There is a version of chiropractic care that most of us are trained in. Patient books an appointment, you assess them, you adjust, they leave feeling better, they come back the following week. It is a model that has existed for decades, and on the surface, it makes sense. People feel relief. They keep coming back. The clinic stays busy.
When ‘Enough’ Stops Being Enough
For a while, that felt like enough.
The turning point for me came gradually, the way most important realisations do. I started noticing patterns across my patients. People who had been coming to see me for months, sometimes years, who were managing their symptoms well in session but returning to the same problems in between.
And I found myself sitting with a question I could not shake: if the work I am doing is good, why are so many people still stuck?
That question sent me back to first principles. What is the body actually doing when it is in pain? What does recovery really require? And how much of what we consider standard practice is genuinely serving the people in front of us?
The Birth of Rehab Chiropractic
What I arrived at is what I now call a rehab chiropractic approach. It sits at the intersection of clinical care and movement coaching, treating the adjustment as one tool in a much larger kit rather than the destination itself. The adjustment matters. Manual therapy matters. But it matters most when it is paired with a genuine understanding of how that person moves, what demands their life places on their body, and what they need to do when they walk out of your clinic.
Learning from the Inside: The Athlete’s Perspective
This is where lived experience as an athlete changed everything for me. Being inside a high-demand body, training through fatigue, load and competition pressure, taught me things about how bodies behave that I simply could not have learned in a clinical setting alone.
Athletes do not experience their bodies the way a textbook describes. They push past signals, they adapt in ways that mask problems, and they manage discomfort as a strategy. Understanding that from the inside completely changed the questions I ask in the clinic.
The shift I made was also about the time horizon. Traditional chiropractic, at its most basic, is often oriented toward the session: how does this person feel right now? Rehab chiropractic asks a longer question: what does this person need to be able to do in six weeks, six months, in ten years? That reframe changes everything about how you assess, treat, and communicate with your patients.
I also had to unlearn a few things. The idea that the clinician holds all the answers and the patient receives care passively. The assumption that symptom reduction equals success. The belief that our job ends when the pain stops. Letting go of those assumptions created space for something much more interesting and much more effective.
For Fellow Clinicians: An Invitation
If you are a clinician reading this and something here is resonating, I want you to know that the pull you might be feeling toward a different way of working is worth following. The model I have built, refined over years of practice, mentorship, and my own athletic journey, is now shared through workshops and one-to-one practitioner mentorship. Because the more clinicians who practise this way, the better it is for everyone sitting across from us in the clinic.
The body is not a collection of parts to be adjusted back into place. It is a system in motion, and the best thing we can do as practitioners is learn to meet it there.
If you are a clinician reading this and something here is resonating, I want you to know that the pull you might be feeling toward a different way of working is worth following. The model I have built, refined through years of practice, mentorship, and my own athletic journey, is something I now share through workshops and one-to-one practitioner mentorship.
Because the more clinicians who practise this way, the better it is for everyone sitting across from us in the clinic.
