 I truly believe that each and every one of us has a Dharma, a purpose, a calling, something that drives us. And I love interviewing people who have taken their passion and turned it into their purpose and made that a viable career. Today I'm talking with Sarah and Rich, who are two of my favorite chiropractors and they're here to share with you their journey. Hi guys, how are you? Hi, very good. Thanks so much for being on the show. It's such an honor to have you here. Thank you for the invite. Yeah, it's wonderful. So for those who are listening who don't know what chiropractic care is, would one of you like to give a brief description of what chiropractic care is? Sure. Chiropractic care, a lot of times people don't quite understand that every time a person is touched, every time a person is worked with, they might think that chiropractic care involves muscles and joints and bones popping and things like that. But it's more along the lines of, we touch you and your body has to cope, react and look at itself. Chiropractic as a whole is more along the lines of a neurologic event. It's not about making you stronger, it's not about changing your physiology as much as it about you changing your own physiology. So you can kind of sum chiropractic up as applied neurology. It's about that. It's not, again, it's nothing that is going to alter you as a person. It's not a mechanical event. Okay, perfect. Now, when people go in for a chiropractic appointment, and I've gone for chiropractic and I have to tell you, it's one of my favorite things. It's when I leave a chiropractor's office, I feel light and just balanced. And when somebody goes in for a chiropractic appointment, they get what's called an adjustment in most cases. So for those, again, who haven't had an adjustment, could you take a moment to explain exactly what an adjustment is? Sure. Well, I'll explain a little bit and then several too. So an adjustment, as I was talking before with the nervous system being involved, when you get adjusted, it's an awareness event. So chiropractic itself, an adjustment can be anything from a subtle pressure nine ounces, which is the weight of a dime to a few hundred pounds of thrust. And the chiropractor, whoever you see, most likely has a different way to treat every person according to what they need. So that adjustment will vary per person. So that adjustment, again, is a point where we're creating awareness in the body so that the body then can heal itself. That's a beautiful way of explaining it. So not a lot of people know about chiropractor, and if they do, they don't know a lot about chiropractic care. How did you, Sarah, first learn about chiropractic care? What was your first? Chiropractic was something my family utilized since I was little. My father is a logger, and so with that, with the profession, you get aches, you get pains, and he would utilize chiropractic instead of pain meds to make his body work better and to get out of pain quickly. And then when I was in junior high, my was laying on the ground and my brother came up and kicked me in the back. Who knows why, just sibling rivalry. But I was stuck in a bent over position for a while, so my mother took me to a chiropractor, and 15 minutes later, I walked out, like nothing had ever happened, so I got to see how powerful it could be right there in them. That's an amazing share. That's very cool. You're very fortunate to have grown up with chiropractic care also. Rich, what was your first? How did you learn about chiropractic care? I was three or four years old. We used to see a Dr. Novak who lived in, who practiced and lived in Cudahoe, Wisconsin. His real interesting guy, he had the biggest hands I've ever seen on a person his size. I suppose a three-year-old would know. Still his hands are big. And we'd go to his clinic, and he practiced in a business building, and he had 10 chairs that would sit inside his office. However, when you'd pull up to his clinic, his space, you'd actually have to stand in line, which sometimes went around the block. So you'd talk 50, 60 people waiting, and he'd do that, he had a session in the morning and a session in the evening, and he'd be busy like that every single day. So, well, he was as a child, I was just wondering why we'd wait in this line, so I do remember my very first visit. We'd wait in line, and he'd finally make it up the stairs, and then he'd sit, and he'd walk around, and at the time, we didn't have soap notes, which is like the standard medical note, he had a little postcard that he'd put all your information on, and then he'd lay you down, and he'd either put a massager on you, or put a little infrared heat on, and then he'd adjust you. And even as a child, I thought it was pretty amazing that this was manual adjusting, so he'd push onto your back, and you'd feel your little bones pop, do-do-do, and it felt so great. I know. And it was fantastic, and I never really considered in throughout the years if I'd have injuries with sports, or my mom and dad would just go to get adjusted, I would go with them. And when I was in college, I wanted to be a medical doctor, that's what I thought. But Destiny had a little different plan for me. I was in a multi-car pileup on my way to animal behavior class, when I was attending UW Milwaukee. And from the accident, I couldn't turn my head. It was, I was pretty racked up. That evening, I had gone to the ER. They gave me muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatories, and this was the time when anti-inflammatories were new, and all it did was give me a bad stomach ache, and I couldn't even move. And so ended up at a chiropractor's office. And again, never thinking about this, but I walked out. I wasn't in pain. I still hurt. It took me about four years to fully recover from my injuries from the accident, but if I didn't see the chiropractor, I never would have recovered. And that is when I