Dr. Francis Murphy

Dr. Francis Murphy
President & CEO, OTZ Health Education Systems

Dr. Francis Murphy grew up in Madison, New Jersey (Born 12.29.1958). In 1978 Dr. Murphy moved to Dallas Texas where he entered into the family restaurant business. In 1984 he opened “Murphy’s Deli ” in Atlanta Georgia. It was during his time as a young entrepreneur that his path turned to chiropractic. Dr. Murphy struggled with a personal health issue, which led him down a long list of medical interventions that were ultimately unsuccessful. It was a student attending Life Chiropractic College that finally diagnosed and corrected a rib problem that changed the trajectory of his life.

In 2006 Dr. Murphy made a phenomenal discovery, which changed the lives of thousands of Frozen Shoulder patients by isolating the cause of Frozen Shoulder Syndrome as a neurological disorder. Since his discovery, Dr. Murphy has been doing researching and developing a complete curriculum on the resolution of the true cause of FSS, dubbed the OTZ Tension Adjustment (The Move). The OTZ training team currently travels around the world teaching chiropractic doctors a new method of analysis called “TOPDOWN ANALYSIS”. This system prioritizes the head on spine relationship and linking it to the opposition of gravity. Malfunctions here minor or severe between the skull and spine play havoc with the nervous system. This science and approach to this malfunction has a profound effect on normal Children Development, Vagal Tone, POTS, Bell’s Palsy, FSS, Insomnia and a very long list of neurologic disorders. Dr. Murphy has personally worked with these cases for years. Now his focus is passing this skill to all chiropractors and the knowledge to all people.

Dr. Murphy has recently published a children’s book about conservation concepts for kids called “OUR GREAT EARTH”. This book is Dr. Murphy’s answer to the question; What message would you like to leave future generations to come?

Currently, OTZ is participating in a research study with the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT); entitled “The Effects of OTZ Technique on neural function, health, and well-being” The goal of this study is to determine whether this upper neck disorder affects brain processes and your overall health and well-being. Primary researchers are Drs. Bernadette Murphy, Heidi Haavik, Francis Murphy, Michael Hall. Early findings to be presented at the World Federation of Chiropractic (WFC) Convention in Berlin, March 2019.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. Pompa:
Francis, Dr. Murphy, welcome to this webinar. Listen, I am so pleased to have you in our up and coming seminar and our event. It’s going to be just a fire hose of knowledge as you’ve already prepared me for.

Francis Murphy:
Well, we’ll try to keep it down to a trickle.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to have trouble because this topic is … I mean, you’ve discovered something. Listen, you’re coming to the seminar for that reason. You discovered something that I think everybody needs to hear. Doctors and the public alike. You know, both for the first time will be at this particular seminar, but mostly practitioners who need to now this information. I mean I remember watching … I think you’ve done some documentaries. You were in many of Jeff Hayes’s documentaries and I watched a guy, I mean he couldn’t even raise his arm up and then you do this cervical move and then foom, his arm’s up. Okay, that’s frozen shoulder but what you discovered, because there’s so many nerves related in this particular one adjustment you’re doing, this affects people’s health dramatically. Let’s kind of open up that right now.

Briefly, let’s talk about what you discovered and what you’re going to be sharing at the seminar about this discovery.

Francis Murphy:
Well, in 2006 I had a patient come into the office. She was a librarian. Pam Hatch is her name and she had a frozen shoulder. I’d seen many frozen shoulders over the years and did not know what to do to help these people. They can’t sleep, they’re in a lot of pain constantly day and night, and they can’t move their arm alongside their head. They can’t internally and externally rotate their arm. They can’t bring their arm up behind their back. But one of the key things is they can’t sleep. And so it makes them more and more miserable. Everybody knows if you can’t sleep, your world’s in a spin.

