Leading Doctor in the Chiropractic field, Dr. Joe Esposito shares his personal story about his journey into the health and wellness field. Being aligned for life starts with getting down to the root cause of any issue and tackling the imbalances in your body. After successfully opening AlignLife Chiropractic and Natural Health, Dr. Joe continues to travel widely and has devoted considerable time teaching about natural healing methods to help counter balance some of the impacts of poor dietary choices and excessive drug consumption that plagues America today.
Table Of Contents
- Aligned For Life: An Introduction
- What It Means To Have an Aligned Life
- America’s Role in Africa’s Healthcare
- The Growing Trend Back To Natural Heath Care
- Closing Thoughts & Where To Find AlignLife Locations
- Links to Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Aligned For Life: An Introduction
Dr. Bryan J.: I get to interview a good friend of mine and another thought leader in the alternative healthcare space, Dr. Joe Esposito.
Dr. Joe E.: Thank you, Dr. Bryan. Real pleasure. I’ve heard great things about this podcast so I’m really honored to be part of it.
Dr. Bryan J.: I actually said this on a previous episode that we kicked this initiative off about a year ago and going right in time for new year’s resolutions and we were now like 52 episodes deep.
Dr. Joe E.: They can actually go to someone that knows what’s going on because these trends are amazing how fast they move with natural health care and chiropractic.
Dr. Bryan J.: You know what, you and I spent a lot of time and we’ve had discussions off the record about books that we read and podcast speakers we listen to and we’re absorbing information all the time. But in the average individual’s life, you’re spending so much time at work that you don’t have time to absorb all this information, especially around the topic that may not be your field of industry or your expertise. It’s nice to be able to offer some of the shortcuts to people. Here’s what I want to do. I think part of our discussion, the questions that I’m going to ask you today are going to allow a true introduction of who you are to the audience as opposed to really just giving the full backstory of everything you’ve accomplished and what you’ve done.
Why Dr. Joe wanted to become a doctor
Dr. Bryan J.: What I’d like to do is just have you share initially your story a bit on how in the world did you decide and when did you decide that you wanted to become a doctor?
Dr. Joe E.: I think when I was young I used to listen to Dr. Gary Null on the radio. I’d be driving back from a relative’s house and we’d have this radio on and it was this guy talking about food. I was like, come on, really, broccoli does that for diseases? Spinach does that. I was just a young person saying, that’s just so odd and weird. Why doesn’t anyone know that? Why am I eating pop tarts every day for breakfast? These are questions at 15 years old, I didn’t understand. That was my first flame in my heart that started to burn about I want to learn this thing.
Dr. Joe E.: Then I got in a wrestling injury in high school and my coach wanted to bring me to a chiropractor. I refuse to go to the chiropractor. He called my mother and got a signature to take me. The next wrestling practice, he says, we’re going to chiropractor. I’m not going. He goes, I got a signature from your mom.. I got in the car, one adjustment, pain went away instantly. After two years in pain I was like, oh my goodness, why didn’t anyone tell me about this? I was immediately angry that no one told me about chiropractic. That’s how I decided to become a chiropractor.
From broccoli to becoming an aligned for life chiropractor
Dr. Bryan J.: How did you go from helping the person with a neck problem from a wrestling injury to we’ve got to now make sure they understand the benefits of broccoli?
Dr. Joe E.: Well, I think it’s the same kind of journey you and Dr. Olivia are on is I know the way you respect the opportunity to take care of people’s health. I know it’s in your heart and how you guys don’t give up until you find a solution kind of mindset. It’s not that we decided, oh, I want to learn functional medicine or I want to… It’s probably, and I don’t know Olivia’s start and how your practice went functional medicine, but mine is obsession with outcome is, you know, I’m doing chiropractic. 68% of people are overweight or obese. 92% have some form of nutrition deficiency. These are the stats and these people are walking in. I’m using this amazing service chiropractic but it didn’t change the fact they were carrying 300 pounds excess or they were depressed.
I was obsessed with outcome so that drove me back down the path that Dr. Gary Null started me on as a child and I became obsessed with really how the body works. I love teaching patients. We treat a patient like we would treat a plant, very simply.
