Now is the Time for Chiropractors to Step into The Health Care Void

Welcome to this edition of Catch Up with ChiroTouch. This is your host, Dr. Ronnie Simms, here in Northern California. I'm so glad that you tuned in today.

You're in for a real treat. Before we dive into that, I just wanna say a quick shout out and thank you to ChiroTouch for their heart in this matter. I think it's wonderful when they came to me with this idea, and we shared these ideas of what can we do to help the profession as a whole.

We're not just looking to sell software here. We want the beloved profession of chiropractic to thrive. And so what do you think we should do?

And I came up with the idea of interviewing some legends on my show. And I'll tell you, I've had some great guests on, but today we have a true legend. This gentleman has had, I wanna say, a five to six decade career in chiropractic.

And so please welcome Dr. Guy Riekeman. How you doing, Guy?

Great, legend just sounds old at this point, you know?

I don't know, man, legend's still a good name. We'll put Goat, how about one of the goats? One of the greatest of all time.

Dr. Guy.

Complimentary.

Yeah, you know, I've met you a couple of times, but it was in a bigger room. And I was always so impressed by your humility, because I know you've had a great career, but you have a spirit of humility about you. And you are a great leader.

You've proven that on many different fronts. And I love how you made the pivot from practice into academics and how you really help steer the colleges in the right direction. So I want to talk to you about that.

Give us kind of a Reader's Digest version of your Chiro story and how you've gotten to where you are right now, which is Chancellor Emeritus, I believe is the title. I don't know what that means. If you can explain that.

Yeah, my story starts at birth, actually. My dad was a 1947 grad from Palmer College in those big post-war classes. And my dad was an amazing guy.

It took me a long time to figure it out. You mentioned humility before. I hope I got that.

If I have any, got it from him. He was this kind, sweet, gentle guy. At his funeral, I made the comment, I'd never heard anyone say anything bad about my dad.

And someone came up to me that had known my dad his entire lifetime and said, the reason is your dad never said anything bad about anyone else. But he was also a really powerful chiropractor. I found out after he died, Joseph Keating came up to me, the guy who was a chiropractic historian for so many decades.

And he said, I was doing a study on state board exams. Back in that time, there were chiropractic boards, but you had to get through the medical basic science board first, whether you were a dentist, a chiropractor, an MD, you had to take what we now call part one national boards essentially, but they were all essay tests from developed or delivered by the medical profession. And they were all subjective.

They were all essays. And chiropractors, even though there was licensure in many states, they would use those medical licensing boards to keep chiropractors from coming in, to even be able to sit for the chiropractic part of the license. And so Joseph Keating was doing a study on these medical state licensing boards and told me that my father was the only chiropractor that was ever put on a medical state licensing board by a governor, in this case in New Mexico, to make sure chiropractors had a fair shot in getting through the medical part of the board so they could take the chiropractic exam.

And I didn't know that, right? When I was a kid growing up, I would just ask my mom, where's dad this weekend? And she'd go, oh, he's up in Santa Fe doing some chiropractic political stuff.

And what he was up there doing was fighting for the profession. In fact, one of the thing, I know this is what you necessarily asked me, but my father and three other chiropractors were fighting chiropractic rights. Two of them had their offices firebombed, windows blown right out the front of the building.

And the other two had their other aisles gassed and burned, et cetera. So, I mean, this was back in a time and age when in chiropractic, we don't even think about that any longer. But so I was born into that, right?

I was born into that kind of an environment. Yeah, one of the things that I've always been known for in the profession is a lot of creative visioning, looking to the future of chiropractic. And I actually think that happened.

I grew up on a little farm in New Mexico and had a horse, and I used to spend eight to 10 hours a day on that horse, all by myself out in the middle of the desert. And you know, when you're doing that, your brain, you create scenarios and your brain runs. And I actually think that what I became as an adult was sort of programmed on those long rides in the middle of the desert out in New Mexico.

But anyway, wound up at chiropractic school, not because I wanted to go to chiropractic school. I was an all-American basketball player in high school and played a year in a college in New Mexico and hated the coat. So I left and was headed up to Chicago to play for old man Ray Myers in DePaul University.

