Heather Alday chooses a chiropractic career path that has your back

It was as a teen growing up in Bainbridge, Ga., that Dr. Heather Alday turned to a chiropractor while dealing with some health issues. The experience helped so much that she eventually decided chiropractic was the career path she wanted to take.

“It made me stop and think that maybe that’s what I want to do, is help people more from the standpoint of allowing the body to heal itself versus only dealing with them when they are so sick that all you can do is give them medicine,” she said.

Alday, now 40, started her education at Bainbridge College, then finished up her chiropractic degree at Life University in Marietta, Ga., in 2001. She then took a short drive south to Columbus to launch her career, with her office at two locations before landing at the current one at 5027 15th Ave. in 2008.

Her career choice is a solid one, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that there are just over 45,200 chiropractors helping patients across the U.S. today. There is a need for more, however, with the agency estimating nearly 8,000 additional chiropractors will be required by the year 2024. The current median pay is 67,520 per year.

The Ledger-Enquirer visited recently with Alday at her Alday Chiropractic office to discuss her job and the field of chiropractic, and what it’s like to assist people who come to her in pain. This interview is edited a bit for length and clarity.

Q. Why should someone see a chiropractor?

A. I think it’s just great to make it a part of your lifestyle from the standpoint of just like diet and exercise. People are encouraged to diet and exercise because it helps keep the body healthy from watching what you eat and making those muscles move. Well, chiropractic is doing the same thing. We’re keeping the spine in alignment and with proper movement in it to keep pressure off the nervous system. I just think it’s great from that standpoint because the more you work to keep it in proper alignment, the better your health is and the better you function. If you make it part of your daily routine, I feel like you will see the good results that happen from that.

Q. Have we moved beyond the days of people calling chiropractors ‘back crackers’?

A. I am seeing that more people don’t just think of it as cracking a back or that chiropractors are quacks. There’s definitely been a shift of understanding that chiropractic is an altnerative health care, that it helps people and their bodies in a holistic function. So I do believe people are more open to it. Even medical doctors, physical therapists and people in the genre of health care, they’re more open to it than they used to be as well.

Q. What do you enjoy about your job?

A. I enjoy this because I actually see people feeling good, but it’s natural. In other words, you’re not having to put them on a bunch of medications that may come with a bunch of side effects, or just make them feel sluggish or things of that nature. We’re seeing results because we’re naturally helping the body by removing nervous system interference, so that people and their bodies function better. And they don’t need the drugs and the surgery except for when absolutely necessary. That’s comforting to a lot of patients.

Q. It can bring tremendous peace of mind for some folks?

A. For a lot of people, that’s what finally brings them to a chiropractor is the fear of being told that surgery is going to be the only fix. So they want to try something as a last-ditch effort to try to change their problem before they automatically go into surgery. It’s really great when that’s the kind of patient who comes in and they actually see the changes they were looking for and they see that it didn’t take surgery to correct their problem.

Q. What kinds of patients do you see? Do they run the gamut?

A. Pretty much all ages. That includes infants. A lot of people don’t think that a baby needs to get adjusted. But, really, adjusting an infant is good depending on what happened to them during birth. With a C-section a baby is just picked up out of a mom’s womb because they had to cut the stomach. But for all other births, when they come through the birth canal, that really starts a lot of our trauma if you think about it. There’s the force with which the doctor has to pull on the head and the neck, and then rotation is also used on that to free one shoulder and then back to the other side to free the other shoulder and get the baby out.

So when you think about the amount of force and pounds of pressure used to do that and the rotation involved in doing that, really it can be stressful to that newborn baby and their spine. So in some cases it’s good to check them as soon as the parent is comfortable with having the chiropractor do it … Pretty much with infants we can just use the pads of our fingers, go down the spine and check for areas that aren’t moving as they should, and use your fingertip to realign that spine.

