EPISODE SUMMARY
Guest: Alan Brewer
Dr. Brewster “retired” from private chiropractic practice after 30 years in order to focus on research at Sherman College of Chiropractic.
Some of the subjects covered in this episode are:
What is a subluxation, and what does it do?
Discovering and understanding chiropractic as a child immediately gave Dr. Brewster a path to follow, motivation, and a purpose.
Why parents who care about their children’s healthcare should include chiropractic care.
Pettibon Upper Cervical work.
Some favorite stories of recovery.
There is so much to learn and so much to research to improve the results for patients to know how and when to adjust and when to leave it alone.
Understanding what makes an OK chiropractor and how to recognize an excellent chiropractor.
What dynamic surface electromyography (SEMG) is.
To contact Dr. Brewster:
Email: abrewster@sherman.edu
Call: tel:8645788770,,,212
To Find a doctor near you: https://www.blairchiropractic.com/locate-upper-cervical-blair-chiropractic-doctor/
https://www.uppercervicalcare.com/
To contact Ruth, go to https://www.blairclinic.com
ruth@blairclinic.com
https://www.facebook.com/rutelin
Transcript
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What Pain in the Neck. I am Ruth Elder, your host, and in this podcast episode, I am interviewing Dr. Alan Brewster. Dr. Brewster, welcome.
Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
So Dr. Brewster, currently, you are a professor at the faculty of Sherman College of Chiropractic.
Yes, I am.
And we are talking inLas Vegas, Nevada. So we are currently at the annual Blair Chiropractic Conference. So we've both traveled here to learn more about head and neck and the nervous system and to meet some other nerdy smart doctors.
It's been an incredible day so far, I have to say.
Okay, actually. This is not how I expected to start, but you said it's been an incredible day. Would you be willing to just give a glimpse of what are a couple of things that you have learned today that you have found interesting or useful in some way?
Well, it's more of a conceptual thing because I spent almost 30 years in practice, and sometimes I think we tend to get focused in on just what we do and what we see in practice. So to be surrounded by so many people.
And by so many, we're talking 180 doctors.
Is that what it is? It looks like a very large room.
I think that's the number.
Okay. And to see their different takes on the adjustment, on their experiences, on the neurological implications of subluxation and the correctness of it, is just a remarkable place to be. It brings you out of your normal day to day and says you're surrounded by like minded people who are as dedicated to an accurate, precise adjustment as you are. And so that's been the best part of it.
Yeah. Just in case you're listening and you don't know what a subluxation is, Can you explain what that is?
Sure. A subluxation, and there will be, of course, a lot of different definitions to this, depending on whom you ask and their particular technique, but it's a bone of the spine that has turned or twisted, lost its normal position in the spine, and then it can have a number of effects. It can irritate the spinal cord. It can irritate the nerve roots coming out of the spinal cord that attach your brain to every other part of your body. It can interfere with the flow of a certain nutritive fluid that surrounds the spinal cord and the brain and the nerves and prevents proper nutrition from getting out. And that will also affect the way and reduce the way in which the body functions. And so the idea is to correct that subluxation, that little misalignment of the spine and allow your body to function the way it's supposed to.
Yeah. Thank you for explaining that.
Sure. I’m glad to.
So yeah, I agree with you. I don't know - So if it's obvious, if you come in as a patient to an office that the doctor there, maybe it's one doctor, maybe it's two doctors, but there's not a lot of colleagues and especially the more specialized you get, you're kind of on an island. So I appreciate what you said that meeting other doctors and collaborating is important.
Yeah, it's very refreshing. I have to say, when I grew up, I started going to a chiropractor very early.
Oh, good. That's what I was going to ask you next.
Oh, look at that. How serendipitous. But I started going to a chiropractor when I was 12 years old. My parents had been referred to a Dr. Gabriel Ricciardi in Passaic, New Jersey. And they went - it was a common thing back, this is the mid seventies, so it was kind of a common thing, a lot of people didn't know a lot about chiropractic, so my parents went, and we kind of humorously say that if the parents survived, then they bring the children. And the funny thing is that not only did they do well, they did unexpectedly well under the care.
The children you mean?
