Transcending, Healing, And Creating With Dr. Josh Henk

The body holds the power to heal itself. It just needs some assistance to remove the blocks that keep it from doing that. Upper Cervical Chiropractor Dr. Josh Henk found his life’s work on the idea that healing begins from the inside out. At Transcendence Family Wellness Center, they all work to help transcend families to a state of wellness by getting the brainstem free of interference. In this episode, he joins Dr. Kevin Pecca to talk more about the amazing things they do at Transcendence Family Wellness Center and why he prefers public mastery over private practice. Dr. Henk also shares his pivotal journey toward chiropractic, finding his purpose just before he decided to give it up. Plus, he takes us across the process of providing patients with specialized care, diving deep into thermography and the reasons that keep people out of alignment. Tune in to this conversation and find out how Dr. Henk is transcending, healing, and creating wellness from the inside out.

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Transcending, Healing, And Creating With Dr. Josh Henk

We have a very principled upper cervical doctor, Dr. Josh Henk. He is an upper cervical chiropractor out of Sterling Heights, Michigan at Transcendence Family Wellness Center. He is an amazing upper cervical doctor. It was awesome to have him on the show. This is my first time ever sitting down with him and meeting him. It was an honor to have him on the show. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Please welcome, Dr. Josh Henk.

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We have a phenomenal guest, Dr. Josh Henk. I am thrilled to have him on the show. He is a phenomenal upper cervical doctor out of Transcendence Family Wellness Center in Sterling Heights, Michigan. I've been following his content on Facebook for a couple of years. It's an honor to have him on the show here. Dr. Josh, how are you?

I'm doing well. I can't say it any other way than just well.

I love knowing how everything started for people. Where are you from originally?

I am here from the Detroit City. As we say, 313. People ask me where I get my swagger from. I tell them from Detroit. People here from Michigan are very prideful. Not all of Michigan is a representation of Detroit. I like the wilderness as well and mixing the two, but this is my hometown here in Michigan.

How did you get into upper cervical chiropractic?

To keep the story very short and sweet, my father is a chiropractor. He comes from a different country. I grew up in a culture where you grew up either an engineer or a doctor. My father always had high hopes for me. I'm a lover of the arts in my office. I have a lot of my artwork. I went to art school for quite some time behind my dad's back. My dad was a chiropractor. Luckily, chiropractic school eventually took all my art credits. They discovered something. There was a class that we had in school where they taught us about the arts. They asked us who created the art and why. There was always that one creator of a piece of art, a Rembrandt, da Vinci, some sort of art.

When we asked the question, “Why? What did this piece of art mean?” there was this huge interpretation. Everybody had a different answer. As I got through art school, I found myself loving art as a passion more than a career. I decided to rekindle my relationship with my father by starting with going to chiropractic school. I followed in those footsteps to the point where I found myself wondering if I was doing this for my father.

I wanted to quit halfway through chiropractic school because the Logan College of Chiropractic is where I hail from. There wasn't very much philosophy. There was a lot of science, which was great for this medical-driven mind, but I was missing that extra something. I threw a big party and I was going to quit chiropractic school. I was done.

I was cashed out. We don't get the respect that medical doctors do. We don't get paid as much. Portrayed on any sitcom as a quack. This was all the superficial level thing. We're treating pain. If someone has cancer or disease, do not take care of it. My roommate is cleaning up after this party and he falls. Somehow he sees Dr. Eddie Weller.

We've had him on the show before.

He is awesome. I would consider him my OG mentor. The man who learned from the man who learned from the man. He goes, “Are you from Logan?” He's like, “I'm cleaning up.” He's at Walmart. He said, “Come on in. I'm having a Philosophy Night on Thursday nights.” He is like, “He comes home and tells me about running into this doctor.” He goes, “I know you're quitting chiropractic school, but you got to come to this Philosophy Night. It was like divine intervention.” I'm like, “I'm out.” He's like, “This doctor is banned off of campus?” I'm like, “What do you mean Dr. Eddie's banned off of campus? I don't think he's still banned off of campus anymore.”

“Let's go figure the upper cervical doctor.” I'm like, “No way. That’s those guys that fix one bone and everything. They don't teach any upper cervical at Logan.” That turned me off. What turned me on was this rebellious nature. That was inside of me ever since I was a kid. I was always going against the grain. I went to the Philosophy Night.

