Whenever I’m asked why I became a chiropractor, it’s always an interesting conversation because growing up, going through school, I never had an interest in becoming a chiropractor.
I was always fascinated with the human body and was interested in becoming a doctor.
My experience with chiropractic at a young age wasn’t the best we’ll say.
My full story is that I was a patient of chiropractic and specifically NUCCA, long before I was ever a doctor.
When I was in the 7th grade, I was a good basketball player; growing up here in Indiana, everybody plays basketball, and I was hit by a car.
I was a pedestrian, and my legs were pinched between the bumpers of two cars and kind of had full-body whiplash thrown back against the hood of one of the vehicles.
By the grace of God, my legs were pinched there was no broken bones, no nerve damage.
My muscles certainly got mangled a little bit in my calves.
I missed most of the basketball season that winter.
As I was going through rehab for my legs, I started developing really bad headaches, and this was in 7th grade, so fast forward as I’m going through the rest of junior high and high school, I developed severe migraines.
Now I didn’t have a really bad opinion of chiropractic because both of my parents had seen improvement from disc problems in their lower back and nerve-related pain in their life and before my accident.
They took me to the local chiropractor in town where I grew up, and I got some care there.
It didn’t work for me, though, not for my headaches.
I felt like maybe the adjustments would take the edge off a little bit when I had a bad migraine, but it wasn’t a solution.
Over the years, even with the care that I had there, the migraines just got worse progressively, more intense, more severe, more debilitating to the point where fast forward when I was in college, an undergrad and I was a premed major, I was always a good student academically,
but I found myself holed up in my dorm room, missing classes, missing time with friends, et cetera.
Finally, my parents took me to a doctor that specialized in NUCCA and had to travel from Northern Indiana.
Manchester College is where I went to school.
My folks were up near South Bend in Plymouth, and we traveled to St. Louis, and in St. Louis, I received my first NUCCA correction.
That’s the procedure that I practice here, so realignment precision, realignment of the head and neck junction.
That’s where things started to turn around.
Before that point, my experience with going to traditional chiropractic is I would get adjusted every single time in the same way.
It never felt like it was moving things forward in terms of progress, and it would make me feel better for a short period, but it wasn’t a long-term solution.
NUCCA, on the other hand, you see the picture behind me there.
I looked something like that.
My head and neck were all misaligned on the X-rays.
Then after a correction, more X-rays were taken and you could see the change.
It was a measurable difference, number one, it took time for me to feel better.
But over time, over the weeks and the months, I noticed that initially, my migraines weren’t as severe.
I wasn’t as debilitated after a migraine.
Then they started becoming less frequent and fast forward to today, 20 years later, my first NUCCA correction was in April of 2001, and over 20 years later now, I don’t get migraines unless something happens to where this gets knocked out of alignment.
At that point, I knew that I didn’t want to give drugs and surgery to people as a doctor.
I knew that because I didn’t feel like that was a solution either.
No headache is the result of a deficiency of pharmaceutical medication.
That’s not the case.
The medication can make you feel better, but it’s just a temporary relief.
With NUCCA, we correct the structural problem that is causing problems with your nerves.
For me and so many of my other patients now, over the years, now that I’ve been practicing for 16 years when you correct the structural problem, the nerves heal.
Your body was designed to heal, and mine was, too.
Now it is such a privilege and an honor to be able to help others in the same way that I was helped where I didn’t want to get into health care because I didn’t want to put drugs in that God didn’t intend to be in the body in the first place or cut parts out of
the body that was supposed to be there.
Instead of making modifications to the body either chemically or through surgery, I get to work to restore the body’s structure and function the way God intended. That is a true privilege.
