Episode 15 True North Chiropractic
"When you walk through our doors, you probably don't even think it's a chiropractic office. It's whole different feel, because the white coat syndrome when you go into a doctors office... We wanted to create such a warm, friendly, loving environment into our practice."
Doctors Josh and Taylor Logan are the founders, owners, and lead chiropractors at True North Chiropractic in Colorado Springs. For this married couple, a day at work is so much bigger than a spine adjustment — it’s an opportunity to restore physical ability and purpose to the lives of their patients.
In this episode, the Logans reflect on the path that led them to a career in chiropractics, regale the joys and challenges of being both business and life partners, and reveal the meaning behind their business name.
Listen to the conversation to hear how these doctors are bringing healing to their community. And for more inspirational entrepreneur stories, visit our full library.
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Shannon Jirik: Welcome to Metaphorically Speaking. For this conversation, we got to chat with doctors, Josh and Taylor Logan from True North Chiropractic in Colorado Springs, along with their three month old baby, occasionally.
Joe Dudeck: Definitely some cooing or gurgling or something in the background.
Shannon: Right, and it’s not Joe, so.
Joe: Not for the early part. And if there’s some in the latter part, the baby was asleep, that might’ve been me in the background.
Shannon: Oh, gosh. Moving on. Joe, tell me what inspired you to connect with this couple. What about chiropractics was interesting to you?
Joe: Yeah, I think, I mean just chiropractics in general. I’ve been pretty ignorant on the whole profession. I think all I ever really knew about it was just coworkers in the past who had a tight back or neck was out of whack and they would just get a chiropractic appointment and just seemed to go every week and no ending to the procedure. And that’s kind of always been my impression of chiropractic care.
Joe: But on their social media, they do a really good job of educating people about the whole profession and how it’s bigger than just a tight back or a sore neck. And they certainly can do those things and correct those types of pains. And I think most of their patients come through the door with that. But then they’re able to educate them on the many holistic benefits of chiropractic care and how really the whole nervous system controls so many facets of the body.
Shannon: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: And we talk a little bit about the nervous system. Certainly, for me it was in a some sort of dumbed down fashion so I could make sense of it.
Shannon: Yes. Listen on to get the scientific explanation.
Joe: For their knowledge, yeah. But it was really interesting, certainly communicators, the point of communication between the brain and the spinal cord, this whole nervous system working together and how the body can work well when the communication’s running well. I can certainly benefit or I can relate to that in the world we live in for sure.
Shannon: Right. Yeah. Well, and it’s amazing. Like you said, it’s not often just back and neck. And people don’t realize that until they go in. This communication is off and so many other problems are happening that they don’t even realize is connected to that disruption in the nervous system.
Joe: Exactly.
Shannon: So, super interesting.
Joe: We talk a little bit … Yeah, they even talk a little bit about some of the miraculous things that they’ve … I don’t know if miraculous is the right word, well, just kind of like surprising things that they treat in their office.
Shannon: Right.
Joe: Again, it goes beyond just some joint pain. And that was the probably some of the most interesting things that they shared in the interview is just some treatments that they’ve offered that might get people to think bigger and broader than they thought about chiropractic care in the past.
Shannon: Yeah, absolutely. I know for myself, I was encouraged, not that I could get myself there.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shannon: But when I was little, my mom brought me to the chiropractor because I had severe facial and sinus issues.
Joe: Mm.
Shannon: And of course, I knew nothing when I was five.
Joe: Yeah.
Shannon: But that was what they recommended at that point. And I just had never thought that, that would be something that chiropractic care could alleviate or fix.
Joe: Yeah.
Shannon: And my boyfriend had severe migraines and he went to a chiropractor and immediately saw healing from that. So, super, super fascinating.
Joe: Well, that’s like most fascinating, because they both have a really powerful story of how they got into chiropractic care and their health being benefited through the treatment.
Shannon: Right.
Joe: So I think that’s early part in the conversation. And I think that’s super fascinating to hear how they have both personally benefited from the treatment, of course, inspiring them to pass that along to other people.
Shannon: Definitely, definitely. Yeah. And they talk about how it’s so important that once you take care of your body and even regain some of that physical ability that you might not have had before, you’re able to then go out and serve your family better, your community better, be a better employee at your place of work. And I love how that kind of purpose and mission is just driven through their company and through what they do. It’s so much more, again, like you said, than just crack my back or adjust my spine.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shannon: It’s how can I be my best self? And then contribute that to the world around me.
Joe: Yeah. I think that definitely leaves a powerful message for you to certainly try to do your best to sustain your own health and take care of yourself. But then thinking with a stronger self how can I give more back to the community?
Shannon: Definitely. Well, we hope you enjoy this conversation with doctors Josh and Taylor. And of course, we would love to hear from you at Hi@KeyholeMarketing.us.
Joe: Well. This is the first time for sure I’ve interviewed three people, two adults and one three month old. So I’m sure it’ll go well. She’s doing great so far, so it’ll be awesome.
Dr. Josh Logan, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for joining me.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Of course.
Joe: The first two interviews I’ve done so far here have been with people who are rare breeds of Colorado Springs natives.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Do you guys keep that trend going? Or where are you guys from originally?
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: 50/50% here. I guess.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: So I was born in Denver.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Resided in Aurora, Colorado for about seven years. And then my family ended up leaving the state of Colorado for Florida. And most of my life grew up there.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: But we knew we wanted to get back here to Colorado. Just being a native here, but not fully having some deep roots here yet. But that’s kind of where I came from. My wife as a little bit of a different story though.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor Logan, True North Chiropractic: Yeah. I lived all over the place growing up. I was born in Iowa.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Lived in Nebraska, a couple of different cities. South Carolina, North Carolina, Nashville. So all over the place growing up, but spent a lot of time when we lived in Nebraska, in Colorado, so really loved it.
Joe: Oh, okay.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Went to chiropractic school in Florida. Liked the ocean, but it was way too hot for us to stay. So knowing he was from Colorado and really fell in love with the mountains and just the weather and the atmosphere here.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: We just knew this was where we wanted to lay down roots.
Joe: Were you in a military family? Is that why you moved so much?
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: No, and my parents are actually chiropractors.
Joe: Oh, wow.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: But my dad is just a little restless. He needed to keep moving on.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: So, yeah.
Joe: Yeah. That’s awesome. I’m kind of the same way. I can relate to that for sure.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: My wife keeps me grounded a little bit, otherwise we’d pack it up I’m sure, every year.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: There’s always someone in the relationship that does that. So, it’s good.
Joe: Yeah, that all good. How about brothers, sisters for the two of you? Are you solo kids?
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: I have a younger sister.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: She actually helps with us in the practice as well.
Joe: Oh, okay.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: So it really is a family practice and it’s good.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: I am one of seven.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: Gosh.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: So I am the second oldest. The youngest is 12, so pretty big age gap square.
Joe: The youngest currently is 12?
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: Oh, wow.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: She’s currently 12.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: But one of my sisters actually also works in the practice with us.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: So that’s really cool.
Joe: Yeah, that is cool. It could be cool. I guess it depends on how well you get along with your siblings, right?
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Definitely, yeah.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: It’s heaven.
Joe: Because like, no, I thought about that and I was thinking who could I possibly work with that I could get along with right now?
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: There’s probably-
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Yeah, but they haven’t quit yet.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Oh, go ahead. Yeah, there’s probably only two of my six siblings that I would get along well and work, hopefully they don’t listen to this.
Joe: Yeah, for sure. Exactly. We’re going to talk about that later, I’m sure. Yeah, I’ve got seven siblings too.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Oh, wow. Awesome.
Joe: Kind of a hodgepodge of, my dad was married before, my mom was married before.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: So they had kids in their first marriage and then my sister and I were the youngest from their marriage and I’m the youngest of all of them.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Okay, wow.
Joe: But quite an age gap between the oldest to me.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Gosh.
Joe: So can relate to that big family.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: But yeah, I don’t know if anybody on that list I could stand to work with on a regular basis. It’s probably more me than it is them.
Dr. Josh, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: How would you describe your childhoods? Where they, I mean you moved around a lot.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah.
