Listen on Itunes
Listen on Stitcher
Listen on Google Play
Dr. Emil Tompkins joins forces with Dr. Corey Kirshner from Kirschner Health Solutions to share about functional neurology and how to treat millennial diseases. Click Here to visit Dr. Kirshner’s website and get a copy of his book by clicking here.
Click Here For our TOP 10 Podcast Episodes
Dr. Kirschner Interview
Dr. Tompkins Hey, it’s Dr. Emil Tompkins and I want to thank you for joining us for Episode 44 of the Beyond Pain Relief podcast. We have a really special treat for you today. We are going to be interviewing Dr. Corey Kirshner. Dr. Kirshner is a licensed, board certified chiropractic neurologist and wellness consultant. He is the founder and clinical director of Kirshner Health Solutions, a private clinical facility located in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Dr. Kirshner has an interesting history. He’s always known he would become a doctor. He grew up in a family of doctors that instilled in him the desire for healing and helping. Dr. Kirshner attended Life Chiropractic College in Marietta, Georgia, where he graduated with honors in two disciplines; he is a Doctor of Chiropractic and a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition. In 2014, Dr. Kirshner completed four additional years of intensive course work, earning him the distinction of Diplomate of Chiropractic Neurology. His Lehigh Valley practice has been serving the needs of patients with acute and chronic pain for the last 30 years.
He is always seeking the newest and most appropriate care for his patients and this has been his guiding principle. His thirst for knowledge has strengthened his conviction that chasing symptoms with medications rather than addressing the root cause of disease is why there is a growing crisis in modern healthcare. He specializes in the treatment of “new millennium” diseases, which are defined as chronic, degenerative diseases, like heart disease, thyroiditis, resistance to weight loss, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, anxiety and depression and diabetes. The increasing number of people afflicted with these neuro-mediated toxic illnesses is alarming and for anyone suffering, the sense of desperation can be horribly debilitating.
In his 30 years of practice, Dr. Kirshner has seen a dangerous rise in the number of patients burdened by toxic illness. He has developed a protocol to test and safely remove the toxic build-up of cells, including heavy metals. He has a health partner and mentor who can be trusted to guide you through the required dietary and lifestyle changes, the right nutritional and laboratory support, and prepares complete, easy to follow programs that work. He’s here to teach us some great things on how to live beyond pain relief. I thank you so much for joining us Dr. Kirshner.
I’m here today with Dr. Corey Kirshner. Thank you Dr. Kirshner for spending some time with us at the Beyond Pain Relief podcast.
Dr. Emil: So tell me, can you expand upon your bio just a little bit? Tell us a little more about yourself.
A Family Of Doctors
Dr. Corey K.: Okay, I am one of eight kids, from a family of eight kids. All the … there are seven boys and one girl. All the boys are doctors. There are three cardiac surgeons, two chiropractors, anesthesiologist, optometrist. I was born and raised, bred to get into the health care field. I was a pre-med major. I was in pre-med school and I had an epiphany, and the epiphany was “how did I end up as a pre-med major” and I had this major thought, like how did I go this track of becoming an M.D.? I had this waking up experience and I talked to my brother who is a chiropractor. I talked to my brothers who are surgeons. The chiropractor, his answer, when he said he changed peoples lives. That resonated with me and then from then I went on track to become a chiropractor.
Dr. Emil: That’s really amazing. I know when was just getting into college, I was trying to figure out my direction and there was a similar journey going on where I was looking at various areas of medicine or various areas of healthcare. Actually, I knew I didn’t want medicine, but I didn’t know that chiropractic even existed until someone had told me and the light bulb went off. That was where I needed to be. That’s so interesting that you have such a similar story, but very unique in that you have all these boys that ended up being doctors. You have a pretty interesting specialty in your office. You do a lot of functional neurology. Tell me about that. What is that?
