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The President Of Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic With Dr. Jake Hollowell

3 years ago

How do you take giant leaps of faith when fear would hold you back? This episode’s guest is Dr. Jake Hollowell, the President of Blair Upper Cervical Society. Dr. Jake shares with Dr. Kevin Pecca his experiences of facing the unknown. A lot of times you’ll get these negative thoughts of “I’ll never be able to do it.” What you always have to do is say, “I can do it and I’m going to do it.” If the fear doesn’t go away the first time, don’t panic! Keep affirming yourself with positive thoughts. It’s just a matter of time and practice. Tune in to hear more of Dr. Jake’s insightful experiences!

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Listen To The Episode Here

The President Of Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic With Dr. Jake Hollowell

Welcome, everyone, to another episode. For weekly episodes, be sure to hit the subscribe button. You can find me on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, @DrKevinPecca and on Facebook at MontclairUpperCervical. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can email me at DrKevinPecca@Gmail.com.

On the podcast, we have one of my favorite Blair Upper Cervical chiropractors, Dr. Jake Hollowell. Dr. Jake is actually the new President of the Blair Upper Cervical Society. He is an extremely talented doc. I always learn so much from him every time we sit and it is an honor to have him on the show. Dr. Jake has set up practices in two different countries. What I love most about him is he follows his dreams. He’s extremely passionate about the work he does. He’s always looking to improve himself, improve others around him, and get people better. Without further ado, please welcome the President of the Blair Upper Cervical Society, Dr. Jake Hollowell.

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On the show, we have a recurring guest, Dr. Jake Hollowell. Dr. Jake is a Blair Upper Cervical doctor in Florianópolis, Brazil. He is one of my favorite Blair chiropractors to speak with. He is also known as the godfather of CBCT 3D x-ray. He’s completely revolutionized the upper cervical world in that department. It’s always an honor to speak with him and see what he’s up to. It’s always an honor to have him on the show. Dr. Hollowell, how are you doing?

I’m doing awesome and thanks for having me on, Kevin.

Jake, what got you started in upper cervical originally because not a lot of people know about it and usually not a lot of people do it? What really got your eyes opened to upper cervical?

Stepping back a little bit, I first discovered chiropractic when I was sixteen years old. I played high school football and our trainer was a chiropractor. I think why that’s relevant to how I went on to be an upper cervical chiropractor is the fact that he was very philosophical. Before I even went to chiropractic school, I had read several of the blue books. He was big into the blue books. He was straight objective. He doesn’t talk really about symptoms, he just finds the subluxation and correct it but I read even the green books. I’d actually read the philosophy of chiropractic before I went to college, which I think is unique unless your dad, your uncle, or somebody was a chiropractor.

When I was going through chiropractic school, I had that philosophy in my head and I would go to different technique groups, clubs, and seminars. I guess I didn’t find that any of the techniques really fit the philosophy. I think sometimes people go to a technique and then they may adopt the philosophy. It’s interesting maybe to have a philosophy and then try to find a technique that fits that philosophy that you have. That’s what led me to upper cervical. With the full spine, I didn’t see that it was matching. When I first went to upper cervical, I went to a certain technique that wasn’t Blair. It excited me and it was actually at Life West where I was going to school. It was a time where upper cervical was very popular.

A lot of people were interested in upper cervical when you were going.

We had some charismatic professors that intrigued a lot of the students, so there was a big upper cervical following at that time while I was there.

When you were going to the chiropractor, was that in North Carolina? Did you grow up in North Carolina?

Yup, that was in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Is that pretty much the Outer Banks?

That’s Outer Banks.

That’s an amazing place to grow up. It’s like a ghost town there in the winter.

Not this winter apparently, because I have a lot of friends that still live there. The same thing that happened with us here in Brazil. A lot of people that could work in home office decided, “I’m not going to be in the city like New Yorkers and whatever,” and they went in there and actually rented houses so that they could have some fresh air and not be so compacted into the city.

I just want to touch on something you mentioned before, the philosophy of chiropractic. I remember applying to chiropractic schools and people were telling me, “You don’t want to go to that school. They don’t teach philosophy there.” I had no idea what that even meant until the first couple of weeks when I got there. I was like, “This is what they’re talking about.” What in your mind is chiropractic philosophy or a sound chiropractic philosophy?

