On today’s episode we explore some of the “how” and “why” behind low level laser therapy with Dr. Jerome Rerucha. Dr. Rerucha is a brilliant clinician who has been using low level laser therapy in his clinic for over 2 decades! To learn more about his Dr. Rerucha and his work go to: https://www.performancepractic.com/
Transcript
Dr. Chad Woolner: What’s going on everybody, Dr. Chad Woolner here with my good friend Dr. Andrew Wells and our special guest today Dr. Jerome Rerucha and on today’s episode 3 of The Laser Light Show, we are going to be talking about low level laser therapy and how it works and this is going to be a two-parter. So this is part one of how low level laser light therapy works. So, let’s get to it.
Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I used to love going to laser light shows at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. They would put on these amazing light shows with incredible designs synced up to some of my favorite music. From the Beatles to Pink Floyd to Jimmy Hendrix and Metallica; they were awesome. Little did I know then that lasers would have such a profound effect on my life decades later. As a chiropractic physician, I have seen first-hand just how powerful laser therapy is in helping patients struggling with a wide range of health problems. As the leader in laser therapy, Erchonia has pioneered the field in obtaining 20 of the 23 total FDA clearances for therapeutic application of lasers. On this podcast, we’ll explore the science and technology and physiology behind what makes these tools so powerful. Join me as we explore low-level laser therapy. I’m Dr. Chad Woolner along with my good friend Dr. Andrew Wells and welcome to The Laser Light Show.
All right, and welcome to the show Dr. Rerucha. We are super excited to have you here, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to be here with us.
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Thanks for having me as well, excited to be here with you and thanks for all you’re doing as well.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, you bet. So, this episode, fresh off of the heels of episodes one and two really kind of help set the stage a little bit behind the history behind Erchonia and kind of the research side of things and really dove into a little bit more in terms of what that looks like in terms of the process and it’s quite the ordeal in terms of time and money involved and the research behind it. What we wanted to do in this episode is maybe dive in a little bit more behind the mechanisms behind low level laser therapy. You’ve been doing this for quite some time, so maybe to kick it off, maybe tell us a little bit about you, your background, and how you kind of came to be with Erchonia.
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Yeah, I graduated chiropractic school early 2000s, prior to that I was a full-time strength coach so physiology, neuromechanical biology was a huge interest for me and I took that in a performance model. And I really wanted to make people faster, stronger, healthier, so I looked at chiropractic, the advantages, that allowed me to have a really good experience with the very dynamic of chiropractor growing up. So, that kind of set the stage of what I was doing and right at the time of my graduation I got introduced to low level laser therapy and Erchonia. And so shortly after that I dove into it pretty deeply and started using it in my practice and met the primaries of the company relatively soon after that with my excitement, results we were getting, how we could pair that with the physiology systems within the body. I started teaching with them shortly after that and basically 22 years later and here we are and there’s been a lot that’s happened since then when we look at the research validation, understanding what’s happening underneath the microscope, what actually happens to the cells, not just with obvious strength and range of motion, symptomatic improvements per say. But really understanding more than we had any understanding when we first started this, it’s been a really exciting journey. So many people have come and brought their level of expertise, some of the people you spoke with already with interviews with this have been instrumental and just a big team approach.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, what’s cool about it, what I love hearing when you tell that story is what I think is so cool about it is this kind of best of both worlds approach. Meaning it’s not as though Erchonia was sitting on the sidelines waiting to use these tools until there was the placebo control, double blind studies that were published, but rather along the way the entire time, docs like you were in the trenches using these tools, you saw first hand what was happening. You knew there was real validation objectively in terms of evidence and simultaneously alongside you Erchonia was there digging in, fighting the good fight and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars that go into these research projects. So it’s kind of cool to see that. Because I think sometimes, at least this is my perspective, there can be a little bit of a disconnect between the world of academia and then the actual like real world. When people look at studies, and I’m not suggesting that studies are bad, studies are great, we want them we need them, but let’s never forget at the end of the day if you don’t have the actual real world in the trenches things that are happening, docs like you on the front lines treating patients and really sharing what you’re experiencing and seeing first hand the right hand and the left hand communicating, does that make sense?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: I couldn’t agree with you more, and coming from the strength and conditioning world we always said that strength coaches on the hands-on applications were so far ahead in making people bigger, faster, stronger. If you told the majority of PhDs out there that people can squat 1,000 pounds, they would have no idea how to do that or even understand the mechanisms and training protocol to do that. Whereas, it’s fairly common sense not every strength coach puts people who are competitive strength athletes, and of course you tailor that specifically, how does this apply to make you a better, healthier athlete that you’re taking it for.
