I’ve been a chiropractor for more than 35 years now.
That means I’ve seen just about every approach come and go. Every one of them promised amazing changes but many are nowhere to be found now.
However, this has given me the ability to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.
I have made plenty of mistakes along the way, but at this point I have a depth of experience, having treated many thousands of people and I’ve been able to distill down what works for almost everyone, and what doesn’t consistently work.
Do you think you’d want treatments that consistently offer predictable results?
Let’s give it a try. Grab your critical eye, and let’s get into the first time I abandoned traditional chiropractic.
My Chronic Injuries are My Gift to You
Let me set the scene for you, the year is 2003, and I have a busy practice but my body is breaking down. Old injuries from car accidents are catching up with me.
This day was significant because I realized I couldn’t go on with that workload unless I found a better way to deal with my chronic injuries. I wasn’t ready for the continued work load because my body was breaking down.
Little did I know my struggles and pain would lead me to a much more effective way to practice.
Because this was a necessity as I knew I couldn’t continue to practice the way I was, I had a lot to prove.
Spoiler alert: it took me a while to fully explore what lied outside of my traditional training
3 Things that Led to My Abandoning Traditional Chiropractic
When you look at how I abandoned traditional chiropractic that day, you could easily think the reason I failed was due to my skill level. But, I was a really good chiropractor who cared deeply.
In reality, there were 3 things I was doing that led to me seeking out something different.
#1. I was experiencing frequent pain in my body
I was involved in a head on car crash at age 18 and the injuries from that accident eventually led me to a chiropractor. And, after a few years had me consider chiropractic as a profession.
This led to me attending a traditional chiropractic college.
While chiropractic greatly helped me, I continued to experience significant recurrent pain. Over time I came to the conclusion there must be something better.
The Solution:
Instead of practicing traditional chiropractic, focused primarily on restoring mobility, I now practice corrective chiropractic.
This form of chiropractic is focused not only on restoring mobility but also on bringing the body back into alignment.
Remember, if you have chronic neck pain, back pain, headaches, you may be missing out on a way to achieve a better long term correction for your problem.
#2. A Lack of a Way to Identify the Core Imbalance
Remember, I was practicing traditional chiropractic, which meant simply restoring motion to stiff joints.
What I didn’t have was a means of finding out what was causing the problem and correcting that imbalance.
The Solution:
I developed ways of determining what is out of balance and the priority of addressing those imbalances.
When the body becomes imbalanced there are a number of areas that appear to be misaligned. The reality is that most of them are compensations. If you can identify the primary areas, most of the time the compensations resolve on their own as there’s no longer a reason for them.
A little introduction to this method can be found here Life Chiropractic Corrective Care Program.
#3. Reinforcing the Correction so the Body establishes Balance as the Norm
It’s easy to look back at this and think that I should have come up with this sooner, but we’re saying that with all the hindsight in the world.
At the time I was doing what I was trained to do.
I’ve learned that the body is a creature of habits. It’s how the brain and nervous system learns, called neuroplasticity.
It takes a while to learn something so that becomes second nature. It also takes repetition to unlearn something that isn’t working for you.
The Solution:
Changing the reinforcement to the brain and nervous system and joints and muscles was the thing that led to people making big changes and holding onto them.
Two people in my practice immediately come to mind.
One, a woman in her 50’s came in with long term hip pain. This is a great example of where it hurts isn’t always the cause of the problem. She was told she had arthritis and sent to an orthopedic surgeon. He ordered imaging and offered to give her an injection. She opted to come into my office where I determined it was her lower lumbar spine and hip that were causing the problem. As soon as I started to correct the lumbar spine the hip started to improve. She’s back running, which she hadn’t been able to do in years.
The other case is a gentleman in his latter 50s with pain radiating from his lower back to his foot for almost a year. He had been doing stretches and exercises, all to no avail. He was miserable. Less than 5 months later he has very little pain that only goes into his buttock and not down the leg. This is another case of identifying the cause of the problem.
Perseverance Pays Off
I wish I could say that I never failed in my time as a chiropractor. That would be impossible, though, because people are complex and there is no way to control all the variables.
However, my success rate has gone through the roof once I started practicing corrective care. I have now made it my mission to share the power of corrective chiropractic with the people of Nevada County.
Here at Life Chiropractic we live and breathe corrective care because it helps people return to their lives.
If you are ready to schedule your first visit to Life Chiropractic in Grass Valley you can do that here: Schedule Here.