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A lot of people can’t connect the dots with a trauma they’ve had in the past. They think once the symptoms show up, that’s when everything started happening, but the body has probably been out of alignment for many years before the symptoms show up. Dr. Anthony Dinonno had the very same case when he was eight years old flunking out of school for falling asleep in class due to antihistamines he had to take for allergies. His mom’s chiropractor noticed his neck was a little crooked and made some adjustments, explaining that the nerves that exit out of the neck go to the allergy centers. Dr. Dinonno says health is wealth, and we must always take care of it. There is such a compound effect with bad health because it accumulates silently rather than being an event. He says you can have chiropractic adjustments for a very low cost, but it will change your life in a way that is far-reaching on your relationships and on your productivity.
On the podcast, we have Dr. Anthony Dinonno. He is the reason why I’m a chiropractor today. I’ve been seeing him ever since the third grade and he helped me out so much when I was going through my concussions and was getting absolutely no answers from the medical community. Dr. Anthony has been doing this for a long time. He is always there for his patients and his community and it’s an honor to have him on the podcast.
Listen To The Episode Here
Health Is Wealth with Dr. Anthony Dinonno
Welcome, Dr. Anthony Dinonno. How are you doing?
I’m good.
Did you grow up going to a chiropractor? How did you discover the profession? Where were you from originally?
I’m from the State of Washington. I’m from the West Coast. I was born and raised there, I went to school there. I went to chiropractic school in Georgia.
You went to Life, right?
Yes. My story is classic. My mom was going to the doc and I was always coming there with her because I was nine years old, so I had to go with her. I would sit there and she would get her treatment. Then we’d leave. The doctor said one time, “How’s your son over there?” I had an allergy and I didn’t know there was anything you could do other than antihistamine. Back in the ‘60s, there was no non-drowsy antihistamines. They didn’t make them.
They all put you to sleep a little bit?
That’s the problem. I was flunking out of school. That’s where it got ugly. I couldn’t read. I was eight, nine years old. If you can’t read, how do you think you’d do in history, language arts, social studies? I’ll go to these special classes and it was very humiliating. They literally come get me out of the class and take me to another room. I was falling asleep in school all the time due to the antihistamine. It’s knocking me out. My mom, she had a big heart. That’s what you do back in the ‘60s. I would sneeze and my nose would run, so I would take it.
I probably took a garbage can full in my first seven, eight years of life and then luckily, my mom hurt herself and I went to the chiro and he said, “Let me check him. He seems like he’s crooked.” My mom said, “His back is fine, doc. It’s okay.” The nerves that exit out of your neck go to your allergy centers. They could be not functioning right simply because your neck is out of whack. I was twisted and sure enough, I had one of these postures in my kindergarten picture. You look at it and you go, “How did no one ever noticed this?” He goes, “Look at that.”
That’s funny that you say that too because when I was coming to see you right after hockey, I knew my posture was bad and I thought it was like a thing that just happened. You were like, “Go back and look at all your family pictures from when you were seven or six. I guarantee you are leaning all the way over back then,” and you were right. A lot of people can’t connect the dots with a trauma they’ve had in the past. They think once the symptoms show up, that’s when everything started happening, but the body has probably been out of alignment for many years before the symptoms show up.
There’s such a compound effect with bad health. It accumulates silently and then you think it’s an event. That’s the problem. It’s not an event. It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s the trigger. It’s rarely the thing you did that day when you started your discomfort. It was all that stuff before. That’s a hard one for people. Even the brightest people go, “No, doc. Mine just happened today.” It’s a process that accumulates. It’s when the one thing you did that set this whole thing up.
EM 63 | Health Is Wealth
Health Is Wealth: It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Doc, when you first started seeing the chiropractor, how were your allergies doing?
Seven weeks and it’s gone. I never took antihistamine. I was ten years, three months old. I’ve never taken antihistamine since there. People say it’s a joke that I’ve got a pug nose. Under two months, it cleared me out. My histamine levels regulated themselves better. I was taking way too many, so I learned how to govern it better and brought it down to what I need to make and everybody’s fine. I was allergic to pollen, not cats and dogs. It was twelve months a year. I was taking antihistamines twelve months a year. It affected me so much. My mother, he had to ask her about four or five times to check me because I didn’t have back issues. I didn’t have neck issues. That’s what a chiropractor does to some people. We know that’s not true. Some people, that’s the frame, “Doc, my son’s neck is okay, but thank you for the offer.”
A lot of people don’t even know that you can check kids going to the chiropractor, why we should check kids, especially if you had a forceps delivery or C-section. People can be out of alignment from day one. When was the first time you gave your kids an adjustment?