Joe: I mean how was that? Was that a …
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Honestly, it was kind of just what we did.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: And now looking back at it, I’m super grateful that I was never scared of change and always could adapt really well.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: And so when I was looking at college, I wasn’t scared to go somewhere far. And when we were looking at where we were going to lay down for our office, it didn’t really matter to me that there wasn’t family or familiarity there.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: So I was thankful for it looking back and like I said, growing up, it’s just kind of what we knew. So I didn’t really question it either growing up.
Joe: Yeah. Was that tough at all, to maybe not get like deep friendships with people for too long?
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: Yeah. A little bit here and there. I do remember sometimes kind of around that 12, 13 age where being like, it was the end of the world because we were leaving our friends.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor, True North Chiropractic: But you moved on to the next place, you made friends and it was good. And then when you left that place you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to leave now.”
Joe: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Taylor: You know, it was good.
Joe: For sure.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: How about you, Josh?
Dr. Josh: Yeah, a little bit different. When we moved from Colorado to Florida, basically stayed in the same city for most of my childhood until I went into undergraduate school at the University of Florida and then chiropractic school over in Daytona.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Josh: But we were able to lay down some pretty strong roots. Whenever we had breaks we would go back to Florida or Melbourne where I grew up.
Joe: Oh, okay.
Dr. Josh: And had a great church family there. A lot of great, really strong relationships. So it was kind of a challenge actually when my wife Taylor was the one pushing us to go over to Colorado.
Joe: Hmm. Yeah, you were good with Florida?
Dr. Josh: I was going to Florida. I was looking at other areas too. I just remember the first time we got off the plane in Denver, it’d been so long since I went back to Colorado.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Josh: And just everything looked dead and I couldn’t even see the mountains.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Josh: And I was like, I don’t know if I really want to come here.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: And then as we’re traveling down I25 going through Castle Rock where just everything opens up, you see Pike’s Peak.
Joe: Yes.
Dr. Josh: You start seeing actually trees.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: And totally opened up my eyes to like, all right, I could see myself living here.
Joe: Yeah. You moved at seven, I think you said?
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Josh: Seven when I moved from Aurora to Florida.
Joe: Florida, yeah.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: How was that? Do you remember that move at all or was that just?
Dr. Josh: Not too much.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: I really missed the snow.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: I do remember that.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: And so Florida you don’t get too much snow ever.
Joe: For sure, yeah.
Dr. Josh: And so it was good to get back to Colorado and actually have our first snow here and it just felt like home.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Joe: We moved out here. We have a six year old, well, I guess he was five at the time, so he’s six now.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: But I always wonder that too. Like we talk a lot, like “How much do you remember from Indiana?” “Not much. Not much.”
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: Little memories here and there.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: So it was just kind of at that age, I just, I don’t know how much … We’ll go back and see grandma and grandpa and stuff.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. And how many kids do you have?
Joe: We have just him. Yeah, just the one.
Dr. Taylor: Just one? Okay.
Joe: Yeah. So he’s pretty much up for anything.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe:
So he’s up for another adventure. But yeah, it’s just funny, sometimes where you were just there like a year or so ago and he doesn’t remember some stuff.
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Joe: And we’re like, do you remember anything of that? I thought they were amazing memories for us. But what about like growing up, did you have any entrepreneurial influences? Were your parents entrepreneurs? Did you have other influences, mentors or anything like that were just not where you maybe just put something in the back of your head like I want to start a business at the time when you were kids?
Dr. Josh: Yeah. Specifically for me, really had no entrepreneurial spirit growing up.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Josh: Both my parents had very stable jobs. My mom was the one that basically was more the breadwinner in the family.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Josh: My dad, he kind of jumped around from different positions. He was more of the entrepreneurial spirit than my mom.
Joe: Oh, okay.
Dr. Josh: He did a lot of different types of lawn maintenance work in Florida. I mean all the rain, it definitely needed that.
Joe: Mm. Okay.
Dr. Josh: And so he was helping out all throughout the city with that. So that kind of was a little bit of the influence for me. But as we kind of went through chiropractic school, that’s where it really started to hit home of just really having that mindset of, hey, I can do some big things throughout chiropractic here.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Josh: But then also when you start seeing the amount of student loans coming through too, realizing, there’s not much that you can do when you do get out and work under another person too.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: It becomes very challenging. And a big thing for us is we just want to not have that financial burden to.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Josh: And so that really definitely pushed us a little bit more. But then also having our own … I mean just the mission and the vision that we had, was something that we knew we could only do that by opening up our own practice.
Joe: Gotcha.
Dr. Josh: And that really is what drove us to create True North.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: How about you?
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. So definitely entrepreneurial. My parents, probably over the years have opened four or five of their own offices.
Joe: Mm.
Dr. Taylor: Moving a lot, they would open a … My dad was also a professor, so he taught at a couple of chiropractic schools.
Joe: Oh, okay.
Dr. Taylor: And so yeah, definitely, I worked in my parents’ office growing up a little bit.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Taylor: So I had a lot of that influence. And so opening a practice was definitely not something very farfetched for me.
Joe: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Taylor: That’s just kind of, again, what I saw and what was modeled for me growing up.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Yeah. I just always find that interesting, because I’m one of those people who didn’t think entrepreneurship until, I mean I had done corporate America stuff for years.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: And then once I sort of got a nibble of it, I said I can’t go back to anything else, but not because I saw my dad doing it or mom doing it.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: They were always doing traditional jobs. But it’s just always interesting to find those people who either saw it coming down the road, or people like me who never even envisioned it for.
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. And I think-
Dr. Josh: So what was the-
Dr. Taylor: Oh, go ahead.
Dr. Josh: I just want to know.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Kind of what was the turning point for you of realizing, hey, I’ve been in corporate America, where a lot of times it’s a very comfortable position for a lot of people to realize, hey, I’m going to step out and go to this route.
Joe: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Well, it was, I had a pretty bad job. My last one.
Dr. Josh: Hmm.
Joe: I stayed there for about a year. I think. I knew it was bad, about 10 minutes into the job.
Dr. Taylor: Oh.
Joe: I had left another job, I’d been there five years. And I knew they were going to get bought out by another company.
Dr. Josh: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Joe: So I wanted to get ahead of that.
Dr. Josh: Sure.
Joe: Went to this other job where they had kind of promised me a lot of things.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: We’ll give you this, and here’s this benefit. And everything sounded great. But it was a manufacturing company that said they wanted to be more progressive in their marketing and then didn’t really seem like they wanted to do that once I got there.
Dr. Josh: Yeah, gosh, okay.
Joe: So I stayed for about a year and then thought I’d just get another job after that at another company. And then just realized I kind of like working for myself out of my house and getting dressed sometimes.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Not getting dressed other times. Just the flexibility.
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Joe: I also loved working around town, meeting other people at different coffee shops.
Dr. Josh: Yeah. Uh-huh (affirmative).
Joe: And I had experienced that a little bit in some networking things that I had gone to towards the end, but I just really loved forging new relationships and that kind of stuff, in that sort of world.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: So it was just sort of I got the nibble, almost in a waiting time. Waiting to kind of get the next job, being selective so I didn’t get another bad job right away.
Dr. Josh: Gotcha. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: But yeah, that was it. And now it’s, we’ve talked many times over the years because I was like, it’ll be eight years ago this year that …
Dr. Josh: Oh.
Joe: Yeah, it’s hard to imagine going back. We’ve talked about it.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Financially, if we had to do that, certainly we would be able to do that. But otherwise, it is hard for me to imagine sitting, going to … I’ve actually gone to Alpha’s complex to meet with clients and it’s just … I get like this weird things up and down my spine.
Dr. Taylor: Heebie-jeebies.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. Just, I got to get out of here. So break out in a rash.
Dr. Josh: Oh, gosh.
Joe: So you met in Florida, in college?
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Taylor: Chiropractic school, yep. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Chiropractic school. Okay, so this was post undergrad?
Dr. Taylor: Yes.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: And where was that? That was at the University of Florida, correct?
Dr. Josh: So did my undergrad at the University of Florida.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Josh: Taylor did it over at Lipscomb University in Tennessee, Nashville.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Josh: And so we both somehow decided to go to Palmer College of Chiropractic, actually in Daytona.