Obviously you don’t need to squat 1,000 pounds but if you know how to do that it gives you a lot of advantages when you’re creating those protocols. And, clinically, for me, it’s the same thing. We never waited for the research, you could tell it’s incredibly safe, non-invasive, obviously light therapy was being used the mid 60s in Europe even though this is very different, huge improvement in the technology itself and the devices themselves. There was very little research so it was very skeptical to say the least, probably not very thought of highly in the world of medicine or anything because the research wasn’t there. But as a clinician, there’s no doubt, we really saw something and how it could help people.
And it was the best of both world you know we had a bunch of aggressive practitioners who aren’t waiting for permission to have it be accepted and Erchonia was doing the diligence from ground zero and really going off of those clinical success we were having I mean just asking the question, how can we learn more about this? How can we make this tangible through academia information based on what these clinicians are reproducibly doing and it took both sides. You wouldn’t want me running a research study, I’m just a good clinician.
Dr. Chad Woolner: If there’s one thing that I can see very clearly is that Erchonia itself as a company as well as all the practitioners, the one thing I can see, the common denominator, is that there is an immense sane level of passion behind this application but just learning in general there’s just a love, an insatiable love of learning and constantly innovating and developing, and so I can’t have anything but a tremendous level of respect that. I’m similar, when I get excited about something I definitely can geek out on it and I think that’s something that all if not most chiropractors and I think doctors in general can appreciate too. I think there’s a mutual geekiness that we all share in terms of digging in and all that so totally.
And the other thing I was going to say too it prompted me, I had heard this before from somebody, I can’t remember who so sorry if I’m not giving credit to somebody. But they said if you want to know in terms of nutrition and supplements, like who’s always on the cutting edge, it’s always the strength and conditioning world, all of the bodybuilding world, they’re always on the front lines, they always have their finger on the poll of what’s… even beyond the realm of study that I saw and I’ll just share, let me pull it up real quick because the title of the study says it all, and I saw this and we banked it away. It says, it was published in England, it was not a study, it was a review but basically it said: “The answer is seventeen years, what is the question? Understanding time lags in translational research.”
So, I think you can appreciate that being in your world and seeing Erchonia in terms of the lags and times sometimes you’ll have various modalities that you know work and yet research and that world is so far behind, especially no doubt with conventional medicine and conventional approaches, there are probably at best 10 or 15 years behind, if not more than that in terms of those lags. So, it’s cool you know that you not only had the world exposure clinically as a chiropractor, exposure to Erchonia but also just your background like you said in bodybuilding and in strength and conditioning, that probably kind of gave you a certain advantage or edge if you will in the term so of seeing 10 to 15 years in the future so to speak, you know?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Without a doubt, I mean coming from the athletic world and competitive athletic world we’re all about prove it and it’s about winning and losing. It’s like when you win consistently it’s like I don’t care if it’s written in the books, we know what we’re doing, we can engineer it and understand the premise, and just because it’s not there academically, we prove it all the time. And that is absolutely what nutrition, science of food, supplementation has done in the training world. And it’s a great model, you know this is kind of one of those situations, it was a really good blend early on, like I said Erchonia did a great job really looking out, starting very conservatively in the research world but it was a priority to them and they did a great job validating and bringing it to fruition, way more significantly than what was done prior to them.
Dr. Andrew Wells: That’s a really good segue into talking about how laser therapy actually works and I think we’ve all heard the term, we’re gonna wave the magic wand and good things happen, and Erchonia kind of seems like that proverbial magic wand right, that’s how the actual application of the therapy works you wave some light over something and it gets better and most of us have heard all these really cool transformational health stories of people who have seen amazing changes with their health by using laser therapy, Erchonia laser therapy. So what we want to do today is really kind of start to understand what some of the mechanisms of healing are, when do you start to use laser therapy, what’s actually happening.