Painting the leaves green
Dr. Bryan J.: On that subject, that’s one thing Joe, we preach on, for lack of a better word, very frequently. Similar to what you just shared is we started to expand the resources that we’re going to provide to patients because of continuing to ask the question, why is this person sick? Why is this person still hurting? I think you’ve come to the same conclusion that a lot of ways as you start to recognize that, yeah, there’s physical demands on the body, but there’s also biochemical or nutritional and emotional stresses on the body. If we don’t really look at all dimensions then we’re missing an opportunity to help somebody become whole.
Dr. Joe E.: In Chinese medicine they call it painting the leaves green. It’s like masking symptoms, go up to that tree and just paint the leaves green. Whether it’s that scenario or using the one I use a lot, which is going upstream like okay, I get it, you’re depressed. Let’s go upstream. Oh that’s right, you’re deficient or I’m in pain. Oh, okay. Let’s go upstream. You have a subluxation. It’s fine. Whether you’re talking upstream or painting the leaves green, the concept is cause, get to the cause, right? I mean, that’s where we live our lives.
What It Means To Have an Aligned Life
Dr. Bryan J.: Part of knowing you, you’re a driven individual and you’ve been perpetuating the mission of getting more and more people to understand what you’ve had the fortunate ability to understand. You’ve created a franchise for chiropractors called AlignLife. I’d like for you to share with us, first of all, how did you come up with the name? Then, how does one ultimately live as you would define it, an aligned for life?
Dr. Joe E.: That’s a great question. We came up with the name because to me when I look at health, without health, I love the phrase back in I think it was Herophilus BC, 600 BC said, and I don’t know the whole quote so I won’t try to destroy it. They said something to the effect that without health, wisdom is useless, money is powerless. They went through the cycle of without health, you really have nothing. When I look at Aligned, I’m looking at aligned for life. It starts with financial health and relationship health and health with our children and whatnot. We got to start first like the mask on the plane goes on you first before your child and it’s like, no, no, you can’t do that. Yes, you have to have health before you have anything.
You look at the aligned for life starting with using the play on aligned, being aligned the spine to ensure we have neurological function and then align your life around that. When we talk about aligning your life, we’re talking about aligning your financing, relationships, time management, values, and of course, your health. That’s the mindset that we want it to go in and expand to more abundance thought around alignment versus just the health component.
Services offered at AlignLife and why they’re important
Dr. Bryan J.: When it comes to you helping somebody with their health, and maybe you can speak on this a little bit, it seems like there’s some pillars that you work your way through. How did you come to the conclusion that those were things that need to be addressed in the body?
Dr. Joe E.: I think, first, knowing that first you have to have neurological function. No tissue in the body works without neurological function. Chiropractic is like the hub of the wheel in our philosophy. Then we have coming out of that hub, and other things we have to look at is nutrient deficiency. As I said, there’s research out saying about 92% of us have some form of deficiency or another.
Maybe mild or moderate B6 deficiency or magnesium or whatever it may be, but 92% of us, so we got to handle that first. Once we have nutrient density and we have neurological function, we’re doing pretty good. Then it’s now is there excess weight on the body that’s causing arthritis and hormone irregulation? Risk to cancer. Well, we’ve got to regulate the weight and that puts weight on the spine, which makes the other thing worse. We got to deal with that.
Then toxicity. Toxicity is a major impact in this country, and most of it is coming from our households, a lot of people don’t know. We had to add the detox. The last one is, with all of these things, it can cause your hormones to become dysregulated, causing what I call the dot syndrome, depressed, overweight, and tired. Someone have a mood disorder, mild or moderate obesity, overweigh, and some fatigue somewhere. Those three together, I haven’t met many people that don’t fall within those parameters.
Aligning health to manifest in other aspects of life
Dr. Bryan J.: Knowing that our health is really our greatest asset which I know that you’re in alignment with, no pun on the word. Right? You mentioned aligned finances, aligned relationships and aligning other aspects of life through the work that your centers do. Do you guys focus on getting the health aligned for life that then manifest to those other aspects?
