EPISODE SUMMARY
GUEST: Dr. Olivia Gurule-Rietmann
She is a Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractor in Albuquerque, NM. She fell in love with learning about the body while in High School and set out to be a Physical Therapist. Her trajectory changed after she had sever ocular migraines daily and rapidly lost her eyesight. No Doctors were able to help until a chiropractor adjusted her neck, and she started to heal. This set her on a path to help others the way she had been helped.
Dr. Olivia grew up in New Mexico. She has noticed a lot of healthcare professionals leaving this state and she finds it meaningful to serve her home community.
Listen to hear the rest of her story and her favorite successes and also some of her struggles.
Here are links mentioned in this episode.:
Dr. Olivia Gurule-Rietmann
(Enchantment Upper Cervical)
(505) 589-9571
Dr. Bradley Fackrall
(Synergy Spine and Nerve Center)
(505) 891-2280
Dr. Bulow Episode
Dr. Christina Koblish and Dr. Ryan Moskey
(Upper Cervical Boulder)
(303) 900-7703
To contact Ruth:
806-747-2735
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 I am sitting here with a really exciting guest. She's a young lady and she's been a doctor just a short while, but already helped so many people. She's doing all the right things to even improve all the time, even as she's in her own private practice, she's got mentors, taking seminars, and doing a great job and changing lives already and about to change a lot more for a long time. So welcome, Dr. Olivia.
Hi, thank you so much.
So Dr. Olivia, why don't you introduce yourself, your full name, where you're practicing, and then you can launch a little bit into your background.
Okay, my name is Dr. Olivia Gurule-Rietmann and I'm a Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractor. I'm currently practicing in Corrales, New Mexico, which is a little village within Albuquerque. So I've been a chiropractor in Albuquerque for almost two years in May and always knew that I was going to open up my practice in Albuquerque. That's where I was born and raised and there was a really great need for good Upper Cervical care there.
So when you say always knew, did you always know you wanted to be a chiropractor in Albuquerque when as in always like your whole life?
No, definitely not. I actually grew up pretty much all the way through halfway through college thinking that I was going to be a historian and a writer. So it took a drastic turn.
So first of all, what drew you to history and writing? And then what happened?
History and writing was just, I always loved to read and write when I was a kid. And then just had like a really big fascination with history. And then I was very inspired by my high school English teacher. So that's what I always thought I wanted to do. And I actually took an anatomy and physiology class, my senior year of high school and was extremely fascinated specifically by the musculoskeletal structure in the system.
Oh, I see where this is going.
Memorized all the bones in the body and like almost became obsessed with it. I loved it. So I started off as a biology major in college. Switched to kinesiology pretty quickly, and became certified in personal training, and was heading towards the athletic trainer, physical therapy route. And then my senior year of undergrad, you know, did another huge life transition and decided to get into chiropractic instead.
So, you told me the story of how that came about a couple of nights ago. And I think it's a really worthwhile story. I've been thinking about a lot of aspects of it. So why don't you tell what what brought about that change?
Yeah. So I was actually like in the process of applying for PT school you know, my mentor was helping me with that, my advisors were helping me. I thought that's what I was going to do for the rest of my life. And it was actually the very first day of my last semester of college. I was sitting in a calculus class and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, my vision blurred.
Wow.
Like really crazy. I couldn't read anything on the professor's screen. And then I started getting this like horrible head pain ringing in my ears. It all just came on ll at once.
Just out of the blue, no incident, no accident?
Not that I can remember. I did have a really bad sledding accident when I was 10. And now, as a doctor, you know, seeing all of my x-rays, thinking about how misalignments happen, things like that, I'm pretty confident that that's what caused it and it was just over time, causing those slight symptoms.
Yeah. Okay. That's actually an interesting side point. One of the things I'm really passionate about is having kids checked out regularly. We recommend that all children, actually all people who have a neck should get it checked out every six months or so, like we do with our teeth. So what you're saying is if you had known about that and have been in that habit, that little sledding thing would have just been a blip on the radar. Instead of now all of a sudden it sounds like it stopped you in your tracks and you're in your college education.