Speaking from a chiropractic standpoint it’s nice when you adjust a patient and they feel and hear something, they hear a pop and they feel something moving and they’re like, ok it worked that time that was a good adjustment. And, the frustrating thing for me, having had an Erchonia laser on my brain, I’m like, I don’t know if it’s working, how does it work? What is it doing? What is it not doing? Is it done? Did it start? And so we don’t have enough of these immediate sensory responses to what’s actually happening and so the reason we wanted Dr. Rerucha to come on the show is, he’s going to help Doctors understand what’s actually going on in the body and what the science is behind these amazing health transformations that are happening so Dr. Rerucha, where do you want to begin with this topic?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Well, a little bit about what you just mentioned, so low level laser therapy, I mean even chiropractic can seem a little bit of what I refer to as invisible. And I know when I was a patient, and lasers weren’t being really used anywhere, a very small group of people, and I had no exposure when I was a patient prior to going to chiropractic school with laser therapy. And, so, I guess what I would say under traditional chiropractic, I probably got adjusted for the first time when I was three years old.
And, my family’s always been, they weren’t chiropractors themselves, but used chiropractic. My grandpa lived to a 100 and I think he said he got adjusted for the first time when he was nine years old. He was one of pioneer patients and it was just pretty consistently used all through his life. He was an expert on chiropractic practices as he was a patient no doubt. He used it a lot, it transferred over to my dad and then my family. So, one of the things to it was neat, and I grew up under a variety type of chiropractors but then one person who then created Team, moved into our town and they were AK-CK based which was even more like a magic show, that was even more fascinating than the original chiropractors I went to which were no disregard to that, I mean you didn’t know. You got the pop, you were in and out of there, there wasn’t really an exam. And it was like, hey it felt good, and these types of things.
We actually want, primarily, my sister had allergies, so we didn’t go for neck pain, back pain necessarily and you know we just went on a family plan and just got a tune up. So, that was a great decision on my parents’ part to do that, not using it for symptomatology alone but the benefits that we know adjusting and neuromechanical biology can provide. But there was a lot of questions yet, you were just kind of like, and it was just by personality, I always, it bothered me as a patient how little people knew about chiropractic and what people aren’t up on they’re down on, so you kind of hear the negatives from the consumer market and it was fascinating to me, you know. What it really did for me was amazing.
And, then when we went to this other chiropractor that moved to our town, he was an AK doctor, could move every bone in the body still to this day he’s one of the greatest adjusters I’ve ever been around. He can smoke it. And a couple ladies were in the office as well and they were equally as good, just a great experience. And, I always wanted to understand it more, you know the whole concept through the eyes of the patient to the power that made the body heal, heal the body, and that’s not as validating to a patient as it is to the doctor and to me, I can wholeheartedly understand and believe in that now.
But, so that tangibility, so, when I decided to be a chiropractor, I made a commitment that I was going to take education as seriously as I take my adjusting skills and knowledge of being a chiropractor, physical, chemical and emotional. And so we have, we’ve always worked really hard to provide information, explaining to patients what I want them to know what’s really important to a patient. To understand the real importance of the adjustment not just the importance of the philosophy necessarily but the physiology, what goes on. It should be very tangible, it’s a very tangible thing. And, one thing that was a blessing for me was when a chiropractor would do muscle testing and show you dysfunction, through a very specific adjustment and you got a response. That was amazing and fascinating, especially somebody who very early on had the drive to lift weights and compete in strength and conditioning sports and that’s everything. If you can recruit muscles and if they’re not turning on, how you’re compensating, how you’re just not recruiting and ideally using your techniques. So that was eye-opening.
And so the same thing when I started using laser, we were the ones who initially did this, we did a lot of showmanship, I guess even though it was the exam where we could show people these dysfunctions even if you just used simple myotome tests, take their history, listen to them, and you could show things that aren’t functioning not working properly, and then you just use the laser and turn them on. You know, so it made it very tangible. So we didn’t have the academic information at that time like we do now, but we had very very good preimposed applications to show people with the laser.