Needless to say, I was there for four hours. The moment I realized that there was a power that made the body, and that's the power that heals the body and our role as doctors is to unbrainwash one another, and then the public into this idea that we're partnering with innate. There's this innate intelligence that nobody talked about in school. In school, they would never tell you two questions that they would always ask an art school, “Who made the body and why?” No teacher ever asked that, but Dr. Eddie Weller told me exactly who made the body and why.

It’s probably one of the first things he started off with.

I'm like, “How come they didn't start off with that in chiropractic school?” The power that made the body heals the body. How come it's not healing? Something's getting in the way. Where's the biggest thing that can get in the way? Let's start with the mind and body, the top bone. You can have all the goods in your office, but if the front door is locked, nothing's getting in. It's a simple analogy.

That's where my journey began. It began with me running away to wanting to build a relationship with my father who is not an upper cervical doctor. Fast forward even further, the real revelation I had with upper cervical chiropractic aside from seeing the infinite wealth potential, because most of the professionals in upper cervical are doing very well in the profession in specifying, “Why wouldn't you be?” We get a lot of respect in chiropractic far more than the average chiropractor and medical doctors that are out there.

I got that respect that I thought I was never going to get. It's opened me up to helping people of all different types of diseases and disorders. I knew all of that potential, but the one thing I never thought it could do that it does for me, and it's the reason why I continued to do it, is because I started working with my father and we had a rocky relationship. As I started to work with him, he started asking me if I could teach him the principle.

I started teaching him the principle. My father felt lost in his life. He said, “The first time you shared this principle with me, I saw a future for myself.” This principle is able to create a vision or a future for people. It brought my father and I closer together. I said to myself, “Beyond anything else, if it can bring my father and me closer together, why can't it help people with cancer, diseases, or disorders?”

That's what gave me the fire because as a student, I had no proof of the money or respect that could come my way in upper cervical or the opportunities to heal disorders that I was told I never could. All I had in front of me was that my relationship with my father had improved tenfold. If it could do that, it could do so much more. It does that for many people in my office. That's why I continue to do chiropractic care, upper cervical in particular, and all the integrated care that we offer here at the wellness center.

That was going to be one of my questions. How did your father respond to you wanting to be an upper cervical chiropractor? It seemed like it was the most amazing transition because you know how that can go in our profession when somebody says there's an upper cervical chiropractor. They might not agree with the other types of chiropractic as well.

That was difficult because we ran our practice, my wife and I, Dr. Kenzie Henk met in chiropractic school. She sat next to me on that Philosophy Night. She had an evolution along with me. I feel blessed to be able to have someone on that exact same path. We moved here to help my father transition to an Upper Cervical Principle-Based Mastery. It’s a principle because we already know it works. We don't do it in private. We do it in public. This is public mastery, not private practice. I'm in a public mastery, and so are you.

I tried to convert my father to a cash-based upper cervical practice. It's very difficult to do that. It's possible, but it's very difficult. A relationship came into check many times over and over. Family businesses may work in some cases. Principals need to align. At the end of the day, I received something even more in my heart that led me to separate from my father. He still does upper cervical. He does Tytron. He does some full spine, in some cases, more straight than any, but I received this concept that holding is healing as everybody else has.

It gave me the revelation that the adjustment is not what we need to be fighting about or trying to master. We've done that for the last hundreds of years in chiropractic. We need to master the science because we have better science than BJ did. That's where I started my nonprofit, Henk Research and Diagnostics. I started my coaching protocol, The Hard Way For Doctors. I work with all types of doctors, holistic pharmacists, medical doctors, biological dentists, physical therapists, and chiropractors.

We unite on this scientific philosophy. Subluxation, all of that fits in, but if the person has anemia, they cannot carry oxygen. The nervous system and the brainstem are not going to hold. If someone's going home to a relationship, that's interfering. Beyond the adjustment is holding. We need to move on to holding. That's why I brought on all these diagnostics to help me to see what was interfering. BJ created this whole system. He had a team of medical doctors. He had a gym with his name on the ground, the rehab facility, to do what? Not to replace the adjustment, but to hold the adjustment.