I believe so too. And yeah, that's a huge passion of mine now is educating patients because it definitely wasn't my parents fault. I know that if they had known that that was an option at the time, I absolutely would have been in a chiropractic office.
Yes. I have a similar story. I was sick as a kid, but, um, and I don't fault my parents. They would have done it, but it wasn't available. But I think when you have hardship like that, it fuels your passion. And so in your case, it changed your career. It's changed the trajectory of my life. So one thing I've noticed on these episodes is when you go through hardships, it can become your purpose. And yet those people, part of that purpose is making sure other people don't suffer the same way.
Right, exactly. Exactly. And that perfectly describes how I feel now as a doctor.
So I took us a little bit of a detour. So back to when you had your headache and all of that, I think when we talked the other night, you called it an ocular migraine.
Yes, uh huh. So there was a lot of damage to my optic nerves and when I was in class experiencing that, I just left and went home, took a Tylenol and went to sleep and that took care of it at the time. But that same thing started coming back at the same time every single day. And after a couple weeks my parents, my fiance at the time like we realized “okay something is very wrong” and you know when you're going through a lot of neurological symptoms like that and not knowing what the other options are. Immediately the panic and the thought is brain tumor. You know, I had a lot of like pressure in my head. So I went through kind of the medical system and had all of the MRIs. I had spinal taps because I thought it was meningitis. There was a lot of blood work, lab tests, things like that. Everything coming back negative. Nothing is wrong with me, is what I kept hearing.
Nothing's wrong except everything is wrong. Yeah. Standard story.
Most medical doctors told me that if I lost 30 pounds that it would go away. So I did and nothing changed. And this was about like a three, four month process before I ended up finding the solution, which was Upper Cervical chiropractic.
So how did you find an Upper Cervical doctor did you have a friend that told you, or?
So my husband, who was my fiancé at the time, he had been adjusted since he was very young. And he had been in wellness, maintenance, chiropractic for a long time. Well, throughout all of these neurological symptoms, I was also having pretty severe neck pain. At the time, he's thinking, “okay, neck pain, we need to take you to a chiropractor.” Really not even thinking that it was going to help with the neurological symptoms that I was having as well. But it was kind of the thought of like, “well, if we can at least relieve the neck pain, that will give you some relief.”
I was being told by every medical doctor, neurologist, ophthalmologist that I was seeing that they couldn't find anything wrong with me, but at the rate that I was going with the different tests they were doing, that I would be pretty much blind by the end of the year. And there was nothing that they could do to stop it.
How scary and in the middle of your education,
Yeah, I was about to graduate. I was about six months away from getting married. And I, so that was another scary thing. I was like, “okay, I'll be blind at my wedding.” It was awful. It was a really, really tough time. So my fiance was looking for a chiropractor, he ended up finding what's called a Gonstead chiropractor. So they practice a full spine technique, but they do have a pretty good way of analyzing and taking care of the upper cervical spine.
So Upper Cervical, meaning the upper neck.
Yes. Uh huh. So C1, C2 vertebrae.
Those are the two top vertebrae, right?
Yes. Right under the base of the skull.
So he actually found a pretty large misalignment at my C1 vertebrae underneath the base of my skull and he only focused on that. I didn't even have any full spine adjusting so he wasn't an Upper Cervical specific chiropractor, but he had been trained enough to know how important that area is in the body along with my symptoms. And I was getting checked and adjusted by him. And I remember very specifically after my fourth adjustment, I wasn't really feeling any difference the first four adjustments, and I woke up the next day and almost panicked because I could see clearly and the ringing in my ears was almost completely gone.
And then, you know, from there it was a little bit of up and downs. Healing is definitely not linear. It doesn't all happen at once.
Yeah, usually it's more of a squiggly up and downy line. But it should always go trending up. So it sounds like that's what happened.