And, now there’s so many different personalities and so many types of chiropractors that use it, and you can use these point and shoot, so similar to what you were saying, you know they lasered your brain and you’re like, okay is it on? Is it doing anything? You know if a certain type of practitioner did an exam that would be very tangible to you and it’s not just a brain exam, but seeing how the whole nervous system is connected and obviously the brain is a keystone. And that makes it very tangible to people even when you don’t know the academia. But we are living in the best of both worlds where you can learn a very practical or a very advanced examination that is even ideal for documentation and insurance billing if you want to do those things, but of course whether you’re a cash practitioner this document, proper documentation is really important. Strength, range in emotions, the gold standard. So that works great for patient education. Apply lasers whether you’re doing an attended or unattended application and then show a change. So, different people practice different ways obviously but those are things that are available out there.
Dr. Chad Woolner: I think, I want to connect some dots for Docs who are listening to this because I think what you’re saying is whether they have connected these dots themselves and realized it themselves; many if not most docs are looking for more and better ways to change the conversation from it being purely a symptom/pain based conversation which can be frustrating for a lot of physical medicine practitioners. Be it chiros or physical therapists or whoever, that when we’re dealing with something as nebulus oftentimes as pain, that can be a really frustrating situation because of the objective findings that are there can be a little bit allusive in terms of, you know you’ve got your various questionnaire instruments like oswestry questionnaire, neck disability, you know you’ve got all these different things. But what you’re talking about here is a very simple, very simple, very tangible, very accessible way to shift the conversation in a way which I think again, is what a lot of Docs if not most are looking to do is shift that away from it being feeling versus function. You’re talking purely a way, a simple, very accessible way to shift into a function based conversation as opposed to chasing nebula symptoms all day long.
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Yeah, that’s always how I practice and under certain expectations I don’t do that oswald questionnaire on everybody, if you were gonna be doing a personal injury case those are the standard forms that I would highly recommend. You know, you need to achieve the standard of care before you exceed the standard of care, and so those would be things that documentation of the oswestry forms, things like that are really important and necessary. They don’t make me a better clinician and there’s no reason you can’t do both, you know by using those things are appropriate, but having this functional assessment always carries over and it’s just about developing that rhythm and we do live in very exciting times, in terms of what we can apply.
Dr. Chad Woolner: So, here’s kind of where I think we should take the conversation, because this is where I’m mentally tracking right, the question being is how does low level laser therapy work? And we’re kind of almost from a macro level looking at, okay you’re seeing these things happening, you’re not exactly sure first the mechanisms behind how they’re happening, you just know they’re happening. And so then Erchonia comes into the picture in terms of their research they start producing it, they start giving better explanations to you and to other clinicians, this is from a physiological standpoint what we see happening based on the research. So, maybe talk to Docs about that. Like what did you start learning? When did those two roads kind of intersect in terms of what you were seeing in the day to day versus the research and maybe explain that to docs in a simple, straightforward manner.
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Yeah, so the biggest change that I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this for 22 years is that, like I said, when we first started pretty much everybody is I call the earlier doctors and there the segment of chiropractic they don’t need research to validate, hey this is a fantastic healing device, and a lot of them were muscle testers at that time. And, so just showing them the functional tests and the functional improvements and even though A.K. has always had the five factors of the IBFs to where they were finding the range of strength and motion and the differences in you’re using nutrition, emotional of course, the adjustments, soft tissue corrections, neurolymphatics and that never goes away.
Like we’re not saying this is even a substitute for any of that but it really was obvious that hey something else is happening here, it’s very complementary to everything in the body. So, what we learned and is completely irrefutable now, this is not a hypothesis and even if you’re still a skeptic, of if you want to bring low level laser therapy into your office, there is nobody out there who disregards the fact that low level laser therapy affects the mitochondria to produce ATP. And that’s it. That is one of the most important and simple understandings, and then when we break that down, it’s like okay, so what does that mean for me, the clinician, no matter what licensure they have, so every cell in your body has mitochondria except mature red blood cells.