Dr. Corey K.: Well, I’ve been on a journey, since I went to chiropractic school, I’ve been a journey on how to deliver the best care possible. The more I do what I do, the more these over-arching things start to occur. I got involved in functional neurology. I got involved in something called functional medicine, always with chronic conditions, there is always an underlying thought about what the problem is. I actually have it broken down into four areas. The four areas of people have chronic problems from is either they’re not getting the right nutrients, they’re having toxicity problems, they are having an inflammatory problem, there is not enough activation to the nervous system. It’s always one of those four categories. If you can figure out one of those four categories where a person is having a problem, then you can overcome chronic problems.
Dr. Emil: Oh, I see.
Dr. Corey K.: That’s why I got into this field. The more I studied, I almost got down the rabbit hole. like you got music in the background, so I will pause for a second.
Dr. Emil: No, that’s okay. So you have those four areas …
Functional Neurology
Dr. Corey K.: Those four areas. The more and more I … I started studying more functional neurology with Ted Carrick and [inaudible 00:05:21], learning how to overcome the chronic conditions with either diet supplements, chiropractic adjustments, functional neurology, or something. Even that I’ve broken down into two main categories. I hope this isn’t boring you too much.
Dr. Emil: No, this is great.
Dr. Corey K.: So the cool … what I always thought is when a person heals from, two things that happen: either I’m doing something to the patient or the patient is doing something for themselves. The more we can empower our patient to figure out what’s going on, how can they overcome their problems, the more … when they go through our treatment, when they get done, they are actually better off. We leave them better off after we get done treating them. So my job is to figure out what the problem is, do what we need to do and also teach the patient how they can do it to themselves so they don’t need me. My goal is to become … have a person have a healthy, happy life and maybe become obsolete to that particular patient. That’s my goal.
Dr. Emil: It’s a good goal to have and a lot of people have the idea that maybe when they are dealing with something that’s a chronic condition like this, even though there was so much frustration, that medicine is potentially the only way and what you’re showing … what you’re showing is something that we’ve been talking about here on the Beyond Pain Relief podcast is that there are ways you can heal yourself from these chronic conditions. That it doesn’t take the really invasive medical procedures that unfortunately fill us with so much frustration anyway. It’s really refreshing the direction that you’re going.
Dr. Corey K.: I’m sure you see it in your practice, I see it … just this past week. Can we talk about a patient….
Dr. Emil: Absolutely.
Dr. Corey K.: I have this patient now, she’s coming in for chronic fatigue, brain fog, overweight, joint pain. I’m sure you have patients like that all the time.
Dr. Emil: Sure do.
Dr. Corey K.: So she’s coming in, I’ve been working on her for about three weeks. Her husband is also a patient. Both doing amazingly well. She’s lost a lot of weight. She’s feeling pretty good. Brain fog is gone away. Digestive is getting better. And then this past Friday, she got on the scale and she gained two pounds. I asked her “how did you gain two pounds”? And I know that I put her on a gluten free diet, that’s part of the restriction. She said “All I had was like a half of a roll” and I tried to explain … She didn’t get the idea that even that much would cause … it’s not weight, it’s inflammation. [inaudible 00:07:42] So within two days, she lost another two to three pounds. The point is, where am I going with this? The idea is, she’s not at that point that she has a full understanding of where her health comes from. That’s the mindset we work against. We work against what people’s pre-conceived ideas are and the pre-conceived ideas with what the M.D.’s tell them, that’s you know, you have to rely on the cholesterol drugs. You have to rely on the pain drugs. You have to rely on the diabetes drugs. But it doesn’t fix anything. All is does is ensure that a person is going to be on drugs for the rest of their lives, until they have this waking up experience and that’s our job.
Dr. Emil: Absolutely. Well it’s good that you’re helping people address that nutritional component, which is so challenging. Conversations that we’ll have with patients at times, where we start talking about maybe going gluten free or getting rid of grains or getting rid of sugar, or something like that. It’s amazing the number of times that I hear, “Well, you can’t get rid of my pasta” or “You can’t get rid of my bread” or my sandwiches or brownies or whatever it is, but the question I ask is: “You want to walk, you can’t walk right now. You’re in so much pain or you’re dealing with such a whatever this chronic condition that you’re dealing with. What’s more important? That sandwich or walking?” When you really look at that change in your diet or change in a lot of different things, when you look at what it’s going to do, it’s really not that painful to make that change.
