Female Host – If you live in chronic pain, you know how terrible it can be, and if you feel like you’ve tried just about everything to make it go away, sit up and pay attention to our next guest.
Male Host – Welcome Dr. Ray Drury with Upper Cervical Spine Center to the show. Hello, sir, and how are you doing today?
Dr. Ray Drury – Doing great. Doing great. Thank you for having me.
Female Host – Of course. Welcome to Charlotte Today. It’s great to see you. Let’s start by talking about chronic pain. Unfortunately, it’s something that so many people suffer from. Where does it come from? I know that’s a general question because it’s different in each case-
Dr. Ray Drury – Right.
Female Host – … but in … but where does it come from?
Dr. Ray Drury – So, first I hope we can all agree that pain doesn’t come from a lack of pills, okay. So, for example, somebody has headaches. It doesn’t come from a Tylenol deficiency. So, taking something like Tylenol is never going to fix the problem. It just kind of temporarily masks it. So, you don’t know it’s there, but it’s still there.
Dr. Ray Drury – So, where does pain come from? So, pain’s your body’s like alarm system or its cry for help. For example, if you put your hand on a hot stove, right? Real quickly, your body hollers at you like hey, dummy. Move your hand. Okay. So, pain is actually your body’s way of trying to say hey, something’s not right. Something needs to be addressed. Covering it up, masking it, rather than correcting the cause doesn’t really make a whole of sense.
Female Host – Right.
Male Host – So, you find out what is the root cause, where it’s coming from, and then you find out how to go ahead and take care of it. Can you explain about that?
Dr. Ray Drury – Okay, yeah. So, for example, if you have migraines or headaches, neck, back pain, even nerve pain, right, that goes down the arm, down the leg-
Male Host – Sure.
Dr. Ray Drury – Um, there’s something amiss, some internal stress within the body that’s creating those symptoms. So, what we do is we want to try to find out uh where is that stress coming from? What’s creating that stress? If we can remove that stress on the body, then it quits hollering at us, right? Then the pain starts to subside, and your body can heal natural.
Female Host – I had a friend, um, who used to come see you. She would drive from Ashville to come in and visit you, and I thought, boy, that’s a long way to drive. Then I find out you have patients literally from all over the world. Patients who are coming from Mexico, Canada. Why do you think that people are traveling such a distance to come see you? What makes you different, your practice different, your office different?
Dr. Ray Drury – Okay, so, at the Upper Cervical Spine Center, we focus primarily on the upper part of the neck. Uh, we use the latest in technology like uh infrared thermography, which helps us to narrow down exactly where the problem is. We do, uh, advanced imaging like digital x-rays, uh, to find out exactly how the bones are out of position so we know exactly how to correct them, and most recently we’ve added a uh cone beam 3D scanner which actually gives us a three dimensional image of the spine, which gives us a better idea of how to more specifically correct the problem so that it heals faster and stays put longer.
Female Host – Because a lot of the pain we’re experiencing elsewhere in our body could be something that’s happening right here.
Dr. Ray Drury – Well, so, from the top down, the whole body will compensate, and then all the nerves from your brain to your arms, legs, even your internal organs go through the top of the neck. That’s how a problem there can affect globally.
Male Host – Okay, why is it such an epidemic of people having pain? When we get older, is it something a little bit more pervasive after you get older?
Dr. Ray Drury – Yeah. So, prevention is key, right? I mean, there’s no preventative medication, right? You can’t take a drug to prevent a problem, but the more your body stays aligned, the better you can deal with gravity, stress as we grow older, and so the more fit you’ll stay, the better … the less pain you’ll have.
Female Host – Uh, you wrote a book called the Best Kept Secret in Healthcare. It’s now an Amazon bestseller. Um, there we see it right there.
Dr. Ray Drury – Right.
Female Host – Um, you must be very proud of that work (laughs).
Dr. Ray Drury – Absolutely. I was kind of surprised Dana wasn’t talking about it earlier.
Female Host – (laughs)
Male Host – (laughs)
Dr. Ray Drury – But, uh, yeah, absolutely. So, uh, actually it was a four-time bestseller, and one of the categories was alternative health, which is a huge category. So, yeah. Very proud. We’ve had a lot of people reading the book.
Female Host – I think a lot of people are tired of just like you said masking the pain with medication. They might feel better temporarily, but it’s not fixing what’s really wrong.
Dr. Ray Drury – Exactly right. That’s our whole key. If we can get the underlying problem corrected, uh, you know, we literally put ourselves out of business, right? So, people come in, they get feeling better,and don’t need us anymore. That’s our goal.
Female Host – Thank you so much. It’s great to see you.
Dr. Ray Drury – Thank you for having me again. Good to see you again.