And so that’s why even when you go into Pubmed, you can type in low level laser therapy and type in the word ‘and’ and pick all sorts of name diagnosis or symptoms and you’ll find out there’s hundreds of symptoms and diseases that you can add to that, that validates the use of low level laser therapy. So, I always tell patients there’s over 30,000 symptoms and diseases written in medical journals, there’s only 14 systems in the body, every cell in the body has mitochondria except mature red blood cells. And what we’re gonna do with this laser is we’re going help identify where there’s breakdowns are in the body, whether it’s the nervous system, muscles, even visceral somatic reflexes, organs aren’t able to keep up with the demands, and we’re gonna see, you know where can we apply the laser to, yes, have systematic benefits. But where’s the mitochondria of these cells really injured? And show them pre and post changes, you know.
The strength and range of motion exams you can do, and you can do more extensive than that but everybody, not everybody muscle tests at an A.K. level but everybody in school was taught myotome testing, no matter what your licensure is. And even chiropractic is diverse in techniques and how people practice, everybody was taught myotome so even when we had that baseline philosophy of the nervous system connects all things in the body, and it’s absolutely true. And, think of how metabolically active your heart is which is phenomenal just to think about that but the central nervous system uses more ATP energy than the heart does even. And so if you’re the most principled chiropractor in the world, that your subluxation based, well if you really understand subluxations and how subluxations in the mitochondria coincide to each other, would you rather adjust somebody with 40% of the mitochondria working or would you rather adjust someone with 60 or 65% of the mitochondria working and that’s a fact. So, I don’t care how good of an adjuster you are, you’re always gonna get a better response from your adjustment the more mitochondria you can get involved. And the lasers are a phenomenal complement to that of how it works at a cellular level immediately.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah that’s amazing. Absolutely incredible. And I think that’s a really easy concept to grasp for docs, right. That using lasers stimulates the mitochondria, mitochondria then has, and that would explain too I think, we were talking about it earlier, this sort of explains a lot of the systemic things that we see. The systemic, because I think sometimes, at least previous to my exposure to Erchonia, we would think of lasers as being very focal, localized, you know? We’ve got an elbow issue so we’re going to laser the elbow and no doubt it’s going to have an effect there but there’s also far reaching impacts from just that one spot there and if you start talking about mitochondria that at least, on some level, begins to explain part of that whole issue there in terms of the systemic effects that we see.
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Yeah, in today’s day and age, like I said, there’s more chiropractors that are newly getting exposed to lasers that probably predominantly use the lasers symptomatically, similar to what the random blind double sight studies do. Here’s your symptom, laser the symptom, and then we’ll re-evaluate over time. And that works, like lasers really can be used as a standalone but like anything I’m really big into integration and of course natural healing integrative techniques, and so when we do see that, they do, they work really well in point and shoot but it’s easy for chiropractors to understand to, hey I could have carpal tunnel and my neck needs to get adjusted and I never even adjust the wrist, and you’re going to help a lot of people just by doing that. Hopefully you have the capabilities of adjusting extremities, doing soft tissue work and adjusting the spine at a ninja level, but that’s not a hard grasp for chiropractors.
So that’s the foundation we all share, and it is really fun over all these years to see very successful chiropractors for 40 years, they’ve been practicing much longer than I have, very successful practices, and not saying they’re burned out, but you know anybody, you do something long enough and you kind of would like to get revitalized a bit. So you see these people with their long standing successful practices for 40+ years, and they come to a laser seminar and it’s like, okay, this is neat. And then you talk to them for one year, three year, five years later, they’re like a little kid like: oh my gosh, things were great before but this has changed everything, my practice is completely different, people don’t just come in for the acute symptomatology and then they leave when it’s done. They come in for so many different things and it’s really allowed them to share chiropractic with a larger audience because we live in the technology age and we live in the information age and lasers are sexy, they definitely check the box for technology, and there’s so much information behind them. Just the FDA clearances that Erchonia has but you go into pubmed and you can find validating research under any way of how you practice. Just to really again give that patient that ease of mind of how long this has been around, how safe and effective this is, and again those basic concepts of how it works and it is, it’s a game changer of patients understanding and being able to get help.