I think what I was thinking at that time was more just going to the nitty-gritty and the basics, which was the subluxation. I didn’t understand how you could feel around with solely your hands on the spine and detect a half a millimeter or a millimeter misalignment, any sort of anomaly, or the different things that made that may occur in the spine using just palpation. With a lot of the full spine chiropractors, it was what I saw and again, I’m not knocking it. I don’t want to say anything negative. For me, it didn’t match my understanding of the philosophy. That was what drove me to upper cervical. We still use palpation. It’s still a valuable tool.

When I first started with upper cervical, I poo-pooed it a little bit. As I’ve grown as an upper cervical chiropractor, I think palpation is very important to be able to feel and touch, and to show the patient the different areas where their spine is twisted and a little bit sensitive. There was a big difference for me between the x-rays taken. In some full spine chiropractic offices, the offices that will twist and pop different areas of the spine, whereas they would look at the x-ray and they would find these listings, but then there was really no specificity to the adjustment. They look at, “There is a little bit of a twist or a structural shift, so let’s just pop it,” but I didn’t see that much specificity. For me, it didn’t match the philosophy that I learned in the books. With upper cervical, we have the 3D imaging, scanning, palpation, and leg checks. Then there are a number of other little checks that each doctor may do to get a good idea globally of what’s happening, not only neurologically but also structurally speaking.

Jake, I know this is tough to say or answer, but if you never went to Italy and stumbled upon that doctor that wanted to show you the three-dimensional CBCT image because he saw what you were trying to do with the flat X-rays, do you think we’d still be taking just digital flat X-ray films?

I imagine, even before me, I had heard of people looking at it. It was like, “I went into a place and I had my CT done.” There weren’t people sending patients out to get the imaging that I was aware of at that time but I’m sure over time, those people were starting to be interested in it. It’s an awesome technology and I think in the coming years, there’s going to be even newer forms of three-dimensional reconstruction technology that will be available to us. I think eventually somebody would have figured it out.

For a very short couple of months, I was looking at plain film with Dr. Banitch, then I went to digital, and then I went to CBCT. I couldn’t imagine practicing any other way. It makes what we do a lot more enjoyable, more fun because you’re getting better results, and I wouldn’t do it any other way. I think a lot of people would say the same and it’s only getting better.

When I look at some of the people posting x-rays and they’ll send me somewhere else, I’m like, “It’s definitely better than not having any image at all.” There are those tough cases. When I first started out in Blair, I got pretty easy cases. I think it’s that weird thing that the universe sometimes does with you, which it gives you some easy ones in the beginning to give you some confidence. Even the tough ones, I guess I got lucky on, so I was able to create confidence. The other thing is I worked with Dr. Forest. Every single image, I had him double-checking the image. If there was someone that wasn’t doing well, I had him come in and check it. It’s very valuable to have that mentor in someone like Dr. Forest. I was extremely lucky so I didn’t start making mistakes because once you start making mistakes, it can be sometimes hard to trace that back.

Did you work under Dr. Forrest for five years?

No, only two years.

What were some of the things you definitely took away from Dr. Forest that you still do now?

What pops into my head is honesty, ethics, being very straightforward and an awesome communicator. I think that’s rare nowadays. Everyone wants to be somebody else. They’re trying to be maybe too salesy or too business-like and he was very genuine and everything. He had very good systems, procedures, and everything was straightforward, honest, and ethical. I appreciated that. That’s something that I’ve definitely taken to my own practice.

He is one of the best adjusters of all time. You definitely got to see him in action and see the way he adjusts and takes care of people. I’ve only seen him adjust a couple of people. I remember Dr. Cameron Bearder was saying when he would watch Dr. Matz up in Montana. He’s like, “He had something about him. When you saw that table click down, you knew something amazing was going to happen. He had that energy and aura about him.” I’d imagine it’s the same watching Dr. Forest do his thing in his clinic.

For sure. I remember there was a chiropractor that was being checked and it was a couple. There was a husband and wife chiropractor being checked in his office. The wife was a network practitioner. You know about the network technique. I remember her saying when Dr. Forest adjusted her husband that she could feel the energy going through the spine because that’s what they do. They’re very sensitive to different spinal energies. I don’t know exactly how it works, but it’s something that I respect. I think it definitely has its place and it was really neat coming from someone from a very different perspective.