And back then, there were no sports portals like today. Back then, you had to sit out a year. You couldn't just transfer from one school to another.

And it was the Vietnam War. And so my dad said, don't sit out at home. You're gonna get drafted if you do.

So he said, why don't you go to Palmer for a year? So I went to Palmer and I was sitting there getting ready to leave after three quarters and head up to Chicago. And one night in an old dark dank auditorium, because Virgil Spring was offering some extra credit points.

If we go listen to a speaker, I heard Reggie Gold talk. And Reggie spoke for four hours. I couldn't tell you one thing he said today, but I knew it three hours into it.

I gave up the basketball thing. I said, this is what I'm going to do. And I'm going to be a chiropractor.

That was 1969. So you can add up the decades after that. In those decades in between, they're obviously built a successful practice, went to Sherman as the vice president to help them get that college off the ground, taught philosophy and Blair x-ray there at Sherman.

Then Joe Felicia and I met up and created Renaissance, which was the first real organized effort with patient education using the contemporary technology of the day, which was videotape. And I say contemporary because in 1977 when we started this, only 10% of American households even had a VCR. We used to go to the seminars and teach chiropractors how to use these videotapes for education that we had shot at the Osmond Studios.

And we'd have 100 VCRs stacked up in the back of the room because they had to buy a VCR. They didn't have one when they went home in order to use the program. So that was 1977, wound up dropping out for four years.

I hit burnout, what I thought was burnout, and I dropped out on a beach in Southern California and did nothing for four years except get up every day. I went to film school at UCLA because I've always loved movies and went to the beach, had tickets to the Lakers during the Boston Lakers, Magic Johnson, Lurie Bird era, and had a great time, went to six, seven, eight movies a week, which I still do until COVID hit, but loved movies. And then one day decided to come off the beach and it was hard.

Going to the beach is easy. You just have to drop out. You just have to quit.

Coming off the beach requires an act of volition. A friend of mine drugged me to here, Werner Erhart in San Diego. And I remember he was there.

I was there with 5,000 people. And Werner put up one diagram on a big chalkboard, lectured for a few hours. And man, that turned my life around that night.

So I came off of it and created Quest, which was the largest practice management program maybe ever, but of its time, we were managing about 7,000 chiropractors on a day-to-day basis in their offices and then gave it up and went to Palmer. Palmer was in trouble, had some issues and wanted somebody to steer it out. And was there six years before I left and then went to Life University, who was really in trouble.

They had had issues with accreditation and the campus had been sold a week before I got there. And it's just a remarkable story of life coming back and becoming not only the largest chiropractic college in the world, but also becoming a really unique university that's known throughout the world for its programs and things like positive psychology, all sorts of issues. So for various programs, it's programs that it's doing in the prison system, with education, et cetera.

So really innovative stuff that we're really proud of that we got done at Life University. And now I'm back to my roots, which is an entrepreneur. And as an entrepreneur, we've opened up some clinics in the Detroit area, which I know we're going to talk about where the profession's going.

These clinics are my reflection of what I think, where it's going. But also we've created a new way of communicating with patients and a new way of chiropractors creating income in their office based on the remote patient management world that we live in today. So anyway, that's a thumbnail sketch of 70 years and hoping to keep it kicking for at least a couple more decades.

I hope so too, man. Our profession needs you. And I want to ask you right now, as you look at the profession coming out of the academic side, and I think about these young graduates coming out with these big student loan debts.

They're not sure where they fit. And so kind of speak into that. Like, what do you see?

What would you say to that young graduate right now? What advice would you give them? And where do you see the profession going for them?

Oh boy. You just gave me two, three hour questions. The first one, and we can break them down.

You go where you want to go. But obviously we probably need to talk about some leadership and success issues for the individual chiropractor coming out. I've always said, and I still believe this to this day, you let me talk to a student before they enter school or in their first quarter.

And I can almost 100% tell you whether they're going to make it or not in the profession. So maybe we can come back to that. The other part of it is, where's the profession headed?