It was the day of their birth. My wife did natural. She didn’t do Caesarean. I’m lucky because her OB-GYN is a patient of mine, so he gets it. He’s like, “If you yank on the baby’s neck, I’d rather you take seven hours to deliver this kid. I don’t want you pulling on those underdeveloped muscles and yank it up.” I was like, “I’ve got do it. I won’t do it.”
You practice in New Jersey. You’ve been there for a long time. What are the majority of the patients you see and the conditions you see in your office that get great results?
I’ve got kids that have perfect attendance in school. I worry about that all the time. My daughter has seven plaques in her room. I wish she had more mathematical ones or she got for social studies, but she’s got perfect attendance. My son has four. You don’t get perfect attendance if you’re unhealthy. Not to be pompous, the only reason they didn’t get it all the time was because I took vacations. I have to take them out of school. As far as being sick, no. It sounds like I’m being pompous but I’ve never had a cold, a flu, a slight infection. I definitely don’t have any digestive problems or cholesterol or blood pressure. Why is that? Because I practice what we preach. I’m 57 years old and no pressure, no cholesterol, no stomach medicine.
No medications?
Zero, and I’m vibrant. I don’t have any digestive or depression. There’s nothing there. Selfishly, why would I want that just for me? I’ve got a family practice. I don’t do a lot of sports injuries. I don’t do a lot of motor vehicle accidents, unless the patient was already with me. They need to help, just go somewhere. There are guys that know how to do that.
There’s too much involved in it. It takes away from the chiropractic care. You’ve got lawyers involved, the tons of paperwork and after a while it’s like, “What are we doing here?”
Like you, I don’t participate with any health care, so I’m not used to that documentation.
The one thing I’ve always loved about you is you don’t turn anybody away. You work with everybody no matter what the situation is, and you figure out what it’s going to take to get you the proper care you need. I’ve definitely taken that with me because you don’t turn anybody away. That’s a great thing.
There’s an old DE saying. The President of our school, his name was Sid Williams says, “You never know how far reaching what you say or do will have on somebody else’s life.” I take you in for a very low cost. I changed your life. How far-reaching will that be on your relationships, on your productivity? Are you just being kind? Maybe you won’t be so crabby with your mate. I go, “Why wouldn’t I want to do that?” I’ll bring you in whatever you can afford. You may have helped somebody else and pass it on.
EM 63 | Health Is Wealth
Health Is Wealth: You never know how far reaching what you say or do will have on somebody else’s life
That person’s bringing in ten people into the office before you know it, so you’re definitely right.
It was maybe three kids started, two husbands and one wife. That was my whole week.
Anybody in need of the care. You do a lot of a postural corrective exercises as well in your office. How important is that?
I have a saying that I haven’t seen anyone that’s acceptable to me. I personally think, after doing this for 33 years, an adjustment without an exercise is incomplete. My chiropractor only does adjustments. He doesn’t give me an exercise. You can get people upset. I got guys in my office and say, “You got some big ones. They will be all over you.” I go, “Show me why that’s wrong.” I will look into the literature, I’ll look at the research, I’ll look at the logic and I think it’s incomplete if you adjust without an exercise. I know all postural, strengthening the weak side, loosening the flip side.
You’re not just giving every patient the same exercise, you’re analyzing their posture, seeing which muscles are weak, which muscles are stronger and then you do a postural-based corrective exercise to help keep them in the right posture, which is great.
It’s got to be custom. There’s this go right, go left. That’s not for you. You’re unequal. You are asymmetrical, so we need this side to catch up. Once they catch up, you hold. Your nerves can fire to your body and single everything that needs to single to function right up. If you keep pulling in a certain way because your muscles are imbalanced and unequal, we’re going to sit in with a little bit though.
Do you do anything to help support the adjustment and the exercises? Are you a fan of any supplementation or anything that you like to give your patients in that regard?
Unfortunately, I’m sure it’s the same everywhere, patients love their Ibuprofen. They may even maybe split it to leaf. They love their Ibuprofen. Their finger hurts, they take an Ibuprofen. Their knees, their back, their jaw, they take an Ibuprofen, a leaf or Advil. I have substitutes for that. I do curcumin, which is a root. It’s turmeric. I do the fish oils, Omega-3s. Those combinations with it to do the same thing adults do without destroying your stomach, liver and brain.
Especially because if you get the new patients that are inflamed, that’s a strong anti-inflammatory and believe it’s got some good antioxidants in there too.
I like ice. I don’t not use that, but ice coupled with three fish oil and curcumin. It’s not destroying their body with these Advil leaf-like substances, which nobody thinks there’s an issue and I’m stuck on this one.
What is the issue? What is that doing to your body?