Dr. Andrew Wells: The thing I’m hearing here too is that when we start talking about neurology and we start talking about biochemistry, I know some chiropractors, especially those who have been out of school for a long time and they’ve forgotten a lot of these concepts it’s really encouraging I think for docs to hear, hopefully encouraging to hear that this is a technology and device and therapy you can use like we call, point and shoot, and still get really good results without having to have a diplomate neurology or some advanced training. Like you can really pick this up and start having an impact on the lives of your patients and I think that’s really really encouraging. And I think it’s a good place to start and I keep hearing this from doctors who have way more education and in-depth understanding of how it actually works on a physiological level they’re saying, yeah just, get it on your patients, start using it, and you’ll start seeing results. Is that what I’m hearing?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: A little bit, I would never belittle all the efforts that were put into this and all the knowledge but it really does, it’s like, to have an instructor that can lecture into the ear of the listener and some practitioner have different needs, they have different questions for instance. And, so you just really help them understand the basic premise of this and listen to how they practice, and say, okay when you go back this is going to work really good for you, to apply the laser into how you practice and then hit the start button and get out of the way of the healing. You know? Don’t think you have to know everything, you’re going to learn a lot about laser therapy just by doing it because you are so smart with how you practice already, and what’s priorities in your office. I always tell doctors it’s like, rule number 1: you don’t change your practice to bring laser therapy into your practice. So, lasers fit into your existing practice, just as it is. So that’s whether you’re an upper cervical doctor or a craniopath, a functional medicine doctor, whether you think the pelvis solves all the problems of the world or you think the feet solve all the problems of the world, it’s great! Don’t change anything, just apply lasers into the great work you do and it just gives you that physiological advantage to implement with that neuromechanical biology in the great work that you’re doing.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, I would imagine that this opens doors for practices in a variety of ways including, like you kind of had eluded to people who maybe otherwise wouldn’t consider seeing a chiropractor for whatever preconceived notions or misconceptions or biases that they might have. I would say exactly what you said is that the technology aspect can be very appealing to people, the cutting edge nature of it and that perception can really really help. And just the fact too that inherently you’re going to open the door to help a wider range of patients that previously you may not have had the ability or the tools necessary to be able to help them. Or at least to be able to help them to a higher degree, you know? And that to me is the most appealing aspect for my clinic of getting lasers involved.
And, I think too, personally, it sends a statement to your patients that you’re willing to invest for their benefit, that you’re willing to constantly seek to keep your finger on the pulse of cutting edge research and whatever is necessary. That’s the one thing we’ve heard in our clinic over the years from our patients is that we’re constantly looking for ways to drop any biases that we have or any sort of…. sometimes chiropractors can have a tendency to be myopic in terms of their various respective techniques. My technique is the best. I don’t need anything else and for us at our clinic, we’re kind of the opposite and that we’re just trying to just keep our eyes as open as possible and make whatever tweaks and changes are necessary. If it means better outcomes for our patients, we’ll definitely look at it and implement it or at least try to do so. I think that’s a powerful addition for sure and a way to just help change more lives for the better.
Dr. Andrew Wells: So we’re talking a little bit about this working systematically versus like a focal approach. Is that to say that you don’t have to be specific in terms of where you’re applying laser therapy. So we talked about you’re seeing the results when you’re doing muscle testing you see the immediate effect afterward. What is your approach when you’re actually applying laser therapy doing it in this? I imagine you’re falling at a very specific protocol for a specific thing or is that not true?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Well, why practice just a certain way. I’m a very systemic practitioner and so I even have a program called brain body fit and will teach clinicians to do our 3D brain mapping and 3D body mapping and how they coincide together. So the body affects the brain, the brain affects the body.
And me personally, I don’t have a bias. I couldn’t care which of the 206 bones I adjust, I can adjust them all, I know how they all work in a cross-bulb neural inhibition pattern and those are fancy words to say that doesn’t matter without hand knowledge having hand knowledge. Having head knowledge is pretty worthless and so it’s just that aspect of…these are so safe when you’re talking to Erchonia laser. It is so researched, it’s so proven, even outside of Erchonia, what true low level laser therapy is researched as and again how safe and effective it is.
So, I always tell people it is safe and effective is this is, lasers are very forgiving. You can be kind of sloppy with them and still get pretty good results in many instances but I’m like that’s not good showmanship to the patient. Treat it like a tool, not a toy, even though this thing is incredibly safe and you know to be specific with it as possible you know acupuncture doesn’t use 16 penny nails because it would work better. You know the body does like precision and what that means to you and your technique is what I want people to apply so it is you know if you’re going to be symptomatic of applications with it then be specific with it.
