From Patient to Doctor: Dr. Emilie's Story

My Chiropractic story started, unbeknownst to me, when I was 14 years old. Like Dr. Lynn, I grew up riding horses, and at the start of 9th grade, I fell off a horse and bulged a disc in my lower back. Coming from a family who didn’t really “believe in” Chiropractic, I followed the typical medical route with my back and did painkillers, steroids, and PT. The pain became manageable and something I assumed I just had to live with.

Then in my early 20’ I graduated college (with a Business Management and Marketing degree) and started playing recreational soccer and doing obstacle course races in my free time. My competitive nature soon took over and I began training very hard and racing a lot. It did not take long for my lower back to start flaring up on me. I became a regular at my family medical doctor’s office, essentially hobbling in to get my painkillers and steroid pack. A few years of this passed with increasingly shorter times between flare-ups which started impacting my training and racing. I finally had enough after having a flare-up during a weekend vacation where all I did was lay on the beach and the subsequent steroids I took did not make the pain go away. 

At this point, I knew two things: 1) my back was getting worse and 2) the drugs were not fixing it. So I started looking for answers from other healthcare providers. After multiple consultations, my insurance denying a doctor’s request for an updated MRI, and still no answers as to how soon I’d be able to start training and racing again - I felt hopeless. I, of course, aired my frustrations on Facebook, and a mutual horse friend of mine and Dr. Lynn highly suggested that I go to OWL Chiropractic to see what they could do. I won’t lie, I was hesitant and didn’t think Chiropractic (whatever that was) would be able to fix me. But I had known of Dr. Lynn for years due to her riding horse beside my aunt’s farm where I rode horse, and figured I could at least go see what she had to say. At this point, what did I have to lose? 

I was blown away by the amount of answers I was given about my body from OWL Chiropractic. I had already started to dive into healthy living and was unaware that this all-natural healing modality existed. Dr. Scott gave me my first-ever Chiropractic adjustment and to say it was life-changing is an understatement. After a few months of care and a careful re-introduction to training, I began obstacle course racing again and stopped having low back flare-ups. 

Over the next few years a variety of life changes, watching my grandmother’s health decline, and continued exposure to the philosophy behind Chiropractic planted a seed in my soul. I started having these intense desires to give back to others the freedom and health that Chiropractic had given me. I felt God calling me to help others understand how our bodies are designed to heal themselves. I’ll never forget the night I sat on the couch beside my fiance Justin and broke into tears admitting for the first time out loud that I wanted to be a Chiropractor. 

That decision led to me quitting a successful career in e-commerce, moving to St. Louis, and going back to school full-time in my late 20’s. The learning curve with my undergraduate degree in Business was very large, to say the least. However, I was driven by the desire to help others and threw everything I had into becoming the best Chiropractor I could be. Dr. Scott and Dr. Lynn remained mentors for me throughout my schooling, and I knew I wanted to intern and potentially work at OWL Chiropractic after school to practice the Pierce Results System - the system that had changed my life. 

To look back over the last two decades and see how this story unfolded - from patient to Doctor - makes it feel like a fairy tale that couldn’t possibly be my life.

Every day I am humbled by the fact that I now get to serve my hometown community in the exact same office that saved and changed my own life.

Remember, you never know how one small thing, even one seemingly bad thing like falling off a horse, can dramatically impact your life even 20 years later.