Absolutely. So it was a whole process, you know, I kept seeing him consistently, but I was able to finish my semester. I really thought at the time that I was going to have to quit and maybe, you know, just not get my degree and I was one semester away from that. So I finished school, I was able to march in graduation. My husband and I got married in August, everything was pretty normal, but I canceled all of my plans to start in PT school and went to my advisor and was like, please tell me I have all the credits to get into chiropractic school and we looked into it and I did so we kind of just took a leap and moved to South Carolina in October of that year.
So, but you said your advisor not only helped you figure out you had the credits, but then she asked you a question you told me the other day. What was the question? Or tell us how the conversation went.
The conversation was definitely one of disappointment on her end.
I think what you told me the other night is she told you, “why would you throw it all away like that? “ Are those the actual words she used?
She said that I was disappointing her choosing that route and that the track that I was going in that I was kind of throwing that away. So, that hurt.
That hurt, yeah. So what did you do with that?
I really ignored it because, and it was no fault of hers. You know, there's a lot of stigma around chiropractic and a lot of misinformation for sure. And that's just what she knew it to be was dangerous and not scientific or anything like that.
And I guess she wasn't the one that was going blind and got her vision back.
And I had been through the mill of the medical system, a lot of gaslighting telling me that I, this was in my head, that nothing was wrong with me. All of the medical tests kept coming back negative, so they couldn't find what was wrong. And really it's because like Upper Cervical chiropractors are the only healthcare profession that are really, really trained to look in that area and see what's going on and how to help with these different symptoms and everything. So, you know, it's nobody's fault, but finding that solution was definitely a game changer for me. And so I knew that if it was a game changer for me, then it had to be for other people that were struggling with the same thing that I was.
It's kind of cool because Dr. Elder has that plaque in his room that says, “the meaning of life is finding your gift. And the purpose of life is sharing it with others.” And that resonates so much with me because that's exactly how it felt at the time. I was going into PT school almost because I was almost done with four years of undergrad. And that's just what I had to do at that point. And I didn't have a passion for it. But as soon as I found chiropractic personally, I knew a hundred percent that that was my, that was my purpose. That was my calling.
That's incredible. Thank you for sharing that story. So then you went to Sherman College of Chiropractic?
Yes. In Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Because there are many different chiropractic colleges to go to. So why that one?
So that one, I was planning to go to a school in Dallas because I had done my undergrad in Dallas. My sister was still living there. I didn't know anything about chiropractic. My first day in school, they were talking about things that I'd never heard of and so I pretty much learned everything that I knew about chiropractic except for my own personal experience with the adjustments ,my first day of school, you know. So, I kind of like did this blind leap of faith into the profession almost.
But I was going to go to Parker in Dallas and when I was home for the summer after graduating from undergrad, I did an internship in the chiropractic office where my husband had been being seen since he was a kid. And that doctor is really amazing.
Should we give him a shout out?
Yeah, so shout out to Dr. Bradley Fackrell in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. He has helped my career tremendously. I actually opened my office in his office space. So I was practicing there for the first like six or seven months of being open. He's mentored me tremendously, but he actually, I was an intern in his office for a while, and he knew that Sherman College was going to be the best option to get my education. They are really advancing a lot in the science and the art of chiropractic, but they have a very, very solid foundation in the philosophy and the history of chiropractic as well.
Yeah, I love that about Sherman College. They're really solid in philosophy and the science is top notch.
Exactly. I think that it is definitely the most well rounded school that anybody could go to. The farthest east that I'd ever been was Dallas at that point. And my husband and I didn't even go check out the campus at all. We packed up our two cars and we drove to South Carolina when I was going to start school and we lived out of our cars for about a week and a half. And finally found an apartment before school started and just jumped into it. We knew nobody there. We never checked out the campus, didn't know the town, anything.
So you're both super dedicated.
Oh yeah. It was great and I don’t regret it at all.
Joint venture.
Yeah, it's very fun.
That's how it should be.
Definitely.
Okay, so then when you graduated you said that you always knew you wanted to go and open your own practice in Albuquerque. But for new doctors, there's always this tension of do I start my own practice right away or do I go and work with a more experienced doctor for a few years first? So how did you navigate that question?
