My Story
It always interests me on how people get into the unique type of medicine that I practice, mostly because as the saying goes, we don’t really choose to get into it but rather we are chosen.
My journey started out as a premature baby that spent the first two months of my life in the hospital and was born 22 days after the vaccine schedule had radically changed for the worse in the late 80’s due to the manufacturers no longer being liable for injuries. Once I was able to go home from the hospital, childhood was awesome. I grew up in and around Chicago, IL and was a very active kid with a great family. On the outside, I was just like all the other kids in regards to sports and outdoor activities besides the fact that I was sick all the time. My stomach hurt often, I caught every cold and flu that was going around and had very odd types of illnesses. These consisted of multiple bouts of walking pneumonia, high fevers, full body itching episodes, migraines and other illnesses that doctors couldn’t figure out which kept me home from school for weeks at a time. I received countless rounds of antibiotics and steroids as a result of this, which at the time is what I viewed as cures. This continued through out high school and when the time came to choose what to study in college, I chose pharmacy. After all, pharmaceuticals are what I thought of whenever the word health was mentioned because it was all I was used to.
As the time approached to apply to pharmacy school, I thought it would be a good idea to job shadow to make sure this was the right field for me. It took me 5 minutes of following around a pharmacist to realize that it wasn’t. I needed interaction with people and that field didn’t provide that. I figured that I would shadow the other two types of doctors that helped me during my basketball years in high school, a podiatrist and a chiropractor. Podiatry didn’t really resonate with me but when I shadowed my chiropractor, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. It was the only doctor that I had experienced patients walking in not feeling great and left feeling fantastic right before my eyes. It was on that day that I would choose to go to chiropractic school.
In chiropractic school I thought I had it all figured out. I was going to graduate and be solely a physical medicine chiropractor treating weightlifters and athletes because we all know that they injure themselves the most leading to endless amounts of patients and business. But a year in is when I experienced my chosen moment. I was about to head on a vacation to Europe when my seasonal allergies flared up. I went to our Naturopathic clinic on campus where I couldn’t get into the student intern that was recommended and I was paired with a random intern. This intern, who already had her Chiropractic license, would muscle test me and find certain blocks in my body that she was not allowed to correct in the clinic. So she told me to go find a certain upper trimester student who she had studied with and have him take a look at me. Little did I know was that this student, Dr. Jordan Bray, would show me a world of medicine I never knew existed and change my life forever. To this day he is one of my best friends and I have had the pleasure of going around the country teaching technique with him for the last few years. But at the time, all I knew was that I had allergies and he supposedly had the solution to my issues.
When he first treated me, he started testing my muscles and within two minutes of finding strong and weak muscles on me, he verbalized pretty much the first 23 years of my life health wise. Its like he was having a conversation with my body through these muscle tests and I didn’t even have to tell him what was wrong with me or what health issues I had had in my past. Not only did he nail every health ailment that I had experienced in the first couple decades of my life but also after treating me for 30 minutes that Friday afternoon, I felt the best I had ever felt in my life. He had used chiropractic adjustments, emotional corrections, homeopathy and other tools that were mostly foreign to me at the time. And although they were foreign, I couldn’t dispute the euphoric feeling that I experienced from them. The best way I could describe it was that my body was humming and it was amazing. I knew that this is what the people of the world needed and I was going to be a vessel to give it to them.
This was the moment I found my purpose in life. I had been chosen.
For the next 3 years I took hundreds of hours of seminars and studied thousands of hours more. I wanted to learn everything that Jordan knew and see what he had been exposed too to be able to provide these types of treatments. We clicked because we both had certain types of minds. He was one of the most brilliant minds I had ever been around and I had a very unique photographic memory that allowed me to keep up with him and even challenge him often times, something that he might dispute these days ha! Those years shaped me into the doctor I am today.
When I graduated school, I was recruited by a very successful practice where people came from all over to find solutions to their unresolved health issues. The practice is called the Cohn Health Institute in Costa Mesa, CA and I have practiced there for the last 6 years. It has been the privilege of a lifetime to be able to provide treatments there for hundreds of people and witness people’s lives change daily. On top of private practice, I have gone around the country teaching a technique called Contact Reflex Analysis, also known as CRA, to other practitioners ranging from chiropractors to medical doctors and everything in between. My treatments are heavily based on this technique and I credit it for most of my success with patients. I am forever grateful to its founder Dr. Dick Versendaal for giving the gift of Contact Reflex Analysis to humanity and extra grateful for his daughter, Dawn Hoezee, for mentoring me to be the best doctor I can be.
On top of CRA, I have learned numerous techniques that have allowed me to form a very efficient treatment system that permits me to gather a tremendous amount of information about the patient very quickly. It also allows me to find the common denominators in the patient or as we call them, body priorities.
By treating the body priorities systematically instead of going after each issue separately, we use a less is more approach.
This is extremely beneficial because the body functions as a whole where anything can cause anything and not as individual compartments. This concept is why it is very common for modern medicine to have a hard time with complex patients and also why it is very common for these types of patients to find their way into my office. Now I am not trying to put down modern medicine because we all know that it provides miracles for trauma and life threatening situations and we should appreciate that. But we should also realize that that same thought process of treatment does not build health for people and doesn’t evaluate complex patients properly. This is why the typical patient I see has seen on average 5 different doctors before they come see me. I am sure some of my blog will cover this topic at some point in the future.
Lastly, the reason for starting this website and weekly blog was because for the last 5 or so years I have had a countless number of people tell me that I need to start my own podcast or YouTube channel. Now I am a very private and introverted person so those two outlets have never really resonated with me and I figured a blog would be a step in the right direction. The main reason people suggest this is because they say that I am a wealth of knowledge that needs to share my thoughts with people when in reality I am just full of clinical pearls that I have learned from some very smart people that have come before me which often times makes it seems like I have an answer for everything. Well I don’t claim to always have the answers for everything but I do my best with those clinical pearls and the clinical experience I have had with thousands of patient visits. I also learn from our failures. Although I am grateful that I have had way more success than failures, our failures have taught me more about patients than anything and they have made me a better doctor because of them.
Finally, I want to thank you for taking the time to read the summary of my journey and I hope that this website and blog helps you in whatever way you need it to. I truly appreciate your time and please never hesitate to reach out if I can help out in any way, shape or form.