Dr. Joe E.: Yes. I think you have to, you start with health. The only thing that sometimes goes into the health component is alignment of our values and our time. Because if we don’t have time and values aligned, it’s just tough because time management I think is my biggest deliverable when I’m consulting people is, I don’t have time to eat, workout, and get adjusted.
You got to have time to maintain your health or time to regain your health. There’s no choice there. Run the gamble of trying to regain it after you lose it, go for it, or you maintain it. Right? I mean that’s you and I probably speaking to choir, to the people listening to this is they’re living this, they’re breathing this, they think like you and I do probably a lot of them.
Dr. Bryan J.: There’s an amazing amount of overstimulation right now in society in general and over scheduling is probably the biggest stimulation that actually most of us suffer from, right?
Dr. Joe E.: Yes.
Dr. Bryan J.: Hyper scheduling puts us into a defense physiology out of the gates where we’re like, the day is just going so quickly that you’re not creating space.
America’s Role in Africa’s Healthcare
Dr. Bryan J.: In that last statement you brought up something that I wanted to ask you about too. You talked about, the listeners in America. I know that you’ve also expanded some of your reach into different continents. Even some mission work and different things that you’ve been involved in. Can you speak and just share with what you’ve been doing? Also, just for the benefit of the people that listen in America, what are you seeing that we’re doing right that other countries are behind in?
Dr. Joe E.: One of the things we’re doing work in Africa, we are most likely opening our first clinic there mid next year. We’re excited about that.
Dr. Bryan J.: Congratulations. That’s exciting.
Dr. Joe E.: Thank you. . In Nigeria. I think the one thing we have is sanitation. If we look back at epidemics and from the Black Plague on and polio, a lot of what changed these epidemics is sanitation. We cleaned the streets up so there’s less bacteria, molds, fungus, rats and different rodents that are causing issues that cause a lot of epidemics. I think that’s one thing we have for us.
We also have really amazing emergency medicine. I’m proud to be in a country that can put an eyeball back in a socket and transplant a heart and things that just can’t be done in other countries. Where we fall short is on chronic disease management, is that we are trying to manage chronic diseases with toxic manmade chemicals or medications to manage a chronic disease.
Free medicine from pharmaceutical companies
Dr. Joe E.: I have Hashimoto’s and some of us listening have heart disease, or they have high cholesterol, or they have diabetes, or they have gastric problems, whatever it may be. We have to go to lifestyle first and what we were talking to earlier. Then look at the nervous system and look at your nutrients before we start looking at emergency medicine because it’s not an emergency. It’s a chronic problem. That’s the good and the bad I see. What we’re doing is just trying to spread the word about natural health throughout the world because I thought, well, if I was to go in Africa, they’re still eating the herbs out of the ground and whatnot.
What happened is America came over there with the pharmaceutical industry and started giving free drugs about 20 years ago, free to every school, hospital, free, free, free that it flipped their society within two decades what it took us a hundred years to flip to, that it made them into a medical society very fast. Now it’s a pill for every ill there. Not four generations, but one generation, two generations know the herbs, know the root. They know what they were doing and they’re starting to get that transition. They went into it faster and they’re coming out of it potentially faster than our generation of a hundred years. We go through this back to nature.
What keeps Dr. Joe going
Dr. Bryan J.: Let me do this. These episodes typically aren’t very long and I wanted to just share a little bit of how somebody lives in aligned life and a little bit about what you do and what you’ve been doing as a thought leader throughout the industry. You’ve now been in health care for I think over 20 years-ish?
Dr. Joe E.: 23 years I think.
Dr. Bryan J.: I still see you as one of the more driven individuals. My question to you would be what wakes you up at night? What makes you want to get up in the morning and go perpetuate this mission further?
Dr. Joe E.: I have an issue with lying to people about anything. That’s my thing. I think as a child I was taught that. What I taught my kids is don’t drink and drive and don’t lie. Other than that it’d be good. Just don’t do those two things. That’s my thing. When I see kids on drugs that don’t have an option because mommy gave it to them. And mommy didn’t know, and now this kid is on a psychiatric drug for 10 years. I don’t sleep when I see that. That hurts me and my soul. I guess that’s my thing is telling the truth to people that really deserve to know the right and wrong or the option at least would be be great. That’s what fuels me, what makes me a little bit uncomfortable. You agree? I mean overall I think-
Dr. Bryan J.: No, I’m in total agreement.