It was a little almost not selfish, but a little bit self centered, my decision to open. My dad owns his own business and has for my whole life. So I knew that on the business side, I was going to be okay. He was going to really help me with that aspect of things.
First of all, I wanted to practice Blair Upper Cervical. And I knew that from like my first year in chiropractic school. There was nobody practicing Blair in New Mexico. So that was a huge motivation for me to move back. But I always just wanted to do things my own way. More so on the business aspect of things than like the chiropractic aspect, but I knew that I had really great mentors, technique wise, Dr. Elder being one of them, that were going to help answer questions. So I feel like I kind of had the benefits of being an associate with having these connections that I could reach out to any of these experienced doctors at any time and I knew that they would help me. But I just didn't want to - I felt like if I had opened anywhere else that I would be abandoning my home community because I knew they needed it so much.
That's true. So one of the first episodes on my podcast was somebody that drove all the way from Albuquerque to here, to Lubbock. And she started before - I think you were in the process of graduating. We knew about you, but you weren't open yet.
Right. And that's a long drive. I know the struggle.
It’s a five hour drive for people who don't know it.
Yes. Uh huh. I know the struggle because I have to drive here to get adjusted by Dr. Elder.
Yes, but I'm so glad now that other people in or near Albuquerque don't have to drive all the way here. They can go see you.So you had that dream. You had that passion. And you're saying selfish, but really you're doing a great service to that area.
And I love it there. Albuquerque is a very unique community and, you know, I grew up there, so my family's there as well, but yeah. It's home.
That's great. I want to get into your practice shortly. But I want to also follow up. You said you knew after the first quarter you wanted to do, or the first year, I don't remember which you said, you wanted to do Blair Upper Cervical. So why was that?
So, we have to take an upper cervical, I forget the name of the class, but it's basically Upper Cervical basics, like the philosophy, the history behind it.
Isn’t it called Upper Cervical rationale?
Yes. Rationale. There it is.
So we take that our fifth quarter. So Sherman is in a quarter system. So there's 14 quarters total. So a little bit past your first year you take an upper cervical rationale class. And when I took that class, that definitely sold upper cervical to me, especially because my personal issues had been Upper Cervical issues. And it changed my life in such a drastic way.
And the neck influences the whole body.
Exactly. And the philosophy of it just made so much sense to me. And then I started looking into different techniques and I took a Blair full seminar with Dr. Ian Bulow and I took it that same quarter and when I learned about the Blair principles, how they approach the upper neck, how they analyze it, and how they adjust it, it was so truthful. It felt like the best option.
So when you're talking about the Blair principles, you're talking about every single person is made different from everybody else. The left and the right is not the same. And it's normal to, I mean, it's the most normal thing is to not be normal.
Absolutely. Yes.
That's what you're referring to, right?
Uh huh.
And so Dr. Blair found a way to measure everybody, every patient to themselves instead of how the textbooks said they should be.
Exactly.
Is that what you're talking about when you're saying principles?
Yes. So that principle of, you know, everybody, and Dr. Elder says it all the time, like your spine is a snowflake. It's very unique. So we have to adjust based on your anatomy, not textbook like you said. That just made so much sense, resonated so much. So I really leaned into it, learned a lot about the technique, ended up becoming the president of the Blair club at Sherman for my last year and just got really, really passionate about the technique, the Blair society. I think that the Blair society is also doing just tremendous work in spreading the news and the truth about Upper Cervical care.
Actually, you just gave me an idea. I think I need to do an episode on the Blair Society because it's more than what we have time to cover in this episode, but you're right. That's actually really important information that I would like to get out there. So thank you for that idea.
So I would like to find out now from you, you've been in practice two years?
Almost.
So in that time, what are some of your challenges. And then we'll save the best for last and go into some of your favorite stories, some of the successes you've seen, but we'll start with the hard part first and then end on a high note of that.
Sounds good.
Because I know it's not a walk in the park to open a chiropractic office from scratch and I can't imagine that being a young woman makes it any easier.
Definitely. Yeah.