With the upper cervical, though we are vitalistic, we’re also in Blair, mechanistic. Dr. Forest will tell you that he is very mechanistic in his thinking, whereas network, is on the other side which is much more vitalistic. I think it was really cool to see that. What I saw is he’s an adjusting and analyzing vertebral subluxation machine. I think that’s what it is. When you see so many, you have to touch a certain amount of spines and you do a certain amount of adjustments, and your body turns into a machine. Think about how many people he’s checked. We have a ways to go, Kevin.

I don’t know if you were speaking to a bunch of people or I think it was at the last seminar where you said something interesting that you get profoundly better at Blair as the years go on, and I couldn’t find that to be more true. It’s awesome that you can keep getting better and better at this technique the older you get. It’s not like you’re an athlete where you start declining. As the years go on, I feel like you get exponentially better every single year. It’s obviously repetition and everything, but why do you think that is? What do you think you get better at every year as the years go on and the more people you help and the more people you get on Blair care?

Part of it is the neurologic part, the muscle memory and the other part is once you’ve seen a certain amount of people, you get confidence. I think confidence is probably the important factor in the equation. Probably, at times, you start second-guessing something or maybe you have two people in a row that aren’t evolving in the rate that you used to and you start second-guessing this, that, and the other. When you’re newer, that happens a lot more. As you get more experienced, that just doesn’t happen. You’re like, “There could be three or four that are going to be tough cases that I get on the row and there may be a year where I have three or four really tough cases in the whole year.”

With the level of stress, just out of whack hormones, and people sitting not leaving their house and not breathing fresh air, I definitely had quite a few challenging subluxations and challenging patients. You’ve got to keep going. They need us. You see this in sports, too. You see a guy in baseball have a slump. Something gets in his head and he doesn’t do good. A lot of the times, you’ll see that mostly happens either when they’re really young or maybe right at the end of their career when really they are deteriorating.

In practice too, good and bad things come in waves where you are on a roll, you can’t miss, people are doing great, and then you get those complications where it’s a little bit of downside. You just got to ride it out and then it goes back up again.

We have to maintain that confidence, not only in our adjusting but in the way we communicate with the patients because the patients sniff it out pretty quickly.

Jake, is there anything that you do personally to keep yourself at your best? When you check a lot of people, it could be taxing on you physically and mentally. What are some things you do to keep you even-keeled and perform at the highest level here?

The first thing is you’ve got to catch waves. When I’m surfing, I’m catching good waves that mentally get me in the right place. In 2021, I started to do on Mondays, a 24-hour fast, and that’s been something that’s amazing. I lost about 5 kilos. That’s about 10 or 12 pounds, I believe. It took me a while to be able transform from pounds and inches to kilos and meters. The fasting and then meditations. On the day where I fast, I do a meditation for lunch. I’d be doing some different positive meditations because there have been a lot of things in 2020 that have stressed me out and me having a child to everything that’s going on. There’s that worry. I was trying to meditate on that and get my head straight. Surfing for sure and when I’m surfing, I’m in the water, I’m also meditating. It’s just the calmest and a nice place ever and then doing this 24-hour fast.

I’ll stop eating on Sunday night at about 6:00 or 7:00, and then I’ll eat only when I get home on Monday night. The other thing is I don’t see patients on Wednesday and I take Friday afternoons off. This is something I got from Dr. Forest. In the beginning, we worked all the time. Probably Dr. Forest worked for many more years, five days a week or even six days a week. Not to say that I’m not working, I am working. Now that I’m the Blair President, those Wednesdays and Friday afternoon among other things that I get to do outside of the clinic. I’m working on projects for the Blair Society as well. I like to see a lot of patients on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Friday, I take a half-day off. Wednesday is my day to do other stuff and go surf.

Are you off on Saturday and Sunday?

Of course. That’s against my religion to work on Saturday and Sunday. Not to say that I won’t do a project or I won’t work on some Blair stuff on the weekends if there are no waves. When there’s a lot of waves, less work gets done. When there’s not a lot of waves, more work gets done.