Q. Do you see plenty of children in your practice?

A. Yeah, I do. Most adults will come to you and let you work on them before they let you work on their kids. So over the years, as people get more comfortable with you, then you do start seeing that you’re adjusting more of the families. People will bring their kids. The longer that somebody is a patient, maybe they have a child, and that’s when you start getting involved and they ask you to adjust their babies and small children.

Then the older they get, we might see kids who have had falls on playgrounds or accidents playing sports or things of that nature — soccer, football, baseball, golf cheerleading and band even, because they’re holding instruments for a long time. That’s along with the heaviness of the backpacks that they’re carrying (to and from school). So I do see a lot of parents and their children.

Q. So your clientele is a little bit of everybody?

A. All ages. I do see children, teenagers, college-age students, I see adults, I see your Medicare-age patients. I have a whole host of ages, plus every activity. Some just come beause maybe they’re in to working out really good, and something just doesn’t feel right when they go to the gym. They don’t want their back to be a reason to not work out.

I have another person and pain affects their everyday life and that’s what made them finally come in. But you also may have the student who is an athlete and their parent doesn’t want their athletic abilities to be stunted by whatever pains they have because they may want them to try for a college scholarship or something. There are reasons they want their backs to be in the best shape possible because they have other goals.

Or it can be someone who has been injured in a car accident of some sort, a fall, a blow, a trauma, something of that nature, and they need to come in because traumatically they’ve had something happen with their neck or their spine, either in the mid or low-back region, and they need to have that corrected. So it really just depends on the person.

Q. What’s the most challenging aspect of your job?

A. To be honest with you, I would say it goes back to another question you asked ... People are more open to (chiropractic treatment) than they used to be. But it’s still a challenge to educate people about it. That’s because what they think they know about it or what they heard from somebody without actually looking into it for themselves. There are still all of these misconceptions about what chiropractic is and what it can and can’t do for someone.

For a chiropractor, we are educating people from day one when they walk into the practice. What is interesting about it, and that people don’t understand, is a person can go in and have a bad experience with a chiropractor, and give chiropractic a bad name. In other words, (the patient) never wants to go to another one because they think chiropractic is not any good, never thinking that they may have gone to somebody who just wasn’t suited for them. But they just lumped the whole profession in: ‘Oh, chiropractic didn’t help me or it didn’t do anything for me.’ Whereas in the medical community, if you get a doctor you don’t like, what do they say? ‘Oh, I didn’t like that one. I’m going to go find me another one.’

Q. What do you enjoy most about your job?

A. The most rewarding aspect of it is actually watching patients feel better, especially the ones who kind of think they’re going to get some relief. They’re a little skeptical, but they’re still hopeful that you’re going to help them. Then when they actually get more relief than even they were thinking they could get, and they get back to doing things that they haven’t done in years, it’s really fun to watch that. They didn’t know they could function that good again.

Q. For those considering a chiropractic career, what basic advice do you have?

A. I would think you would want to be a people person, because you are dealing with people and you’re dealing with all kinds of people. The thing is you’re not just dealing with all personalities, but you’re dealing with all personalities and most of them are in pain, which means it alters how they act towards you and everybody when they come in. The more pain somebody is in, the more they’re just not in a good mood. They’re stressed out.

So you have to be OK with knowing that you’re going to be dealing with that, and be willing to be the type of person who wants to help everybody no matter what. That’s even if you can tell early on that you’re either not the chiropractor that can help them or that chiropractic itself may not be able to help them and you think that they need to go to the medical side of things and get it looked at with, say, an MRI. You just need to have a heart to want to help people.

Q. Q. Do you recommend patients to medical doctors?

A. Yes. I even refer to other chiropractors at times, too, when I don’t think that what I am doing is what that person needs. It’s good when people can recognize that and send people where they need to go.

This story was originally published April 29, 2017 at 1:00 AM with the headline "Heather Alday chooses a chiropractic career path that has your back."