I always break this down into two parts, right? One is, what does the profession stand for? What does it have to offer?

What is its marketing brand, right? What contribution does it have to people's health? I'm just going to call that principles, right?

What are the principles of the profession? In my opinion, the principles of the profession have not changed since the beginning of the profession. If I could be oversimplified, you know, it starts off with the belief that's different than medicine.

What we call a vitalism in philosophy today. But vitalism basically says that living things are self-developing, self-correcting, self-maintaining mechanisms. You know, they heal from on their own.

You don't have to train them how to do that. So it starts off with this notion that human beings in the universe is sort of a self-maintaining, self-developing, self-healing mechanism. From that, you flow some trickle down concepts.

So in human beings, then, we have to look at, well, what is normal function, right? If it's self-developing, self-healing, self-maintaining, we know that these systems in the universe, including the environment, works best when it's free of interference. So if you look at the planet, for example, I would say that the planet is a self-developing, self-healing, self-maintaining mechanism that has some interference in it.

It's us, right? We have the interference to the planet. If you wipe all human beings off the planet tomorrow, does anyone have any doubt that within a relatively short period of time, the planet wouldn't heal, maintain and get itself back to balance?

So, you know, the planet works on this vitalistic principle, and so do human beings living things. And we know they work best if they're free of interference. And of course, there are three basic interferences, but one of them that's critical for us as chiropractors is the idea that since as human beings, the nerve system controls who we are, we have to look specifically to the nerve system.

We had at Life University a think tank called the Octagon, and every year we'd bring experts in various fields in, and they would have discussions. Jerry Klum would come out and negotiate those conversations. And for a five-year period, we had neurologists, neurophysiologists, functional neurologists, academics in neurology, medical doctors in neurology, chiropractors, and they would sit in a room.

And I remember the first conference they had, they would talk for a week about research, et cetera, and then they'd write these white papers. And I remember the first time they came out, they said two things about the nervous system. Number one, you are your nervous system.

You're not your heart, you're not your lungs, you're not your liver, right? In fact, you are your nervous system. That's where all consciousness, memory, function, adaptation, all those things come from is inside your nervous system.

And the second thing they said was that the whole function of the nervous system was by working in its environment to evolve over a period of time. In other words, we are not who... 70, I'm not who I was at 12.

You follow me? My nervous system has taken information, it's learned from that information, and it's more successful at adapting in the environment because of it. So we are our nerve systems.

And when we look at interference to the nerve system, there are three of them. Physical traumas, right? Whether it's a spinal malfunction, which is our specialty, of course, a concussion, right?

Whether it's a trauma that someone's had in an auto accident, right? Brain trauma, et cetera. You have physical trauma.

The second are environmental toxins, everything from cigarette smoke, pollution, mercury in fish, mercury in the fillings in our teeth, and vaccines, right? All the toxins that we take in from the environment that lodge in our body. So for example, we know that the average American consumes a credit card worth of plastic every year, which the body has a difficult time eliminating, and plastic has a tendency to lodge in the gut and create all sorts of gut issues.

Or metals, for example, we know they tend to lodge in the brain and lead to neuro-generative diseases. So these are environmental toxins that impact the nervous system. And then finally, emotional stresses.

Someone sees their best friend blown up in a roadside bomb in Iraq. They come home with all sorts of problems, including higher rates of suicide. They weren't physically traumatized, but they were emotionally traumatized.

Their nerve system was. So we know the nerve system controls function. We know as human beings, the nerve system is how we're expressing and adapting in the environment.

We're better off if we have less interference in our nerve system than more. And we know that these three interferences exist, and we should try to minimize them. That's our story in chiropractic.

Now, some chiropractors practice that by going, I'm just concerned with correcting the malfunction in the spine, subluxation, if you will, to clear out that part of the nervous system. Other chiropractors on the other end of the scale say, hey, I have a lot of interest in getting rid of environmental toxins and cleaning up these issues. And I think most chiropractors in the middle, the 90% of us in the middle say, hey, my main focus is correcting subluxations and then giving people information about how to build a lifestyle that's congruent with getting rid of these other interferences and living a healthier, more naturalistic, organic, vitalistic lifestyle.