Well, both my parents, as well as ultimately my brother and myself, but my parents did so well things they had never even told the chiropractor about started to get better. Their whole vitality increased. And so they brought us, I'd like to say it was the summer of 1976. I didn't really have any problems. People talk about these miracle cases that we've all seen. If you've been in practice more than 10 minutes, you've probably already seen one, but the chiropractor on the first day, he said to me, he wanted to explain chiropractic, and he had of course a number of pictures of spines and nerves and various things in the office.
And he said, “when your body is subluxated, when the bones go out of place, it irritates the spinal cord, it irritates the nerves, and it degrades the way your body functions. And we want you to be completely healthy and have every part of your body functioning the way it's supposed to.” I was 12 years old. I thought that was the most brilliant, most incredible thing I'd ever heard in my life. So that's when you decided to be a chiropractor? I like to say I decided on day one in a chiropractor's office. And when I went for my second visit, I stood at the front desk and his wife ran the office. So she was at the front desk. He was standing there at this particular moment. And I announced my intention to become a chiropractor. And I said, “one day, if it's okay, I'd like to come back and work in this office.” And so, over the years, we kind of jokingly said that I considered it a binding contract, and they considered it adorable that I wanted to do this at 12. And I spent most of my career actually running that office. Which was an incredible blessing that I had.
Yes. That's a really neat story. I want to ask you a follow up question. So you started at age 12 and you said you didn't have a miracle story. Well, did you have a really serious problem to have a miracle story from?
No, no. The idea was just that my parents said, “I want my children, you know, we want our children to be healthy. And this is something that is so incredibly helpful for them, that we're going to bring them to the chiropractor, not because they have headaches or back pain or sciatica or things like this. Just because we know it's like good nutrition, just because we know it's good for them”.
Because you don't want them to have that.
Excellent point. You don't want them to ever have that.
And this is something I'm extremely passionate about. You don't wait to go to the dentist until you have a raging toothache. You go because you don't want that. And the same with chiropractic, right? You have a spine and you only have one. And it's bad, bad, bad news if there's something wrong with it.So, you know, make sure that doesn't happen, right?
That's exactly true. Yes.
Yes, so I'm super happy for you that your parents knew that and had that opportunity.
It was very interesting. It was one point when I was maybe 13 years old so shortly after we started there and because I have an identical twin brother. When one of us would catch something one of us would get sick and miss school. Because we're identical twins, we shared a room. Usually one of us might have been sick for say about a week or just a few days. But then on the last day the other one would catch it from the first and we would go through and one day I got something. I don't remember what this was. This is, you know, almost 50 years ago now. And so my mother came to me and she said, “what would you like to do?” And I had been, I had gotten adjusted and I said, “I would like to just let my body heal. I don't want to take anything. I don't want to do anything for it. I don't want to upset the symptoms that are perhaps the natural part of my body healing.
At age 13?
At around 13.
Wow.
And my mother said, “okay.” She said, - I thought, you know, for 1977 or so, I think it was pretty progressive. She said, “we will do exactly what you want for 24 hours. Then we do exactly what I want.” And she's used to each one of us getting sick, you know, perhaps for a week. Well, I was sick for whatever it was, maybe 24 hours, 18 hours. I woke up the next morning because I had developed 102 and a half fever. And I woke up the next morning. Refreshed, revitalized, not lethargic, no fever whatsoever. And my mother couldn't believe that such a thing was possible. Made me stay home from school that day, which when you're 13 is, you know,
Not a bad thing.
I was a bit of a nerdy kid. I kind of missed school, but it wasn't the worst thing in the world. And that's pretty much how I've tried to do things. For the last quite some decades now.
Yes. And so you were in private practice for a long time.
For almost 30 years
Almost 30 years. So why don't you describe that period? What kind of things did you like to do? Maybe some favorite stories. What was your favorite thing to do in practice? Describe what it was like for - to do that day in and day out.
Indeed it was actually being in practice and being a patient of Dr. Richardis was my introduction to Upper Cervical care. He did Pettibon Upper Cervical work. And I don't think they really do - the Pettibon organization really does this now. But it was an Upper Cervical technique that used a very large adjusting table, not unlike an Atlas orthogonal table, an Epic table, these kinds of things.
Okay. So I'm not sure most of the people listening will know what that is. So there's a few different Upper Cervical techniques, which means that it's a specialty that focuses on the neck.
It's focused on the top bone of the neck, maybe the top two.
