I’m very excited to share that I have been featured in this month’s Pleasanton Chamber Business Connection newsletter, located on page 4. This Pleasanton Chamber Business Connection feature highlights my holistic, hands-on approach to chiropractic care and my mission to support long-term health and wellness in the Pleasanton community.
Being featured by the Pleasanton Chamber has been such an incredible honor. The feature article focuses on the values that guide my practice, my dedication to personalized chiropractic care, and the passion I have for helping patients improve their overall quality of life. As a chiropractor serving families, athletes, professionals, and individuals across the Tri-Valley, I am grateful for the opportunity to share more about the work I love.
In the article, readers get a closer look at my background, certifications, and treatment philosophy. My practice is centered on a holistic, nervous system–focused approach. This aims to support healing without unnecessary medication or surgery. This approach allows each patient receive care tailored to their unique needs, and I’m committed to helping people move better, feel better, and thrive.
The Pleasanton Chamber Business Connection feature also highlights my involvement in the community, including my service with the Pleasanton Chamber of Commerce and local professional organizations. Giving back to the community that supports me is something I value deeply, and I’m proud to be part of a network of leaders who care about Pleasanton’s future.
If you would like to read the full article, you can view it in the image above. I’m excited to continue serving Pleasanton with integrity, compassion, and a long-term commitment to wellness.
To learn more or schedule a visit, feel free to book online or reach out anytime.
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It happened! I am officially voted as the “Best Chiropractic Office” in the 2022 Pleasanton Weekly Readers Choice! 🏆 Thank you everybody!
I would love to thank everybody who voted for me and for the continued support you have brought to me ❤️ This allows me to continue to serve my community, and providing a quality service to allow health, happiness, and healing. It is a huge honor to win something that was chosen by my community, for the community.
You all mean the world to me 🙌. And again, thank you so much!
You can read about the award, and as well as the other recipients of 2022, here.
For more information about the author, please visit www.drdavidwongdc.com, or follow me on social media FB/IG/LI/YT @drdavidwongdc
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First off, I’m a firm believer that in order to better understand a concept like chiropractic, you must dig into the history of it all.
It was September 18th, 1895 in Davenport, Iowa where there was a healer named Daniel David Palmer (D.D. for short) who helped a man named Harvey Lillard that day. Harvey was working in the same building as D.D., and was talking about how he has been deaf in his right ear for 17 years. It was D.D.’s passion to be in service of others, and his confidence in the natural innate healing properties that the human body holds allowed him to make the decision to check Harvey. He found something along Harvey’s upper neck and decided to apply an adjustive force onto it (some say it was C2 on the right side), and because of that Harvey was able to regain his hearing back. It was right then and there, D.D. thought he had the cure for deafness, and had coined the term chiropractic which means “done by hand.”
D.D. then tried to help other people with deafness by adjusting them, but his luck wasn’t as successful as he anticipated. However, other phenomenon’s started to occur in these people. D.D. noticed their blood pressure had become more regulated, digestion and constipation gotten better, stress levels started to decrease, etc. It was then and there that D.D. concluded that our nervous system; the brain, spinal cord, and the peripheral nerves; is the master controller that provides the functionality to our bodies, and the bony vertebrae of the spine can twist, tilt, and get pushed back out of alignment. This causes interference of nerve conduction, thus impeding the function of the target area. It was then where his son Barratt Joshua Palmer (B.J. for short) took over and started to do research and formulate techniques to adjust the spine as we do today.
The majority of the world population has 7 cervical (or neck) vertebrae, 12 thoracic vertebrae, 5 lumbar vertebrae, 5 sacral vertebrae, coccyx bone, and 2 ilium/pelvic girdle bones when we are first born. As we get older, the sacral vertebrae fuses together into one triangle bone called the sacrum. As we start walking, we start forming primary and secondary curves all along the spine. The curves are important because they allow the discs to help support your upright stature properly, and allow shock absorption to disperse evenly when gravitational forces are going down and forces from the feet coming up.
The spinal nerves that come out of the foramina (little tunnels created by the facet joints) of the vertebrae can channel towards any cell, tissue, muscle, or organ depending on its location. When the spine gets misaligned due to a past trauma (either from birth, falls, car accidents, sports, etc.), this can inflame the nerve causing dysafferentation, and if not resolved it can later dead to spinal degeneration AKA osteoarthritis.
The first system of the human body to develop in-utero is our nervous system, and it help guides the development of the entire body and giving it its organized anatomy and physiological function. Thus, giving it the innate intelligence that animates within all of us to heal itself from above-down-inside-out. The chiropractic profession is perhaps the only healthcare profession today that honors the bodies innate ability to heal, and it requires no drugs and surgery is necessary to do so.