Joe: Gotcha. Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Technically Port Orange. And that’s officially where we met.
Joe: Gotcha.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Okay. Incidentally, is that Palmer sort of the founder?
Dr. Taylor: It’s the fountainhead, Is what they called that.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, so the original, it was Dr. D.D. and B.J. Palmer, those are the ones you hear about.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: But they founded the school in Iowa.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Taylor: Which is actually where my parents went to school.
Joe: Gotcha, okay.
Dr. Taylor: They have a sister school in Florida and then California.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Okay, okay. And then talk a little bit about … Well, I guess talk about how you guys met. I mean, you obviously were in school, but what was the attraction?
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: And how did you guys spot each other? Those types of things.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, so we were friends for two years. Literally, no future insight at all, of course, no way.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: A guy in my class that I was really good friends with, went to undergrad with him.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: And so when he came into, or actually before he came to chiropractic school, he came and visited him and we always hung out of our apartment. And so I met him there. He was dating somebody else, stayed in that relationship for quite a while and we were just really good friends.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Taylor: We were in the same Bible study.
Joe: Oh, okay.
Dr. Taylor: Different groups on campus, things like that. And so our close friend circle was all together.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: So definitely were very close friends for a long time. But it was three months before I actually was leaving to start my internship in Alabama that we of course decided that this was maybe as good idea.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Now’s the time, right? Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: So yeah, we started dating. I moved to Alabama, was there for a year.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Taylor: And we got engaged during that time and married during that time.
Joe: Oh, wow. Okay.
Dr. Taylor: So we were really only together in the same city for about three months while we were dating.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Dr. Josh: While we were dating.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: So it kind of moved quickly, right?
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, it did.
Joe: But at the same time, you built a long relationship.
Dr. Josh: Absolutely.
Dr. Taylor: It moved pretty fast. We were engaged for about six or dating for about six months, engaged for about seven.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Taylor: So a little over a year from the time we started dating til we were married. But again, we had been really close friends for about two years, so there was a lot of trust there already.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: We knew each other on a deeper level. It wasn’t like we were trying to figure each other out or figure out if this person is trustworthy or good.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: So, we had a pretty good foundation and I think that that helped a lot.
Joe: Was the chiropractic connection, a good thing for the relationship? Did it not matter at all? Was there a sense of where you’re thinking, should we both be doing the exact same thing?
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Joe: Or who should we find somebody who has a different interest altogether?
Dr. Josh: Yeah, especially going through chiropractic schools, there’s so many different, just even philosophies and techniques when it even comes to even practicing it.
Joe: Mm. The practice, yeah.
Dr. Josh: And thankfully, one of the things that really drew us together too is we were practicing the same technique.
Dr. Taylor: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Josh: Something that when you go into chiropractic school, there’s all these different techniques, some of them are very easier compared to others. And we really drew towards the more complicated ones.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Just a lot more analysis when it comes to that. And so when it came to us kind of coming together and realize, hey, we kind of like each other here.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Josh: But then we also are practicing and studying this technique that we can consistently keep growing upon each other with that too.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: And then also just finding out, hey, we have the same mission and vision with kind of what we want to do too.
Joe: On a person level too. Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Exactly, exactly. And so that really made things pretty easy. Like, hey, this is kind of a no brainer, let’s do this together.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Obviously, there’s been challenges along the way, with just the little things, but overall, the big picture, it made it pretty obvious like, hey, this is a great idea too.
Joe: What was your attraction to chiropractic care to begin with? Talk through those stories a little bit?
Dr. Josh: Yeah. I honestly knew nothing about chiropractic before a dive in headfirst into it. Honestly, all I knew was just kind of the misconceptions of it. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the show Two and a Half Men where the brother of Charlie Sheen, basically all he got trashed upon was his profession and it’s like, “I don’t know about this.” And so it was going towards just other different types of healthcare professions, whether that’s physical therapy, medical doctor, PA, and honestly had a pretty significant illness in undergrad. Developed pneumonia, had a lot of allergy asthma problems after that, and developed really severe migraines and nothing was really helping me at all throughout the process of that. And it was getting kind of frustrated like, “Why is this not helping?”
I was a big athlete, too, and because of the asthma I was not able to do things as well. And my buddy who, we were in a Bible study together, he invited me to come to this conference and completely opened my eyes to chiropractic. And how it was so focused more on the nervous system compared to just muscle and bone and pain and all of that. And hearing just the testimonials of people literally getting their lives back it totally opened my eyes to that. Jumped headfirst into that. Had my own chiropractic healing journey of breathing issues completely going away. Migraines completely going away. And that really developed just the huge passion for what I have now for it.
Joe: That’s awesome. That you had a personal transformation for how this had affected you.
Dr. Josh: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then my wife, I mean, she has a life-changing story for that, too.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. Well, so both of my parents are chiropractors, like we talked about. So that’s, obviously, what I grew up around. But when I was born, about four hours later I actually stopped breathing. And my parents were at home actually at a home birth with a midwife and resuscitation was not working. Turn completely black and blue. My dad is fresh out of chiropractic school at this point. All he knows to do is check the spine. Right? So he checked my spine, the very top bone in my neck called the atlas was misaligned. And the brainstem actually runs right through there, which has some respiratory control centers in it. So he adjusted that and immediately I started breathing. So really did save my life.
And then just, originally, when I was young I always said I wanted to be a chiropractor. I have a picture from when I was in first grade and it says, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I drew myself, adjusting somebody and said I want to see a chiropractor. Back then it was because it was cool because that’s what my parents did, right. But just growing up in their office and seeing just the huge life transformations happening from the people that were walking through the doors. I just really was drawn to that and the holistic side of it. And really just couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I mean because you can imagine that some kids would watch their parents and want to do something completely different, but just your own personal connection to it and, like you said, those deep stories of transformation other than just another patient come through the door, another resource of money. You actually saw lives being altered and changed.
Dr. Taylor: It’s pretty powerful.
Joe: It’s really cool. You had talked a little bit about the different practices part, I think that’s how you said it, yeah, of chiropractic. And I guess my limited research that I… By the way, this is going to be awesome to have this coocooing in the background. No, seriously, it’s going to be awesome. Probably the best podcast. Have a little bit of background noise. It’s going to be great.
I guess my limited view, it was these two paths of musculoskeletal and wellness. Is those kind of like the two paths? Are there more different sectors in there that one travels down in chiropractic care? Are those too broad maybe?
Dr. Taylor: No.
Dr. Josh: I would say that’s… You could probably put it in those two little categories, I would say.
Joe: Okay. And so what was assuming, I guess, again, I’m now going to assume that you guys were in more the wellness path of those that goes beyond just sort of back adjustments that most people assume about chiropractic care. What was it about that? You’ve kind of alluded a little bit with your parents and seeing some of those life transformations. What was it about that path that maybe was more appealing to you than some of the other routes you might go with chiropractic care?
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, I think with chiropractic, I think you’ve pretty much hit on the hand. There’s definitely a very preventative side focused on making your body just function better. And then there’s a side that’s very pain focused. Focused on getting rid of back pain, neck pain. And the thing about it is both of them we do very well at, right? But there’s that side, the prevention side, that a lot of people don’t really think about. And so I think that’s a part we really try to educate and focus on.
And that’s something that I was very drawn to because growing up under chiropractic care since essentially I was born, I never developed a lot of the issues that a lot of people do. And then kind of cool from a sense that Dr. Josh and I can compare ourselves with that because he didn’t grow up with it. And so kind of seeing our childhoods and I wouldn’t say he was a super sick kid, but he had a lot of health challenges that I never experienced. And so just knowing, yes, there are some other factors, but knowing that my quality of life was a little bit different growing up than his was, and just knowing that we could help other people live that as well was super appealing to me
Joe: Yeah. You talked a little bit about this, too, some of the reasons of starting your own practice. I’m sure there were a lot of obstacles in that path, too, that might’ve made other routes more possible. To work underneath somebody else for a while. Pay your dues a little bit there. Did you actually leave your internships and go straight in to start the practice? Was there a time in between there that you worked for some others? How did that work?