was still, between that time, still thinking I was going to be a medical doctor, but the medical model of healing and life didn't suit my needs, and chiropractic did. And that's why I wanted to be a chiropractor. That's, and Sarah, thank you for sharing that because that is so powerful, and there's just so much information in that statement. And just, I love that. Thank you for sharing because that is right on, right? Like hammer nail hitting it. So what drove you? What was your, I need to be a chiropractor? Or I want to be a chiropractor? I grew up as a slightly chubby child, and I was aware of it. And I think I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I started to become more health conscious. And watching what I ate, I started playing sports, and got really involved in that. From there, it was looking at magazines and seeing what the new trend was in health or whatnot. And kind of did that throughout junior high into high school, and then it came time to, well, what do I want to do for a career? And so I was weighing between, I thought, well, chiropractic sound kind of like healthy and PT did too, but I didn't really know what the differences were. So once I did a little bit of research, I discovered that chiropractic was much more in line with what I wanted. It was more of a whole body approach. It wasn't just like where PT was more exercise to fix muscles either or imbalance. Chiropractic was fixing the body through nutrition, through adjustments, through mental states, and just the way you think. And so it just was much more in line with the direction I wanted to go with in life. So it was kind of a quick no brain. I was like, I figured it out. And when I went to college, I set up everything, like all my classes. I knew what I was gonna take to get through as fast as possible, because it's a long haul. And so I just wanted to be the most efficient I could be to get through there. So let's talk about that. Now, people might not know, to be a chiropractor, you're in school for a while. Yeah. So how long are you in school for? Well, the state of Wisconsin requires that you have a BA or BS to be a chiropractor. So you do have to have a bachelor's of arts or bachelor of science. Interestingly, you don't have to be a, you don't have to have a BA or BS to be a medical doctor. Just to let you know, in the state of Wisconsin. So you technically have more schooling than a medical doctor? Well, at least you're supposed to have a little more schooling. I don't, yeah, I don't, I doubt that many go through without... They usually do get their BA or BS. But anyways, chiropractic school does mirror medical school. The way the laws are set up nationally is that chiropractic school parallels medical school. We have to know what a medical doctor knows. We do have more hours in radiology. We have more hours in anatomy than a medical student does. And we have nutrition, which they get nothing. So when it comes down to class time, the lowest credit load I ever went to, and we went to both the same chiropractic college, was 28 credits for a semester. And we did trimesters. And so it was very intense. Due to my sports, I was a bicycle racer. I took summers off, so it took me a full four years to get through my chiropractic school. And it was three and a half for you? Something like that. I mean, I was, I started out Michigan Tech, technological university in the UP. There I went straight through summers. I think I had won the last summer I had off. And I was in a pre-med program there with a bunch of other soon-to-be doctors and dentists and whatnot. So we were all taking the same courses. And then when I finished the three years, I had enough credits. I transferred over to the University Chiropractic College, Northwestern College of Chiropractic. And I think it's changed to Northwestern Health Science University while I was there. They took on acupuncture also. But then it was another, I think, three years. And I went straight through. I didn't take any summers off. I think I was done in a total of about six and a half years. So now you started at UWM. You already mentioned. And then you ended up at Northwestern, but years before her. So we do have some time span before that. Or a time gap between each other. So he would tell me, like, do you remember this? And I would be like, that's not there anymore. Do they still have this club? I started it. No, that's not there. Yeah, the club you started is gone now. Sorry. Your legacy has not gone on. What we had done is we, when I was in the college, I at times really wanted to make sure we were integrated with medicine. I still had that mindset when I was in school. I was very analytical. We started rotations with UWM Medical College. And so then the medical students could come and rotate at chiropractic school. And we could go there. The only problem was is that we had a very low medical to chiropractic. As we would go and watch surgeries, we'd go through and look at everything that they would be doing since we paralleled, but they had no clue what we were doing. And then after I got into practice here in the states, in Wisconsin, in the state, I found out that most medical doctors really don't know what we do. They're completely oblivious. They don't get it. But I'm not mad at them for that. But when you talk to them and if you speak to them, and that's where when I go about the applied neurology, if we talk in vocabulary that they understand, they get it. But if you don't and you start talking wishy-washy and it sounds as if you're a watered-down physical therapist or personal trainer, I wouldn't want to trust me either. I completely understand that. So I'm going to ask Rich, where was your first job out of college? Well, I started working for a chiropractor in West Alice. And with that, he had a medical contract with Wisconsin Health Fund, which is the medical center that took care of all the local Teamster 