Jake, I wanted to touch on and talk to you about is you’ve made two, from what it looks like to me, gigantic leaps of faith that I think a lot of people would not do because fear would hold them back. You completely moved your entire life from the United States to Italy. I don’t know what that process was like for you, but that has got to be a little bit scary. I don’t know too many people that that would take that chance because there’s a lot of unknown there. I wanted to pick your brain on what that move was like from you going from the United States and opening up a clinic in Italy, and then Italy to opening up an entire new clinic in Brazil with a new language and all that. Some people are scared to start over from just another state over, let alone a different country in a different language. I would love for you just to walk through that and what was that process like for you?

When you talk about the language, one of the things that I learned and this is just on the side note. We now even have a lot of like expatriates that live here in Brazil from America and Europe and they say, “It’s hard.” A lot of times, when you’re going to learn something like, “It’s hard. I can’t do it,” and you start getting these negative thoughts, “I’ll never be able to do it.” The first thing you always have to do is say, “I can do it and I’m going to do it.” It’s just a matter of time and practice. When I arrived in Italy, to be honest, I was there a little bit and I had a panic attack and like, “What did I get myself into?” Because I didn’t speak the language. I could say, “Grazie,” and that’s about it. I could point to things and I know a few numbers, and that’s about it. I didn’t understand anything. It was a lot different.

At the time, I was a young chiropractor. I didn’t go and visit Italy, and check it out to see if I want to live. I was like, “I’m going to do it.” There was something in me that said, “I need to do this,” because I always wanted to travel and I thought I’ll probably open up a clinic. I’ll never be able to have a clinic abroad. When the opportunity came, I jumped at it and I probably didn’t really think too much about it. I didn’t think about taxes, for example, are extremely high there. I was thinking I was an independent contractor. All of that business part, I’d never really done in the United States. All that was handled by Dr. Forest and the previous chiropractor that I worked for. I didn’t think about all that. Those are the things you might want to think about before you go to a country.

Which might have been a blessing too, because if you did think about it, you might have talked yourself out of it.

It was cool being in Italy. I loved it. Everywhere you go, you’ve got to see the good in people. Sometimes you go and you see the bad, and it was that negative aspect. You see what they do that you don’t like. You’ve got to focus on what they do that you do. In the end, you have to determine if it’s more things that you liked than you don’t like, if it’s somewhere you’re going to stay and live for more time. The first year I didn’t speak Italian. It took me a while. After a year, when I finally started to speak Italian, I found out that almost all of them thought that when I passed Tytron scanner on their neck that that was a treatment because a lot of times I wouldn’t adjust them. They thought that was some an adjustment or correction.

That’s beneficial because they think they’re getting something.

They are then disappointed and they’re like, “You’re just checking me with that thing?” I thought that was a funny thing that happened. I had a great assistant there and she was passionate about chiroprsactic. They have the aperitivo there where you go out after work, like a happy hour. She’ll go out to these little happy hours that everyone goes and they walk around and spread the word about the chiropractic. That was cool. Shortly, thereafter, that was when I met my wife and she is Brazilian-Italian. She has Italian citizenship, but she was born in Brazil. Both of her grandparents left Italy during World War II and went to Brazil to flee the war, persecution, and everything. I met her and that was what eventually led me to Brazil.

Now, what were you thinking heading to Brazil? You don’t speak Portuguese either. At that point, you probably knew some words. You were about to open up another office, support a family, and you don’t speak the language. What’s going through your head there?

Yeah, I didn’t speak any Portuguese when I arrived in Brazil. I started to pick up a book and read it, but it started to confuse me with Italian. I was like, “I’m still here.” They’re very similar and that in the end, helped me out to learn. I learned Portuguese in about six months. It took a year to learn how to communicate. When I’m talking about not talking perfectly and communicate.

You knew what they were saying when you got to Brazil with the Italian background, but it took you a while to communicate it, right?

Yeah, exactly. I could understand very quickly what they were saying and it’s a work in progress to communicate and speak correctly. I feel now after years here, there are still words I don’t know. There are still some verbs that I won’t conjugate correctly but they understand what I’m saying. I sound like a redneck sometimes.

What was going through your head when you were moving to Brazil?

