Welcome back. It has been a while. And there is a lot to catch up on.
If you are new here, hello. I am Dr. Elizabeth Hoefer. I am a Blair upper cervical chiropractor, the founder of Well Connected Chiropractic in Mission Viejo, California, and the host of this podcast. If you have been here since the beginning, thank you for waiting. I took a hiatus that turned into several years, and I am genuinely excited to be back.
Today I want to tell you a little bit about how I got here. Not just the chiropractic part, but the whole thing. Because it is a story that I think deserves to be told plainly, without a lot of polish, as a reminder of what is possible when you decide to stop getting by and start going somewhere.
$6.19 an Hour and a Front Row Seat to Miracles
I did not grow up planning to be a chiropractor. I grew up in Davenport, Iowa, which is the birthplace of chiropractic. People in Davenport see chiropractors the way people everywhere else see dentists: it is just the thing you do. So I had been adjusted throughout my life for sports injuries and minor accidents, but I never really thought about it as a profession.
What changed that was a part-time job.
In 2001, my friend's mom, Kim Hutchinson, slipped my application into the pile at Palmer College of Chiropractic's main clinic. I got hired. I made $6.19 an hour working nights. And I spent those hours watching student doctors and clinicians help people in ways that I could not fully explain but absolutely could not stop thinking about.
I was 21 years old. I had a daughter. I had not had a lot of people in my life telling me I was capable of much beyond getting by. And watching those miracles happen in that clinic, night after night, something in me started asking: what if?
I enrolled in the chiropractic technology associate program first. I told myself I could just be the assistant. About halfway through, I realized that was not going to work. Taking direction from someone was, as I told a room full of people not long ago, a little much. I wanted to understand why. I wanted to go deeper. And the students around me kept saying: Liz, you have the gift of gab. You believe in this. Become the doctor.
I was scared of the debt. I was scared of the boards. I had a little girl to support and no safety net. But in November of 2004, I enrolled in the Doctor of Chiropractic program. I opened my calendar and circled October 24th, 2008: the day I would become a doctor. And I got to work.
The Blair Correction That Changed Everything
A year before I graduated, I was spiraling. The pressure of building a future while managing the darkness I had been carrying for most of my life was catching up with me. I had dealt with depression and anxiety for years. I had been in really dark places before. And I was heading back into one.
My best friend in chiropractic school, Jackie Newhouse, had had enough of watching me struggle with something she believed could be helped. She gave me an ultimatum: try Blair upper cervical chiropractic, or she was done hearing about it.
I was skeptical. I had grown up around chiropractic and thought I already knew what it was. I had even made fun of the upper cervical doctors on campus a little bit, honestly. They had this confidence that felt a little much to me at the time. Now that I am one of them, I completely understand it. When you know, you know.
I submitted myself to the care at the clinic. My Blair correction was on October 27th, 2007, one year before I graduated.
Instantly, the sounds in the room were clearer. The colors were brighter. And I felt something I had genuinely never felt in my life: hope. Real hope, not the kind you talk yourself into. The kind that arrives.
I enrolled in the Blair elective immediately. I graduated. I built a practice. And I have spent the 18 years since then telling anyone who will listen that there is hope in this thing called upper cervical chiropractic.
The Broadway Singer Who Found a Different Stage
People who know me well are not surprised that I ended up in a career that requires me to talk to people all day. What they might not know is what I originally wanted to do with that gift.
I wanted to be a Broadway singer. I was in musical theater. I danced, I acted, I sang. I had real opportunity in front of me. And then I got pregnant at 18, and I knew I could not go to New York as a single mother. I let the dream go.
But here is what I have come to understand looking back at it: I was never going to stop being drawn to sound and voice. The vagus nerve, which is central to everything I now do clinically, is regulated in part through singing and humming and vocalizing. I was addicted to nervous system regulation before I had any idea that was a thing. The stage just changed shape.
Now I am always on a stage of a different kind. Educating, teaching, speaking, sharing. The gift is the same. The application is just better than I ever could have planned.
What I Got Wrong About Chiropractic, and What Most People Still Do
One of the most frustrating things I encounter is being told I am not a real doctor.
I have the student loans to prove otherwise. I have the licensing exams, the continuing education requirements, the diplomat credential, and 18 years of clinical results. We go through a rigorous process to earn this degree and we never stop studying to keep it. Chiropractic is not a luxury. It is an essential component of nervous system health, and your nervous system determines everything about how your body functions.
People also get wrong that a bad experience with one chiropractor means chiropractic does not work. I had a man yell at me at a networking event once about a previous chiropractor who had hurt him. I told him: have you ever gotten a bad haircut? You probably found a different barber. Same principle. Find your fit. Find your vibe. The right approach exists for you.
The field is vast. There are so many techniques and philosophies within chiropractic that what did not work for you somewhere else may be completely different from what I do here. Blair upper cervical is specific, gentle, image-guided, and precise. No twisting, no popping, no cracking. If that sounds different from what you have experienced before, it is. Come find out.
The Diplomat and the Practice Growing at the Same Time
The reason this podcast went on hiatus is because I opened Well Connected in May of 2019 and simultaneously enrolled in a postgraduate diplomat program in cranial cervical junction procedures, the most neurologically complex area of the spine. For three years, I traveled at least once a month to study neurology, physiology, structure, blood flow, and cerebrospinal fluid flow at a depth that transformed my clinical results.
I called the practice and the diploma my twins. They grew up together. As I learned more, I saw better results. As my results improved, more people came. And through it all, my husband and kids held the fort while I was gone, and I am more grateful for that than I can say.
I now have some of the richest friendships of my life with the doctors I met in that program. We call ourselves the battery killers because we were always on the phone and our batteries were always dead. The program continues to bless me professionally and personally in ways I did not anticipate.
Are You Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired?
Here is my pitch, the thing I say when someone asks what I do: are you experiencing anything you do not like in your body? A headache? A back that hurts? Exhaustion at the end of every day? Irritability you cannot explain? All of that is connected to how healthy your nervous system is.
What if I could show you a way to regulate your nervous system without expensive, time-consuming, ongoing treatment? What if we could engineer a correction specific to the exact anatomy of your spine, and what if it held?
That is what we do at Well Connected. For less than $300, you can have a cone beam CT, a three-dimensional image of your neck that most people have never seen. I can use that to engineer a Blair upper cervical correction that is built for your body and nobody else's.
No twisting. No popping. No cracking. Just your head getting straight and your body remembering how to heal.
I will see you in the next episode.
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Ready to get started? Visit us at wellconnectedchiro.com.