The Growing Trend Back To Natural Heath Care
Dr. Bryan J.: I would love to have an idea, on our listeners’ behalf of where do you see things going? Do you think the trend is going in a good direction in terms of getting the truth out there more so, or do you think it’s still being harnessed and pushed back pretty significantly?
Dr. Joe E.: I think the pendulum is swinging. If you look at the cycles of health care or economics, it’s like a 30 year pendulum that goes one way and then comes back and it swings. There’s a book written on, I can’t recall the name, but I think we’re on the swing of the pendulum back to natural health care and I think the public is moving so far in that direction. People are asking questions, people are challenging drugs, people are denying surgeries, people are not wanting status quo anymore. They’re saying, why? Why? Why? Nonstop.
I think in that realm, what’s happening is the industry of conventional medicine is now stepping up the challenge. No exemption for vaccinations anymore. We have these opiate crisis. We have major things going on in this revolution of conventional trying to regain control. At the end of the day, we’re going to come to a place where medicine is going to be more genetic assessments looking at how we can better express genetics. I think the old medicine is going to go bye-bye, my opinion. We’re going to have a new age of medicine that we’re going to enjoy, which is genetic assessments of how to better express our lives. That’s what I think will happen.
Dr. Bryan J.: No, I think that’s very cool.
From being pushed away to getting recognized
Dr. Bryan J.: I actually just got a message from one of the local hospitals here not too long ago earlier this week that chiropractors are being introduced to a lot of the hospitals in Missouri right now. I found that fascinating because we were pushed away as quacks, if you will, for many years. Now because truth is actually starting to emanate, what we’re seeing is the medical models had to change a little bit to say, I want to introduce the idea of educating people on nutrition, labs that make some sense from a functional perspective, healing touch or energy type of treatments and then chiropractic. It’s really cool to see that the gates are opening.
Dr. Joe E.: I like that. I like what I think it was Dr. Guy Riekeman and I believe you were there when they were talking about that if you start natural first, let’s say chiropractor first, about 70 something to 80% of chiropractors are referred to a medical doctor, so they refer out when needed. Only about 30, I think it was 25, 30% of medical physician referred to chiropractic. If you’re in medical, you may be stuck in that realm and not have the experience outside because of the referral mechanism. I thought that was worthy of telling people that are looking at what’s my philosophy for my family.
Dr. Bryan J.: I think that is worthy. We started this as I said in the beginning, to try to help more people really get a resource to help them get well and stay well naturally. You’re starting to open up potential centers in different locations. We obviously do what we do in one location, but we’re trying to connect people to the proper resources.
Closing Thoughts & Where To Find AlignLife Locations
Dr. Bryan J.: Where can somebody find where there’s AlignLife locations? Where could someone find if there’s somebody that does what you do in their area? Because it’s hard for some people when they live across the globe or across the country to say I want someone that I could work with in person.
Dr. Joe E.: Where To Find AlignLife Locationson. For our clinicsg, you can go to alignlife.com. We have a list of clinics. We have clinics in Illinois and primarily the east coast, South Carolina, North Carolina area, Pennsylvania. Also Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida. Go to alignlife.com and they can get a great, great doctor. Appreciate that.
Dr. Bryan J.: We’ll put that on thewellnessconnection.com/e52 where this episode will be living. We’ll put a link directly there for anybody that would like to look there for a resource. Dr. Joe, I’ve appreciated our relationship, our friendship, and you giving of your time to provide some of your thoughts on the how to help people do what we all want, to live on aligned for life and be well.
Thank you man, much appreciated. Thank you very much. With that said, thank you as always for sharing this message, passing it forward to somebody that you think may benefit. I hope you found some value out of today’s conversation. I know I certainly did. Thank you, Dr. Joe.
Dr. Joe E.: Thank you. Let’s not paint those leaves green anymore. Have a great day.
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