I worked on her for a long time, a good three months. I wasn’t getting anywhere. But she made me commit to her that I wouldn’t give up on her. I go home at night and I’m scratching my head every time I’d see her like, “What the heck’s going on with this frozen shoulder?” I know anatomy pretty good and I couldn’t figure out what was causing this. I started down the road of okay, what’s the scapula’s role and abduction of the arm and what part of your nervous system runs it and of course I came up with the trapezius muscle kind of runs the scapula and it’s run by the 11th cranial nerve.

As a chiropractor I’m always thinking upstream. I’m always thinking of this diaschisis, this downstream effect that something upstream is causing. And so I’m thinking, “Okay, how can I access the spinal accessory nerve?” and I came up with the skull and spine relationship. And but it took me quite a few months to land on that. And so I brought that to her. She was ready to actually go to a surgeon and get her arm manipulated under anesthesia. This barbaric … They’re doing that because they want to do something for the patient. The patient is in a lot of pain but they don’t really know exactly what they’re doing so it seems like a barbaric thing to me.

I came to the conclusion that if it is the spinal accessory nerve the only way I would be able to help her would be to adjust or to start to analyze the spinal accessory nerve through the skull and spine relationship. She came in that day. She told me, “I’m going to get my arm manipulated.” I said, “Let me try something. I want to take a new x-ray and I want to take this time instead of an x-ray of hour shoulder, I want to take an x-ray of your neck.” And I took the AP open mouth and the lateral and the AP shots and I looked at it and she had a head tilt. You can look at it two different ways. You could say her head is tilted to the left and lifted on the right. Most everybody looks at it a little differently. But I looked at it like her head was lifted on the ipsilateral, the same side as her frozen shoulder.

So I explained to her that this was wrong, and I didn’t know if it had anything at all to do with her frozen shoulder, but I’d like to palpate it and look at her a little differently, and if it was appropriate make an adjustment. And I did, and her arm was like a [inaudible 00:04:50] revival. I have a big open room practice, so lots of people in this open room, because I’m constantly talking, I’m trying to deliver information to everybody in the room all the time.

So I explained to her exactly what I was going to do, and why I was going to do it, and what I was trying to accomplish. And I laid her down supine, and I begin to glide her skull. And I couldn’t feel anything, Dan, it was like, “Uh, I don’t know what I’m looking for.” But each time I tried to palpate it I could go faster and faster, and finally I take a little heed of myself and I said, “Francis, slow things down here.” So I took the hint and I just slowed down my palpation, I closed my eyes, and I begin to palpate her through the normal range of motion, and at the extreme end of the first range of motion, of her occiput on her first cervical vertebra, I found a blocked area, what a chiropractor would call a loss of springy end feel, or just a blocked vector of movement that should have that springiness to it.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Francis Murphy:
So I opened my eyes and I looked, and I had her head in a very precarious position, one that you wouldn’t see a chiropractor put somebody in, and one that I had never adjusted anybody in either. So it was a totally new thing, but I am a true believer in the philosophy of what we do, and that a subluxated joint, a joint that’s lost its alignment, it’s lost its neurological function can be restored with a chiropractor’s adjustment, provided the joint is healthy.

So I explained to her what I was going to do, and I palpated her back to that point again, and I delivered a thrust, and it was a very loud pop, if you will. A cavitation. Loud sound came out of her and her arms flailed right up. She says, “Don’t do that to me again.” I knew though at that second that her skull and spine relationship had changed dramatically. So she stood up, and remarkably her arm went right up.

Dr. Pompa:
Right up.

Francis Murphy:
She was amazed, and I was amazed really, and I didn’t expect it, so I didn’t videotape it. But I immediately said to myself, “Oh my gosh, could this be the cause of frozen shoulder syndrome?” So I ran out to Best Buy and I got myself a little camera, and I was the chiropractor for SMU at the time, and I’d made good relationships with orthopedic surgeons who had tons of these people, but they didn’t know what to do with them. And when I said to them, “I think I’ve found the cause and a good way to fix frozen shoulder.” They were like, (laughing).