Dr. Josh: Yeah, so specifically for Dr. Taylor here, she graduated about a year ahead of me in schooling and so a big thing that we were trying to figure out is should she go out and start the practice and I join her a year in or have her work under somebody for that time being. And since we both did our internships in Alabama, we had phenomenal doc over there and we just decided, hey, learn under this doc, let’s get mentored by him for a year.
Had a great opportunity to where he outgrew his small space and totally opened up a new space about a mile down the road. And he, honestly, let us take the whole project with it. Just the architectural drawings, work with the general contractors, just handling all of the legality purposes of that, too. And so that way we were doing all of that, thankfully, under his dime and not our own. And being able to understand, all right, these are the mistakes we made. Let’s make sure we don’t do that as we transition over to Colorado. And so we were very, very thankful that we took that route instead to kind of have a nice little practice run before we opened up our own practice.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: The name True North. Where did that come from? What’s the meaning behind that? When did that actually come up in your minds?
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, when you came up with that while we were in school. And one of the things that I’ve seen growing up and Josh has seen growing up is just that we’ve really seen close family members, friends, get into a position where their health has held them back from really fulfilling what they’re called to do. And holding them back from serving in the community. When you’re sick and broken and dealing with sickness, you really have to focus more on yourself. It’s really hard to focus on those around you. And so we really felt called to help remove that health barrier so that people could really follow and go after what they’re called to do. And so helping people reach their true North. And so that’s what we feel really called to do, not only just through chiropractic care but in the community. And so when we were deciding what we wanted our practice name to be that really spoke to us. Hey. Do you want to add anything to that?
Dr. Josh: Yeah, exactly what you said with that. And I mean it’s just so prevalent just seeing so many people being held back by health challenges. And so, like Dr. Taylor mentioned, we just really want to help remove those barriers so people can really fulfill that. Because I think a huge issue right now is a lot of times with families, too, and people not being able to just serve their family as well. Not only that but their communities and due to people focusing so much on their own health challenges. Because when we’re able to focus less on ourselves, I mean that opens up such a huge door to be able to serve the people around us. So it’s been pretty cool to even start seeing that just in the short period of us being open here in Colorado Springs.
Joe: Yeah. What year did you guys open up again? I skipped over that.
Dr. Taylor: July 2018.
Joe: 2018. Okay.
Dr. Taylor: So we’ve been open a little over a year and a half. It’ll be two years in July.
Joe: Yeah. Okay. Just as you did that practice run at the other practice before you got your own started, were there some things that you were sort of tagging away of we want to make sure we have these specific things included in the business? Or, not that he did it wrong, but just like things that kind of aligned with your brand. Were there some of those things that you said, “We’ve got to have this in our practice when we start this.”?
Dr. Josh: I mean biggest thing was just the community influence that we wanted to have in not only just within our practice but outside of the four walls of our practice as well. And I know we got to get to know each other just through social media. And so we knew we wanted to have a huge social media presence just with education. We want people to know more about their own bodies. To know more about their own potential to heal because, again, knowledge is all potential power. You can use it, learn it, but if you don’t apply it, then it’s kind of worthless sometimes. And so that was a huge thing we wanted to do. But then again, we just wanted to create such an awesome just culture when it comes to our practice. And so when you walk through our doors, you probably don’t even think it’s a chiropractic office. It’s a whole different feel.
Dr. Josh: It’s because, again, the white coat syndrome is real when you go into a doctor’s office. I’ve had that experience myself, blood pressure goes up. And we wanted to create such a warm, just friendly and loving environment into our practice. And previous, obviously, they did it very well, but we knew that we could add some different elements to it to just create our own field of the practice here, too. And do… Hey sweetie. And plus we wanted to have our kids in the practice, too. And that was something that was super important. We wanted to have family be a part of it. And knowing that we were husband and wife team and my sister was going to be joining the practice and Dr. Taylor’s sister was going to be joining us, too, we wanted to have a lot of that family aspect of it, too.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. For sure. And kind of going back to what Dr. Josh talked about with education. I don’t feel like people make bad health decisions because they want to. People make decisions based on the knowledge that they have and they do the best they can. But we also just knew that there’s a lot that people aren’t being told. We knew there’s a lot people aren’t being told or just don’t know because it’s not how they grew up. It’s not the culture they were raised in. And so if we could help just maybe bridge that gap and give them more knowledge and information about, again, better ways their body can heal and things that they can do to live a better functioning and more fulfilling life, then that was one of the biggest things we wanted to bring to the city.
Joe: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. That’s a nice segue right into just the chiropractic focus of your business because I think we’ve learned more about your business specifically, but I think there are, we talked about a little bit, there’s a lot of misconceptions about chiropractic care, whether from our own lack of education on what it is or what somebody else told us about it and they go and get adjustments and that’s all we assume that chiropractic care is. So how do you tell people what you do? Like when somebody says, “What’s your business?” I’m sure you could just say, “We’re chiropractors.” but I’m sure that you know that that falls short. So how do you typically describe what you do when somebody asks that?
Dr. Josh: Yeah, I guess in short, is we really optimize the nervous system’s function. And so whether that’s the nervous system have an irritation to it leading to aches and pains that we’re experiencing or that can also be nervous system irritation leading into, let’s just say for me personally, having problems to my lungs. Not being able to breathe properly, or a lot of times women with infertility, all those different types of things. And so biggest thing is finding exactly where misaligned segments are causing irritation to the nervous system and removing that to allow people to function properly.
Joe:Yeah. Well, I think also, you said it never system and I think like that also raised a lot of question marks for people, too. Because it’s language you guys use a lot but I think-
Dr. Josh: What is that?
Joe: Yeah, right. Because it’s not like it’s a vein or something you can just easily just grab and take out or, oh, it’s your kidney. I don’t know, there’s just not a physical part that makes a lot of sense to us. So even help us, use some language to help us understand like what that is and how that works in the body.
Dr. Josh: Yeah. So again, the nervous system is composed of your brain, brainstem, spinal cord, and really all nerves in your body. And so I guess the biggest thing is realizing kind of what it does. And so right now we’re breathing, I mean we probably had some food today and it’s digesting right now. And our lungs are breathing and our brain is sending signals constantly through the brainstem, the spinal cord, to those nerves saying, “Hey, we need to start beating. We need to start breathing. We need to start having this food digest.” And so everything in our body is controlled by our brain and spinal cord. And so that is all composed of that nervous system there.
Joe: So just the awareness of things do not function on their own. The kidneys do not function in their own way without being told to do so.
Dr. Josh: Yeah.
Joe: That’s fair?
Dr. Josh: And a great example of that is, if you remember Christopher Reeves, I know a lot of people might be a little too young now for that, but falling off the horse and he actually fractured the top two bones in his neck and that totally stopped function or communication from the brain down through the spinal cord, through those organs. So he had to be on a ventilator just for his lungs to breathe. He had to be on basically all these machines just to have his heart to beat. Just have his bladder be removed, all of these things. And it wasn’t because the heart was having problems or the lungs were having problems. It was because the communication going to it was having problems. And so it just shows us how important the nervous system’s function is.
Dr. Josh: And that’s really what we focus on because you got to think if you ever have a light dimmer, you can have that light basically dimmed all the way down and it’s working, but it’s not to its fullest potential. And so those are things that we are constantly looking at in our practice of how can we turn this light up a little bit more so people can really be expressing their full potential of health, but not only that, their full potential of themselves.
Joe: Gotcha. So it’s kind of a two-part system though, too, right? So if the signal’s going strong but the part itself is not functioning well, that also needs to be looked at, too. Is that fair play?
Dr. Josh: Absolutely.
Joe: So if the kidney isn’t functioning well, then we need to look at the kidney as well. It isn’t always the message, it’s also the the body part as well.
Dr. Josh: Absolutely.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. There are both ends, so what we really focus on is that message. I would say your specialists like the gastroenterologist and all your different cardiologists, things like that, they’re going to focus more on the actual organs and that symptom, maybe. We try and look at it from a global perspective of the body and the nervous system and making sure that that communication isn’t causing issues.