And most of the techniques have way more things in common than they have different. They all take x-rays. Everybody gives a really light adjustment without any popping, twisting, or jerking, very light adjustment. But within that, there's slight differences in the way the x-rays are taken. And then there's different methods of adjusting. So, with the Blair method, Blair doctors use their hand. And then the techniques that you mentioned use a machine.
Use a very large instrument that gives a very light the one I used had a little stylus, like a tiny little instrument that was on this very large table to hold it in proper position and it would just tap on the first bone in the neck in order to realign it very specifically, which is the goal of all Upper Cervical techniques and I've often said they probably have 98 percent similarity from one to the next.
Yes. So is that the technique that you were practicing?
That's the technique that I practiced for most of my career until I retired from practice a few years ago. Um, but it was a great introduction. And so I practiced back in the office I went to as a child, as a matter of fact, right up until the day I retired. And it was really, it's an incredible experience to see the kind of results, the kind of things that can happen.
Yeah, so you're saying the kind of things that can happen. Can you give me some examples?
I guess one of, one of my favorite stories; it starts out in a very odd way. It was a woman who had come to me. I don't remember what happened to precipitate her care, to cause her to first go, I think it may have been some accident, but she developed very serious neurological problems. Certain headaches and neck pains and radiating pains where people get like a nerve pain for the listeners who may not be familiar. Like a nerve pain that goes down the arm down a leg this kind of she had had it for three and a half years. She was going to a chiropractor three times a week, for three and a half years, and nothing ever changed. And, the reason I say it's one of my favorite stories is obviously not because of the unfortunate circumstance of this woman for the first three and a half years. It’s the things that you almost don't believe people are willing to go through until they find the right chiropractor. And I, to be very clear, it's not about me as such. It's about chiropractic and finding someone who will practice it and practice it carefully and precisely.
I don't know. I'm just thinking about myself. I don't think I would last three and a half years, three times a week, if it didn't work.
We did kind of wonder - she and I used to joke after things had gotten along in our office, how someone puts up with that. For years. How do people suffer through through this kind of thing for all these years? Well, when I asked, I said, “Well, what, what did they do in the office?” And she described a whole host of physical therapy. And I'm fine with physical therapy, like chiropractic care, as long as it's done appropriately at the right time in the right way. Unfortunately, she was getting physical therapy that was not done in the correct way. And so finally I said to her, I asked, “what kind of adjustments did the Chiropractor do?” Because it took quite some time to describe the details of all the physical therapy they were doing. When I said adjustment, she said, “what's an adjustment?” And I said, “well, you know, when the chiropractor comes into the room and perhaps he feels or palpates around, maybe took some X-rays and looked at those X-rays.” And then she goes, “Oh, he never did anything like that. Chiropractor never came in the room.” She said, “it was all just assistants.” She said “just secretaries come in the room and do this”, which was humorous at the time.
So I described what we would do. I described the x rays we would take, the very precise adjustments we would do. I said there'd be no physical therapy. And she had such terrible, terrible, particularly neck pain and spasm. that in between the - Every 48 hours of physical therapy, right? Every other day, three days a week, she would live on, with heating pads and all these kind of things. So I adjusted her first adjustment was on a Friday, and I said, l”ook, I want you to go the weekend with no heat, no massage, nothing.” I told her, “you don't sit in the sun where the hot sun can be on your neck.” I jokingly said to her, “if you're watching TV and you see a commercial for a flame broiled burger, you divert your eyes. I want nothing hot in your life”. And I told her, “the muscles will get tighter and tighter and tighter.” And I explained that the muscles - Because of the injury she had the muscles were trying to stabilize her neck to protect it and that by taking the muscle spasm away artificially what they were doing is they were satisfying her and making her feel better for the moment. But it always came back because they never actually fixed what was wrong with her spine, with the nerves, with the spinal cord that was causing this protective, this overprotective mechanism.
And I told her, I said, “you're going to hate me all weekend.” I said, but this is, I'll tell you what I said to her, “On Monday, you'll come into the office. If you still hate me on Monday, we'll shake hands. We'll part friends. It'll be fine.” And she kind of gave me an odd look. She goes away, she comes back on Monday, and she looked at me.It was kind of funny now. It wasn't so funny then. She had a bit of an angry look on her face, and she goes, “you know, it was killing me. It got worse and worse. And by Saturday, I was in agony.” And she said, “and then, I woke up Sunday morning, and just like you said, it's all gone now, after three and a half years, with that one adjustment.” And she looked at me and said, “Was it this easy all along?”
