I have wanted to have Rich Carr on this podcast for three years. Rich is an author, a mentor, and a learning scientist who completely changed the way I communicate with my patients. But before he was any of that to me, he was a man who had every reason to stay away from chiropractic for good.
Thirteen years ago, Rich was run over by a car. He lost his right leg. His right arm was torn off and reattached. Vertebrae in his neck were fused with titanium hardware. Before the accident, Rich had been a regular chiropractic patient who liked to hike, fish, and work out. After it, he didn't step foot in a chiropractic office for ten years. He was terrified that anyone touching his neck again would undo everything the surgeons had put back together.
That fear is something I hear from patients all the time, and it never gets old to watch someone work through it. Rich finally flew down to my office because he trusted that a Blair correction was different. There's no twisting, no popping, no cracking. We use a 3D scan to find the exact correction someone's body needs, which meant we could work with him even with hardware in his neck and a body that had been through more trauma than most people could imagine.
Rich remembers walking out of that first adjustment feeling almost let down, like nothing had happened at all. Then he woke up the next morning and the pain that had been with him for years was simply gone. Not faded. Gone. He described it to me as somebody had been sitting a car on his arm for years, and suddenly the weight lifted.
Before that adjustment, Rich was on prescription Oxycontin, a hundred milligrams at a time, just to function through nerve pain. Today he takes it once a quarter, if that. He runs again. He works out. If you passed him on the street, you would have no idea what his body has survived.
That's the story that brought Rich into my world. But it isn't the only reason I wanted him on the show.
Rich is also the mind behind Brain-centric Design, a framework for how the brain actually processes and retains communication. I took his class years ago and got certified, and it changed the way I teach, the way I lecture, and the way I connect with every single patient who walks through my door. One of the biggest lessons Rich taught me is something called working memory. Research shows most people can only hold about four to six new pieces of information in their mind at once. If you overload someone with everything you know, they walk away remembering nothing. But if you give them one big idea and build everything else around it, they remember all of it.
I use this every day in my practice. Instead of trying to remember every detail about a patient's life from my own notes, I ask them one question at the end of a visit. What's one word that describes how you feel right now? They might say seen, or heard, or supported. That word becomes the thread I pull on the next time they come in, and it lets me reconnect instantly to their whole story, not because I have some incredible memory, but because Rich taught me how memory actually works.
It's part of why Well Connected has grown from three employees to twenty-two, and why we're able to see a thousand patient visits a month with one doctor. Communication rooted in how the brain actually learns changes everything, not just in a doctor's office, but in a boardroom, a classroom, or a conversation with your own kid about something they're struggling with.
Rich has a fourth book coming out on September 5th called Stake Skills, all about how to stay relevant and take ownership of your work in a world where AI does more and more of the heavy lifting. If his first three books are any indication, this one will change the way a lot of people think, too.
If you take one thing from Rich's story, let it be this. Fear can keep you stuck for a decade. But healing is still on the other side of it, whenever you're ready to face it.
Listen to the full conversation with Rich Carr on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Rich at brain-centric.com. Find us at wellconnectedchiro.com.