And knowing the systemic benefits too you know will get people that are very one-dimensional and their thought process and not saying as an example like the brain or upper cervicals is not important, but you’ll get people even in their clinic to this day that they, if you had low back pain, chronic low back pain, they won’t even laser your low back. You know, if they have a brain-based practice many of them they just laser the brain, not all of them, but they’re still not uncommon. That’s the case or they just laser the upper cervicals and do the adjustment as well and you see improvements, especially the noticeable difference you see with people that have practiced for 5, 10, 20, 40 years without using lasers and have had that type of practice. And then they bring lasers in and we just help them implement it into exactly their philosophy at exactly how they use it knowing there’s symptomatic and localized benefits.
But, you never put a ceiling on the systemic benefits that can happen in the integration that’s applied in the body. And you’ll get people that’s like: “Wow.” You know, we’ve managed this person’s case or they always plateaued results a lot earlier than the standard patient in our office, that as soon as we started using laser like even a far away from their symptom. But what they consider the primary area of the body to work on and you see noticeable clinical improvements and it’s the patient telling you it’s like, “Holy Cow, I feel so different!” You know?
And that’s really exciting to see. So you can never ignore both. And that’s just why I tell people too. It’s like when you first bring lasers into your practice, you’ll hear a lot of stories. You’ll hear a lot of miracle stories. Everybody practices different. I’m like the most important thing is for you to bring lasers into how you already practice and you’re going to see those symptomatic improvements and you’re going to see systematic improvements just by the nature of the beast. So, rather than chasing and trying to be something and someone that you don’t have a lot of experience with to see difference in care, that to me has been the most effective way to introduce it to clinicians and in a very short time to get their confidence up. They start seeing what’s normal. What would using laser therapy…and then it is really fun to watch and then progress and do things that they said they would never do in their office like you would when it comes down to muscle testing. You know that’s not chiropractic. And I know some of the most venomously jaded people against you know muscle testing for 40 years of their career that they got into lasers and they’re like hey, could you show me some of this other stuff? And literally they’ve become some of the best muscle testers I’ve ever met even when they were very against it, you know for their entire career prior.
Dr. Chad Woolner: That’s hilarious. So my question for you in your practice, you’ve been practicing now.. how many years? You graduated early 2000s?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: That’s right, yeah it’s 22 years.
Dr. Chad Woolner: So in 22 years, tell me off the top of your head, if you can, what’s one of the coolest cases that you’ve seen with laser?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Yeah, I mean just being a chiropractor, you’re gonna see miracles and at times you just can’t even predict at all of course who those are going to be. I guess the one thing I would be out there to share with people rather than a specific case because I never liked to sell miracles to people. I like programs of care, you know. The miracles are going to show themselves whether you want them to or not, but lasers have a phenomenal benefit to acute trauma as in injury.
But one of the biggest advantages I had was you know patients that would deem themselves as non-responders. You know they’ve tried a lot of different things even if they didn’t try chiropractic you know they think they’ve tried everything? And even some people that have done more one-dimensional chiropractic and I know people that have gone to really good chiropractors and I know it’s not normal results but they were non-responders.
And my clinic primarily was built on non-responders is more what I see than anything. And it is really just really neat you know you listen to people’s histories and there’s a lot of very unfortunate histories and decrease quality life and obviously we’re doing very dynamic advanced chiropractic care, physical, chemical and emotional, but to see that implementation of the laser it without a doubt in my mind you know how it speeds up the process coordinates the body.
We’re not trying to suppress the body. We’re not trying to stimulate the body. We’re trying to facilitate the body and you know that’s what low level lasers do. You know with certain techniques you can neurologically organize it. Obviously you can cellularly organize it and talk about the integrand system and meridians and all those things you know it’s a light source and it is a foundational principle of how the body’s wired as well. So I would say that’s one of the biggest advantages. I mean the acute traumas and just the speeding up of tissue regeneration is a big deal. But when you really get those non-responders and anything you can think of it really tilts the law of averages in your favor no matter what they were. It really makes a difference on how there’s pretty systematic, easy responses and in many instances.