200 members. And so we got into there, not really knowing what was going to happen, but it turned into something incredible. I learned so much. They had 11 departments, many, many medical doctors. And I was roughly working with well over 1,000 people a month just doing chiropractic care alone. We would see things that my teachers in school in chiropractic college told me, if you see them in a lifetime, you'll be lucky. I hit every one of those on the list in the first five years in practice. That's amazing. That's what an incredible experience to be able to take that with you through all of your career, right? It was fantastic. I wish every chiropractor could go through that. It was such an eye-opener. It held me to be accountable. So I had to be a good practitioner. But it also allowed me to see how the medical family, I might call it like a clinic, but it's really a family and how everyone works well together and how they take care of each other. That's amazing. Yes, and so I really did appreciate being able to work with medical doctors at that level. And again, when I was able to communicate what I was doing with them and understanding that it was really about neurology, they were very respectful. And even to this day, my number one referral are other chiropractors or other medical doctors. So I do appreciate that time there. That's absolutely wonderful. Now, I know a little bit of your history, so I know you two are married. And when I ask where your first job is, you can kind of tell also the story of how you two originally met if you would like. Well, my first job was in New Berlin. And I was a scared new doctor. And I didn't know what I was doing. And I thought I was looking for a doctor to kind of mentor me and show me the ropes. And it didn't quite turn out that way as I had hoped. So I'd like to actually consider my first job to be with Rich. I interviewed with him. And just by seeing his enthusiasm to teach, he was more than willing to show me the ways or to... Let me inject something here. But I did interview a dozen other chiropractors. And she was the only one who got mad when she got questions wrong. So that's why I was so impressed with her tenacity. And no one ever got mad in front of me. Frustrated, I would say frustrated. Frustrated that I didn't know these things that I should have known. I just felt like I should know this. Why don't I? And so by watching him how he treated people, how he assessed, that was the big thing is how he assessed people. It just gave me a way to treat a patient and not question myself as to where do I adjust to them? How do I adjust to them? I knew every time just by the assessment. So that was what I was most impressed with. And I knew this is the place I need to work with. So he hired me, thankfully, and it worked out because now we've got two children also on top of working together. A little off topic. When you first saw him, of course you wanted him to mentor you. Like did you think right away, I'm working, my boss is cute, my boss is, I kind of- He reminded me of somebody else that I was like, oh, and then I was like, oh, he's kind of a know-it-all, but that's okay. Because it turned out he did know a bunch. So it wasn't an unjust know-it-all. And I guess it's unfair since you were interviewing to have her as an employee to ask, did you know right away, like? No, not at all. Not at all. So we didn't really look at each other that way, but just as time went on, we had so much in common and just chiropractic itself and talking about diet. And we're always looking to improve ourselves and to cook better food or different health that than assessing them. And then it was something that's, something we should go down or supplements. And just, I don't know, we can talk about health for a long time, as long as most people's ears would start to fall off, we can keep going. But she was also really good for us to get out in the public. We'd go to bicycle races, we'd sponsor bike races, we'd go to running races and to set up shop and sit and talk to people. And we, of course, the whole object was to get out and meet people and potentially have patients. But even when I didn't want to go, she's like, I'm going. Push them. Push, she had pushed and that was a good thing. Or I would just go. See you later. Or she'd just go, that would be it. So she had that hunger to go out and to talk to people and to learn. Well, I liked working with the athletes, especially. That was just, it was fun time. So being on site at the bike races and they would come to you and you would treat them there on the spot and then they'd go jump into their race and they'd have an amazing race and come back and go, I don't know what you did. But I was in the front the whole time or I won the race or they were just, they could see improvements. And that's really, I enjoy the, not having the approach of taking away pain but actually improving the body. Taking a body that didn't have pain just wanted to be physically better. And they were living examples of that. And I think that's something, people wait until something goes wrong a lot of times to get to care. With this, you can go in, you can just maintain health, strengthen health, which is simply amazing. And I'm just gonna say it again, every time I've gone to the chiropractor and I walk out, there's a known improvement. Like I feel an improvement in it. It might not be, I was in a pretty, I was rear-ended by two cars also. So I went through a series of chiropractic appointments and every time I left, I felt better. It might not have been 100% right away but there was better, my movement, my agility, all of that was getting better with each and every visit and no medication because I'm allergic to pain meds. So I'm allergic to antibiotics. And so those segues aren't available. A segues, is that the right? Those pads aren't available for everyone. So having this alternative path of