My educational path to chiropractor
My
educational path to chiropractor
(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.)
I get asked
this all the time: “What kind of education did you need to pursue to become a
chiropractor? You didn’t just start
making back-crack videos overnight, did you?” In fact, I get asked this so
often that I thought it might just be a good idea to write this blog post about
it, so here we go! Obviously, school (both my undergraduate and graduate
studies) was a huge part of my training, but it wasn’t everything. As you’ll see
below, the vast majority of my expertise was really fine-tuned after school was finished, out there in the real world.
But school was definitely my starting point!
My educational introduction to the world of health care stared at Oakland
University in Rochester, Michigan. This is where I earned my Bachelor of Arts
degree with a major in communications and a minor in biology. But even more
important, this is the time when I worked as a lab assistant, and later, a
nurse assistant in a hospital. As I mentioned in a different blog post a while back, this is when my eyes were first opened to
the fact that chronic pain can lead to a host of other, far more
serious problems. And most important, this is when I learned that I wanted to
help people before it was too late. But how?
Well, it was Dr. Guzzardo (also mentioned in
that previous blog post) that suggested Life University in
Marietta, Georgia. So, after some hands-on research, that’s exactly where I
went for four years, earning my Doctorate in Chiropractic. But here too, it was
my interning at different chiropractic offices that really made the difference.
This is where I really learned the basics. Most of the traditional
chiropractic clinics I worked in followed a pretty similar procedure: heat/ice,
tens unit, one or two adjustments, then roller table. All too often, though, I
saw that this standard process would get very poor results, and the same
patients would keep returning with the exact same problems, without any
improvements. So, even though I was officially a chiropractor now, I didn’t
quite feel like on yet – there had
to be a better way, I thought.
Turns out, there was. My very first position
out of school opened my eyes even wider. I had the privilege of working at the
largest chiropractic office in North America – we were seeing 2,000 patients per week! And here, the patients were getting
true, lasting results. Finally! It was at this clinic that I was first
introduced to the y-strap and to full body adjustments. I learned from the
legendary Dr. Zaino, and I attended several seminars that widened my chiropractic
understanding. As anyone might do, I took what I found to be the best elements
from each experience, and incorporated those things into what you now see me do
with my patients today.
As you can see, it wasn’t a short road, and
it wasn’t an easy road, but is anything worthwhile ever short or easy?
Eventually, these years of schooling, and (most importantly) real-world
experience and mentoring finally paid off. Without that entire process, these people might still have chronic pain, and you
might not have these entertaining videos to watch. So, I guess it really worked out
for all of us, lol.
