750,000 Adjustments Later: What 44 Years as the Last Resort Doctor has Taught him

About this episode

Most people do not go looking for a chiropractor until something has already gone wrong. Dr. Nick Athens built an entire career on that fact, and then spent 44 years trying to change it. He opened his doors in June of 1983 with no patients and no safety net, in a profession that was still being called quackery out loud. Eight out of ten people he approached turned him down. He kept going, built a practice from scratch in San Carlos, and eventually found himself in the locker rooms of the San Francisco Giants and the San Francisco 49ers, working on athletes whose careers depended on whether his hands actually worked. What he learned there was not really about athletes. Somewhere north of 750,000 adjustments in, the pattern he kept seeing was that almost nobody had ever been taught how to sleep, how to breathe, how to handle stress, or how to sit, stand and move without slowly wrecking themselves. Doctors were handing out prescriptions. Nobody was handing out guidance. So he wrote it down. "To Health With You" is his answer to the question he was tired of repeating one patient at a time: what does it actually look like to age on purpose instead of by accident? In this conversation