Good health means lifestyle adjustment

Her residential office and treatment area might be three miles outside Houma down Bayou Terrebonne, but chiropractic doctor Amy Rhodes-Hebert said that her practice of holistic alternative medicine is far removed from prejudicial images of an old swamp woman offering potions and chants.

Rhodes-Hebert contends it is safe to say that during the past quarter century, chiropractic and alternative treatments have begun gaining respect even among some parts of the mainstream medical community.

A native of Houma, Rhodes-Hebert, 40, had some health issues with her knees and back approximately 20 years ago that prompted her to investigate alternative treatments when traditional medicine failed to address the problem.

“I was always involved in exercise, personal training and nutrition, and decided I wanted to make a career of it,” Rhodes said. “Chiropractic helped me with the health issues I was having and really made an impression on me, so I decided to go to chiropractic school and help people naturally.”

Rhodes-Hebert graduated from Logan University in suburban St. Louis in 1996. She also studied nutrition, diet and exercise, and found how a holistic approach offered an alternative to dependency on medication and treatments that those in her field insist only mask symptoms rather than dealing directly with most health problems.

Chiropractic in itself is a form of alternative medicine, which was officially founded in 1890 by Daniel Palmer after he had performed a spinal adjustment on a partially deaf man in Iowa who, afterward, reported that his hearing had been restored.

While it is popularly known as a procedure based on the skeletal structure and spinal adjustments, supporters explain that its real focus is on the easing of nerves that stimulate function throughout the entire body; not only from the spine, but from any misaligned joint or strained muscle.

“I came back home and have been in practice about 14 years,” Rhodes-Hebert said. “I thought I wanted to live away until I lived away. I wanted to bring this back home and help people in Louisiana who basically have lifestyle diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Those are things that can be changed or prevented by our lifestyle.”

Rhodes-Hebert said that one of the challenges of practicing holistic medicine is getting beyond the stigma that those in her field are not genuine doctors.

“Basically, it is a different philosophy in how to treat [ailments]. A typical M.D. will treat a symptom,” Rhodes-Hebert said. “If you come in with the symptom of an illness they want to get rid of that so they do it with either medicine or surgery. That is what they went to school to learn to do.

“Chiropractic, or any of the holistic approach, like lifestyle coaching, looks at why you would have the symptom and correct that.

“If we had a fire alarm that went off right now a medical approach would be recognizing that as an aggravating sound and saying, ‘Let’s take care of the noise.’ You can take care of it by taking the batteries out. That would be like surgery. Or cover it up (like taking medication). I can turn the volume up on music and we won’t even hear that smoke alarm. But that doesn’t cure the problem. It covers up the aggravating symptom, but it does not take care of why did the smoke alarm go off?”

Chiropractic and other holistic approaches, according to Rhodes-Hebert, focus on the cause of the annoying symptom, such as finding and addressing the source that caused the fire alarm to sound.

Rhodes-Hebert’s success stories include a 3-year-old boy who had stopped talking and was diagnosed in a traditional medical setting as having autism. With a series of realignment treatments and teaching his parents about living a healthy lifestyle, it was not long before the boy was talking again and his behavior was that of a normal child his age.

In a more dramatic case, a couple had a newborn child with a head deformity. They had been told by medical professionals that in order for it to be corrected the boy would have to live for an undetermined number of years with a halo screwed to his head and then a special helmet fixed to his skull so the sections of bone around the brain could be restructured.

“Can you imagine a child having to go through all that,” Rhodes-Hebert asked. With chiropractic skull adjustments over time she was able to help the child regain a normally shaped head without any invasive procedures. “He is now a healthy 16-year-old boy.”

Rhodes-Hebert explained that while skeletal manipulation can address many illnesses and ailments she does not completely dismiss traditional medical procedures.

“I had a man come in for an adjustment once and I told him he needed to go to the hospital,” Rhodes-Hebert said. “He got mad at me, but I told him, ‘You need to go to the hospital. You’re having a heart attack.'”

Beyond simple manipulation of joints, Rhodes-Hebert said a larger part of holistic treatment involves proper diet and exercise. “That’s what I teach my patients. If you have high cholesterol no amount of adjustments are going to treat that. Only diet and exercise can make that change,” she said.

Rhodes-Hebert said that traditional medicines might be appropriate in some case, but most of the time the synthetics in chemical drugs cause more problems than the symptoms they mask. “I’m not sure I want all the side effects they warn you about for the possible treatment of one thing,” she said.

As an alternative, she offers her patients a line of all natural supplements to help them meet daily nutritional requirements when diet, exercise and adjustments are not helping to the fullest extent. “But even here, the supplement only helps if you are doing the other things,” she said.

“We don’t use prescription medicines or over the counter medicines much,” said Amy Baudion of Gray, who along with her husband and children, follow a lifestyle diet and exercise plan and get regular alignments from Rhodes-Hebert.

“I like it because it is non-invasive,” Baudion said. “I don’t have to worry about side effects of medicines and she is treating what causes the symptoms.”

In the United States, chiropractic practitioners must meet licensing and continuing education requirements just like any other medical professional.

According to the 2007 National Health Interview Survey, approximately 8 percent of American adults, more than 18 million people at that time, and about 3 percent of children, more than 2 million, had received chiropractic or osteopathic manipulation during the previous 12 months.

With individual visits averaging from $50 to $75, the business of chiropractic medicine generates more than $4 billion annually. Many insurance companies have begun covering chiropractic procedures as a recognized form of preventive medicine.

Throughout modern history chiropractic and holistic medicine have been controversial and in a constant battle with the interests of mainstream medicine.

Chiropractic practices were boycotted by the American Medical Association and the practice was called an “unscientific cult” by that organization until it lost an anti-trust suit in 1987.

The term chiropractic combines the Greek words cheir for hand and praxis meaning practice because it is literally a hands-on treatment.

As for chiropractic and holistic medicine, Rhodes-Hebert said it is a matter of adjusting one’s mindset and lifestyle that makes for healthy results.

By adjusting spinal pressure on nerves, Dr. Amy Rhodes-Hebert says the philosophy of chiropractic medicine is to address the ailment and not simply mask the symptoms with drugs. MIKE NIXON