I graduated and taught my students and my mentors as well. This is where sometimes my mentorships clash because it's this old way of thinking that needs to be that way. We need to move on to better science and integrate with other practitioners who could help our clients not heal but hold. The body doesn't need help, no interference. This is where the Transcendence Family Wellness Center came about. It's not a chiropractic center.

I teach not to put chiropractic in your office, but that may be a matter of opinion. I have a lot of reasons why. Why do I put anything about health? To put why you do what you do and what you do in your statement. We transcend families to the state of wellness in their center. The center of wellness is right here. We talk about whether it's a nutrition plan, a psychological idea that we're trying to break through, an adjustment, or exercise. We're all trying to get the brain stem to be free of interference.

I don't have to be the one to do all of those things. I have to get our clients to see the bigger picture. Our wellness center is all about holding as every doctor should be about holding. It is going to take 1,000 years to get 100% mastery of the exact adjustment. We're at 90% and that's okay, but we are immature in our science. That's why I brought on thermal imaging. I'm probably one of the only doctors in America who have a strict protocol for analyzing the Delta T temperatures and referencing them with research as well as structural changes in the spine to see subluxation and then if it's healing over time.

There are other doctors who are using it for the full spine. They're using it very casually, but I've created a course where you can learn how to use thermal imaging and get the proper thermal imaging camera, track disorders and diseases like Bell's palsy, for example, screen your clients for stroke, or to see where that subluxation is. You’ll be able to see it with your own eyes, not just a paraspinal, which is seeing the nerves exit the spine. We want to see if they're getting to their destination, which would be the organs, which could also be the whole body.

Does the thermal imaging you use necessarily correlate with a side of a misalignment? How does that work?

That's a great question because sometimes we have this belief system that let's say, there's a left wedge slip. It's going to create a thermal imbalance on the opposite side. A lot of times, doctors will look at Tytron, for example, as iEOS. They'll look at the hot side and see that that's the subluxated side. It's the cold side. Nerve problems, generally speaking, will show up on the cold side because there's no blood getting there. The hot side is thriving. It's overworking. There's more blood supply. That's the detour that the blood is taking because it's blocked.

Usually, you could say that the hot side is the wedge moved towards that side. That's what you would see. The side that is kinked will be affected. The brainstem works uniquely because that's close to where the decussation occurs. Sometimes you'll see FC lateral colding, half the face is cold and it's the other side. I usually see that with the C2 versus C1. The decussation I've found is at C1, C0, cervicocranial, C1 and C2 are where they've already crossed over. That's where you get the opposite. C2 listings will be the opposite of C1 listings, generally speaking. These are things that I've correlated because very few people have C2 listings as their primary.

From a patient's perspective, what is the thermal imaging doing for them? This is for someone who has no idea what we're talking about.

Simply speaking, it gives them a visual. They see their face. This is the greatest part for you. They can see clearly that one side of their face is cold. I have a big screen with my Tytrons. I do Tytron scans and explain them. A lot of doctors think that's crazy, but I have a way of explaining that most people cannot. I can explain that pretty well, but even then, it's difficult. People need a picture. This gives them a picture of their face that they can see, but it gives you, as a doctor metrics, so you can take two points an infinite amount of points, and compare those two temperatures.

You can take general areas like we do a cerebral vascular screening. I have a ten-point stroke screening that I use. 1) Thermography. 2) Doppler ultrasound. 3) Looking at their X-ray, then family history, blood work, biofeedback, and all those other factors. In thermography, if there's a circle, you take 2 circles on the forehead and 1 side is colder, which means there's no blood getting there. Either the person's got an arterial clog. You want to rule that out. There is some research that you can cross-reference to see that certain temperature differences will indicate more likely that there's a stroke risk or something like that.

You cannot use thermography by itself to determine a diagnosis. Like we don't diagnose subluxation on thermography or X-ray, we won't diagnose anything else based off of thermography or X-ray alone. We got to do them both together, ultrasound or blood work. That's why I created an integrated diagnostic strategy. What you want to do with it is up to you. If you want to be a straight chiropractor, do lab work. Prove that it's changing the blood chemistry.

Not Tytron scan. How often do you do the thermography scan to see changes? Is it after an adjustment, months or weeks later? How does that work?