And when I was younger in practice, and this was somewhat early on in my career, I would hedge my bet a little bit. I said, “well, you know, I'm seeing you now. Some things have healed over the years. And maybe they did some of the work, and I was able to do the rest of it, so it looks like it -.” I have to say that after about 15 or 20 years in practice, people would say, “was it this easy all along?” I'd say, “yes. Yes, it was. If you want to get your chiropractor on the phone, I'll tell them.” Because I got so angry that someone was doing this to my profession. There's so much to know.There's so much to learn. There's so much to research. There's so much. To do, to give the right adjustment at the right time, right?
And then to not adjust at the right time.
My litmus test. And I've gotten into a bit of an argument with some chiropractors over this. My litmus test is how well do your patients hold the adjustment? If I can tell you a brief little thing that used to happen. Every now and then in practice, someone would come into the office and they'd say, “oh, can my cousin, my co-worker, my neighbor, can they watch when I get checked and if I need to be adjusted, can they?” I'd be like, “sure.” And I knew it was going to happen because it was the same story every time.
They didn't, they were in would be in alignment and they would-.
Well, sometimes they would be. And I would say, “look, I'm sorry, today's a boring day. There's no adjustment.” But the visitor after the check, whether adjust or not, the visitor would say, “uh, doc, can I ask you a question? Um, I'm going to a chiropractor and I go three times a week.Is that okay?” So I was a little unfair in saying this, but sometimes my answer would be,”is this your first week?” Right? Because that's where that might be acceptable. The answers I got ranged from six months to the three and a half years of three time a week care with no change and no success. So I would say to them often, I'd say,” Look, I haven't examined you. I haven't seen your x-rays. I don't know. You might have a very bad spine. I'd have no way of knowing.” So I said to the - I would say to the visitor, Here's what you do. I said, “did your chiropractor ever say, I'm going to talk to you about bones out of place, about nerves, about alignment, anything like that.” Pretty much no matter what your philosophy, what your approach to practice is, you would say something like that. I'd say, “here's what you do. Go back to your chiropractor, and let's say it's been two years. Say, look, you've been adjusting me for two years, three times a week. And you talk about putting bones back in place, et cetera, et cetera. And they'd say, ‘oh, yeah, yeah.’ Say, ask your chiropractor. Say, look, it's been two years, it's three times a week, say 50 weeks out of the year, right? I go on vacation, you go on vacation. That's 150. And then two years is 300. And ask your chiropractor, say, it's been 300 times that you've tried and it hasn't worked yet. It's not staying in place. Is it ever going to work?” Yeah. Well, they would say, “Oh, that's a great idea. I'll ask.” It got to the point where when they would leave, my staff would yell at me. And they'd say, “you have to stop doing that. Do you know what's going to happen when that person gets to their chiropractor's office and asks them that question?” I said, “good, they deserve it.”
I understand there are some patients who need a little more care or a little less, but I thought that three times a week for years on end to be adjusted. Someone needs to be precise and know when they're holding.
Yeah. Or even once a week for three years.
Even once a week.There are some varieties, you know, there's some various things, but you're right it's often too much.
Yes, I remember meeting a person that was really proud and she felt like she was doing a great thing for herself. And she said, I'd gone once a week to the chiropractor for 11 years. And I'm thinking to myself, that's not what I would want to do once a week for 11 years. Now, I obviously, I'm in the chiropractic office every day, all day, but that's a different thing. It's, you know, our goal would be to not need to see you because you're well.
That would be, - that is always, that is always a goal from my very first day in practice. I used to be so delighted when people were holding their adjustment.
Yes. So before we move on to your career at Sherman College. You said retired, but it's not a real retirement. It's like - I call it an American retirement. You stop doing one thing and then start working on something else. But is there something else that you want to share about your practice before you talk about teaching at Sherman?
It was certainly one of the best experiences of my life because again, I knew I wanted to do it from a very, very young age. I was doing it in the place I wanted. I was doing the type of care that I wanted. I tried to conduct some research. That's why I retired actually, from the practice to try to conduct more research.
Yeah. And that's actually how we got to know you, was through research.