As a chiropractor, we seek these subtle misalignments, also known as vertebral subluxations, and we specifically adjust them by hand or instrument to allow nerve conduction to flow at its optimal best. Chiropractic care brings alignment and balance to the body in order to bring your full potential of health, function, healing, and quality of life. When an adjustive force is applied to the body, it allows it to do what it was built to do which is to heal itself. This occurs due to optimal function of the nervous system, allowing the brain to communicate with the entire body much more efficiently and effectively.
Today marks exactly 2 years ago since I started my private practice/small business, and it was perhaps one of the best things I could’ve done for my career. To honor that, I thought I’d write a little bit about who I am and my story as to why I became a chiropractor.
My passion and vision has always been to help and empower others to achieve their fullest potential of health and a greater quality of life. I grew up indoctrinated in the medical model. I suffered from severe asthma throughout my entire childhood and adolescent life. I couldn’t play sports when I was younger or else I would be on the ground suffering from severe asthma attacks gasping for air, and I had to depend on an inhaler with a minimum of 12-16 puffs a day, with or without any brisk exercise. Going to the hospital at least 2-4 times a year was normal for me whenever the inhaler was not able to control the attacks. The doctors would tell me at a young age that there was no cure and I was either going to grow out of it, or deal with it for the rest of my life. This news led me feeling hopeless, since everyone around me was thriving and leading a healthy life. How can there be other people who are in the same roof as you and eating the same foods as you be healthy, and you’re just suffering? This pretty much laid down a path of self-sabotage for me. But overall, I still have an amazing life filled with a great support system from my family, mentors, colleagues and friends.
I pursued my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at San Diego State University because I knew I wanted to work with people and help people. Throughout my study, I thought I wanted to become a psychologist/ counselor/therapist. It wasn’t until I started taking neuroscience and human physiology classes and started learning about how the human body functions and operates. This intrigued me so much! It was like a puzzle to figure out which drove me to pursue a career with a vision of getting people healthy in the field of healthcare.
After graduation, I worked as a pharmacy technician where I was trained in pharmacology. I was under the impression that I was going to help others with their health under this field. However, that wasn’t the case. 85% of the medications I filled were pain/opioid medications, and I had seen the effects of those prescriptions first-hand when threats were calling in from patients to the pharmacy on a weekly basis. I once filled a prescription for a patient of 120 count of Vicodin, told the pharmacist in charge “this must’ve been a mistake…why would anybody need this much Vicodin?” But he urged me to fill it anyway. That was pretty much the stick that broke the camels back for me. This led to my own conclusion that the pharmaceutical companies were all for-profit, taking advantage of the geriatric population with Medicare, and not care about patient outcomes. My vision of helping others turned into me believing I was a drug dealer, which was very discouraging. Because of this, it led me to not want to pursue a career in healthcare. This also occurred in the beginnings of what we know now as The Opioid Epidemic.
As I was working at the pharmacy, I had a second job at the hospitality industry helping hotel guests. One day, I had to help someone with their luggage (which felt like 200 lbs), and this caused my low back to spasm and caused shooting right leg pain, and later found out I had a disc issue at L5-S1. I couldn’t walk for 2 weeks, I thought it was going to get better overtime, but it just kept getting worse. From my experience in the pharmacy, I knew if I would’ve went to my primary doctor I would’ve just gotten pain killers and muscle relaxers, or be a candidate for spinal surgery. That was unacceptable for me at a young age, so I went to a chiropractor close to my house and within two visits, I was able to walk again.
And as I continued to go to him, I realized I’ve been using my inhaler a lot less (and now I currently do 1 puff every 3 months if needed). It was a very miraculous experience, to say the least, and it had empowered my vision to go further into helping others improve their own health. He recommended Life Chiropractic College West, a prestigious chiropractic college in Hayward, CA. At first, I didn’t even know if I wanted to become a chiropractor, but as I took the tour of the campus and I absolutely loved the congruent philosophy of inside-out healing, the curriculum, and a supportive network of students and faculty. I loved it so much I enrolled that day, and as a week passed, I had my first day of chiropractic school and the rest is history.
Now, fast forward to today and I am now a chiropractor with my own private practice. To be able to do this for a living has exceeded my expectations and obtain the dreams and goals I had set for myself when I was young. My passion after school has grown profoundly, and I’ve experienced a lot of growth being a chiropractor (and I’m still growing). I am extremely blessed to serve the patients I serve, and to be able to help as many people as I possibly can through natural healing from within without the use of dangerous drugs and surgery. I hope in the near future I can mentor future chiropractors and guide them toward the path of success because chiropractic is by far the best profession ever.