I've done it before and after enough adjustments to know that the change happens right away. Blood supply or nerve supply improves right away. Sometimes completely back to normal. Oftentimes in an appreciable amount. You would expect a Tytron response to occur, which is incredible, but then what you'll see over time is it gets quite tedious to do them on everybody before and after, especially if you're running a high-volume-based office. I'm not saying it can't be done, but this is why I'm not for high volume. I'm for high value and high quality.

My exam workup is $1,200 to do my chiropractic workup. I'm probably one of the only doctors in the industry who has that for their day 1, day 2, and day 3 process. My tier-two workup with lab work and biofeedback is $2,400. It's a five-day analysis, but you have to measure twice and cut once. When you're looking at that, you have to make sure that your exam is twice as important as your care. How much is your care plan? Your exam should be twice as much.

How does that tie into the wellness center? You said it's not just chiropractic. People are going to see you to get their upper neck put back in place, but what does the big picture look like at the wellness center? Where do these people only see you? Do they see a team of people in the beginning? How does that work?

When someone comes in, we qualify them. We see where they're at. I sit down with them and give them options. If they want to do chiropractic care only, then we'll talk to them about that initial workup. I can take the thermography off and make it cheaper. I'll do it for $500, but I won't do the thermal image. I'm trying to set a value standard in the chiropractic industry of $700 should be the cost. It may be $500, but I charge $700 to be above the standard so then when I teach you, you're going to charge $500 if you're going to add the thermal. If not, then you say, “My workup is not $1,000. It's $500, but I'll take the thermal off.” If it's not a high level of case or if it's about money and you don't need it, then you don't do it.

Most of the time, your idea is not to see. It’s to guess, the more we know, the better we can work with you. I don't know what to do with your body. Let's do more testing. The only thing both parties can agree on is, “We don't know what's going on, but testing needs to be done so that we know what to do.” Oftentimes, about 80% of my clients will do that tier-two workup, the blood work, and analysis on all that.

That's all done through me. I'm the portal of entry. From there, I'm able to see the big picture. I'm looking at, “Where's the brainstem missing its vital nutrition? Where's the interference, subluxation, and psychological abruption?” I'm meeting with this person throughout the process. I may have an associate take the X-rays and do the X-ray report.

I may have somebody else. My wife is doing the thermography, but I'm doing the report. I have my staff put the blood work into a specific program that gives me a 70-page report. I read the report off. I tie it into how it's interfering with their body's ability to hold the alignment. Even further, what's interfering with the alignment holding is your lifestyle. It's beyond the subluxation is not the cause. It's the victim. A lot of chiros think it's the problem. If you're stopping at subluxation, you're not getting them to the finish line. You need to keep going withholding. That's getting into the rest of their life. I don't know it all, and I don't want to know it all.

I want to be able to knock on the door of my medical doctor and say, “I got someone on medications. They want to do this whole body health plan. Can you give me a one-page report on what you would do?” I take all this data and I give it to my team. They give me some ideas on what I should do then I present it to the client. I say, “This is what my team says that we should do from the 150 pages of integrated diagnostics that we have. We're going to start from the top down.”

“You're going to get your head on straight. If your neck keeps going off alignment, that's going to be an indicator that everything else in your body is out of alignment. We need to cleanse your gut and liver. We need to do some fasting, pull some heavy metals, and get hormones imbalance, but only because your blood work validates that.” Stop giving vitamins and minerals to your patients if you don't even know their vitamin D level. Ten percent of the time it can be causing more harm to the gut. It's not worth it. It makes you more scientific.

What are some of the common things that you see in your clinic that are preventing the atlas from holding?

You can categorize them into the three T’s: Thoughts, Traumas, and Toxins. I've also seen things that when you do pattern analysis over time, you'll start to see things that are sometimes out of our control. You'll see how the moon cycle will affect people, how the political nature, the political state, around election times, people will be out of alignment. You'll see people will hold better in the summer versus the wintertime.

These are all valuable things that you can discover as a scientist. You're a scientist. That's what you are. Don't let that go, but you're also a creationist too. You're salutogenic. You want to respect life. Observing the thermal scan and how people's nervous systems are behaving during different times of the year. My advanced paraspinal thermography course goes into showing you a case of someone who's been with me, let's say, for six years.