Dr. Pompa:
Here you go.

Francis Murphy:
So like, “Here, we’ll give you as many patients as you want.” So I took on about 10 patients, and every one of them went right up. It was remarkable. But when I start to show it to medical doctors, they start saying, “Well, that was misdiagnosed. That’s not a frozen shoulder. I don’t know what it is, it’s some restriction in the shoulder movement. It’s not frozen shoulder.” So I said, “Okay.” So the next 200 patients required them to have a diagnosis with a medical doctor of frozen shoulder. The same results. Almost every one of them. 75% to 80% of them went up in the first adjustment. So this is the genesis of how this science began to become developed.

So after I became known for this frozen shoulder, people were pouring in the doors, and my practice had transformed itself into this frozen shoulder thing, which is good and bad. I don’t like to take care of the same thing all day every day, I like to be creative and help as many people as I can, and I already had a good practice. But it began to dawn on me, “Hey, how could the skull on spine relationship be altered and affect the spinal accessory nerve and leave out all the other nerves in the brain stem?” I mean, select the spinal accessory nerve.

So I begin to do cranial nerve exams. What I found was that each person that had a frozen shoulder had at least four other cranial nerve disturbances, so including the spinal accessory nerve, five. It’s almost half, and many of them had more than that. Facial distortion, posture distortion, inability to swallow, eye problems, hearing problems, all of that.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, and just for people watching, the cranial will supply everything that he just said. And you found that it effects systemically. Even your digestion, etc. because of the vagus nerve. Explain that, because that’s huge. So this wasn’t just affecting the shoulder, this was affecting so many aspects to people’s health.

Francis Murphy:
Yeah. Which we know. I think a lot of people have tripped onto this, but didn’t realize what exactly the mechanism of concern was. So the vagus nerve emanates in the brain stem, and then shares a conduit with the spinal accessory nerve, the nerve that runs the shoulder, and they both exit through this hole called the jugular foramen, and the vagus nerve [inaudible 00:10:21] through the entire body; the gut, the diaphragm, the lungs and heart, and it has an intimate relationship with the frontal lobe of the brain.

So now we were measuring people in a different way. We were measuring their heart rate, their heart rate variability, their oxygenation of their blood, and what we were finding out that people that have disorders like POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which the medical community, and I’m not trying to say anything bad about them, but the answer to that was fusing the occiput to the first cervical vertebra. And it was a really simple thing to address, it was really simple. It was doing exactly the same thing that I was doing for frozen shoulders. Finding that specific vector in which the skull and spine relationship was altered and not functioning properly, get it to function properly, and then you’d see this change in oxygenation of the blood. You’d see the heart rate down, you’d see the heart and lungs start to operate normally. And it was remarkable, and we did it time, after time, after time on stage.

It’s really been profound, because now we have a new way of analyzing the human body. It’s taken years to develop, but what we noticed is this head tilt, right? I said it earlier about the head tilt and it lifting the skull on one side and dropping it to one side. Well, now we know that a skull that is tilted to own side is an indicator of a weak frontal lobe on that side.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh wow.

Francis Murphy:
So the three things that the frontal lobe, the three most important things the frontal lobe does is it inhibits flection of the body, which as the frontal lobe became developed, man started to stand up straight. And it was a survival strategy so we could see far. So as you’re walking down this plain you could see prey, you could see water, shelter, potential food. So this strategy was working, so man began to walk upright.

So when the frontal lobe becomes weaker, you see postural distortion, inability to inhibit flection. The body wants to be flexed forward, the frontal lobe inhibits it and allows us to stand up straight. It also inhibits the temporal lobe, which is the thing that allows us to be social, and when your temporal lobe isn’t functioning right, you are not very social. That’s why kids with Asperger’s and kids that are on the spectrum, they’re kind of secluded. They have sometimes some savant behaviors, but they’re not good in a social set. This is the effect it can have on them.