I think that's where 90% of the professionals. So I know that was a long run. To answer your question, the principles of chiropractic, I don't think have changed since 1895.

What's changed is delivery, right? What's changed is delivery, whether that's delivery over an adjusting table. Let's face it, there was not an adjusting table for the first chiropractic adjustment.

I've seen all those pictures of, you know, Dee Dee Palmer's office in 1895 and there's a bench in Harvey's Lane on it. But from what Joseph Keating told us, it probably happened on the floor. Palmer probably put Harvey Liller down on the floor and as Palmer said, he racked the vertebra in the lower cervical spine back into place.

I would tend to believe our delivery has changed a bit over the years. We've got to research. Our education has changed, right?

When I first got out of school, there was one way to educate a patient. You sat down with them one-on-one at a report of findings and tried to explain chiropractic to them until the reception room was so backed up you had to interrupt it and go take care of patients. Then we went to video education in 1977 with Felicia and what we're doing.

And today, in entirely different format, I'd love to get into it in a moment, but we can talk about how people are living remotely today. They're living on their iPhones and we should have that conversation. So the principles haven't changed, but the delivery has changed.

But I think just to wrap this up, I think the biggest change in the last 10 to 20 years in our profession has been a reorientation and focus on the impact of chiropractic on the nerve system. We've always said that chiropractic simplistically is about spinal function and its impact on the nerve system. But what's happened in research today from medicine to chiropractic is this huge exploration about the brain and neuroplasticity and how we function and how we heal and how we deal with neurological degenerative diseases.

I mean, the issue today is absolutely in the world of research, nerve system information. And what we're finding out is that chiropractic may be less about racking bones and more about our impact on the nerve system. I know that Heidi Havik's work out of New Zealand, for example, they've hooked up the brain, and when a cervical adjustment is given, the brain lights up like Christmas tree lights.

So we know that chiropractic is having a huge impact on the nervous system, and I think the future for us is really owning and taking control of this issue of the nervous system.

No, that's wonderful, and I think the word racking the vertebrae back into place is probably not appropriate in the modern ROF, but hearing you talk, I love the transition we're making as a profession. Are we ready for that? And are the students coming out?

Is it still the same old, I'm going to go hang my own shingle kind of thing, or do you think the profession is evolving like other businesses where you go through your, find out your strengths and your weaknesses, figure out what my personality type is? You know, I know some guys and gals come out and they're more equipped to be a caregiver. They're not an entrepreneurial spirit like you and I.

They're not built to build a business. So is there something in school now where the students are starting to discover that stuff so that we, I just feel like chiropractors should be together more. That's just my thought.

I have five associates. I want to have more. I just feel like we thrive better in a tribe like that.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I would agree totally with you. Two points on that. One is when I got to life, one of the things we did after we reestablished and stabilized the school and it was growing was we looked at our curriculum and we added up all the hours that were spent on bones, right?

Spinal bones, right? And then all the hours that were spent on the nerve system and it was so disproportionate to bones, it's no wonder that our profession and the chiropractors graduating have a bad back kind of consciousness, you know, versus a neurological consciousness. And so we made a commitment at life to readjust that balance.

So literally, we had more, and I think this is probably still true, we had more people who had been diplomates in functional neurology teaching neurology classes than all the other chiropractic schools combined. Right? Or it was at least close.

And the second thing is we made a commitment that we would teach neurology in the classroom to a diplomate level. Now, not necessarily the application of that through a functional neurology center, but the understanding of the nerve system. So, the kids getting out of school today have an understanding of the nerve system that is so far beyond mine.

And when I graduated in 1972, that it's incredible. So, I think they have those resources. But to your point, in the old days, it was single doc, hanging up a shingle, you had to be an entrepreneur, you had to battle marketing and branding and all those kinds of issues.

I sit on a board right now called Vistria out of Chicago. It's a group of venture capitalists that are working with a group called ChiroOne. And they have about 150 clinics, they're going to 400.