So what were some of the challenges you faced? And then launch into some of your favorite things.
I would say some of the biggest challenges that I've had since opening has been trying to figure out the best way to educate patients, which is kind of a learning curve, you know? Challenges in, specifically in Albuquerque, in New Mexico, the healthcare system there is really rough.
In what way?
So it's very hard to find providers. A lot of providers are leaving the state. I don't really know why that is. And when I say providers, I mean medical providers. But there is just so much dismissal of pain and chronic illness that I've seen in all of the patients that have walked through my door. And it's almost the same story with every single person that they've been kind of run through the mill and and dismissed very easily.
Which you yourself experienced. So I'm sure that coming to you is a great relief.
It's frustrating when I hear them say that, but it's also just really like reinforces why I wanted to become an Upper Cervical chiropractor, but also why I wanted to move back to Albuquerque because I was in school in Dallas when I was going through all that, all those symptoms and the sickness and everything. But most of the providers that I was seeing was in Albuquerque. And I knew how frustrating it was that there wasn't an option there outside of the standard medical care that really didn't do anything. And that's been a huge challenge is finding a good network of providers and healthcare people that I can refer patients to.
And cooperate with.
Right, and also educating them on what I do so that they know when something is an Upper Cervical issue to send them to my office. That's been a challenge. And then there's a lot of, I don't want to say dismissal, but there, it does feel like it at times being a woman in practice. And honestly, that's not just from the medical community or my community. But sometimes Chiropractic as well. You know, there's a lot of challenges.
You can't possibly be as smart or as good because you're a woman.Is that, is that how you feel sometimes?
Right. Or there's, you know, going to conferences and addressing all the male doctors as Dr. Last Name and being called Olivia in return by people I don't know. And that's a really common frustration.
I have seen that in places. And yet you have chosen to go by Dr. Olivia.
Yes, well my last name is kind of hard to pronounce but the majority of people that I see in my office are young women and moms and kids. And so, I just decided, my office is very small, it's very home-like, it's very personable, and Dr. First Name matches that vibe a lot more for me.
Yeah. So you've just embraced it.
Definitely.
So that actually sounds almost like a benefit to being a woman. So it's not just all harder.
Oh yeah. And I think that being a woman in chiropractic, specifically Upper Cervical, has so many advantages when it comes to the technique side of things.
So elaborate on that.
I've been adjusted by both men and women, and really it's, kind of doctor specific. But I've had many of my male mentors within the Blair Upper Cervical technique tell me that women have an advantage because, and this is getting really technical, but, you know, the way that we adjust, we can get a lot more specific with how we adjust. It's a much more gentle and precise adjustment.
So the way I understand it is, women tend to be a little bit more flexible. Is that correct? I think why it might be easier for a woman to learn the actual adjustment.
I think so, definitely. And there's this principle in chiropractic and really in life in general that force is very inverse to presence. And you know, if you're trying to be present with something, you definitely can use a lot less force to get the results that you want. So that applies in like pretty much all aspects of life, but specifically with chiropractic adjustments.
I feel like as a woman, I have a lot more intuition and presence with a patient when I'm making contact with them. So I can use a lot less force and I'll have these big giant guys come into my office and say like, “oh, you, you can't adjust me. Like I'm too big.” And I'm like, “if you can fit on my table, I can adjust you. That's the only issue that we're going to run into is if you don't fit on the table, but that's it.” Other than that, I can adjust everybody because it's not a force issue. It's not a strength or a power issue.
And really with the Blair technique the lighter the better anyway.
Exactly.
So I have been observing lots and lots and lots of seminars and for some especially male chiropractors, the biggest challenge is doing it light enough.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, so that's great.
So what are some of your favorite stories that you've seen? Give us one or two stories that just makes you smile and makes your heart happy.