Dr. Corey K.: Yes.
Dr. Emil: But it might be in our minds.
Dr. Corey K.: That’s true, and I’m sure once again, you probably see the patient … you and I, we both have the prospective of having patients go on a gluten free diet or go on a healthy diet and then three or four weeks , all of them coming back and saying, “Hey, this pain is gone, that pain is gone”. So the patient who has not gone through that process, doesn’t have the prospective of what it even feels like. What I love, is when the patients actually have gone through the prospective, feeling great and then they think, oh I must be fine now and then have the breads again and feel like crap … oh, I’m sorry … not feel well. I love that we sponsored them, now they know they are now empowered. It’s not me. They know the prospective, what it feels like to feel good. They know the prospective of feeling bad and that’s it, that’s the type of patient that you want.
Dr. Emil: Well, your health is a journey. Your health is a journey that you never completely get over. You do all this work to feel better, to function better, to get healthier and then we achieve that goal or maybe we’re feeling the way that we would like to feel and we might think, well now I’m done. There’s no done. You’re not finally healthy and then there is nothing else that you have to do. If you go back to doing the things that you did that got you unhealthy, you’re going to eventually become unhealthy again.
Dr. Corey K.: Best analogy: You live in a house or live in an apartment. You clean it on Sunday, the house is perfectly clean. You like the way it looks. You don’t clean it for a couple weeks. What does it look like? Which house would you rather live in? The point is those things that to be maintained and keep the attention … Health needs attention. If you don’t put attention on it, your body will decay or degenerate. That’s just a little thing.
Dr. Emil: Yup. You are definitely right about that. Do you feel like … Was there any point of struggle before the breakthrough in this functional medicine area that you’ve been in?
Dr. Corey K.: I guess the biggest struggle that I … and I’m still trying to … this is an insurance thing. My biggest struggle is a lot of patients come in and say “Will my insurance pay for this, insurance pay for that”? In my mind, there is a certain model in my mind that a patient or a person needs to go through and it’s very hard to fit that healthcare model into the insurance game system. That’s my biggest challenge. It seems like people value … when they have insurance, they almost say “Okay, my insurance will take care of my health” and almost disregard their health because they’re not paying [inaudible 00:11:30]. Make sense?
Dr. Emil: Oh yeah.
Dr. Corey K.: Make sense? That’s my biggest challenge. Having a patient value their health enough, they’ll actually pay the money, time, investment so they can actually improve their lives. That’s the biggest challenge.
Dr. Emil: Well when you think about insurance, insurance will pay for injuries, for acute types of illnesses, those kinds of things or they’ll pay for certain chronic treatments that you’ll have to take for the rest of their life. They’ll even on their guidelines explain that they’re not going to cover things that are going to improve your health or maintain your health, which is absolutely outrageous. You would think it would save them money if they were improving others health.
Dr. Corey K.: One of the conditions that we take care of is peripheral neuropathy. We frequently see patients who have … there’s a peripheral neuropathy like pain keenly numbs the feet and they [inaudible 00:12:19], something called a mononeuropathy. Mononeuropathy is like Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, Sciatica, pinched nerve of the neck. It seems almost even lately because we’ve gotten a number of patients who’ve had like pinched nerve of the neck and their family M.D. would give them Gabapentin or Lyrica for these conditions. We know that Gabapentin or Lyrica are all seizure medications. They’re not pain medications and I’m scratching my head, like why doctors would actually prescribe that, knowing that when they come into the office for a couple of weeks, a few adjustments and those problems usually clear up; not the peripheral neuropathy, but the mono … the single thing. It almost seems like … maybe I shouldn’t say this on … yeah, I’ll say it. It seems like some M.D.’s are kind of lazy. They are prescribing a drug that has no business being prescribed to a patient for a problem. I don’t know what it is.
