HRV University for Chiropractors

Dr. Fletcher was a guest on The Underdog Curse with Dr. Don MacDonald discussing on of our favorite topics – Heart Rate Variability.

People want to know more about Heart Rate Variability and how to use that application in order to deepen conversations with practice members.

On the episode, Dr. Fletcher discusses HRV and how to help us understand it in the Chiropractic setting. Also, he shares how to describe HRV in a simplistic model to your practice member when you’re doing it.

How chiropractic differently impacts the HRV compared to sleeping or exercising is that it engages specific parasympathetic feeds, arousing the body’s innate responsiveness, and giving it an energetic boost so it can keep the momentum going.

Key Takeaways

• Heart rate variability is a modulator of a central oscillator.
• Complex biological systems are always striving to become more efficient.
• HRV gives you a window into:
  • How much reserve does an individual have to continue to adapt?
  • What balance does an individual have between the sympathetic and parasympathetic?
• The HRV tends to be a longer lasting set point of the combined responses of adaptability.
• Most drugs that start with ‘anti’ tend to suppress the expressive vitality responsiveness that the body is going through to a point.
• Keeping a good reserve and getting back to a neutral balance is about re-engaging the parasympathetics.
• Reserve is all about resting, restoration, reorganization, and resilience.
• To build back your state of recovery, you have to do these two things:
  1. Re-engage the parasympathetics.
  2. Reorganize around a restorative lifestyle.
• If you’re going to track people in a clinical grade model, you have to use the HRV with a very stable system.
• The value of an adjustment many times is viewed as removing an interference, but it stimulates the neurology to remove that interference.
• It is our responsibility to build from where the patients’ reality is and give them tools so they can learn to believe and understand the way the human body works as we do.
• State of mind is as associative as physical function.
• Resources: Insight CLA’s website, Insight CLA Forum Facebook Group