you can get information about this and other episodes. Um download any assessments, get show notes, and if you need help clinically, you'll be able to see how to do that from there. Now, I know that for some of you, uh, picking up the phone is the hardest part, especially if you've been let down a lot. So, let me tell you exactly what happens when you call. That way, there are no surprises. You talk to someone on my team. They're going to ask you questions about what's going on and how long it's been going on.

44:48 That's it. Nobody's going to pressure you. Nobody's going to sell you anything on the phone. When you come in for the consultation, the first thing we do is check your posture and then we listen. We really listen. Your whole story, not just the thing that hurts today, the fall you had 15 years ago or the car accident you forgot about. The list, all of it, because the story is where the clues are. I learned from a good friend of mine a long time ago that the diagnosis is made on your butt. meaning when the doctor is sitting and listening that's when we start to learn what's happening anyway after that we look we look at how you stand how your head sits how your body is carrying itself and if it makes sense for you we measure precisely because again we don't guess and then I'll tell you what I see the plain English no jargon is this structural is this something I can help with and what would that look like and if the answer is this isn't mine I'll tell you that and I'll tell you where I'd go if I were you.

45:54 That's it. You walk out knowing more than you did when you walked in either way. Because the worst place to be is where she was for years not knowing, wondering, agonizing. A consultation ends the wondering. And if this isn't you, but you just thought of somebody while I was reading the list, your mom, your sister, your best friend, somebody at church, somebody at work who's always got something going on and nobody can quite figure it out. Do them a favor. Send them the this episode. You might be the reason they finally get this looked at. We're going to take a short break and we'll be back right after this.

46:39 If you're just joining us, welcome back to the Dr. Lazar Show. You can call or text us anytime at 734-274-5107. I'm Dr. Lazar and we're here to help. You can also check us out at the uh at drlazarshow.com. Now, before we wrap up, I want to leave you with something good. So, here's the plan. Every week, I'm going to end the show with what I call the win of the week. One real result from one real person we've been able to help. Here's why.

47:20 You hear a lot about what's wrong on shows like this, what's broken, what got missed, who fell through the cracks. And that's important. We have to name it. But I don't want you walking away from this show feeling heavier than when you started. I want you to leave with a reason for hope. So this week's win is the woman I told you about today. The one who walked in apologizing for being complicated. The one who'd been to the rheumatologist, the natural provider, the peptides, the nutritionist, the therapy, everything, and was still losing days to these confusing symptoms.

48:03 The last time I saw her, she told me something I want you to hear in her own in her own spirit. She told me she'd gone a stretch of days without feeling like she doesn't know what her life means anymore. This is the first time she could remember in years. That's it. That's the win. Not a miracle, not a cure, just a person getting a piece of her life back because someone finally looked at the right thing. And I want you to think about what a stretch of days like that means when you've lived the way she's lived for so long.

48:51 It means maybe she can start making plans and keeping them. Or maybe she can say yes to something without the fear of just of what's going to happen sitting at the back of your mind. Or maybe she doesn't have to be a spectator anymore. Means getting a little bit of yourself back. And for her that meant being able to give more of herself to her family. Now, she's still working on it. There's still a lot more to do. This is a process, and I wouldn't want to pretend otherwise, but she's not apologizing anymore. And to me, that's the whole thing.

49:33 That's what we do here. One structural cause, one honest look, one person at a time. Well, that's our show for today. Let me tell you what you heard today in one breath. You heard about a woman who did everything right and still got missed. You heard why she got missed, not because anyone was careless, but because everyone was looking at their part. You heard how the top of the neck can act like a lever. Here's what I want you to do before next week. If you know someone with the list, send them this episode. It'll be at drlazarshow.com. And if you're someone with the list, You can also text, but tell my team you heard the show and ask for a consultation.

50:30 We'll look and we'll be honest. And if we can help you, we'll tell you exactly how. And if we can't, we'll tell you that, too. And we'll help you find someone who can. Don't miss next week's show. Next week, if your feet or your hands burn, tingle, or go numb, and especially if somebody told you it's neuropathy, but you're not diabetic, next week's show is for you. I'm going to tell you why the problem usually isn't where you feel it. And I'm going to tell you the one thing almost nobody checks. If you've been told, "It's just neuropathy. Here's a prescription. Learn to live with it."

51:08 You need to hear next week's show. And one last thing before I go. What we're after on this show and what I'm after for you is not just a little relief. I want you to get better, not just feel better. And I want you to stay well, not just get well. And I want you to feel alive, not just stay alive. That's the whole mission. It's why this show exists. Until next week, I'm Dr. Lazar. Take care of your structure and it'll take care of you. This has been the Dr. Lazar Show.