Then the other thing is the sympathetics are inhibited by the frontal lobe, and you cannot rest, digest, or do anything properly unless your sympathetics are intact. You’re supposed to be 80% parasympathetic, 20% sympathetic, and what happens in today’s society we are really under a lot of stress, time issues. The stress is usually combined with forcing your body into a flexed forward position working at a computer a lot. So we’re actually breaking down the frontal lobe by forcing ourselves to do what the body is not designed to do.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. So you’re getting a lot of people who can’t adapt to stress, have no clue why. It’s probably their frontal lobe, the interference with the vagus nerve, which drives parasympathetic, so you have a drive on sympathetic. So they’re probably doing all these things to deal with their stress, including overeating, taking pills, taking medication, taking supplements, you name it, and meanwhile it’s a structural problem.

Francis Murphy:
Yeah. In a lot of cases it is, and you can’t fix the other problem unless you fix the structural problem first. Because there’s information … You’re body is always just reacting to its environment, so if your environment is constantly changing, your body delivers that information to your brain, and your brain makes the appropriate response. Well, as your body becomes distorted, it can’t make the proper response, and we see it in almost every part of the body.

We see people with digestive problems, even low back problems. We were talking about POTS and the whole heart and lung thing. What we even see is people, as their posture becomes altered and their head becomes tilted their eyes start to change. And the muscles in your eyes are supposed to make your eyes an eyeball, but we see the eye becoming more ocular shape, because you’re looking down and now you find yourself rolling your eyes up to see straight ahead, which distorts the muscle. The muscles that you’re using, you’re using them differently and then one becomes dominant over the others, and before you know it your eyesight is altered.

So a lot of times, as we fix the skull and spine relationship and we recapture posture, people’s eyesight gets better too. You could go into everything in the body, and without that good proper structure and frontal lobe working, everything kind of goes to hell over time.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, at the seminar you’re going to be teaching this. People are going to be salivating for this, man. I love it. I think you said you’re going to bring some folks up on stage as well.

Francis Murphy:
Yeah, I’m bringing Mike Hall with me, you might remember Mike Hall.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t know. I know the name. As soon as I see him, I’m sure I’ll remember.

Francis Murphy:
Yeah, no, he’s a genius. He’s become my partner in this. He’s the one that helped me dissect the nervous system aspect of it, because like I said to you, I thought it, and he’s the one that said, “No, that’s a head …” I thought it was a head lift and he says, “No, it’s a head tilt, and here’s what’s going on, that’s an indicator of the frontal lobe being weak, and when the frontal lobe is weak it can’t inhibit flection.” And one of the things that flexes the SCM muscle, sternocleidomastoid muscle, becomes hypertonic, and it’s what drives the head over to the tilt. So, really it’s been a beautiful composition of his work and my work, and it’s dovetailed really nicely, and now we’re finding that almost everything that we look at chiropracticly, if you don’t get that right first, you’re chasing your tail.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve always said, I mean in my day I did structural correction, and I said, “If you don’t get the head sitting right on the spine, everything else is just constant adjusting. It doesn’t hold.” And it has the greatest impact on the entire nerve system, your entire health. So for what you’re doing, listen, again, that’s why you’re here, because I saw what you were doing, I heard what you were doing, I saw the videos, I’m like, “Okay, we have to bring this to the masses, man.”

Francis Murphy:
Thank you, Dan.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, I appreciate you coming, and just for that I cannot wait myself to learn. I know those coming, you’re going to be blessed. That’s all I can say, you’re going to be blessed.

Francis Murphy:
Yeah, well I feel like I’m blessed to be a part of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Well, thanks Francis, we’ll see you then.

Francis Murphy:
Okay, Dr. Dan, see you.

Dr. Pompa:
Always sign up right here guys, every one of these videos, webinars, you can always sign up right here for this seminar. And I’ll see you then.