In my hallway, there’s the dialysis center at the end of the hall. There are 68 beds in there. It’s open seven days a week, even on Sunday. The number one reason why they’re in there is not cysts in the kidney, not diabetes, because I’m blessed just for the nurses coming to get treated. I’m right down the hall. It’s geographically desirable. I go, “What are people in there for that?” This has been for fifteen years. They’re in there for medicines that are prescribed or over the counter and people don’t get that. Dialysis is fatal. You don’t live forever once you get into dialysis. You’ll get away with it for a little while because your kidneys filter your bodies. A little bit of irritation.
Every time you take an Ibuprofen, it meshes with those little tubules in your kidney that has taken that junk out of your food, liquids that you consume and you’re destroying it just a bit every time. It could be the compound effect. You maybe took 300, then the kidneys went bad. It’s not that day that your kidneys went bad. It was all that stuff you did before. These people, they’re not old. There are people in their 40s. There are six people in their 30s and one of them was there for a bad knee. He just lived on Ibuprofen. I feel terrible, bad, back, one guy had a bad shoulder and one guy had a headache. They’re not going to make it until 40.
Because they’ve been crushing the medication, damaging the liver and everything?
That’s what people do. They don’t think there’s a long-term negative effect even though they know it. They may think, “It’s not going to happen to me.” It happens.
The tough part too is you watch television and they’re advertising this stuff like candy. It’s like, “Why would they put something bad for me? It’s on the television. It must be good for me.” They don’t teach you everything what’s doing to your body all the harm it can do.
It’s management. We can go off on a tangent. It’s management.
They’re masking the problem.
If it was helping you heal, you’d be healed. You’ve been taking that stuff for how many years? Your pressure, your bad knees, your back, your thyroids, your stomach. If it made you heal, you’d be healed. It’s managing you through medicine. Even the brightest people, they step back, and they go, “This isn’t fixing me.” You and I got a big hall because there’s a lot of people that subscribe to the medicines, “It makes me feel better, so what the hell?”
You can do a lot of things to feel better but the goal is to get better. You want to get better. You can go to the liquor store and feel better, but you want to go get the root cause of the problem corrected, getting better. I like to ask this question to a lot of my guests. What is the one thing that you’ve taken with you over the years that you would like to share, just something you’ve learned and helped you out through life?
Persistence. Nothing takes the place of persistence. I know brilliant people that don’t persist and they’re just mediocre. They’re brilliant. Just persistence, whether it’s health goals, financial goals, physical goals, relationship goals, just persistence. I’ve got a pretty good marriage. You know my wife a little bit. My kids, it’s not bad. My daughter’s going to be a naturopath, a great pharmacist. Instead of giving medicine, she’s given plant-based, fruit-based. That’s something for me. My son doesn’t know yet. He may go to chiropractic school, he may not.
It’s funny you say that, persistence, because that separates a lot of the good and the great people. Everybody, no matter what you’re doing, is going to wake up and you’re going to have bad days and it’s the question of, “What’s getting you up in the morning and pushing you through that day to become what you want to be?” It is all about persistence.
It’s like Rocky. If you get knocked down, you get up from it. That’s your true core, your true self. It’s how well you can get up from getting knocked down because everybody gets knocked down. I’ve been knocked down quite a bit. I say this politely, the IRS, I paid a little bit less than I should. We’ve got an IRS letter, we don’t want that. We’re not saying, “Give us this money or we would take everything from you.” That wasn’t a lot but it was enough.
EM 63 | Health Is Wealth
Health Is Wealth: If you get knocked down, you get up from it. That’s your true core, your true self.
I did get an IRS letter for my taxes. They wanted $4.99. They came after for it.
Letter after letter they said, “We’ll give you until July 17th. If we don’t receive this money, we’re going to levy your bank account.” That was back in 2015. That knocked me down a little bit but my persistence, I took that negative into a positive. I said, “I must have helped a lot of people that year because I made that much more than my implied that I made. That’s great. That must have helped a few hundred more people than I suspected.”
How you look at certain situations is everything. You’ve got to find that silver lining.
I didn’t want to pay it but I was like, “I must have helped a few hundred people.” That just slipped by me with the tax part.
Where are you located? Where can people find you on the internet? Where do they go to see you?
I’m in Monmouth County, New Jersey. I’m in Monmouth, which is just north of Freehold, Bruce Springsteen’s town. He was talking about it on a TV show about being from Freehold. I’m north from there. I’m in Monmouth. It’s a great town. There are about 10,000 people in that town. I’ve personally been there in that particular location for 29 years now.
I was going to see you when you were in that house.
I blissfully outgrew that place one building over to the other one.
Doc, what’s your website and everything?
It’s MonmouthBackAndNeck.com.
Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for everything that you’ve done for me over the years. You are the reason I got into this profession and I can’t thank you enough.
Thank you, Kevin.
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