In the first three years, we see that every February and March, they're out of alignment then October. In the first three years, we see that as a ritual, but they hold better in other months. What is happening in those months? I talk to the family and they're like, “We have eight birthdays in February and March. We got a lot of parties.” I'm like, “What is it about these situations that stress you out the most?” They'll say, “We're doing all the work and we don't get to enjoy the parties.” I said, “That's where the stress is coming from. That's why you're out of alignment. Hire a party planner and a caterer. Tell somebody to put up the tents. Walk around, have fun with your family, and enjoy all the parties that you're doing.”

The next year, that's exactly what they did. They're holding. The subluxation was somewhere else. Too many chiropractors have not gotten the big idea yet. That's where BJ said the absent adjustment, “I don't have to touch people. With my word, I can make the adjustment.” They talked about over the telephone, “I could send through the waves.”

At the time, the radio was the psychological wave that he could send. Through his voice, he would talk to you. The chiropractor can't break through because the chiropractor couldn't find out why you weren't holding. It wasn't about the adjustment. Dr. Palmer knew that adjustment wasn't the entity. It was the holding. He would talk to them on the phone. He would get down to the bottom of the major thing and 80% of the time, it's in their mind, 10% of the time it's trauma, but then you got repetitive. Small things are large and small traumas.

Most of the time, it's not physical trauma at all. They go to the dentist. They drive over six hours. Those are things that will throw them out of alignment. Going on vacation. Almost 100% of the time, I don't care if you climb Mount Kilimanjaro. You're going to come back in perfect alignment. The only time you come back on vacation out of alignment is if someone robs you or steals from you, or you had an emotionally drained time, and then that emotional card trumps things.

You got the toxic stress. It is huge now and wasn't big in BJ's time. The foods that we're eating, the water that we're drinking, the air that we're breathing, and the sunshine that we're not getting. There are many things that our nervous system requires because our nervous system is a processor of information. We need to give our nervous system all the information it needs in order to function. Eighty percent of the time, it's emotional though.

I'm glad you said that because a lot of the doctors in our profession, especially the high-volume upper cervical ones don't want to know how the patient is feeling. They say it's not their job. They want to clear their atlas out, get them on the table, and get them off, “We don't care about your symptoms.” Not all, but some. There is a time for that. How do you balance that in your office when sometimes people need to debrief and let some things out and vent to you? You don't want to be there for an hour, but you want them to be heard.

One of the things that has helped is I put my office on a forum. The old schools said, “Put your office on stage.” I have an open atmosphere because if I'm talking to one person, it's relevant to everyone else. If someone's three deep, I'm having three conversations with that person and I haven't even talked to them yet. I put the office on stage. They pre-rest. Everyone's laying down in an open atmosphere and everyone's hearing the story. Everyone's hearing what I have to say. They're thinking in their head, “That's me.”

Even if I tell them directly, it won't work, but if they see it in someone else, it does. That's the number one thing because even if you're saying the right thing, they have to see it in someone else. They have to see that someone is struggling. The number one key that I say is, “You have to see someone else's struggle to break through,” because it is the old joke that your husband doesn't listen to his wife until he sees it himself. She jokes, “I told you that a month ago.” That's how everyone is. They get to see it themselves, but other people can help others. It’s a social proof. That's one of the biggest ones.

Another way is you have to separate your care. I have three exam strategies that dictate which programs I do. I don't do just chiropractic programs. I only work with people who do my all-in programs because those people get better results holding. Their Tytron scans hold longer than not. Why wouldn't I? If the entity is holding, then why wouldn't I? That's why I've put my clients up.

Let's show you the holding processes and what I've had to do to get people to hold. The stories I hear of people holding years or months are great. In my own office, we're not comparing outside offices and who's better because that's not what it's about and we all uniquely see a demographic that may be stressed or less or more stressed than others. What I've seen in my own clients, is those who get their heads on straight, go about life and do the best they can just chit-chatting and those who do higher levels of testing, get to know more about their body, find out where more interferences are in their body in the emotional, physical and chemical areas.