Joe: Can you talk a little bit about that relationship with the others in the medical community? Do they see that as a good partnership? Do you have challenges when you’re working with those who are specialists in those arenas to see the value of the nervous system working with these things? I don’t know, what’s your relationship with that and maybe generally speaking?
Dr. Josh: Yes, kind of all over the place. I mean, we’ve met with quite a few providers that are 100% involved with what we do. We take care of quite a few doctors in our practice just because everything we do is very objective-based, as well, and not a lot of like hurrah type stuff.
Dr. Taylor: Very scientific.
Dr. Josh: Very scientific. Exactly. And so they’re able to physically see with their own eyes, all right, these are the changes I’m seeing structurally through x-rays, through thermography scans, all of these things.
Joe: It’s that validation they need sometimes.
Dr. Josh: Exactly. Exactly. And that was for me growing up with my mom being a, basically, an engineer and so I needed that to validify really what I’m seeing. But then also, again, I mean chiropractic hasn’t had the best rep oftentimes, too, and so there are a lot of providers that really honestly won’t even sit down and listen to us, too, to let them know, “Hey, these are things that we can really potentially help with.” Just given the chance in us to educate as well. So it’s kind of on both ends, too.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Where does that bad rap come from? Is there a specific moments in time where that’s happened because of this event or that event? Or is it just sort of general marketing of chiropractic care over the years to sort of set a certain tone in people’s minds?
Dr. Josh: Oh, if we go back to the history, it’s actually pretty cool. The AMA, American Medical Association, but then also the Chiropractic Association went through a huge lawsuit, actually, back in the day. It actually went all the way up into the Supreme Court. Basically, the AMA was pushing basically what’s called quackery to try to get chiropractic out. If we’re looking at the huge flu pandemic back in the day, too, a lot of people were actually flocking towards chiropractors to help boost their immune systems. And unfortunately, a lot of medical providers were not too happy with a lot of that, too.
Joe: Loss of business.
Dr. Josh: And so their huge lawsuit happened and chiropractic ended up winning, which is phenomenal. But, again, that led it into a lot of that underlying…
Dr. Taylor: Tension.
Dr. Josh: Is it really? Yeah, exactly. And so as we’ve kind of progressed all the way from that…
Joe: Time gets away from that event.
Dr. Josh: Exactly. Yeah. But then also as more research continues to keep coming out, too, it’s been cool to see a nice little harmony between the professions.
Joe: Yeah. What was the effect of that experience on the consumer, the patient? You’ve got those relationships with the other doctors but are the patients, too, also sort of misinformed or they have their misconceptions from that event that you’re having to constantly sort of deal with and educate them as well in that whole arena?
Dr. Taylor: I don’t think nowadays. I think it’s so far removed from the general public that there’s not a lot of knowledge of that. I think a lot of that is taught through medical school and that history. So a lot of medical providers are aware of that. But I think a lot of it is on us as chiropractors, too, in the profession just not educating well and just not getting it out there a lot of times. As a profession, you’ll use the big words that we were talking about and sometimes you just need to speak to their language and educate well on not just pain because I think most people know chiropractors can help with back pain and neck pain. Those are super common. But a lot of them don’t know about just the general nervous system function either.
Joe: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s definitely been my perception. My limited understanding. The people I knew was a guy who had back pain so he’s getting adjustments. And have somebody had some neck tightness, so getting some adjustments. That’s all I knew about it until your practice came around, really, to start educating like, “Oh, there’s a tie in to what our lifestyle was starting to become.” We were getting much more into holistic functional medicine because of our own health journey and then I realized, oh, this can actually be a part of that experience and not a whole other thing to avoid actually.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: Because I think what was so fascinating to me about the holistic functional thing, which is what you guys are aligned with as well is just getting to that cause, like exploring that and not just, oh, you’re back, let’s make a few adjustments and then of course come back every week and we’ll always adjust it and never resolve it and I was like, that doesn’t make sense. I want to get the result, I want to get the answer. That’s why I think I never connected with chiropractic care, because at least my limited experience was we’ll just keep fixing you for short term and then come back and we’ll do it again and come back, so your education has certainly broadened my mind in that regard, which has been great.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the biggest things we try and focus on in the office is just what’s causing this? You’re having this symptom or this underlying issue, but if you look at it, high blood pressure’s not there cause you have something wrong with your blood, right? It’s a side effect of an issue on a deeper level.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.
Dr. Taylor: And so, rather than chasing that symptom and just putting a bandaid over it and trying to get that pain to go away, we want to know what’s causing that so that it can be eliminated and that we’re not just having to do these temporary fixes.
Joe: Do you feel like the majority of your patients or maybe just the community as a whole are interested in that answer or just fix my problem? Just get the pain to go away. We don’t have to go digging through all this stuff or I don’t know, I’m really curious about that but I also know a lot of people are taking remedies that are quick fixes, they don’t really care about the reason for this.
Dr. Taylor: I think now in this kind of age we’re in right now, I think it’s become a lot more prevalent. People are really being more drawn to more holistic measures versus I think people are starting to realize that throwing medications at it, it’s just not the healthiest thing longterm, I think people are starting to see that now. And so, I do think there is people being at least a lot more open minded than they used to be about it. And people searching maybe for more answers and a lot of times it’s because they’ve been through the medical gamut and they found no answers and sometimes it’s just because they feel like there’s something more.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Taylor: So I would say there is definitely a battle we’re fighting from the education aspect. But again, I really feel like there’s never been a better time than there is right now to educate people on holistic health and their body’s ability to function because I think people are so much more open to that natural way of healing now.
Joe: Yeah. That was our experience too. We had sort of gone through several doors of not having good answers and just go take this or just do this, just sort of almost send us on our way and never really felt right then it just led us to we need to start a different path of health and that’s been more of our path the last couple of years of working with those who want to explore the why and not just here’s the what, here, just take this.
Dr. Josh: That’s awesome.
Joe: What are some surprising, we’ve talked about some of these things, broadening people’s minds I think about more than just a back correction or tight neck, like what are some treatments that you guys have done, generally speaking with no names. What are some treatments you might’ve done that have surprised some people? You talked about a few things like your allergies, I was certainly surprising to me how that was affected by chiropractic care. What are some other things that people come into your office for that listeners might be like, wow, I had no idea chiropractic care even touched on that.
Dr. Josh: Yeah, and to be totally honest, most people coming into the practice, they’re coming in with say, neck pain, back pain, but as we start throughout care, then they start realizing, hey, I’m having all these secondary issues I had no idea that I was dealing with starting to resolve. Like for instance, we had a gentleman come in completely lost vision and peripheral vision in his right eye and after the first adjustment, his vision was restored and that was incredible to see that we’ve had people with the glossopharyngeal neuritis to where they’ve been through the whole medical profession just prescribed medications …
Dr. Taylor: Do you know what that is?
Joe: No, but I was going to look it up later.
Dr. Taylor: No.
Dr. Josh: Basically it’s the nerve that helps you be able to swallow. It’s going directly to the mouth there and when you’re having the neuritis, it’s basically inflammation of the nerve. And so, it feels like everything is just on fire.
Dr. Taylor: It’s like lightning strikes, so every time this person would swallow and eat and talk, I mean they couldn’t even talk because every time they had that movement it would send a lightning strike. So have you heard of trigeminal neuralgia? It’s the same thing.
Joe: Yeah, okay.
Dr. Taylor: It’s like in the tongue, mouth area.
Joe: Okay, wow.
Dr. Josh: And so, especially with trigeminal, that’s also called the suicide disease too and so many people unfortunately are suffering for so long, so we had an individual who came in, hadn’t eaten in the last 10 days, barely even drank in the last three I wanted to say and we were able to get them back to eating again. But just from a lot of women just struggling with infertility being told, hey, you’re never going to have a baby to finally getting pregnant and having a baby and seeing the baby even grow up too has been phenomenal.
Dr. Josh: I mean migraines, we hear about that all the time. And I mean, we just had a gentleman who in the last 12 years been with the Mayo Clinic just under so many different types of experimental medications due to his migraines and every single evening he was dealing with it and now he’s finally getting free of his migraines and finally getting off some of these medications. He told us the other day, he’s like, I’m finally feeling like more like myself.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Josh: So really, really cool to see that. Dr. Taylor, do you have any? We can probably go on but it’s so cool.
