By Todd Stein, DC·4 min read
Most people who end up doing this work start with the body. A sports injury, a parent with back pain, a summer job in a clinic. Something physical happens and the spine becomes the obvious thing to study.
I came at it from the other end. Before chiropractic college I was at Cornell studying neurobiology, perception, and consciousness. I was not thinking about vertebrae. I was thinking about how a nervous system builds the experience of being a person, and why two people can be handed the same set of physical circumstances and live in completely different worlds because of it.
[TODD — why did you choose that field? What were you reading or arguing about at the time that pulled you in?]
What that background does to how you see a spine
When you have spent years thinking about perception, you stop being able to see a body as a machine with a broken part in it.
The mechanical view is genuinely useful and I am not dismissing it. A joint moves or it does not. A muscle is tight or it is not. But the mechanical view answers a narrow question, which is what is wrong with this part. It does not answer the question I find more interesting: what is this whole system doing, and why is it doing it here.
A spine that is holding tension is not malfunctioning. It is responding to something. Sometimes that something is a fall down the stairs. Sometimes it is eleven years of a job, or a loss, or a habit of sitting that started in a chair nobody chose carefully. The tension is the nervous system’s answer to a question it was asked.
That changes what you do with your hands. If you think of the body as a machine with a fault, force is a reasonable tool. You find the stuck thing and you move it. If you think of the body as a system that is responding, force is a strange thing to bring to the conversation, because you are shouting at something that is already braced.
New York Chiropractic College, 1994
I graduated in December of 1994.
[TODD — what was the training actually like? What did you find yourself arguing with? Were there people there who thought the way you did, or were you the odd one out?]
[TODD — the gap between graduating in 1994 and opening here in 1996. What happened in those two years, and did it change anything?]
Ithaca, 1996, and staying
I opened here in 1996 and I have been on North Triphammer Road ever since. Thirty years, same town, most of it the same road.
There is a version of this job where you build a practice, sell it, and build another one. That was never interesting to me. What I wanted was to be somewhere long enough to see what actually happens to people over decades rather than over a course of care. You learn different things on that timescale. You learn what holds and what does not, and you find out which of the things you were confident about at thirty were wrong.
[TODD — is there something you believed early on that you no longer believe? That is the most useful paragraph in this whole piece if you are willing to write it.]
Why any of this matters to someone booking an appointment
It probably does not, most of the time. People call because their neck hurts, or because a friend told them about the place, or because they have been putting it off for two years and today is the day.
But it matters in one practical way. The reason nobody gets cracked here is not a marketing position and it was not a business decision. It comes out of thinking about nervous systems for a long time before I ever put my hands on one. Light contact is what makes sense if you believe the body is responding rather than broken.
If you have avoided chiropractic because of the sound, or because you did not want to be pushed on, that is the thing to know. The approach is gentle because of what I think is going on in there, not because gentle sells.
Dr. Todd Stein has practised in Ithaca since 1996. He holds a Doctor of Chiropractic from New York Chiropractic College and studied neurobiology, perception and consciousness at Cornell University. He is licensed to practise chiropractic in New York State.
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