Yes. Yes. I've often said I was very lucky to have Pettibon work as my Upper Cervical work. When I was in practice, I was very fortunate Sherman to be exposed to a number of other techniques.
Is that where you graduated from? By the way?
Yes, I did. Dr Jamie Browning is a specialist with a knee chest. So I've managed to talk to her about the technique. I assisted in her classes. So I learned more about it. Christine Theodossis, who's an expert in epic technique. Well, epic came to the college. I sat through their elective. I went to their bootcamp. It's an opportunity to learn a lot of things, but it wasn't until I bumped into, Gordon, I'm sorry to Dr. Elder with Blair technique doing, - you know, to assist with his research. And when I assist, I have to be on, you know, I did one half of 1 percent of anything that was done on that.
But an essential part of that.
Well, you're very kind. But he has this way. First of all, it's the precision of the technique, the acknowledgement of, you know, that the subluxation occurs at that joint and the absolute relationship of one bone to the next bone, the x-rays that they take, the specificity of the adjustment. And Gordon has this way of explaining it and teaching it and doing it. I was fascinated. And that's why, that's why I'm here this weekend. That's why I went to the one last year, because of him.
Yeah, well, that's a fun story. And it's again, it reiterates where we kind of where we started; what one of the beauties of these conferences is just meeting different people. So what made you decide since you loved your practice so much? And you said you loved research. So was it the pull to something? So you decided it was too much to be in practice and the research? Or can you talk to us about how that process went?
Sure. There were actually a number of things. The research was one of the largest. But I knew that being busy in practice, I didn't have the time to do the research and run a full time practice. So it was a very difficult decision and it took a few years from the time I first mentioned it to my wife until we finally decided to try to do it and then the whole transition took a few years. So it was a very, a very long, very deliberate process but it was mostly to do the research. I was doing research in something called dynamic surface electromyography. So we call SEMG.
Okay. You’re going to have to translate that to us mere mortals.
I assumed I'm glad I'm always glad to do it. I's very much - like if you, if anyone has ever been to a cardiologist and they do an EKG, so what do they do? They put little adhesive electrodes on your chest, and they monitor the electrical activity of your heart. And then they can tell certain things about the health and the function of your heart, right? And everyone's seen, I always joke that on TV, every one of these medical crime dramas starts with an EKG tracing of people monitoring the heart. So what we do is we take electrodes. We put them on the person's back by the muscles around the spine and then we stand the person up and we have them move and turn and twist and bend. And there's a certain kind of natural pattern of what's called muscle recruitment around the spine. And if that pattern of muscle recruitment is different, is aberrant, is altered from its normal, then we know that the body is struggling to do something.
And what it's trying to do is stabilize itself. But also it is struggling to correct the vertebral subluxations that it has. And so I like to say that Surface EMG is a reflection of that innate striving of your body to correct its subluxations, restore the health and stabilize the spine. And by interpreting that - so, I used it throughout my practice, and I was very deliberate and very careful, but at a certain point, I knew that I would need more, and quite frankly, quite a bit of it is also that the equipment I was using was made by a company founded by Dr. Christopher Kent, who works at Sherman College. He and I were actually on the board of trustees together for a couple of years. So that was yet another pull in that direction. It's an incredible college. Just to be there is a remarkable thing.
Yes, and doing research at a college makes a bunch of sense too.
It really does. There's a lot of resources. I get to work with a lot of very intelligent people. There's a great opportunity.
Yes. So do you teach as well?
Yes, I teach one research class right now, and I teach a couple of technique classes. One adjusting class and one palpation class, and that changes from quarter to quarter depending. I tended to be in certain classes for a while, but then I also get to assist. So I've assisted Dr. Browning and other people in other classes. So it's mostly technique and research. And then, of course, quite a bit of my time is to either do research or to assist students or other faculty who want to do it. And so I go over some of their protocols and things with them.
Okay. So I would like to go back to your research. Sure. And you did a good job describing \what you're researching. What I want to know is what is the practical application? So for me as a patient, what is the benefit to me of you doing that research? How can it apply to me as a potential patient?
