What is Gonstead?

If you’ve ever been to a chiropractor before, the experience most people have is walking into an office, having little to no analysis done on their spines, and the doctor starting at their feet (or pelvis) and working their way up manipulating every single area of their spine, twisting their low back to one side and then the other, and then doing the same this to their neck. The goal behind this “shotgun” approach to adjusting is to adjust every segment of your spine and hope they “hit” the one you need along the way.

Our approach is different. Lifetime Family Wellness Center specializes in the Gonstead System of Chiropractic. There are many differences in this system and conventional chiropractic, but most importantly the Gonstead System is more thorough and more specific.

The technique itself was named after Dr. Clarence Gonstead. Dr. Gonstead was known as the “Chiropractor’s Chiropractor”. During his time in practice, doctors from around the world, including the nearby Mayo Clinic would send their toughest cases to him. From the time he became a Chiropractor and his death, Dr. Gonstead adjusted well over a million patients and built what is still to this day the largest chiropractic clinic in the world. Dr. Gonstead was so sought after that he had to build an airplane runway and a hotel next to his clinic to fly patients in from all over the world and house them there while they were receiving treatment. Dr. Gonstead’s motto was to ” never go to bed on the same day you started seeing patients” because he worked around the clock and he boasted a 95% success rate with his patients.

It is this legacy that our doctors strive to uphold.

5 Steps of Analysis for Each Patient

1. Visualization (looking at the area in question)
2. Instrumentation (we use a thermographic instrument to detect areas of nerve pressure & stress)
3. Static Palpation (gentle feeling of the area for swelling, tenderness, etc.)
4. Motion Palpation (moving the joint to feel the areas that have a lack of motion)
5. X-ray (we use “Full Spine” x-rays which are long x-rays that get your entire spine on one picture. This cuts down on radiation and allows us to see how your whole spine works together.)

After a Gonstead Doctor has gone through these steps they will be able to determine not an area they want to focus on, but the EXACT bone or bones that NEED to be adjusted and the EXACT direction they NEED to be adjusted in. So there is absolutely NO guesswork in the Gonstead System. We adjust one bone at a time, very gently, by hand, and leave the rest of your spine alone. There’s also no rotation in any of the adjustments, so these adjustments are the safest manual adjustments you can receive.

We Learn from You

We like to relate taking your family to chiropractor to taking them to a dentist for a cavity. Would you rather take your child to a Dentist for a cavity who was going to just drill every one of your child’s teeth HOPING he hit the one with a cavity, or would you rather have that doctor actually analyze your child’s mouth and find the one tooth that is the problem and work on that tooth by itself?? Makes sense doesn’t it?!? We think so.

You and your family are in good hands at LFWC. If you’d like more information on the Gonstead System, go to www.gonsteadseminar.com.