They start giving themselves iron. They start eating more plant-based less refined foods. They start cleaning their air. They get more sunshine. They detox chemicals out of the liver. They forgive their husband, wife, mom, or dad. They start making these changes through this whole body health plan that I developed uniquely for each person. That's huge. Each person is different. All of a sudden, they're holding better. They're healing better.

People are losing weight. All my people on the tier-two are losing 30 pounds in 8 weeks. People scoff at me, “Come on. It's not chiropractic.” I never said it was. They get the best version of chiropractic, but I have a Master's in Nutrition too. I'm going to use that. I'm not going to abuse it, but I care about innate having the best opportunity it has to heal the body. That's what we should learn as chiropractors. I believe in the toolbelt analogy, but not that you need all these different techniques to adjust. Forget it. The other tool that you need is your team. You need to move from an associate-based practice to a team-based and mission-based.

These are theologies that are set forth and are out there. Dr. Dean DePice talks about bringing people from an associate-driven to a team-driven to a mission-driven practice, “What's your vision and mission?” Transcendence is moving towards the island theory. We're going to have a bunch of land and people are going to come and hang out with Dr. Josh on this land because that's where you're going to get the best opportunity to heal.

I'll have my mega centers everywhere else, but you're going to fly in. You're going to eat, drink, be merry with me. You're going to rough the land, get your head on straight, and get checked three times a day. You're going to live with me. We're going to do everything that I know. I'm going to have a complete team. That's what we'll do. We'll transcend people truly to a level of awareness that they can choose what they want to do, but when you got to eyesight here, you only see this far. When you got to eyesight here, you see that far. I want people to see more than that. You're partnering with people on their vision.

At the end of each show, I'd like to ask all my guests, what is one piece of advice that has resonated with you over the years that you would like to gift the audience? It could be anything.

That's easy. Do more for the service than you charge and you'll soon be paid more than the service that you do. Over-provide, care for, and value. Go to the largest ends. Give. Be as lenient in your fee structures as you possibly can. Go cash-based because it allows you to do that. Be the most unbiased doctor.

I saw people in my office barefoot. Why? When I walked in, I had wet shoes. I had shoes in the office, but the office was so busy that I decided to take care of people first, then put shoes on and everybody loved it. Wear a T-shirt. Be you. Be the most comfortable version of yourself. That's authenticity at its finest. Be authentic. That's the best gift that you can get. That's the value that you can give. If you want to tell somebody what to eat, tell them what to eat. Don't call a chiropractor. If you want to send them to a massage therapist or tell them an exercise, do that. Get them to hold. Their body will heal. Holding is healing. Authenticity is probably one of the most important.

What is the name of your practice? Where can people find you online on social media?

You can hit me up. Facebook is where I'm usually hanging out. I know everybody's got their opinions on social media, but I'm mostly on Facebook putting all my stuff out there. A couple of things you can look up Henk Research and Diagnostics. You can look up Transcendence Family Wellness Center. You can hit me up @DrJoshHenk is my personal. DM me if you have any questions. I only work two and a half days a week. My life is to be of service to everyone else, to have fun, and to spread that light.

Thank you so much for coming on. I enjoyed this episode. Would love to have you back on any time.

Thanks for having me. Maybe next time, we'll talk more about you.

Let's do it.

Important Links

• Transcendence Family Wellness Center
• Facebook - Dr. Josh Henk
• Dr. Eddie Weller – Previous Episode
• Henk Research and Diagnostics
• @DrJoshHenk - Instagram

About Dr. Josh Henk

The two most important days in our lives are the day we are born and the day we learn the reason for our birth. Dr. Josh is an Upper Cervical Chiropractor, whose life's work has been focused on the idea that healing begins from the inside-out.

He began to build his roots through education at the Logan College of Chiropractic in search for that answer. Upon completion of his professional education, he received a Doctoral Degree in Chiropractic and a Master's Degree in Human Nutrition and Performance. He is convicted by the idea that each and every one of us are connected to one another the same way our cells are connected to one another through the brain and neurologic system. In search for for a greater understanding of this underlying connection, he has vowed to master and serve his community through hope and his faith in the subtle healing energy inside of us all.

Being a doctor, father, husband, and friend, Dr. Josh began to realize the importance of the family dynamic. Transcendence Family Wellness Center was founded by Dr. Josh and Kenzie Henk to offer hope and inspiration to families in their community.

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