alternative care is so, so empowering. So let's talk a little bit about what can chiropractic care help? Now you've mentioned teamsters, you've mentioned athletes. What can chiropractic care help? Now I know it's amazing for neuropathy but I'll let you guys go on about this. Okay, well, whenever we look at chiropractic, hate to say it but it's from the cradle to the grave. Yes. And the reason I hate to say that though is it sounds like a cliche, like how can you have something that can span the test of time? Well, you think about it, birth is the most traumatic experience. And when you adjust a baby, and like our children are adjusted right out of the womb, you're only using, I use my pinky to adjust them so if I'm pushing them like that, that's a baby's adjustment. But to go through the process of birth is very traumatic for a child. And when I was at the teamsters, I got to see children who, their collar bones were broke, that they had different parts of their spine broke by traumatic births. You know, a birth is, I've seen births that are traumatic. They're not pretty. So if I'm using a pinky, there's no way I'm gonna hurt a baby. Right. And with it, we work with, so I'm just gonna stick with a baby right now for a second is we can work with their stomach. We can work with their head to help form it so it's nice and circular. We work with their palate to make sure that that works. When we work with their stomach and viscera, this is to make them so their digestion works better. We teach the parents how to do these things themselves so that they can empower themselves. And then as you go through that whole gamut of what else can you do? Of course, you know about the headaches, the low back pain, the mid back pain. You have those mechanical things where maybe an event occurred and so that joint is off or mechanically. That's the time when you go in there and you work on somebody and it's, boom, it's a quick fix. I put it back in place in a sense. It wasn't fully, as I call it, medically subluxated where it's joint is out of place completely but it's just dysfunctional. That stuff heals fast. But then you have it where the body does things and it does it purposefully, but people don't like it. But that's when you come in and you get those tendinitis and you get those bursitis. And chiropractic does work with that but that's when we have to look at it and say you have to break a tendency. You have to break a lifestyle. That's what right now what we've been working on from going more or less along the lines of working with people like Sarah was talking about with the low back pain or something like that. She loved working with athletes because they wanted that heightened performance. Well, what I've been doing now for a long time and just picking up more and more is we work with a person but right when they come in there, we interview them to see are you a patient for us because I can do my passive care with you. I can adjust to you. But if you don't take care of yourself, you're probably not gonna get well. And if you don't get well, you're gonna say chiropractic's not a good fit for people or a fit for them. So I think just as I have to be responsible for the care that I give to people, they have to be responsible. And if I make a suggestion, you need to clean up your diet. You need to go for a walk during lunch. You need to do that. There's only so much that we can do in a 15 minute span. It's the person's life. That's what they're doing on a daily basis all day long and whatnot that needs to change. We can just help them become aware of it. Right, exactly. And what they have been doing up until that point also. So let's, can you believe we're almost out of time already? I know, right? We'll have to come back and do another one to cover everything else. But really quick, if someone comes into your clinic, tell people, first of all, the name of your clinic and what they'll find inside of your clinic. Sure, that's a great question. So our clinic is called Center of Gravity. Excellent. The best place to reach us, or the fastest way to reach us is at 414-282-9500 or you can visit our website, which is COG4, the number four, life.com or cog4life.com. Now inside our clinic, when you walk in, we just recently created our new space. And that space, we're very excited about it. I like to be there. And believe me, in the past, when I had to have clinics, go and see patients and get out. Well, anyways, we have a gym so we can get people to exercise. We do small, niche classes where we limit the number between four and six people for members. We also have our chiropractic section. We have our, I guess you'd see our massage room where we do have therapists work with people. In the front, we have a cafe where we serve organic teas and coffees. The difference there is instead of normal coffee shops, we use food grade essential oils. We use different types of milk choices so that a person really is getting something healthier for them and not just a sugar fix. We use, we don't use artificial sugar substitutes, but we use things that you won't find at any other place. So we're looking to, again, have something that is unique for us and, again, we're really proud of. Excellent, that's beautiful. Thank you, Sarah and Rich, so much for being on the show today. It's such an honor and a pleasure for me to learn all of this about chiropractic care and we're going to have to do this again because I know we could literally talk about this for five days straight, all the benefits and the care of it. And I love that. So thank you so very much for being here. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on Create a Life You Love. For more information on Sarah and Rich, please feel free to visit their website which is listed right below us. And you can also visit my website, Tony, T-O-N-I-G.info. Thank you again for watching. Until next time, create a life you love.