Dr. Taylor: I know, yeah. It’s cool. My first patient that I ever saw in the clinic in chiropractic school was an infertility case and she had, I want to say five years plus they’d been trying and she had, I want to say she had had eight miscarriages. She never carried past eight weeks, she lost them all right away. And they had done everything they could, medical gamut route and they just told her you need to look into adoption it’s not physically possible for you. She came in to see me for low back pain, right? And so, we did our full assessment. We did a neurological evaluation, we did our postural exercise and we had found that she had had a fracture when she was growing up that had really caused some major structural issues causing a lot of irritation in the lower part of her spine and those nerves are actually going directly to the reproductive organs.
Dr. Taylor: So we started make adjustments and within three months she was pregnant, super nervous still. She was like, I don’t know. She carried the baby completely full term, had no issues, beautiful healthy baby girl that we actually had the pleasure of adjusting when she was just a couple of days old, so that being the first patient that we ever saw in clinic was just super powerful and we’ve had a lot of cases like that since.
Joe: It’ll validate your degree right away I think.
Dr. Taylor: Exactly. It’ll make you feel like you’re on the right path.
Joe: Yeah. Are these treatments just for general education, like for example, that situation right there is that sort of it’s fixed for life or there’s some continual adjustments that need to be made or some corrections or checks on that kind of stuff?
Dr. Taylor: So it was a lot more often in the beginning getting that true correction and then she continued to come to us for maintenance periodically because she still had a lot of stressors in our daily life and you got to think about the things that you do all day and the stresses you put your body under, whether you’re an avid athlete or just more of a couch potato, you’re still going to put your body under a lot of stress. And so, she did come to us periodically for maintenance care to make sure that she wasn’t doing something to effect that. But yeah, we were able to get to a point were we were seeing her far less frequently, which is cool.
Joe: Yeah. I guess my assumption it took for this to go really well, there has to be a lifestyle outside of the office to tag team with your treatment too, is that accurate? Can’t just sort of make the adjustments and they go back to their regular life, which could be part of the problem, their lifestyle. They have to make some lifestyle changes as well to make this thing really work well, is that fair?
Dr. Josh: Yeah. I mean you can’t just get an adjustment and then eat McDonald’s 24/7 and expect, oh, I’m going to be perfectly healthy after this. And so, there’s such a huge influence outside of what we do as well just whether that’s the toxins that we might be inducing through food, through our water, even just chemical and emotional stress that many of us deal with, especially with a lot of the fear that’s going on right now in the world today. I mean that plays a huge role of influencing the nervous systems function too. And so, those are all things that we do look at, but we very much just focus and specialize when it comes to the specific chiropractic adjustment and if anyone is coming in and we’re realizing, hey, we might not be getting the results that we would expect to see at this moment then we have people that we would refer to as well that make basically those things their life mission that they pride themselves in and being a master at and we kind of partner with them alongside that too.
Joe: I’m sure there’s a range of reasons why the nervous system needs adjustments, needs some corrections.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Some of those can be personal injuries like a fracture. Are there things like you mentioned, their fear that can impact the nervous system to shut some messages down, is that a fair thing or is that going too far? I don’t know.
Dr. Taylor: So in chiropractic school you’re taught that three things can cause a subluxation, which have we talked about what a subluxation is?
Joe: We haven’t but I know what it is but you can say it on here actually.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, so subluxation is when a bone in the spinal column has become misaligned to where it’s putting pressure and irritation on the nerves of the system and affecting its function. And the three things that can cause that are, they call it the three T’s in chiropractic, but it’s traumas, thoughts, and toxins. And so yeah, there’s very much this belief that even emotional stress and I mean I feel like you go through something very emotional and it affects you in a physical way too, right? And so, that’s definitely a belief that we’ve seen manifested in people. And so, a lot of different things other than just like a physical trauma, but sometimes it’s even just what we call a micro trauma, like sitting at a desk all day on a computer in an abnormal posture, right? That may not affect you that day, but doing that for 10 years, what is your spine going to look like after that?
Joe: Yeah, it’s amazing. I think that’s still, no pun intended, mind blowing, how powerful the mind is, right? And how the way we, of course we talked a lot about fear just in society and just recent events going on. But it’s just amazing how those aren’t just quick thoughts that go through and then we go on with our life they just lodge themselves in our body in certain ways and have physical ramifications to that, so it’s really amazing. That’s something I’ve been trying to explore recently because I’m the personality who just puts it on my shoulders and carries it and to think I’m okay with it and then eventually my body says, oh, you’re not actually okay, I’m going to send you some warning signals …
Dr. Josh: You got to think about it.
Joe: … that you need to stop this, yeah.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: How do you two personally benefit from chiropractic care? Like you had some experiences as kids, how it affected you but then how do you continue to be impacted by chiropractic care on your own level, on your own?
Dr. Taylor: I think one of the biggest things for me was throughout my pregnancies. I mean one of the things we specialize in and really have a focus in is prenatal care. And so, I was adjusted all through my pregnancy. There’s a lot of physical stressors that are causing your body to have to adapt and so, not only just working to keep myself comfortable through that, but also now there’s a lot of cool research coming out that’s showing that chiropractic care can help reduce labor times and delivery pains by up to 38%, which is awesome. And I had really quick, beautiful, amazing labor and deliveries with both our girls and I 100% contribute that to chiropractic in making sure that my nervous system was functioning well, but also my pelvis was in proper alignment for that to take place, so I mean I could go on and on about that but I am so grateful to chiropractic for that throughout the pregnancy and then just our deliveries.
Dr. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Even for me it’s a lot more just prevention and maintenance for me right now I’m not dealing with the symptoms that I experienced in undergrad with the asthma, the pneumonia, migraines and all that. But especially just with right now, I’m having a pretty physical job too where we’re adjusting quite a bit more people. I’m a taller guy, 6’3 and so, I’m looking down a lot of times too and so, that doesn’t help my spine too much either. And so, thank goodness I married a great chiropractor and so, she’s able to take good care of me too, to not only make sure that I’m able to physically keep doing the things I love to do, but also keeping myself healthy too. I think that’s been super important for me.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. And it’s funny because the whole time I’ve known him have not seen him ever have to use an inhaler or anything like that. So it’s funny to me when he talks about how he used to have migraines and asthma and all these things I’m like, that’s just a different person than I ever knew and that’s because he was able to see that change through chiropractic care.
Dr. Josh: Yeah. Not only that, but for our kids, I mean both of our girls were adjusted three hours after they were born and since then, I mean we haven’t dealt with any type of colic, any type of ear infection. I mean they’ve been feeding, latching grade sleeping wonderfully as well too. Obviously they’re their babies too and so, they’re not going to be perfect, but they’ve done so well compared to so many of the little kids that we see on our practice on a daily basis to where they just had a lot more traumas and so, they’re really having to just get their bodies and into that better position too.
Joe: Yeah, that’s awesome. Just kind of more of like a theological question, it ties into chiropractic care, but I think you have on your website for example, you say bodies are designed to heal and prosper, maybe we should just start off with what does that mean to you? What does that phrase mean to you?
Dr. Josh: Yeah, I mean first thing that comes to my mind is that each individual is fearfully and wonderfully made. I mean, it’s amazing to seeing two beautiful babies being birthed by my wife and realizing, man, how did this even happen? Like there has to be some type of designed creator to be able to come with this. And not only that, just fully believe that our bodies were designed to be prosperous and to heal, to function properly. And I mean, just for us with our faith background too, just seeing when Jesus was here he came to heal and save the lost and so, he calls us to do the same. And so, just being able to kind of walk alongside that and see kind of the journey, but not only that, but seeing so many lives being restored that people felt that they were broken but then actually starting to realize, hey, I’m not so broken after all. My body is able to heal in amazing ways and so, it’s been really cool to see that take place
Dr. Taylor: And just to be able to give people hope. I mean, so many people unfortunately come through our doors and we’re their last resort, they’ve tried everything and they’ve been told time after time again you have this disease, this is your diagnosis, it becomes their identity. And they’ve been told that there’s no cure for them, you’re going to be on this medication for the rest of your life, you’re never going to be able to do X, Y, and Z again. And so, just being able to have them come through our doors and even just when we first meet them, giving them hope that, hey, that’s not your destiny. That’s not a label that you have to live by and let’s just see what we can do to get your body functioning better.
