There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with treating a colleague.
When Dr. Mindi Jentes called me begging to get on my schedule, she told me she didn't care if it cost her a thousand dollars, didn't care if the appointment was at 2:00 in the morning. If I didn't get her in, she was going to the hospital to have surgery. She was in tears. She was desperate.
And I thought: this is where the rubber meets the road. This is a doctor. She knows anatomy, she knows technique, she has advanced certification in activator and trains other practitioners. If Blair upper cervical chiropractic is as real as I know it to be, this is the moment to prove it. Not to her, exactly. To both of us.
I got her in that Friday afternoon. And what unfolded from that point forward was, in her words and mine, nothing short of a miracle.
A Lifetime of Headaches and a Heart That Was Struggling
Dr. Mindi had been a headache sufferer her whole life. A traumatic birth had set things in motion early, and though she had found some relief through chiropractic over the years, the headaches had never fully resolved. She had built her own practice using activator technique, which she is gifted at and deeply trained in. She was helping patients every day.
And then, two or three years into practice, everything escalated.
The headaches became unbearable. Neck pain radiated into her shoulder, down her arm, all the way into her hands. She was experiencing numbness, tingling, and loss of motor strength. As a chiropractor who uses her hands for a living, losing function in her arm was not just painful. It was terrifying. She was looking at the possible end of her practice, and she was only a few years in.
On top of all of that, her heart murmur was acting up.
Dr. Mindi was born with mitral valve prolapse, a condition where the mitral valve doesn't close completely and can leak. It is not typically dangerous from birth, but as hormone changes occur heading into midlife, it can become increasingly symptomatic: palpitations, racing heart rate, elevated blood pressure, chest pain. She was experiencing all of it simultaneously.
When she came in for that first visit and I checked her blood pressure, it was alarmingly high. She insisted my cuff was wrong.
It wasn't wrong.
What the Correction Did
After the adjustment, the transformation Dr. Mindi experienced was rapid and far-reaching. The neck pain, the arm symptoms, the headaches: they responded. But what neither of us expected was what happened to her heart.
The palpitations settled. Her blood pressure normalized. The chest discomfort eased.
I want to be thoughtful about how I explain this, because I am not making a claim that chiropractic adjusts the heart. What I am saying is that the vagus nerve, the nerve responsible for regulating heart rate, blood pressure, and a host of other autonomic functions, passes directly through the upper cervical spine. When C1 and C2 are misaligned and the nervous system is under compression, the body's ability to regulate those functions can be compromised. When the alignment is restored and the interference is removed, those systems can return to normal function.
The body knows how to do this. It just needs the interference removed so it can.
Watching a fellow doctor go through that healing process, watching her own clinical understanding shift as she experienced firsthand what her patients experience, was one of the most profound things I have witnessed in my career. It impressed me. And as I told her: I see miracles every day. That is not a word I use lightly.
Chiropractors Need Chiropractic Too
There is something I want to say directly to any healthcare provider who might be reading this.
We are not exempt from the things we treat. We carry stress. We have physical demands in our work. We sustain our own injuries. We have our own structural histories and our own nervous systems that can go offline just like anyone else's.
Dr. Mindi knew this intellectually. She knew Blair upper cervical chiropractic existed. She had heard me talk about it. She had seen what it did for the patients we shared. And still, the urgency of her own situation is what finally brought her in.
That is not a criticism of her. That is human nature. We often need to arrive at the edge of something before we say yes to the help that was available all along.
What I hope her story communicates to providers everywhere is this: you cannot pour from an empty vessel. Getting your own care is not a luxury or an afterthought. It is the foundation from which you serve everyone else.
What Pain and the Pandemic Prepared Her For
Dr. Mindi's healing journey did not end with the physical. She went through an emotional and spiritual reckoning in the years that followed, one she was honest enough to share pieces of on this podcast. The pain cracked something open. The healing brought things to the surface. And what she came out with was a clearer sense of who she was, what she was carrying, and what she was built to do.
She moved across the country to North Carolina with her husband and children. She joined an Atlas chiropractic practice in Raleigh, continuing to use her activator expertise alongside upper cervical technique. And she started a separate private practice focused on functional nutrition and emotional healing for women, offered primarily via teleconference.
She is also building an online wellness retreat called Pain to Peace, a journey designed to walk people through physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental healing together, so they can visualize and begin to live their ideal life on the other side.
I said it on the podcast and I mean it: God doesn't waste a thing. Every valley, every health crisis, every late-night desperate phone call, it all becomes material. It all becomes the testimony that guides the person coming down the path behind you.
Dr. Mindi went from pain to peace. And now she is building a bridge for others to do the same.
Find Dr. Mindi
Dr. Mindi Jentes can be found at briowellness.com, where she offers functional nutrition and emotional wellness services via teleconference. If you are in the Raleigh, North Carolina area and looking for upper cervical chiropractic care, she is there too.
And if you are a chiropractor in Southern California who has been watching Blair upper cervical from a distance and wondering if it might help your patients, or you yourself, I would love to have that conversation.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Mindi Jentes on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Dr. Mindi Jentes at briowellness.com.