I spoke with my wife and it was basically to go back to maybe California. That was the option or what about Brazil? My wife had lived in the United States before and she liked it there, but she’d been wanting to come back to Brazil as well. She always says that I dragged her back to Brazil. Here, she is close to her family. Just like any place, there are good things in America and there are good things in Brazil. You just have to determine if it’s more that you like here than you don’t.

Is your wife from Florianópolis or is she from somewhere in Brazil?

She’s from about ten hours away from here in car and six hours in flight because you have to get a connection to get there. Her family lives far away. They live far away from the beach. I selected one of the best places to surf and it’s a capital. We live on an island, but it’s the capital of the state. We have a very small state. It’s a little bit bigger than the population of New Zealand. It’s a good population of about five million in the whole state, but it’s a small state. Think of it like Connecticut and there’s an island off the coast, which is actually the capital. It was really unique that there were really good waves, a capital with only about 500,000 people on the island, and another half a million people right on the other side of the bridge that connects it. It was good because it’s still a little bit of a city vibe but not a huge city. I don’t like a huge city and then we live on the coast. My house is about an eight-minute walk to a good surf break. I can go 10, 15, 20 minutes and catch different types of waves in either direction. It’s pretty cool.

Did you scout out to see if there was CBCT in that area or you just got lucky?

No, for sure, there was no luck. After the mistakes made in Italy, I learned from my mistakes. I did a lot of research. What’s funny is that Florianópolis wasn’t on the cities to study. It was actually when we got here, people were like, “You’re going to like Florianópolis.” That’s where you need to go. I’d never heard of it. Like most people in the United States, they only know of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Brazil is almost the same size as the United States. It’s humongous. Florianópolis is in the state of Santa Catarina and we’re in the second most Southern state.

Were you up and running fairly quickly, patients coming in the door? Did that take a little bit for people to know you were there? They probably had no idea what even upper cervical was. Did they think they were just going to see a chiropractor? How did that even work?

You have to be careful. Not so much in Brazil, but we made that mistake in Italy. Cervical means other things, too. Sometimes they get confused. They don’t know what that is and the thing in Brazil that you have to be careful of is that a lot of people will try to copy you. They see someone have success and they try to copy you. I wasn’t worried about promoting it as upper cervical but just promoting what I do. I changed a lot of the words and translated it to their culture so they would understand it. When we came, it was very easy to open up because chiropractic is not regulated here. There is no regulatory board. You find an accountant, you get the tax number and you’re paying taxes. Also, the downfall is that in Brazil, you don’t have to be a licensed chiropractor. There are a lot of physical therapists that have taken weekend courses. There may be a massage therapist that has taken some weekend course and how to pop somebody’s spine. They too, can say that there are a chiropractor and the law will protect them.

As far as opening up because of all that and Brazil is also very liberal in that. In the United States, you’d have to get this document and that document before you can open. In here, you just have to apply for the document and then you can already open until it gets approved. It took me about six months to get approved with all the docs. We got here in January and looked around. I then went to the United States and got all my equipment. At the end of March, we were already open. Since we opened, we never had a month where we were in the red, except for the month that they made us close down because of the coronavirus.

How did you get a toggle table down there? Did they ship it down?

In my surfboard bag. I separated it into three different bags. The larger piece went in my surfboard travel bag and the headpiece went in another bag. I dismantled it and smuggled it into the country. I’ve done that with two tables. Why? Because when you send it, it could stay up six months in customs and then you have to pay taxes and all those other stuff. Legally, I could do that. I legally have six months that I could bring whatever I wanted into the country tax-free because I was moving into the country. After that, then you’d have to pay taxes. That’s why I went and got everything that I could that was expensive and brought it in legally.

You like to go to the chiropractic schools in Brazil. You teach there. The upper cervical is growing down there because of what you’re doing. Did the students even know what upper cervical was down there? Were they teaching it?

No. Basically, what happened is when I got here, a few chiropractors reached out to me. They got really excited because there’s not a lot of courses that come down here. They came into the course with very little idea of what we do. They have no idea what upper cervical and a lot of them were very excited. We had a good group of people in the beginning and they found out that it was much more difficult than they thought. I saw the interest decrease.