Dr. Emil: One thing that when I have these kinds of conversations, I’ll say in their defense even though I’m not an M.D., so I can’t really defend them, they’ll give you what they’ve got and what they’ve got is medication. What they’ve got is potential surgery or something and so when you come in with something, they’re going to let you know what they’ve got. I’ve got a medication or bad enough, we can think about doing a surgery. When there are so many more things that can be done, but all they’ve got are those things, so that’s all the patient hears about. It’s so good that there are people like you, doctors like you, who are getting out there and making a difference in teaching others that there is something that they can do. There is a way, in a natural way, for them to be healthy and to achieve healing in some of these things that we’ve thought were chronic and we’d have to suffer with for the rest of our lives.
So what do you think makes your place stand out in your specialty, why do you stand out amongst the others?
Dr. Corey K.: That’s a great question. One thing that makes us stand out, I’ve been doing this for over 30 years. As a chiropractor, I think I’m pretty good as far as adjusting the spine. [inaudible 00:14:16] Functional Neurology gives me big … full of information to use on challenging cases. One of the really cool things we do in our office and this probably separates me from a lot of, I would say a lot of Chiro’s and M.D.’s in whatever is that I tend to think outside the box for those challenging cases. I’ll pull knowledge or information from a lot of different areas and trying things. If a person is not responding to whatever we are doing, we might change something, and say okay, “Let’s think outside the box on what might work”.
Case in point, I have a patient now that is coming in, once again – peripheral neuropathy. He’s having some balance problems. The pain in his feet is much better. He used to be able to walk 30 feet with pain and now he can walk miles without pain. In fact, his video is on my website now. But he’s also … every time he’d go from a sitting to a standing position, he’d have a little bit of a balance problem. When he’d wake up in the morning, he’d have a balance problem. We give him some techniques and therapies to do that most people use for balance issues. He wasn’t responding to that. So we thought, okay, let’s think about this a little bit. We need some little checks and we narrowed it down to he has a specific part of his cerebellum, which is the back part of his brain, is having balance issues. We have him do this really simple, stupid little technique. It takes about 30 seconds to do. He’s tapping on a part of his brain. No one taught me this, it’s more like okay, think of how the wiring of the body is, let’s think of how the thing works. We told him this little technique, he said that since he’s been doing that, he’s about 90 percent better as far as balance is concerned.
The point is that yeah, I do a little typical stuff that most folks or medical doctors do or most chiropractors do, chiropractor, neurologists, but also you have to think a little bit sometimes. What are the possibilities and work from that basis.
Dr. Emil: It’s amazing how intuitively you came up with that because I believe people are developing certain techniques around that kind of tapping mechanism that EFT and a few other techniques so to just come up with that, is really amazing. It just shows when you are doing good things you can pull this stuff out and make a difference for people. That’s exciting.
So tell me something here at Beyond Pain Relief, the podcast here, we are committed to helping our audience, our podcast community, not just relieve pain, but to experience more, greater health, weight loss, and cognitive ability. We just want to people to get their lives back. If you could give one piece of advice, right now, that someone could implement today, to get their lives back, what would that be?
Dr. Corey K.: Okay, this might sound self-serving, I came out with a book called “The Whole Body Cure”. Simple, easy peasy and how to … simple diet, by the book for the advice. For those who don’t want to be spending money on a book, the biggest advice I could give anybody, the first things I’ll tell a person: knock out the grains, knock out the sugar and move frequently. Those are the three biggest things.
Dr. Emil: Oh yeah, that’s big.
Dr. Corey K.: It’s huge. It’s life changing. I’ve seen so many people respond, from an inflammatory viewpoint by knock out the grains and moving and start where you’re at. Meaning, if a person is a couch potato all the time, don’t run a marathon. From a couch potato, just walk ten feet if you haven’t walked ten feet before and the next day, maybe walk 11 feet. Start where you’re at and move beyond that a little bit. That’s more than one thing.