And they are the perfect example of taking chiropractors coming out of school and setting them up in practice and saying, you take care of the patients. You take care of them Monday through Thursday, you educate them, we'll do all the work around it, which is staff and driving patients to your practice, keeping track of the money, the statistics, all those kinds of things. So I think we're seeing that in the profession.

My daughter and son-in-law have about 100 offices called 100% Chiropractic. They go out and skim off the cream of the crop out of each school, the entrepreneurs, and set them up in practices. The other end of the scale is like Chiro One that says, hey, we'll take people that don't want to be entrepreneurs, that don't want to do this, give them a great living in Chiropractic, and let turn them loose to provide outrageous care, and we'll handle all the other stuff for them.

So I think that's happened more and more in Chiropractic.

Oh, I love hearing that, and it really encourages me because I've always felt that's the future, is that we need to bond together and play to our strengths, and what you're saying there is these companies are helping fulfill those weaknesses that you might have so that you can play to your strengths and be your best. Some guys come out, they're entrepreneurial spirits, they're going to start their own practice. That's just going to happen.

But I love what you're saying now is that I think the future of Chiropractic is working in teams, working in a legitimate business where you don't have the stress of running the day to day.

The other part of that, if you don't mind me interrupting, the other part of that is specialization in Chiropractic. You know, in medicine, you walk into a hospital, you know, because you have an earache, and all of a sudden, they've got people, they can refer you to all sorts of specialists in that structure. In Chiropractic, Chiropractors have for some, I don't know, egotistical reason think, well, if I can't take care of it, a patient comes in and I can't address what they have, I'm shipping them off to the medical community, not me, right?

To me, my idea is if a patient comes in, we have a lot of kids coming in now with learning disabilities into our clinics here in the Detroit area. And the first thing we do is we examine them, of course, chiropractically. We then have a functional neurologist that we can send them to that starts checking the reading levels and how their brain is working, how their eyes are working, right, to include along with chiropractic.

And we also have someone around here that practices pediatric chiropractic. So, you know, instead of referring them off to the medical community, we refer them to other places, right? Including, I took my dogs in this weekend for two chiropractors who take care of animals, right?

So, you know, I think that this specialization in chiropractic is great. No chiropractor can be everything to every patient. For example, I hated taking care of PI patients.

So I had the chiropractor I referred them to. He hated taking care of families because kids would come in and eat his plants, you know? And I love that.

So we referred back and forth to each other frequently, and I think that's also about our profession growing up.

Yeah, I feel like that's always been a bit of an Achilles heel where we tend to circle the wagons inward and shoot at each other, and I think it's so beautiful. I have a couple situations very similar to that where we refer out regularly. Now, some people like myself are building teams that have specialties on that same team too.

So I think chiropractors growing up, like you said. So now as we pivot and you and I both grew up in an era where technology, talk VHS, earlier offline, we're talking about how you used to print your emails. Anyway, you and I become our parents, but as we look at this, the future and technology, give me a glimpse into the future of chiropractic, especially with the remote workforce now and all these different resets we've gone through.

Well, let me give you three points. This is my new interest over the last five years. People, because of these things, because of our iPhones, people are living remote lives.

Let me tell you what I did yesterday, just so you know, right? I got online and bought return tickets to Puerto Rico, where I live half the year. I needed to get some stuff before I went down there, so I got on Amazon and I ordered four or five things.

I also am getting ready to go on a great golf trip with some friends, and I needed some new shorts and golf shirts and balls, right, and a glove. Well, those are different places that you go to to get the clothing versus the balls versus the clubs. I set up dinner reservations for Friday and Saturday night, and a number of other things.

If I would have had to go and do all those things, I would have been spending two days running around the stores all over the place. Instead, I got all that done in half an hour, in the 30 minutes laying in bed at 10.30 at night, waiting for Erica to get the kids down, right? I got online and I ordered all that stuff.

Amazon is the ultimate example of that, right? And stuff has been being delivered to my front doorstep all morning long this morning, right? We're living remote lives of management, and people are doing that not just in bed at night before they go to sleep.

They're ordering groceries while they're standing on their kids' soccer field watching their young kids play soccer. They're ordering dinner that they're going to pick up on the way home. They're on Whole Foods.