Dr. Taylor: We don’t fully know each person’s capability and what their body’s capable of, but we do know that if we can get their nervous system functioning better, their quality of life will be better. And so, that’s cool to be able to give people that hope and see that change in them right off the bat because the other side of it is I would say a huge part of a person’s healing is their mental ability to think they can and so, being able to give somebody that hope that their body is capable of more than they’ve been led on to believe is really huge in the healing process and we get to see that every day, which is cool.
Joe: Yeah, I think the thing and I totally believe the body heals itself because I’ve seen in my own way in small levels of just your wound being healed by a scab. I mean, it doesn’t just keep continuing to bleed, that’s a very small example but I think sometimes the tension I feel sometimes is the body healing itself and then God having a part in that as well. And so, I don’t know, did you guys have the same sort of tension that you, I wouldn’t say struggle with, but just a sense of there’s a part where the body is created to do this, but then there’s also a part where we pray for people, right? We say God heal her and yet there’s a part of the body doing it. So I don’t know, there’s a little bit of tension I sometimes feel personally, do you guys have the same?
Dr. Josh: Yeah, I don’t know. For me personally, coming out at school, that was a huge tension for me, like I fully believe God can heal this person, so why am I even being a doctor right now to help this person with adjustments and realizing, hey, this is, this is a gift that the Lord has given us and is this something he wants us to be able to partner with people with too. And especially when you look at even just the main healer, like if you look at Jesus, I mean there’s many times where he healed in very different ways from laying hands on people, from people just touching his cloak to him spitting in dirt and rubbing it over someone’s eyes. It’s all these different ways to help heal people and having the Lord work through us and starting to realize, hey, it’s not two separate things, but it’s all one entity working together and that’s really what gave me a little bit more peace about what we’re doing too.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. We just really feel like we’re a vessel for his healing, I would think is the best way to put it. And it’s really cool because I feel like a lot of people put science over here and faith in God over here.
Joe: Never shall the two meet, right?
Dr. Josh: For sure.
Dr. Taylor: And God created science, right? So I feel like in our minds it’s a very separate thing sometimes, but I feel like it’s all very much one and it’s just the way he’s using us to have his healing take place.
Joe: Yeah. I agree. I think that when I start to separate them I think them as either or, that’s where the tension is but when you can see both and you’re created to do something amazing and I’m created to do something amazing in my own way. I don’t know about amazing but do something.
Dr. Josh: It’s amazing.
Joe: So it’s just the awareness of that, that the creation of you feeds the opportunity for that, so that’s really amazing, but that was one of those things I thought through as this process, especially for you with the hands on, you guys are really experiencing that tension not just my own. Literally today, I was praying for somebody and I was like, I wonder what they think about when they’re … just that phrase [inaudible 00:00:59:53]. But when did that faith come alive? When were you first introduced to it? When did it become real for you? I guess.
Joe: I have, I guess. When were you first introduced to it? When did it become real for you, I guess?
Dr. Taylor: I pretty much grew up under it, although in a lot of different avenues, very similar to how my dad was in a sense, a little bit of a nomad all over the place, travel-wise. He also really, I don’t want to say wrestled, but was very exploring with our faith as a family too. At one point we were in a Catholic church. At another point we were in a Methodist Baptist Church of Christ.
Dr. Josh: You were Jewish for a year weren’t you?
Dr. Taylor: It’s an inside joke. But he always been on this search for truth and so I very much grew up with faith for sure. But I think it wasn’t until I was in undergrad where the Lord really blessed me with a group of people that just really challenged me and I think for the first time I had to really decide like, What do I believe?
You know, like what not, what did my mom or dad believe or what do my siblings believe? Or like, what do I believe about this and how is that going to manifest in my decisions moving forward, I guess? And so thankfully, like I said, you go to college and there’s a lot of different ways that can go. I was, and I think a lot of it is influenced by the people you surround yourself with and I was very blessed to be surrounded by really incredible group of people who are very strong in their faith. And so I think that was where it really became reality for me and my own.
Joe: Yeah. I think that there is that inherited faith that we a lot of times have from somebody else and it’s sort of our own, but not really until another point in time and we take it on as our own.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah.
Joe: Or throw it out altogether. A couple of options.
Dr. Josh: Yeah. Very similar. Not to the point where we jumped around from different types of religions I’d say, but very much grew up in the church, was very thankful to have two parents that kind of brought me into that. Grew up more in the Methodist faith and so when any type of healing where things of the Holy Spirit were brought up…
Joe: It’s huge in the Methodist church.
Dr. Josh: No one really talks about that much and so as I came into undergrad at the University of Florida, that’s really when I started searching for those things and understand like, Hey, there’s yes, our faith in Jesus is an amazing thing, but there’s so much more deeper when it comes to even incorporating the Holy Spirit too. It’s like icing on top of the cake. And so that’s kind of when I started journeying into my faith a little bit more deeper as I transitioned into my undergrad and just started serving more in just different types of ministries also and exploring a little bit more of, all right, What is this faith that I believe in? And trying to understand more about that.
Joe: Yeah. That’s, I think most of our journey has been, my wife and me, is in kind of throwing out a lot stuff that’s been maybe poorly presented to us over the years. To make it our own, I mean not in that create our own faith necessarily, but just sort of like to find the truth in there versus all the extraneous stuff that was presented along with it.
Dr. Taylor: And I think I look back to my childhood growing up and I really, at the time it was a little bit confusing, but looking back on it, I feel like that’s exactly what my dad was trying to lead us in is finding like what is the truth for us? There’s so many different avenues, but that’s something I have always really appreciated and respected about him is he is always searching for truth. Not necessarily what is everybody else saying or doing or what should Christianity look like, but what did Jesus want it to be about?
Joe: I think for us too. Yeah, it’s evolved over the time. Like for certain seasons for us when we need it. Like right now we’re at an Anglican church, which would not have thought that was on the horizon at all.
Dr. Taylor: Right.
Joe: But it’s so necessary in a lot of ways for where we are right now and you know the way our journey’s gone, I wouldn’t say we’re there forever, but there’s a sense of like community and connection there that has kind of led us to that point. So it’s been interesting to see where things have landed and where things will go but probably from my son’s perspective, I’m the same like been a couple of different backseat stops along the way. He’s probably like, What are we doing? We visited probably 10 churches here so he’s like, Where are we going this Sunday? What’s going on?
Dr. Josh: Community is so important. So it’s awesome just really what you’re doing too and just building community through just your marketing that you’re doing as well. And so being able to see how you tie that into basically your why is has been really good.
Joe: Yeah, I think that’s been an interesting thing. I think you have the same journey of just blending faith and work. Like a lot of times there’s been a desire to keep them separate, I’ll keep this to myself, I’ll keep it private. But I also don’t want to go the other route where it’s all like that’s the primary message and then you get a lot of like reactions from that. So it’s finding that proper balance of blending it together. For it’s the right balance for me, and then where I feel comfortable, I’ll have no problem talking to people directly but sometimes when you put it out in a digital form, it has a different take and people deal with that a little differently.
So, but yeah, it’s been an evolution over time of figuring out what that means. I think for me, for a while it was just, that’s my own thing, I’m not going to tell anybody. But then you eventually things happen in life and it’s like, No, this is a part of me I have to tell because this is part of who I am.
Last couple of questions, just family, you talked a lot about family. I’ve just, you too, first of all, it’s interesting you guys call each other, Dr. Josh and Dr. Taylor. Do you do that at home too? Or is that just?
Dr. Taylor: We don’t. We try not too. We do it at the office.
Joe: Yeah. How do you separate, that’s an interesting thing too. Like how do you like, I don’t know, practices, rituals that you do when you get home to sort of take your chiropractic mind off and be able to just sort of be husband, wife?
Dr. Taylor: It’s hard.
Dr. Josh: We’re still learning.