Dr. Emil: That’s a great piece of advice and it’s a piece of advice that sounds simple, sounds simple, but the problem is that people don’t do it. It may sound simple, but it’s actually a little bit of a challenge, but if you do it, it really will make a difference in your health and how your body’s working and that’s awesome. Very good advice and we’re going to talk a little bit later here. I’m going to have a link in the show notes for us to be able to figure out how to get a hold of your book: “The Whole Body Cure”. That’s really exciting.
Describe your ideal client. Who’s the ideal person that would benefit from your service?
Dr. Corey K.: Actually the ideal patient is someone who has been suffering from a chronic condition for years, who has done the medical route, has had all the tests done and realize they had the epiphany thinking, “You know what? I can’t live like this anymore. I do not want my life to not be okay. If six months down the road, I’m living the same way I’m right now. I’ve got to something different, whatever it is”. That’s the ideal patient. It could be peripheral neuropathy, it could be weight, it could be brain fog, it could be brain fatigue, any chronic condition. You’ve had the problem for a long time, you’re tired of the drugs, you’re tired of the frustration and you want to something about it. Not just complain about it anymore, but do something about it. That’s my ideal patient.
Dr. Emil: That’s great. That’s great. It’s always good to receive good information. It feels good and we like to get that information. But you just said something really important, “What are you going to do with it”? That’s the key.
So, you have a book. I want to make sure we get a copy of that. If I want that, how would I most easily find your book?
Dr. Corey K.: This is the challenging thing. It was originally put out through Rodale Press. I believe you can buy … Rodale Press had it. Rodale Press that sold to another company. I think you can buy it on Amazon.com now, I think. Maybe.
Dr. Emil: Alright.
Dr. Corey K.: I’m sorry that wasn’t … someone just told me you could buy it on Amazon. I haven’t actually seen it there, but …
Dr. Emil: You know what? If you can buy it on Amazon, that link will be in the show notes. As you are listening, just scroll down the show notes and you’ll see a link to that book. You can get that book on Amazon or wherever you’re able to get that book, we’re going to find it and that link will be in the show notes. Dr. Kirshner, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thank you for giving us valuable information to improve the lives of our podcast community and I hope you have a great night.
Dr. Corey K.: Well thank you. I appreciate it.
Dr. Emil: Hey guys, it’s Dr. Emil Tompkins. Many people fail to make a change in their health until things are drastic, until we’ve gone so far, that it’s so challenging to make that change or we feel like it’s almost too late and then we’re much more reluctant to make those changes in our health. This is a problem and it needs to change. It needs to stop. When you find something that has an opportunity to make a difference in your health or the health of someone around you, I invite you to take that opportunity to make that change for yourself or for someone you know.
I have a favor to ask of you. If you listen to this podcast and you feel like there is something here that you feel would benefit someone that you know, I invite you to share that podcast with them. There is a share link on the bottom of the screen. I want you to click that share button to share this with others. Give others the opportunity to experience the Beyond Pain Relief podcast. Share that with others. Make a difference in the health of someone around you. I thank you so much for doing that.
This is Dr. Emil Tomkins. Thank you for joining us on the Beyond Pain Relief podcast. And thank you for making a difference in lives of the people around you. Have a great day.
Speaker 1: You are listening to the Beyond the Pain podcast, where Dr. Emil Tompkins and his guests guide you through the latest techniques to relieve your pain and learn how to fuel, move and think for lifetime wellness.
If you want a consultation with Dr. Tompkins Click Here for our special offer!
Follow us on social:
Previous Podcast mentions: 20% off your first order of supplements
Natural Inflammation Fighters: Inflavonoid Intensive Care
Probiotics for Immune Function: Ultra Flora Immune
7620 N Hartman Lane
Tucson, AZ 85743
520-572-2596
Read Next: Headache Or Migraine? How Do You Know the Difference and What To Do About It