Whole Foods is delivering the groceries to their front doorstep. And we see this everywhere. Carvana has no showrooms, right?

You see them in these big cities, these glass cylinders that are eight stories high, like a vending machine with cars stacked up. I had a friend a year ago. We were watching the NBA Finals.

He ordered a car at halftime, and it got delivered. He drove it for a week and decided whether he wanted it or not. So, you know, we're seeing the American Banking Association, for example, says by the year 2034, which is not far away, 2034, there will not be one single branch bank left in the United States.

They'll have their big headquarters downtown where they're doing administrative stuff, but everything else is going to be done online, which most of it is today anyway. So people are living remote lives of remote management. Medicine has been into this for a while.

So, for example, a couple of sort of scary statistics. 75% of hospitals in the United States already have an app that they're using for remote patient management. And 50% of the patients that go through the hospital are signed up into these programs.

White Plains Hospital in New York, for example, has a program that's typical called Hospital at Home. 50% of the people that go through White Plains Hospital are signed up in this app so that the medical community is now in our patients' living rooms, bedrooms, et cetera, and they're communicating information to them, research, data, health care advice, all those kinds of things. We are so late to the show.

This one's even more telling. 20% of all cell phone users in the United States, which is basically everybody in the United States that's older than eight has a cell phone, right? So 20% of all cell phone users in the United States already have an app that their doctor has given to them that the doctor is using to manage their health care.

So they might have a patch to measure their insulin levels so the doctor can get those readings twice a day, manage their diabetes remotely, et cetera, et cetera. 20% of the people in the United States, one out of five is already having their health care managed by a doctor through some type of remote app. And just to give you an idea of how widespread this is, and this is not a blip on the screen, one small aspect of remote health management is telehealth, right?

It's one small piece of it, but it's reflective. In 2016, there were, excuse me, I take that back. In 2017, there were 350,000 televisits to MDs.

Last year, there were one billion. One out of every five visits to a medical doctor last year were televisits. One out of every five.

So things are changing. There's a company, you can look at it online. It's a medical group called Forward.

They are sweeping the country. You can get online and see their video. You go in, they have no reception room.

There's no staff there. You go in, you can go in every day if you want. They have equipment.

You can measure how your health care is going. The consultations are done remotely for the most part. And the way they have it set up, it's a program where you pay a monthly fee and it covers all of your health care rather than a per visit kind of fee.

I mean, things are changing quickly in health care. In chiropractice, we've got to get this wrapped around us or we're going to be left in the dust.

Yeah, that's wonderful. I mean, you're so spot on there, Doc. And even in my practice, we've began implementing this with some HIPAA-compliant apps and whatnot.

And I know that's just going to get better and better. Obviously, the good old-fashioned adjustment needs to take place in the clinic. But to your point earlier, it seems like chiropractic is heading toward not only giving great neurologically-based spinal care, but also what you said earlier is so spot on of being able to come alongside them and help them with their lifestyle.

And these are things we can do remotely, and we can do it more efficiently remotely. Gosh, when you're in the clinic, I know you used to hate this, I hate this, where you don't have enough time to spend with this patient and go over what you want to go over with them because the waiting rooms get filled up. And so anyway, I think it's great.

So any other... Go ahead.

You know, to your point, one of the things... This happens to chiropractors all the time. Patient gets up off the table and says, hey, doc, my wife and I just got pregnant.

What do you think about chiropractic for her, for the baby? Is it safe? You're right.

There's a bunch of people in the reception room. The chiropractor gives them a bad five or seven minute view of how we view chiropractic and natural birth and chiropractic sends them home with no information, no research on any of that. And patient leaves the office without our story, so to speak.

Today, for example, we have an app that we put out that's just come out to manage all those things like you said. So the patient says to my staff today, hey, we just got pregnant, what do you think? The office gives them a one minute answer.

Hey, we have an app. The app has a five trimester program with Claudia Onrig, one of the leaders in our profession in pregnancy. She does the three months prior to pregnancy, trimester one, two and three, the four months after pregnancy, all the things that you need during that time, the research articles.