One of the things - actually there's a great example. The person - this was quite a number of years back, but a friend of our family had a number of spinal problems. Oh, the cliché of what you might hear of someone who goes to a chiropractor. A lot of spinal pain and spasm. He had pain radiating into, I think it was both legs and one arm. I honestly don't recall, but he had been to a number of chiropractors before and physical therapists, this kind of thing. And I examined him and I found some findings, but. Mm they weren't terribly clear. And I took some X-rays and his x-rays looked perfect. Now, we were doing Upper Cervical as well as full spine adjusting with, this patient. And, his x-rays looked perfect. I mean, publish them in a book. Perfect. So I ran this EMG test, this test of the electrical activity of the muscles to show how they're working, what pattern, how they move and pull. I said to him, “your spine is behaving like a spine with an enormous curvature in it that's focused at these spots and it identified one,” in his case, I think it was two particular segments in his lower back. where the body was struggling to realign them. “And it was holding it so well that on x-rays it looked like it was stable. It looked like it was in line. It looked perfect. But if those muscles ever relaxed, it would just fall apart. It wasn't a stable good correction.” And so I adjusted him according to those findings. Because it's a dynamic impression of what's going on with the spine. It took - he had - we figured out once that his problem started when I was 8 years old. And I finally adjusted him when I was about 32 or 33. And he had been to a lot of different places. And it took two days. It took two adjustments. And he was fine.
Unfortunately, that is so true for so many of our patients. And I think a lot of people get excited at first when they get help. And then it's like “why didn't someone tell me about this sooner?” So that's what I'm doing with this podcast because you can always decide to get the information and say, “oh no, I don't want that’s not for me.” But if you're looking for help and you don't know about it, you can't make that decision.
That really is, to me, it's the sad part of the whole thing that people don't know what to look for. And, you know, in research, in evidence informed practice, and these things that guide how research is used in the real day to day work in someone's office, there's a big push for something called patient preference. And so we use the research, we use the experience and intelligence of the doctor, no matter the specialty, and we use patient preference. I think that patient preference is sometimes, it's a little bit out of proportion to what it should be because all too often patients don't know what they could look for. They assume that all chiropractors are exactly the same. And perhaps there are some who don't do Upper Cervical work or don't do various things and maybe they help people. But when someone has failed time and time again and they feel hopeless. And you say, well there's someone out there who does the kind of the type of work I'm used to, the chiropractic care. With more precision and more focus and more attention to detail than some others. It's a shame that they don't even know to look for it and hopefully this helps that.
Okay, so let's say I'm in this situation, which I was many years ago in that situation Do you have any advice from your wisdom of this long career that you've had? How will I know that this is a reasonable person to try yet again to go and see someone?
You know, it's funny people, people used to ask that of me and I'd say, you know, they say, “well, I live in California. How do I find someone who's good?” And there were a handful of things I would tell them. The more that your chiropractor talks about the precision and the care of their initial examination. The more time they spend with you, you know, to the extreme, I heard one case where a woman said, “I sat on one of those adjusting tables. I sat there, he took his two fingers, kind of slid them down my spine. Person had a bit of a curvature in her spine, a scoliosis. Said, “oh, I see you have a bit of a scoliosis here.” She said, “yes.” He said, “where does it hurt?” She said, “my lower back.” He said, “get on, lay down on the table.” And that was his entire exam. So I said, “if that happens, you get up and you walk out.” Because you wouldn't put up with that from a medical physician. You wouldn't put up with that from a dentist. You want someone who's going to spend a lot of time and talk about, maybe use the word analysis. Maybe try to do something detailed. Spend some time with you. And that's usually it. And when it comes to the adjustment, it should feel pecise, right? If there is, if you're going to someone where there is - where they hear that cliche of a pop, it shouldn't sound, you know, like squeezing a bunch of bubble wrap. If anything, it should sound like one small, controlled, and that's it. It shouldn't feel like it affected - like one twist affected half your spinal column.. I think with that, the care and the time and the precision, and I think sometimes people know in their gut. They, where they just, they say, “I'm just going all the time and nothing ever changes don't wait years to make a change for that.
Good advice. I'll post links. We've done this on multiple other episodes, where to turn. If you're listening, you can also call me and I'll lead you in the right direction to where to look for someone in your area. So Dr. Brewster, it's absolutely fascinating all the stories that you have. I'm especially fascinated with how you knew so early and had such a clear direction of what you wanted to do. But what would you say to a younger person who is thinking about maybe the healing professions is for me, but it's a, it's a lot of school. It's a lot of tuition. I don't know. There might be other ways to help people.What would you say to that person?
