Beyond the Crack: Why Your Pain Keeps Coming Back

Pop. Relief. Repeat. Why It Doesn’t Stick.

Ever seen your chiropractor and felt great right after a visit, yet just a few days later, the pain returns? If so, you’re not alone. Here’s the thing that nobody is saying out loud – this cycle is not normal. While there are probably many contributing factors, I believe there’s one main reason – most care focuses on where it hurts, not why it hurts.

I’m guilty of this myself. For the better part of my first six years in practice, I thought the goal was to stop the pain. Now I know pain’s just the headline. There’s a whole story underneath.

It’s like the firefighter going into a smoldering building to silence the smoke alarms without ever touching the fire. Pain (and other symptoms) are the alarm system meant to tell us something is wrong. They are the signal, not the actual problem. Silencing the alarm might give us peace and quiet, but the house is still burning.

We are not a machine with bolt on parts, even though we tend to treat healthcare like this. We forget what any 5th grader knows when it comes to biology – we are a system of systems. All of our parts work in unison. Everything affects everything, and anything can cause anything! Forgetting this simple fact has led us away from real healing, and led us to band aid solutions and quick fixes in health.

I Helped Make Back Cracking Viral. Then I Walked Away.

I was one of the first in Austin to post cracking videos on my social media accounts. No flashy editing like you see now. Just a simple, clean video with a big crack after I’d explain what I was doing. The videos blew up. Tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, YouTube, and Tiktok. Even a few “Best Of Austin” awards from this magazine. I should have felt proud and excited to keep going but something didn’t sit right.

Somewhere along the way, the crack became the point. Not the healing. Just the sound in the videos. People thought the louder the pop and the prettier the girls were in the video, the better the care. Even some chiropractors started chasing that – mic’d-up adjustments like it was an ASMR game show.

And yeah, it’s satisfying. I’ll admit it myself. But it’s also misleading. Healing isn’t instant. It’s not three visits and a miracle like certain chiropractic chains advertise. I’m looking at a website now on another tab that claims to “fix the root cause of your pain in just 3 visits on average.” Healing is a process – a deeper one most of these videos (including my own past videos) never show.

Our North Star got Hijacked by Insurance and Symptom-Chasing

Chiropractic was founded on one radical idea in 1895: health starts with the nervous system. The brain, the spinal cord, and the nerves aren’t just passengers – they drive the whole system. Back then, people would see their chiropractor for anything from a cold to digestive issues, not just pain. Why? Because the nervous system influences everything, including the immune system.

Try telling someone today you’re seeing a chiropractor to help kick a cold or support your immune function, and they’ll probably give you a look. We’ve been trained to believe that chiropractic = back pain. Why? Because that’s the story insurance companies are willing to pay for.

Here’s the part that really burns: insurance doesn’t care about keeping you healthy. Just about managing their profits. They’ll gladly pay for insulin and beta blockers but won’t touch lifestyle changes like sleep, stress, or movement. As we say at Lifespring: Why would we let a profit first system dictate your care plan?

This shift has taken us away from function and into the shallow end of symptom management. Symptom management in itself is not the bad guy. It’s symptom management without ever addressing the cause. This ends up costing us more time and money in the long run! Not to mention, many people get lost in the specialist shuffle. Bouncing from specialist to specialist, never finding real answers.

What Bryan Thought Was Aging Turned Out to Be His Nervous System

Bryan thought the brain fog, foot pain, and energy crashes were just aging. They weren’t. Bryan, a patient at Lifespring, was a lifelong chiropractic patient. When his back flared up he knew the drill, as he put it. In the recent Google review Bryan left us, he shared what surprised him most: it wasn’t just his back that felt better.

He states that “it cleared the brain fog that I thought was just part of getting older.” His late afternoon crashes disappeared, and his favorite thing of all- the bunion he was told he had to live with actually got better! It returned to a better position and felt pain free again. He described it as a whole- body breakthrough.

Since looking beyond the crack, this has become a familiar story we now see at Lifespring. The real miracles happen when we shift back to the founding focus in which chiropractic was first born in 1895 – the nervous system is the star of the show.

We play detective to find the thing behind the thing. Something from someone’s past that usually seems insignificant.  This is where the real root cause is typically hidden. It’s not the pillow, or the last workout though it may seem like it.  We find what most people miss with our high tech nervous system scans. These big breakthroughs happen when we go beyond the spine and look at the nervous system as the central component to healing. It’s the system that interconnects it all. Bryan (and most others) didn’t need another adjustment. He needed a new lens.

You Can’t Out-Adjust a Messy Life

We love to blame the mattress, the chair, or the workout. But let’s talk about the stuff that actually drives health outcomes: the choices we make every single day. In clinical practice, I like to describe this idea with a health bank. We make deposits and withdrawals everyday.

The biggest deposits – or withdrawals – in our health bank come from what we call the Core 4 at Lifespring. Our sleep, stress levels, movement, and toxin exposure (mostly through nutrition). These things can be seen as the dollars when it comes to a health bank. They hold significant weight.

While the dollars are the best starting place, we tend to overlook them and obsess over the pennies when it comes to our health – the ice baths, sauna, supplements, massage guns, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pennies! I have all the health gadgets in my home. The problem is we obsess over putting pennies into our health bank while we are getting robbed of the dollars.

Why? It’s easier and more convenient to chase the pennies. It requires less time and money! We can do it easily and call it progress. All the while regularly sleeping less than 7 hours per night, overschedule our lives, drink too much caffeine to push through the afternoon slump, never really addressing what’s underneath the surface. And when these daily choices stack up? The nervous system feels every one of them.

Healing Isn’t a Moment. It’s a Movement

Relief can feel instant. Especially from a good adjustment. Beyond the crack, real healing happens with the right lens over time. With the right plan.

The miracles happen in the plan. 

The common trap we all tend to fall into is that we think feeling good (or looking good) means we are healthy. This is the illusion of health. Symptoms are a good starting line – not the finish line. Real root cause healing is about an interconnected approach that starts with the system that runs them all – the nervous system. And the most important thing of all – the lifestyle habits that create these imbalances in the first place. We even see this shift show up in real-time on our scans – especially in the one that reads vagus nerve activity.

That’s the part of the nervous system responsible for helping the body relax, digest, and heal. When that switch flips, everything changes.

It’s the kind of perspective I didn’t always have, but one I’ve come to fight for. While sometimes I wish I could go back in time and not make some of the social media cracking videos I’ve made, I’m grateful that I’ve come full circle, back to helping people with health optimization. Beyond the pain, with things that help us not just feel our best, but really live our best.

Let’s stop thinking a quick crack will fix everything, but rather ask more questions and focus more on healing than feeling. We don’t just need another adjustment, but rather a different approach. Because Healing? It’s not a moment. It’s a movement.