My whole world has been turned upside down! We had a guest speaker in Sports Rehab Club on Friday and everything I thought I knew about the prognosis of treating patients has been flipped on its head.

Dr. Justin Dean is a new face in Functional Rehab. He incorporates many treatment techniques into his practice such as functional range release, dynamic muscular stabilization, and myofascial release in addition to traditional chiropractic manipulation and corrective exercises. He demonstrated how quickly one could alleviate their patient’s pain. It took minutes to alleviate my fellow student’s back pain, my knee pain, and my professor’s groin pain. But he didn’t want us to take his word for it; he wanted us to feel it. During his presentation, he talked about some of the things he does and how to incorporate them into our practice. It was cutting edge information. Functional Rehab is fairly new and I do not fully understand it yet. Dr. Dean was stopping by before his seminar the next day, and if I didn’t have work I would definitely have attended. I plan on going to his next seminar when he is back in the area.

Though I don’t understand it fully, I can say what I do understand. He had me reproduce my knee pain, which usually happens in one-leg squats. I performed a one-leg squat despite a slight pain, then he had me lay down and made me resist against his pressure on certain parts of my body. I believe the goal was core activation. Once he was done, I repeated the one leg squat and to my surprise, my pain was gone. I was astonished! For years, I would just stick to P.R.I.C.E. (Protection, Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) for my knee pain and hope it went away within the week. He made my pain disappear in a few minutes. Experiencing it first hand completely changed the way I previously thought about recovery time. He also helped my professor’s groin injury, which he claimed was a muscle pull he sustained during judo. My professor had difficulty walking. After he did a different set of exercises and movements, his pain was gone. He was amazed by the results.

The following day was the beach cleanup for the Chiro Games Club! We met at Gulfport Beach bright and early for our community outreach event. Unfortunately I had to cut my day short because I had to go to work. I managed to grab one of my friends for a quick photo as we were cleaning. With three exams this upcoming week I must get back to studying!

Thanks for reading, if you have any questions feel free to email me at [email protected].