Interview with Dr. Wayne Neal, DC                           6/07

This kat meets members in the darnedest ways. Into my inbox came an email from an unfamiliar name, Dr. Wayne Neal, of Smyrna, Georgia. It read:

You have Coenzyme Q-10, 50mg, 60 Softgels for $8.57.

How is this possible? I want to tell my patients about your company, but is this too good to be true? Please help.

Thank you,

Dr. Wayne Neal

Humber Parkerson Clinic Chiropractic Orthospinology www.humberparkerson.com

It seemed important to talk to Dr. Neal rather than send an email. We chatted and there was such a strong connection around values, Dr. Neal became one of our newest members. I decided to interview him more formally and share his story about becoming a chiropractor, his interest in nutrition, and, of course, how he found the Co-op.

How did you become a chiropractor?

Dr. Neal: Since elementary school, I suffered migraine headaches. I saw a variety of specialists, took different medications, but still suffered from migraines. As a last resort, I saw a chiropractor and it worked! I decided that I wanted to become a chiropractor at that point.

However, when I was in chiropractic school, my headaches returned. I couldn’t get out of bed because the pain was so great. At the time, I had still only been exposed to the traditional style of popping adjustments.

I talked with a professor and research director, Dr. John Grostic, whose father had pioneered a gentle, non-manipulative procedure for aligning the top bone in the neck back in the 1940s. He took three x-rays of my neck and saw that my top bone was misaligned. He barely tapped and I certainly didn’t feel anything, but I felt better, not only in my neck but also in my lower back.

After in adjustment, he took another set of films and the bone was now in place and my body was healing with the gentlest of chiropractic interventions.

I stayed and finished my training, working under Dr. Grostic for the last four years of his life.

How did you get your start in private practice? Had you been exposed to business early in life?

Dr. Neal: Quite the contrary. I grew up in a small town in Tennessee. My father was a preacher, so there was no capital for me to start up a business. A doctor in Georgia, who also focused on the Grostic technique, was looking for help.

The practice evolved over time, with a doctor who had grown up in a chiropractic family taking over the business side. We really play to each other’s strengths, with him leading on the business side and me focusing on patient care, especially challenging cases.

I’m meticulous when it comes to healing and adjustments.

What’s the biggest change you’ve experienced in your 11 years of practice?

Dr. Neal: Really, it was a change in mindset. I used to try to “fix” patients, more like a mechanic works on a machine. Now, I work with patients more like a gardener. If you remove weeds and provide the right fertilizer, the plants can do their own growing. Similarly, I remove interference (the weeds) in the nervous system and spine and talk to my patients about nutrition (the fertilizer).

Without fail, the patients with the worst diets have the worst health problems, so I started to become interested in educating patients about nutrition.

How did you become interested in nutrition?

Dr. Neal: It’s ironic, since I grew up in a small country town, where ham and eggs, biscuits and gravy, and anything fried is the norm. I took nutrition classes in school, but they were just requirements to be gotten through. I didn’t care. It wasn’t for me. I thought people were nuts who were overly interested in nutrition.

Then, as I worked with patients, I noticed that some patients could hold their adjustments much longer than others. I was intrigued with the correlation between nutrition and how well chiropractic adjustments held. I did an experiment on myself, after reading about eating organic and unprocessed foods. I kid you not. I used to get multiple adjustments each month and suddenly my adjustments were holding for two to three months. The only thing I changed was my diet.

Since then, I’ve become what I call a ‘nutri-nut’ and write a column on nutrition in our email newsletter. I study nutrition as a hobby now. I recently did an article on food and mood, how without the right nutrition, the body can’t make the right neurotransmitters, and so a person doesn’t feel good.

Do people ask you for nutritional consultations?

Dr. Neal: It comes up when my patients are seeking treatments. I had one patient whose child would go ballistic at school. You wonder if a kid like this is dealing with trauma or excessive emotional stress, but in his case, the answer was ‘no.’

Instead, he was having reactions to his diet, with food coloring and additives being the prime culprits responsible for his emotional outbursts. When his parents removed processed foods with all the dyes and chemicals, he was like a different child. You would never know he had been the kid acting out.

It’s not like I go out looking to do nutritional consults, but people come in to us, sometimes as a last resort, as I did when I was a kid having migraines. It comes up naturally as we seek to understand our patients’ needs.

How do people find you, since you don’t do any advertising?

Dr. Neal: That’s right, we do not chase the personal injury business and we don’t take insurance, so ours is a cash-based business. Since patients are paying out of their own pockets, it’s important for us to keep our costs down.

Regular visits to us are only $40 while a lot of other chiropractors in town charge $100 for a single visit. They add a lot of extra therapies that raise the price but don’t necessarily create long-term improvements. Our goal is to be dependable, cost-effective, and personable in our services.

Patients often comment on our staff, all of whom are incredibly encouraging and optimistic by nature. We offer tailor-made adjustments calculated from the three film of the person’s spine. We also promise that patients will see improvements within two weeks or else we will refer them to another specialist. If it’s going to work, it will work within two weeks.

We get people in who are facing surgery and want to avoid surgery. Most are out of alignment and we can help them, but sometimes we have to refer to a medical doctor.

What generates the volume of business you get from out of state?

Dr. Neal: Mostly, we have patients who have moved away, who drive or fly in to get treatments. Family members of patients will also fly in to get treatment.

How did you find the Co-op?

Dr. Neal: I found you through Bill Henderson and after I became interested in researching orthomolecular medicine. I saw that you had a product similar to what Linus Pauling did his research on, but it was a much better price than what I had found previously.

I was impressed with what you offered and liked your emphasis on education versus pages and pages of catalog offerings and salesy stuff.

I also liked your prices, a lot, but I couldn’t imagine how you could offer good products at such low prices. That’s when I wrote in with my question about CoQ-10.

I am interested in finding good prices for my patients, but it was more than that. I was buying for my own family. We just had our second daughter, who is now 6 months old. We paid for her delivery out of pocket as we did not have maturity coverage on our insurance. Financially, we’re being careful and budgeting things carefully.

I looked at your CoQ-10 and saw that it was in the right amount and in a softgel formulation, identical to what I had been buying for a lot more at the store.

What convinced you to buy?

Dr. Neal: I heard “the rest of the story” as Paul Harvey used to say. Your president shared a lot of stories about how you enforce quality, how you decide on products to offer in the first place, and the principles that guide your company.

It was a very different conversation, one that emphasized good science and doing what’s right. I remember saying, “I feel like I’ve found a place that cares about the same things we care about.”

After all, when people are paying for chiropractic services out of pocket, it’s all that much more important to be able to recommend supplements that are affordable. A lot of aging baby boomers are very budget-minded. I talked to a woman recently who agreed that supplements are important, but said, “But they’re so expensive.”

I am happy to find a place that I can send my patients to for supplements.

Okay, the question everyone gets. What do you make of the ‘kat’ and the Co-op’s sense of humor?

Dr. Neal: I think the kat is a cute concept. It’s like a mascot for a high school team, except that this one is a lot more educated. I’ve always thought of cats as having a lot of personality, but this one is the smartest one I’ve encountered. The kat is fine with me.

Regarding the humor, I’m new to the newsletter and I haven’t talked with Teri yet, but from what I hear, that will be a treat when I do.

Mascot, indeed! Didn’t we just have a lovely interview? Some humans can be so linear. ^..^

Nevertheless, if you are interested in contacting Dr. Neal, he may be reached at: drneal@humberparkerson.com