This was written by Dr. Matt Hart, who lives in the Chicago area and is one of our 8 Weeks to Wellness doctors. He wants to do more for his patients. I thought this was worth sharing.

For everybody who has been at the office lately, I am sure you have noticed many changes and have wondered what is going on around here? It’s kind of a long story, but I will try to keep it short. The truth is that I have had to take a hard look at our practice’s long-term mission. We all know that there is a health crisis and that diabetes, obesity, heart disease, strokes, and cancer are on the rise, and it becomes even more personal when it affects you and the people you love.

The hard truth is that there is a huge difference between our biological and chronological age and that difference is becoming more apparent as time goes on and we take a hard look at ourselves as we age. Although the life expectancy in our country is around 79 years of age, most people over the age of 65 are taking 9 different medications and living with chronic pain and disease for the last 15 years of their life. People are merely surviving, instead of thriving in their golden years. In many ways, they are a burden to their families, instead of the blessing that they could and should be.

I lived this firsthand for the last 10 years of my dad’s life and watched him go from a jovial, passionate man, excited about his new life after retirement, looking forward to traveling the country in an RV with my mom visiting family, and national parks and playing with their 8 grandchildren. He had all these dreams of what he would do once he retired, and the reality was that shortly after retiring he had a mild stroke and developed Type 2 diabetes, and then developed kidney disease. He also had COPD from years of smoking, had a major stroke, and spent the next 10 years in and out of the hospital and long-term care facilities, in a wheelchair or with a walker and with my mom as his primary caregiver. Sound familiar? All my dad’s health problems that he developed were due to poor lifestyle and health choices throughout his life and they were all completely preventable. Years of smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, and high stress robbed my dad of his golden years. Instead of my kids being excited to visit their grandpa because he would play with them, we would have to tell the kids to come with us to visit grandpa because we don’t know how much longer he has. I wish my kids could have known him like I did, a great man that I admired. They knew him as a grumpy, tired old man that they had to see out of family obligation. What made this so hard for me was everything that my dad had going on with his health problems was preventable years earlier with better lifestyle choices.

Don’t get me wrong for the past 20 years I have loved every day at Hart Chiropractic Center and have loved helping people live better lives naturally by helping to take care of their aches and pains with chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture, and spinal decompression. However, over the past 10 years struggling to help my dad with his failing health I have realized that there is so much more we can do to help serve our patients and the trip-city community. For that reason, we are starting the 8 Weeks to Wellness program, a proactive, lifestyle approach to help individuals optimize how they eat and supplement how they handle stress, exercise, and care for their body through a specific comprehensive 8-week program.

Our primary mission is your health. One by one, family by family, our goal is to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own well-being and positively impact their God-given true health potential. I am excited to share more with you as we grow and serve our community. You can also go to our website Hart Chiropractic.com and learn more about the 8 Weeks to Wellness program.

Yours In Health,

Dr. Matt Hart