Definitely. My number one favorite patient story actually is from when I was doing my preceptorship right before I graduated chiropractic school. So I did my preceptorship with Dr. Christina Koblish and Dr. Ryan Moskew in Boulder, Colorado, and they're Blair Upper Cervical Doctors. Their office was the perfect fit for me. It was just a really fun two months of being in there. But we had a little girl come in and she was nine years old and her parents told us that they had been snowboarding about two weeks ago and she had crashed on her snowboard. I think she hit a tree and things were fine. And didn't notice any symptoms, any pain, anything like that. And then about two weeks later, she started having really bad accidents during the night. So she was bedwetting. And she had never had that problem from being a toddler on up. And so her parents, you know, thank goodness they knew, “hey, something's going on neurologically. We gotta check this out.”
So they were sent over to our office. And it was really cool because I really resonated with her because I really believe that it was my sledding accident when I was 10 that caused a lot of my Upper Cervical issues that were never addressed. So she was pretty young, but we did end up taking one of the 3D x-rays of her neck and we found one of the biggest C1 misalignments that, all three of us had ever seen before. It was huge. And she started getting adjusted and it was like two adjustments later that things were just completely back to normal for her and kids are very adaptable, so she moved into maintenance care really quickly. But it ended up getting her entire family under care because they saw how powerful that was. She was like having accidents at school. Like, she was having so many issues. And was really embarrassed, they were having to change her sheets a couple times a night and then it just stopped, like, she had so much stress on her nervous system from that accident, that it really took so much little intervention to correct.
Yeah, and then I can't help but think about the compounding. Because like you said, kids heal so fast. So yes, she had a serious issue, but it resolved. But if it hadn't been resolved, like what else would have kept going wrong?
Oh yeah, especially at that young of an age and especially with the symptoms manifesting that quickly. So, you know, my accident happened when I was 10 and my symptoms didn't manifest until I was 22. And hers were right away. So I can only imagine how bad things would have been if she had gone to adulthood…
If she had gone for 10 more years. So that is a really cool story. Do you have another one?
That's probably my favorite. The coolest stories are with kids. They just have so much drastic results. But I was seeing a young boy last year who out of nowhere was just having grand mal seizures, like 10 a day. It was really bad. He actually was in an induced coma for about two weeks because of it, because that was the only way that they could get it to to stop. It was really rough. So once they pulled him out of it, he was still having the seizures a little bit less, but he ended up becoming dependent on a lot of the seizure medication so every time they would try to wean him off of it, the seizures would come back in full force.
So his parents brought him in, and I believe when he started seeing me he was about three, and he could barely walk because he would have these drop attacks out of nowhere. And he was just the sweetest kid and so happy and you could tell that who he was, his little personality, was kind of trapped inside this very stressed out, damaged nervous system. So we started doing care on him and the grand mal seizures stopped pretty quickly. And then the drop attacks, things like that kept lessening and lessening to the point where I pretty much moved him to like a maintenance as needed basis because he was doing so well. From the first time that he came into the office, his dad had to carry him, his head was kind of like rolling all over the place, he had like no control of his nervous system and of his muscles, anything like that. And then towards the end of seeing him, he was running into the office and high fiving everybody and that was really cool. So I never thought I wanted to see kids all throughout chiropractic school. I was like, “I don't want a pediatric practice. No, thank you.” And now they're my favorite patients. 100%.
Yeah. It makes such a difference. Big time. That's great. Is there something that you would like to share that I haven't asked you about?
No, not that I can think of.
I just have one thing that pops into my brain that I would like to say to you. And not that it has anything to do with me, but I'm just going to say, I'm really proud of you. You are doing some really great things and I see the choices that you've made so far with seeking out coaching and mentoring and you're continuing on that track. It's kind of easy to graduate and say, “okay, I'm a doctor now.” But you're continuing to learn, continuing to improve. And that's what I see all the best doctors just keep on learning and keep seeking out other people who maybe know things that they can learn from. And I'm so pleased to see that you're on the solid trajectory of doing all the right things.
Well, thank you so much. That means a lot.
All right. And if you are anywhere within driving distance from Albuquerque, Go and check out Dr. Olivia and I'll link all your information in the show notes so people will know how to find you.
Cool. Thank you.
Yep. You're welcome. Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you.