At the end, what I do now is I just do a very small group. I found that it was better to have a small group of dedicated warriors than a bunch of people that may be trying to adjust without imaging because requesting here is you can’t have an extra machine in your office. You have to send out and there are different ways to do it. There are different ways not to do it. Some of them, you don’t feel comfortable doing it. That’s the big limitation and that’s something we need to worry about all over because of what’s happened in Canada.

I’m selfish in the reason why I went and taught in the schools. The reason is because when I was in Italy, I didn’t have anybody there that that could check me. The first thing I did and I was thinking, “If nothing else, I need somebody to check my spine.” I ended up getting my very best student, Thomas, who still works with me. I think he came in and around 2015 and he’s been with me since. I then got Franco, another associate as well, who came from the Southern Chiropractic School. I have one from the Northern or the São Paulo Chiropractic School and one from the Southern Chiropractic School. They’re both great. I was like, “I’m going to try and teach anyone that I can.”

Right around about a month or two before I opened, so I’m actually not the first in Brazil, there was a guy that opened up. He does Atlas Orthogonal and he’s in São Paulo and his wife does Blair. She just liked Blair better and Atlas Orthogonal was what he went to. There’s not a huge group of us. We definitely need more. We keep working at it and I have found it’s better to have small groups. I can give them more dedicated time and help, so they can practice the technique and get good results.

Jake, how long have you been the President for Blair?

I was sworn in October of 2020. We have an excellent board and I’m happy to have you on as one of the newer members. I think we have an excellent group and they’re hardworking and dedicated and stuff. All successful chiropractors, we have families and we have clinics. The amount of work that we’ve already accomplished in this short amount of time, it’s not me. It’s them. We have some good guys on the board and I’m excited about the future. I’m excited about some of the new blood that’s coming into the Blair Society. I’m excited about what we’re going to be rolling out the rest of this year.

It’s an exciting time to try to grow anything really with all the amazing platforms now and social media. It’s a great time to get the word out if you do it correctly. Where would you like to see Blair go in the next five, ten years? What’s your mission with that?

I want us to be one of the powerhouse techniques. I think we have a good level of respect from the other techniques. Once again, I love all the techniques. I think they all have their merit and there’s a reason they were created. In the next years, we’re all going to have to start putting out research on reliability and validity because that’s the way the world is going. We’re going to have to think of creative ways to be able to do that because we don’t have the humongous funds that medicine and other companies have. A powerhouse, that’s what I want for the Blair technique.

How we’re going to get there is we’re going to have to get research published and I’m excited to say that I believe this year and the next year, we should have some good papers coming out. We have other papers that we’re starting now. My goal is to every year to try to get a few papers started and we chip away at it, get some references and sources. Not only that, team up with the other upper cervical chiropractors and even the other full spine chiropractors as far as this imaging goes and the imaging problem we’re having right now. I think if we team up, we can really help each other. As Blair President, I’ve had excellent conversations with the leaders of the other upper cervical techniques. I think now more than ever, there is a collaboration that’s awesome to see. There’s not that much, “I’m better than you.” We all make our little jokes or whatever, like with your baseball team or your football team or whatever. I’m very excited to see the collaboration that’s occurring right now.

I did notice that. There’s still technique bashing, but there’s a lot less of it. There’s a lot more of a community. The Upper Cervical Club on Facebook is great, a bunch of different techniques, people getting along and referring to cross-techniques. I’ve referred people to NUCCA chiropractors and they’ve gotten their life back. People from different techniques have referred over to us. I think that’s what we need because we can’t help everybody if there’s no one there. It’s great. I love the direction it’s going.

Also, with the Diplomat Program coming in, there are also a lot of chiropractors that are becoming fairly proficient into upper cervical techniques. That’s an interesting aspect and I think that’s something that will probably continue to grow. As you said, a lot of maybe the older chiropractors, the super-rigid ones, they’re the ones that fight and bash the other ones. They think their technique is better but I think the newer generation that’s coming in is much more open. A lot of them are excited to learn two techniques. It’s good to have a backup in case your primary technique just isn’t getting the result. I think our technique, the Blair technique, and that we’re able to adjust by hand, it’s a double-edged sword in that on one side, it’s much more difficult than an instrument, but then on another side, there are certain cases that need a hand adjustment. That’s something that’ll be interesting going forward.