Dr. Chad Woolner: For Docs listening who want to learn more from you, where would you direct them? Where would you have them go?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: I guess probably one of the things we’ve created, so Erchonia has always done a great job. Oh my gosh, the amount of seminars that they put on and the amount of great speakers that they provide to the profession is obvious. Outside of that, I’ve always created my own videos of education of what I thought could help the most amount of people, kind of like universal information and systemic exams and treatment show and tell. And we’ve created a channel now called Performance Practice TV so for a long time you could buy one of my training DVDs and you owned it forever.
But they weren’t that expensive for what you get but that’s it. You buy it once, you kind of pay a premium price for doctor information and now we kind of created a Netflix for healers to where all these videos are just all in one place. You pay for a low monthly fee and as long as you pay for your subscription, you can watch everything. We’ve updated the information up there recently so we got about another seven to ten hours of information sitting here in our office right now that we have to upload here pretty soon. But there’s a lot of information on lasers in there. And the super simple application of lasers and then the integrated application. So it will start you out very non-confusing, all the details of understanding, research science, basic application goes through the research studies and it explains from a hands-on clinical application, not just the study alone and then we progress you know. I just go through the standard of care, strength and range of motion. You know whether you have lasers or not. This is the standard of care, but this is how laser implements into that and then we take the gloves off and we spend 12 plates at the same time and you know rip souls out of people’s bodies and you do all sorts of things.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Love it, so what’s the URL for that again?
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: So if you go to my website which is performacepractic.com that’s one of our portals and on performacepractic.com they’ll be an obvious window there that mentions performance practice TV so then they can click on that and it’ll kind of explain and they can sign up right there.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Got it! Got it. Awesome very very cool, we’ll make sure we put that in there
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Yeah, we try to make that as user friendly as possible. Based upon a book. Did I lose you?
Dr. Chad Woolner: No, we’re here.
Dr. Jerome Rerucha: Okay, my screen changed here so I can’t see what I was looking at but at least you could hear me.
Yeah, so yeah, it’s just you can cancel anytime. There’s no year subscription you’re dedicated to. It’s just month by month so practitioners have really liked that a lot. There’s adjusting information, manual instrument adjusting, soft tissue, obviously a lot of laser in there and even how you we integrate it you know on the brain. Visceral somatics, nutrition, implementing vibration therapy with laser needle why we would do those things, implementing some very common clinical exercises, helping people implement it in their practice and explaining the benefits of symptomatic care.
Systematic care, creating unattended laser stations and of course, the active laser stations to where you don’t have to just lay there face up or face down or sitting in a chair there were lasers work great, but we really give doctors very common sense, very practical but very big changes by doing certain activation things that really promote chiropractic structural correction or strengthening the nervous system and doing that while you laser and that’s really where the lase…the magic starts getting to where you start learning how their single doctor practices out there but they’re working on 12 people at the same time. And that’s no exaggeration.
And they have these unattended stations and they have certain activation things and there’s single doctors that have a laser at every station. You don’t have to do that obviously. But that’s how people have grown into this. You know it’s really helped their business and helped their efficiency of working on people. They can only examine and adjust one person at a time, but you can have a lot there. Things successfully go on in your clinic at a very high quality level with the systems that we teach on there.
Dr. Chad Woolner: That’s amazing. Well we will definitely direct docs that way and we certainly appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to be here with us today and sharing just some of the fundamentals behind what makes these tools so powerful and how they get the results that the doctors are experiencing so, Docs, hopefully you found this extremely valuable. If you have gotten a lot of value out of this, all we ask is a few docs to share this with your colleagues to get them interested and excited about better ways to help your patients get better results. So, thanks again for being here with us and we will talk to you guys on the next episode.
Thanks for listening to The Laser Light Show. Be sure to subscribe and give us a review. If you’re interested in learning more about Erchnoia lasers, just head on over to Erchonia.com. There you’ll find a ton of useful resources including research news and links to upcoming live events, as well as Erchonia’s e-community where you can access for free additional resources including advanced training and business tools. Again, thanks for listening and we will catch you on the next episode.