Dr. Taylor: And this season it’s hard, we’re definitely getting better. In the beginning it was all office, all the time. We’re definitely getting better with that and finding things that are, sometimes we just have to say, Okay, for two hours we’re not talking about the office and we’re going to a coffee shop.
Joe: You’ve really pounded on a table…
Dr. Taylor: But sometimes we just have to be very intentional about it because it’s just something we’re there all day together with each other and we get excited about it. We love it. We love talking about it, but it can become consuming for sure.
Joe: Yeah. My wife and I are the same way. We have both been in marketing for so long that we’re constantly like, we’ll go out for coffee and I’m like, So tell me more about this campaign that I wanted to do. What are your thoughts on this? And like, Oh wait, we should not.
Sometimes it’s harder to get to that path. You can eventually get there, but it’s again, we love it, so it’s not like we’re trudging through stuff we don’t want to talk about. It’s stuff we love and we’re passionate about and we’re trying to make each other better. So there’s a lot of justifications to do that, but then there’s a lot of reasons to not do that too.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah. I can think just again, we have to be very intentional and just protect that time that we set aside and a lot of times it’s more quality over quantity, for sure. But making sure we are intentional about weekly setting aside some time that we really focus in on our marriage and on our family has been really, really good for us.
Joe: How was it working together? Is that, was that an easy transition? Was it a struggle? I mean sort of, I don’t know you’ve kind of seen each other in a couple of different phases of your relationship. How’s that been going? I don’t know quite how to ask that question, but…
Dr. Josh: No, that’s a great question. I mean it’s constantly evolving and so we’ve learned so much from when we first started opening and to where we are now to where we’re really finding really what our main gifts are also when it comes to the practice. And so obviously it has its little challenges, we’re both doctors, we’re both kind of more like the authority in the practice. And so learning kind of where our main roles are and in the beginning I was like, I’m going to be in charge of all the finances just because that’s what the man’s supposed to do, right?
And so I ended up being terrible at it and it stressed my wife out so much to the point where I realized, Hey, I need to just hand this over to her. And it’s really funny, like [inaudible 01:08:18] she’s very passionate about it. She’s really good at that. I’m more of the visionary in the mission focused aspect of the practice and when I need something to really get done, my wife is phenomenal at that.
Joe: Oh for sure. Yeah.
Dr. Josh: Checklists on checklists and so really figuring out, All right, what are our main gifts and strong suits when it comes to the practice and figuring out really where we’re weak at and very thankfully we’re very opposite when it comes to those things and so we’re able to really partner together well with that.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s been, I mean amazing, just in general. I mean, he’s my best friend. We love being in practice every day together. We’re doing something we love together, which is so cool and I think it’s an awesome opportunity that not a lot of people get to do. Like there’s definitely challenges and we’ve had to learn how to work well together for sure and how to lead a team well together. Which is challenging too because sometimes there’s things that he may be talking about or leading the team in that I don’t agree with, but just learning the best way to communicate that and have mutual respect for each other and maybe come to an agreement when we aren’t necessarily on the same page as something that we’re still fine tuning. But it’s, we’ve grown so much through it and it’s cool and I think it’s also really made our marriage better too, which I’m thankful for because a lot of times it doesn’t go that way.
Joe: Yeah. I think for us, a lot of therapy and counseling were probably good for us because, probably more for me than her, but I needed to release a few things. You talked about the finances, like I had a lot of those, that pride of just, I’ve got my own way, let me just do it this way. Even though we didn’t work together on a business, there are a lot of times where I would ask her for information and of course I didn’t really want her honest feedback. I wanted her to tell me how awesome it was and then she came back with the honest feedback. I’d go, Wait a minute, that’s…
Joe: So but learning, she’s great at certain things that I’ll never be great at and vice versa and we’d found a good balance there. But man, it took almost 20 years to kind of figure that out. We actually now can, I have a business idea that we want to pursue maybe in a couple of years, but I can see that possibly working now, whereas five years ago, 10 years ago, there’s no way it would have, we just didn’t know how to communicate or work together well. It’s been good that we’ve evolved as people I think.
Joe: But you’re the visionary person, what sort of next, what’s on the horizon for True North?
Dr. Josh: We’ve got big plans and so we’re in our physical location for really the next five and a half years. And so, I mean, biggest thing is now to kind of expand, whether that’s a bigger location here in the Springs and adding other kind of tenants in, having own complex or creating multiple True North offices throughout the Springs or throughout the United States as well too. And so all our different ideas that we have, we’re still kind of brainstorming really what we foresee True North to become too.
Dr. Josh: But really our main focus is outgrowing our place that we’re in now, having to build a bigger location here in the Springs and being able to just serve people more excellently with that too. Bring more doctors on as well. We’re currently looking for that too and so it’s exciting to see just the little steps that are coming together for that.
Dr. Taylor: It’s pretty cool though recently we looked back at our business plan that we presented to the banks, just like us all green and nervous and like, Please give us a lot of money right now and we have nothing to our names. It’s cool looking back on that and the projections that we set and we had to set out a five year plan and tell them where we were going to be in five years and after our first year, second year and just to see us like hit those but actually go beyond that and knowing like, Hey, like when we put these on paper, these were just like our big dream. Right?
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: And to see it after a couple of years starting to happen and hitting all those goals that we had back then was super cool and really encouraging.
Joe: What do you attribute some of the success too? I mean yeah, you can put it on paper and put it in a plan, but then things have to work well, things have to happen. What would you look back and say like, It’s probably because of these reasons.
Dr. Josh: A lot of practice and a lot of great mentorship and I mean mostly everything that we did in our practice from building it to getting the clientele before we even opened our practice, it was all that we did before we even moved out here. And so we collectively really flew across the United States and helped open up about, what was it 12 offices?
Joe: Fourteen offices as students.
Dr. Josh: Fourteen offices. And so we were able to help just with a lot of other honestly, chiropractors helping open up their practices and understanding, all right, this is what to do, this is what not to do and…
Joe: Willing to take a risk on you.
Dr. Josh: Absolutely. And so seeing a lot of that and always taking notes, always learning and figuring out, All right, how can we make this better? And that’s kind of what helped us to create what we wanted to, but then also say, Hey, I think we can actually do things even better. And obviously as we’ve gone through the process, we realized that we could have done even better with these other things. And now we’re incorporating those.
Dr. Taylor: And our mentors, I mean we’ve got some really, really solid mentors that we kind of looked at what kind of practice do we want to have, but what kind of family life do we want to have as well? So we see a lot of people that are successful in one or the other, but not both. And which was something we were very set on from the beginning we didn’t want to sacrifice our family for the sake of the office. But we felt like they could both be very successful if we did it the right way.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Taylor: So just finding mentors that were doing it and having the practice we wanted, but also the family life we wanted was really, really powerful for us in the beginning. So we have some awesome mentors that we check in with pretty periodically. We jump on calls with, we text back and forth all the time and are constantly just bouncing ideas off of. And so that was a huge catapult for us in the beginning opening. But also just as we’re progressing forward with our office right now.
Joe: Do they help kind of keep you accountable too to how things are going on with your marriage, those types of things as well? Or do you have other resources like that because I think that’s sometimes where everything seems, can look awesome from our perspective sometimes, and somebody else can provide another light on that and go, Pay attention to this too.
Dr. Taylor: Yeah, we do. And that’s cool and they’re not always the same. We’ve got some chiropractors, so as mentors we have some people of faith in our life too. And so it’s cool to have different dynamics speaking into you and speaking into your life and getting different perspectives.
Joe: Yeah. Well thanks so much for the time. I mean, like I said, I’ve really enjoyed following you guys on social media. I’ve learned so much. I’ve already got a couple, I’ve got a list of my own things that I want to go in and get corrected that I had no idea that you guys even worked on until like our conversation and just a little bit of research on my end. I was like, Okay, these would be who I’d go to. So I’ll definitely be in there at some point as a patient, but I’ve enjoyed following online and thanks again so much for sharing your story today. I really appreciated it.
Dr. Josh: Thanks for having us.
Dr. Taylor: Thank you for having us.
Joe: Yeah, awesome.
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