My personal opinion is I think the body responds a little bit better to the human touch technique but the instrument techniques get great results, too. Whatever you’re doing, if it’s working, it’s good.

All of them, even the ones you don’t like, they’re getting good results in a majority of cases. It’s a matter of them continuing to refine their technique because you can always get better. There are these little minute details. That one case could make a huge difference.

If it wasn’t for standard chiropractic, I probably wouldn’t have gone to chiropractic school. I had an upper cervical guy on the podcast and before he found upper cervical, his wife’s life, she had horrific asthma and breathing issues, and she went to a regular chiropractor and she got better. If you’re pressing the right area there, you can see a lot of miracles happen.

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut. It’s a joke, but that is the truth. Something that has hindered upper cervical is that there are a lot of upper cervical that really put their nose up to the full spine guys. As you said, there’s a lot of people that have had miracles with full spine. There are some excellent full spine adjusters and there are some people that come into our clinics that would benefit from an extra full spine adjuster. There are limitations to what we can do and there are limitations to what they can do. Us working together, it’s not just the chiropractic, it’s the human race.

People are so certain that they’re right about things. It’s good to have an opinion. There are certain things that I’m very certain about and there are other things that I’m not so certain about it. I’m not going to go to war about it. Some people are not certain about things, but they’re ready to go to war to fight for what they’re not even very certain about. What I’m certain about, I’m certain about and there are some things I can’t say for sure. If you think differently, then I’m cool with that. I’m not going to bash you or get in a fight on Facebook. We’ve got too much of that.

That’s usually a waste of a lot of energy because usually, nobody wins on those little Facebook and Instagram. I’ve spent hours fighting people on Instagram and it always ends in the result of me saying, “Why the hell did I just spend hours talking to this person and no one’s even making a good point?”

I try to stay away from that nowadays. There’s a famous proverb that says even a fool appears intelligent if he keeps his mouth shut. This is something important for chiropractors because I think we need to know when to open our mouths because obviously, we can’t just keep our mouth shut and hide from it. We need to know when to open our mouth and when to keep it closed.

Jake, I pretty much asked you all the questions I wanted to ask you. I love having you on the podcast and would love to bring you back any time. Before I let you go here, usually at the end of every show, I ask people, “What is one piece of advice that has really resonated with you over the years that you would like to gift the audience?” It could be absolutely anything.

You should have let me know that beforehand so I would have time to think. Something that’s very important, especially right now and it doesn’t have to do with just chiropractic for anybody that’s reading, is that old rule. I think it came from the book, The Richest Man in Babylon. You’ve got to pay yourself and take at least 10% of everything that you make, and put it away. You can diversify it, put it into an investment that’s a little bit more secure and a certain percentage in an investment maybe that’s a little bit more risky that could pay out, and start thinking about that now. That way you can make a lot of money in those investments and then you can donate it to the Blair Society, so that we can do research and you get a tax break on it. That’s the best advice that I can give for everybody that’s reading.

Jake, if people are interested in learning the 3D cone beam x-ray work, where can people find your manual so they can join in on the great work and learn about the CBCT analysis?

Very simple. Go to Google or your favorite search engine and type in Blair CBCT Upper Cervical Manual and you should be able to find the link, or you just go to the Blair site, contact Tracy, and she’ll send you a link on how you can get that information and start using CBCT in your office.

If people want to find you, I hope you have the translator on and ready to go, but what is your website and where can people find you?

I’m in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, www.EspecificoQuiropraxia.com. If you go to the new Blair site, the new BlairChiropractic.com, and you go to Find the Chiropractor, you’ll see a map. That’s one of the things why I didn’t go back to the United States. I want to see more of those little Blair symbols, the Blair logo pins all over it. I’m going to challenge you that maybe you with this new Brazilian love interest, half the year in New Jersey when it’s the summer, half the new year in Rio de Janeiro, when it’s almost always the summer there. You get an associate. You guys do a little switcheroo and I think that could be something that’s pretty cool, and we put another pin on that Blair map. Go to the website. You can find my information there if you look on the map. Click on it.

Jake, thanks so much for coming on. I would love to have you back on anytime.

Thanks for having me and take care up there. We’ll talk soon.

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