How I became interested in back health
How I became interested in back health
(Hi, I'm Dr.
Joe 'BackCrack' Cipriano, a chiropractic physician in Greenville, SC. All of
the people you see in my videos are real, actual patients. My y-strap
decompression adjustments get the results people have been searching for. I'm
here to help! For appointments and other information, please visit my website, www.DrJoeBackCrack.com, and to watch
my crack-tastic videos, please visit www.YouTube.com/DrJoeBackCrack.)
Hi everybody!
And welcome to my very first blog post. Over the last couple of years, you’ve
seen me crack many backs and you’ve seen me use
the y-strap several times – maybe even on you! But have you ever
wondered why I decided to do this? Why I want to help patients with their
back health? Several people have asked me this over the last many months, so I
thought this might be a good venue to explain. Really, it all hinges on a
hugely impactful experience I had while I was in college, which I’ll get into
below. This is where I saw what can happen to people with poor back
health, that’s when I realized the importance of good back
health, and, shortly after receiving some related critical advice from a family
friend, that’s when I made my decision to become a chiropractor.
It goes back several
years ago, while I was attending Oakland University; I quickly realized that I
wanted to be involved in the medical field in some way, shape, or form – it was
in my blood since early childhood (and, in fact, that might be a great story
for another time, but for today, I’m just going to stay focused on back health).
So anyway, after a short stint as a hospital lab assistant, I transferred over
to that hospital’s medical-surgical floor as a nurse’s assistant instead. This
is where I saw a true and ongoing tragedy: All of these patients were either
about to go into surgery, or just coming out of surgery, the vast majority
requiring open heart procedures or feet/leg amputations (due to diabetic
neuropathy). I had to see far too many people lose limbs or experience slow,
painful heart surgery recoveries, usually (but not always) because their
lifestyle choices had left them in such poor health.
But why were
so many people making these poor lifestyle choices? Why were so many of them –
who used to be active, who used to eat well, who used to live cleaner lives –
no longer doing so? Sure, for some of them, it was just laziness. For others,
they just didn’t care. But for far too many, it was chronic pain that led
them to stop the exercise that they used to do, or led them to eat unhealthily
as an escape, or led them to consume excessive amounts of medication for
temporary pain relief. At this time, I was strongly considering becoming a
nurse practitioner, a physician assistant, or an MD, to help these people cope
with their new lives and get them safely through their surgeries, as so many in
those positions do so well. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking,
what if I could get to these people earlier, more naturally, before they
stopped exercising, before their diet went south, before they
were deep into meds – really, before the chronic pain?
Luckily for me,
at this precise moment in my life, an old family friend, Dr. Guzzardo (also a
chiropractor), hit me with the reality, like a ton of bricks: He told me that
chiropractic care is one of the first areas where you can have an impact
on one’s life to create change. When he said this, it was immediately so
obvious: If you can help a person relieve their pain early, they often won’t
stop exercising, they often will keep eating a healthy diet, and
they’ll usually have no need for those pain or heart medications. Ever.
Man, I could write a whole blog post on the infinite wisdom of Dr. Guzzardo
(and I probably will sometime soon), but for now I’ll try to stay focused on
the issue at hand: With this wisdom, Dr. Guzzardo pushed me to check out Life
University and their “Life Leadership Weekend” – shortly after, I knew that
being a chiropractor was exactly what I wanted to do, and I was enrolled
in their 4-year Chiropractic Doctorate program.
Life is funny that way, sometimes. You might see a problem, but you might not know what to do about that problem until you have an epiphany. For me, I saw a very clear problem during my time at that hospital during my college years, but the solution wasn’t clear until Dr. Guzzardo pushed that epiphany out of me: If you can help with a person’s pain early, and you can help a person’s entire life later on. For this, I’m extremely and forever grateful to the incredible Dr. Guzzardo. Today, patients travel from all over the world to see me, usually because they’re experiencing that kind of pain, and they’ve exhausted all other options. If I can change just one person’s life a day, if I can help someone get out of that pain so they can make healthier life decisions, then I feel accomplished and purposeful. That’s one less person in the future being on a medical-surgical floor about to undergo a surgery that they’ve now been able to avoid, forever.