And so when you get home, get into the app, go to the pregnancy section in the programs and start your five trimester program with all the videos, research articles, and we'll check in with you on your visits.

That's just one topic. I imagine your app, you just fill in the blanks, right?

It's got over 20 different programs in there, from gut restoration to the newest one on long haul COVID, which they now know. Long haul COVID symptoms of fatigue, confusion, brain fog, all of that. The research coming out from the universities now says it's all about the nervous system.

They don't know what to do with it, but they've even said it's about the vagus nerve and getting the vagus nerve stimulated. And by the way, one of the things that we did was we did a year long study with 25 patients from different offices across the United States without their chiropractors being involved.

Right?

So we got the real scoop. Two things we found out a lot, but two great things. They all love their chiropractors, right?

They all love their chiropractor. The other thing though, the number one thing they said was we have more questions to ask our chiropractor, but we don't ask because we know they're too busy. Right?

And so we said, well then where are you going to get your answers? And here were the two big answers, WebMD and Google. Right?

So when they go there, what are they getting? They're getting medical advice, they're getting Google, they're getting Dr. Bill Gates, you know? It gives news on the world and helps share.

And so we're literally sending them by not answering their questions to places that are going to contradict what we're trying to teach them in our chiropractic office. We got to change this.

No, I agree. And that's a brilliant plan. I really like that.

And so I know you and I could talk all day, and I have very personal interest in what you're saying. So you and I are going to talk offline more. But just kind of some final, final parting words to the profession, because just so you know, this is going to go out to all of chiropractic, not just newbies.

So just some parting words as we close this up.

You know, if I were to say two or three critical things that we need to look at as a profession is one is, you know, and we talked, although we didn't get into it about what students need to be successful when they get out, they really need to be grounded in our principles. They need to own those, right? They need to own those principles.

I'm always amazed. We got to watch sort of a microcosm of what's been going on for decades and decades when COVID hit. And at the beginning of COVID, I know myself and my other chiropractic friends, while the world was going insane with masks and fear and, you know, multiple vaccination levels, we laid out the first month that this happened, we go, here's what's going to happen.

When it all gets settled out, here's what's going to happen. We said, number one, they're going to find out that self-immunity is better than the vaccines. And they have, they found out that if you've had COVID, your immunity is two and a half times stronger and last longer than the temporary vaccines with COVID.

We said, everybody's going to get COVID. There's no way to protect us. And it's true.

Everybody's going to get COVID along the way, right? We said that mask and distancing was for the most part, except in certain unique circumstances, sort of ridiculous, right? And yet we still see that they're taking kids who are the least vulnerable, have the least likelihood of getting it, the least likelihood of having adverse effects from getting COVID.

And there's these school systems still trying to mask and do social distancing in schools, even though John Hopkins came out with their research and said that that had absolutely almost nothing to do with protecting us from COVID. And in fact, they have created a problem. And one of the problems they created, we destroyed a whole generation of kids that we're now finding are mentally challenged because of the lack of a year of social interaction and all those kinds of things.

We did that all wrong. And yet, you know what? A group of us sat around and said, here's what they're going to find out when this all gets said and done.

You say, well, how did you know that ahead of time? Our principles in chiropractic were very clear that that was going to be the outcome. That's right.

One is I think chiropractors really need to get, understand those principles and be able to communicate them. I think the second thing comes from Christiansen, which is we live in a society of disruptive innovation today. You know, the automobile was a disruptive innovation in the world.

The iPhone 11 years ago was a disruptive innovation that changed literally how people lived their lives. And so, you know, we live in an age of disruptive innovation. We need to use these innovations to take care of people, to provide better health care with this neurological orientation.

We need to be able to communicate and educate people more effectively through the systems they're using like remote patient management, you know, various apps and referrals, et cetera. One, the practice grows. You mentioned lifestyle.

I went and Googled, just to wrap this up, I went and Googled the top 10 lifestyle diseases. And it's a list you and I would have come together, we would have created it in five minutes without even Googling it. Heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, et cetera.

Interestingly enough, I went and looked at all the associations that treat those things. I went to the American Heart Association. What's their answer?

