Total Health Systems | April 29, 2013 (updated December 18, 2018)

Total Health Systems Demonstrates Test for Digestive Dysfunction

Hello. I’m Dr. Rose Minkiewicz. I’m one of the chiropractors here at Total Health Systems, and today, I’m going to be discussing part of our wellness program, which involves checking for digestive dysfunction in the body. We do offer a lot of different avenues for diet and nutrition, but we find that we need to get a baseline for a lot of our patients. And digestive dysfunction is extremely common and if we have poor digestion, we’re going to have poor absorption of our nutrients that we put in our bodies, so it really won’t matter what foods we’re taking in if we can’t absorb any of the nutrients. So one of the first things we do after we have a patient undergo care, it’s very shortly after they start as a patient; we’re going to be implementing this digestive exam. It involves a little bit of paperwork on the part of the patient. They have to fill out what’s called a digestive diseases symptom survey and a toxicity questionnaire, and basically, it evaluates their organ systems based upon the symptoms that they may be experiencing. And it evaluates their level of environmental toxicity that’s build up in their body, from that questionnaire.

Now, no one symptom is our guide to recommending a nutritional supplement or correcting anything in the body. But taking into account a host of symptoms or a multitude of symptoms can give us a good idea of which organ system needs to be addressed. Or what part of the digestive system needs to be repaired. So today, I’m going to show a brief demonstration on one of our lovely employees, Emily. And just of what it looks like when we do the exam. To show that it’s completely painless to the patient. And it’s very brief. It doesn’t take a lot of time after we go through the questionnaires, to get this information.

So, Emily, today I’m going to just push on your belly a little bit in a couple spots, and I’m going to have you rate your pain. Zero is going to be no pain, and five is going to be the most severe pain you’ve ever experienced. Now, Emily is just going to not answer me today for this demonstration, but I’m just going to show what the pattern would be like on the body. So we start in the upper part of the abdomen, and it is gentle pressure, just like that, and then we ask the patient to evaluate their pain. So I’m going to go all the way around her body. And then we examine around the center of the belly button to check for intestinal issues, partial intestinal issues. And then I would evaluate after that around for her large intestine.

The upper portions I tested were her stomach and her gallbladder and liver areas and then certain points in the large intestine. If there’s pain, we also check some of the areas along the sides of the legs that would coincide with that organ system, as well with the reflex for that pain signal. And then after that, I would have the patient turn over, and we’d evaluate their spine. Every level of the spine has a nerve that comes out of it that goes to a specific organ. So, if the patient has tenderness when we touch the backs of their spine, then it can also correlate with what we found here, to more hone in more closely on which areas need to be addressed. And then after the exams complete, we’ve run through all the paperwork, and we try to focus in on as few supplements as possible to help correct the problem. Sometimes we do come across the patient that has way too many symptoms, way too many tender spots. Their bodies just are so overwhelmed with dysfunction that we will recommend that they see our nurse for our wellness program and she can work more closely if they have a specific metabolic disease or just too many things to deal with one or two nutritional supplements with. Also, another avenue would be if their toxicity questionnaire and their physical exam were very elevated with symptoms and trouble spots we may recommend a detoxification program, and we have several different versions of that program that we recommend, and if need be. So, depending on what you have going on, we might just recommend one or two vitamins, or we might send you the full out detox and wellness program route.

Thank you.