I will tell you what I tell current students because I think that it applies. I tell them that being a chiropractor is far better than you can possibly imagine it is. I tell them every single - I mean, I miss it terribly. Every single day of my life I miss it. Now, I'm trying to do something else to express some of that and to be part of the profession and all. But I try to tell them, every single day, your day is filled with people who come in and say, “thank you for being here. My whole life is different. Thank you for helping my children. Thank God you were here for me.” And that's your - there's no other career. Or at least maybe. Perhaps very, very few, where that kind of thing happens. Where people just love you for doing what you enjoy doing and you can make a career out of it. I will tell you that my decision to go back to Sherman, I was a student there, and now I work there of course, but I will tell you that back in the 70s when I was 12 years old and I announced my intention to become a chiropractor. So a while later, I think it was a few months, two, three months later, maybe two months later, I asked Dr. Ricciardi, I said, “where do I go to chiropractic school?” He hesitated not one moment and said, “you go to Sherman college.” But then he said, “if anything happens, And then he gave me a second choice.”
And I was a pretty nerdy kid, so I thought, “what does he mean if something, does he mean if, if I don't get in?” I thought I could get into a college. It turns out, what he meant was, that this was in July, maybe August of 1976. Sherman had not yet graduated a student. So we had no alumni association because we had no alumni. I mean, for all he knew, the college could have closed, could have folded. And as you may know, right, we just recently, celebrated 50 years of the college. So half a century.
And it's going better and better, it seems like.
And I thought he was absolutely certain that that was the place to develop, the art, the philosophy, the technique, the science of chiropractic, and now, 50 years later, when we've expanded to multiple buildings, when we have thousands of graduates, when we have a faculty, and I will tell you, I'm very honored, I work with some incredible people.
It's an incredible faculty.
They can feel free to call me, call me, email me, I'll take you around, there are people who do incredible tours of the college. There was no hesitation to select Sherman when they had nothing, and now they have a half a century of experience and results. I'll put in a little plug for Sherman. It's a fantastic place. It made me move 700 miles away from a lot of people I know and love just to be part of that community. And sometimes I look at the students and I just like inside I'm smiling, I'm beaming to think they don't know how good it is yet. They don't realize that these are the times they'll remember for the rest of their lives and they'll go out and have fantastic careers with it.
Yeah, fantastic.
I hope that answered your question.
Yes, it's great.
I do get off a little, a little bit thinking about the process.
Yeah, no I love your energy and your passion and there's no video. But your eyes are sparkling. It’s incredible. So it's been an incredible conversation. But before I close, I need to ask you, what have I neglected to ask you that I don't know about that you really want to share?
Wow. It would probably be something we touched on a little bit, the research within chiropractic. You know, I'm a big believer that there is so much more to learn. Whether it's things that are completely undiscovered at this point, whether it is, you know, new techniques, new ways, or perhaps it's just improving the techniques that we have now. I've heard a number of chiropractors over the years say, “well, I don't think we need the research because I see the miracles every day and that's all the research I need.” And I appreciate that and I honor that they achieve that in their offices. Like I always say, “if you've been in practice for more than 10 or 15 minutes, you've had incredible things happen,” but we don't know yet what we're missing. And when someone says, “well, I see the miracles every day.” Great. Well, whatever technique they're using, whatever they're doing in their office, well, someone had to research that. Someone had to think that up, research it, decide how to do it, work through it, so that they could be there to do it.
There's a great quote where someone said, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, they said, “I'm but a child playing on the beach. While vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me. We don't know what we're missing.” And that's why we do weekends like this. That's why we do a lot of things. That's why I retired to pursue that. And if everybody in the chiropractic field, whether a chiropractor, a chiropractic student, chiropractic advocate, a chiropractic patient, if they all had the mindset, what else can we discover to make chiropractic even more incredible than it is, I think we would surprise ourselves with what we could come to.
That is fantastic. I love that.
Thank you.
It's been great. I'm so honored that you took time to talk to me today. It's been a pleasure. And I would like to invite you to come on a second time. And maybe next time I'm in Sherman or maybe next year here at the Blair Conference. And just talk about your research projects.
I would be honored.
All right. Well, it's been a great honor to have you on. Thank you so much.
Thank you.