Because if it's a lifestyle disease, it's preventable. And the answers were get exercise, clean up your diet, learn how to sleep, control your weight, and have social interaction, social connectedness, as the Cleveland Clinics called it. Then I went and looked up stroke.

It was the same thing. I went and looked up diabetes. It was the same thing.

You follow me? If the formula is there, the only thing they were missing was the adjustment. So the formula was there, and if we as chiropractors recognize that and give the adjustment, teach people our principles, have them adjust their lifestyle, be able to answer questions, or give them direction where to get the answers that are within our lifestyle, you know what?

We're going to prevent problems, these lifestyle issues, just by cleaning up the way people live, function, eat, move, etc. And I think that makes chiropractic on an entirely different level in a person's life. When they see chiropractors not as a back doctor or a neck doctor when you have a pain, they see them as part of their neurological and their brain health.

And they see them as part of lifestyle management. They see them as way of preventing problems. That's a whole different level of sophistication and respect for the chiropractic profession.

So I think that's where we're headed.

So what I'm hearing you say is this is our time. This is our moment to step into the gap. And I hope and pray that we're ready.

I just hope and pray we're ready. And you give me encouragement, man. You really do.

You've been at this a long time, man. And you have a very encouraging spirit. And this is our time as a profession.

And you spoke into that the whole time, man. And you are, I know you don't necessarily use this word. But you have left some incredible legacies behind you in many different areas.

And it looks like you're not done. And I love that because it was your calling. You know, it's not your job.

This is your calling. And you can only sit on the beach so much, right, Doc?

Yeah. You know, one of the people that was one of the original founders of Life University, and he's still on the board, is Dr. Charles Ribley of Michigan. I can't tell you the impact by being on the Life University board for 35 plus years and starting the school and all the students that they've sent to school and educated.

You got to look at and say, well, that one individual has had a tremendous impact on chiropractic today. And what was funny was we were at a board meeting. It wasn't funny.

It was emotional. It made me cry. When he got out of chiropractic school, he wanted to go to Michigan, but it was really difficult to get in because of these basic science boards that the MDs ran.

And so they were known that you had a good shot of getting through the basic science board in a few states. One of them was New Mexico. And then you could have through reciprocity, you could get into Michigan or some other state.

And so he went and took the basic science board when he graduated in New Mexico and failed the first time. And one of the people pulled him aside and said, look, here's what you need to do to prepare the next go-round. And he came back and took the exam the next go-round passed and all this other stuff about starting the school and his history, et cetera.

And we were in a board meeting, and Chuck Ribley was talking about this. He said, I was asleep last night. And in the middle of the night, I woke up.

And he said, I remembered the day I took that exam and the advice of getting through the board. And he said, I remembered that the person who gave me that advice and got me through that board was Dr. Alvin Reikeman, my father. And that's brutal.

That's awesome. Things happen. You follow me?

What we do today impacts huge numbers of people. And so we need to do it with integrity. We need to do it with humility.

We need to put our block in the wall for humanity and then train the next generation and move on. And I'm just so proud to be part of this thing called ChiroPractic.

Man, that's a good way to cap this. Thanks for that story. That just makes my heart flutter and sounds like your dad was quite a special man.

So, Doc, I just want to thank you once again for your willingness to come on our podcast. For those of you out there that are tuning in to this, this is a real treat for you. And I just want to applaud you for taking the time to watch and listen to this podcast.

We always say that time spent on personal development is great time spent and keep doing that. We need you now. It's our time.

Like Dr. Guy said, this is our time to step in the fold. And once again, I want to thank ChiroTouch for their willingness to put out these podcasts. I think this is a great, great vision here.

And the profession needs this kind of content. And they need to hear from Dr. Guy and all the other greats in our profession. So again, thank you, ChiroTouch.

And thank you again, Dr. Guy. And for those of you out there, make sure you're taking care of yourself in a way you want your patients to take care of themselves. So don't neglect yourselves, doc.

Right now, we need to be at our best. The world needs you at your best. So once again, thank you.

And I hope you have an amazing day.

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