With a plethora of chiropractors in Atlanta to choose from, it’s easy to wonder if there’s much difference between one and the next. Turns out a handful of local practitioners go beyond providing the expected spinal and limb adjustments and embrace a number of holistic, complementary practices to facilitate a deeper and more rapid recovery for their patients. While most patients of these integrative healers seek them out to help them get rid of pain, people also seek their help for complaints such as digestive disorders, headaches, reaction to medical treatments or simply not feeling well. Here’s a sampling of local practitioners who have a more integrative approach than traditional chiropractors.

Mike Greenberg, D.C. • Millennium Healthcare

 In practice for more than 30 years, Mike Greenberg, D.C., describes himself as a “holistic chiropractor” because he does a lot more than adjust the spine to help people get pain free as quickly as possible. “I can do a lot of adjusting without having to do physical manipulations,” he says. He estimates that 85 percent of the people who come to see him don’t even need manipulation to treat their pain or trauma. Instead of or in addition to spinal adjustments, he’ll choose from a variety of techniques to treat issues that contribute to the problem and keep it from healing.

Greenberg typically begins by using applied kinesiology, also known as “muscle testing,” to help him identify the best treatments to use to address conditions and their possible causes, such as emotional underpinnings, viruses, allergies or other issues. He might use Neuro Emotional Technique (NET), for example, to help pinpoint the emotion, memory or issue that is helping to keep the pain and imbalance in place. Then, he might use a gentle acupressure tapping method to facilitate the release of the issue. He says the method either reduces the pain or eliminates it completely. When indicated, Greenberg uses an allergy-elimination technique that can help eradicate allergies, release viruses and bacteria, reset hormonal balance and more. When trauma or anxiety are factors, he might treat them with EMDR or other techniques that help to release anxiety and balance energies.

“People often come to me for pain relief without having to use medication or surgery,” he says. For example, he says a recent patient had a history of terrible back pain from his four tours in Iraq. He had seen an orthopedist who had done an MRI but couldn’t find any reason for the pain, so he recommended surgery. Greenberg saw the patient and treated a variety of conditions, including emotional stress and the presence of viruses, and did a bit of chiropractic adjustment as well. In eight visits, the patient was completely free of pain, Greenberg says.

Karen Tedeschi, D.C. • Tedeschi Wellness

While chiropractic has come to be equated with physically adjusting the bones of the spine and extremities, the practice began with an emphatically holistic approach. Its founder, Daniel David Palmer, boldly claimed that three things cause the spine to go out of alignment: emotional distress, physical trauma and toxicity within the body. Karen Tedeschi, D.C., takes Palmer’s teaching to heart. “For the fastest and most effective results, you need to look into all three of those areas,” she says. “Whether it’s stress, toxins in the environment or nutritional deficiencies, they all can play a role in preventing the long-lasting healing that people are looking for.” Tedeschi uses muscle testing to determine which nerve pathways aren’t working correctly, as well as what other factors are in play: nutrition issues, muscles that aren’t working, ligament laxity, stress and so on. If an adjustment doesn’t hold, she’ll check if there are neuro-emotional, neurochemical or additional structural issues in the way. “There’s always a neuro-emotional, neurochemical or structural issue behind things not holding,” she says, “so in those cases, you have to look for the next piece: nutrition, diet or vitamins. They help things stabilize for the longer term. Nutritional problems weaken the nervous system so stuff doesn’t hold. I work to create the proper neurological signaling and then reinforce it. The emotional work helps to set a different pathway and foster long-term health.”

Guy Gunter, D.C. • Healworks

Guy Gunter, D.C., founder of HealWorks in Sandy Springs, believes the most exciting new modality in chiropractic care is frequency-specific microcurrent (FSM), an FDA-certified device that stimulates the healing of connective tissue, muscles and the surface of bones. “We chiropractors can restore the proper position of joints,” he says, “but we can’t force the body to heal. We have to wait for that to happen.” Gunter uses FSM to accelerate the healing process for his patients. “FSM seems to stimulate a rapid healing response that restores ligaments and other tissue in much less time.” Getting results in a short amount of time is a focus of Gunter’s. Statistics from his office indicate that 95 percent of those that have been treated for lower back or neck pain report total recovery in five office visits or less. “One of the most impactful interventions is targeted nutrition,” says Gunter. By that, he doesn’t mean the supplements available over the counter. “Most of the nutritional products that are made for the general public aren’t as concentrated or effective as those that can be sold by practitioners with healthcare licenses.” Targeted nutritional supplements have a specific goal for a specific part of the body, such as replenishing the adrenal glands or helping the liver detoxify. With that kind of focus, they get better results. But most can only be purchased through a licensed care practitioner. Gunter also uses applied kinesiology, neuro-emotional technique, Western and Chinese herbs, and Chinese medicine to help his patients achieve optimal health.

Gurusahay Singh Khalsa, D.C., Dipl. Ac. • GRD Healing Arts Clinic

Gurusahay Singh Khalsa, D.C., is a licensed chiropractor, a licensed acupuncturist, an experienced lecturer, a certified Kundalini Yoga Teacher trainer, a meditation instructor and an author. Yet that only begins to tell the story of how he’s made it his life’s work to educate and inspire people to achieve better health.

“I knew I was going to be a doctor since I was 5,” he begins. He was drawn to “complementary” practices such as nutrition and acupuncture early on in his career and integrated them into his chiropractic practice from the beginning. “I look at the body as an equilateral triangle,” he says. The first side represents the physical structure, the second is the chemical balance and the third is the emotional/energetic aspect. All three aspects have to be addressed to heal: “A person might have back pain, but because of how the nervous system works, her stomach might not be working right because she’s worried all the time, which would cause nutritional and energetic deficiencies.” When a patient came in with anger issues, he says, he gave liver supplements and did acupuncture for liver, and her anger problem was gone within a couple minutes. “The liver has to do with the flow of energy in the body, so we had to get the flow going again.” Khalsa might also give people yoga exercises or meditations to help them continue healing on their own.

Dr. Catherine Franklin, D.C. • Absolute Health Chiropractic

Central to Catherine Franklin, D.C.’s work as a chiropractor is the Zone method, a diagnostic technique that helps doctors find out which of the patient’s six brain centers are not in harmony with the corresponding zones of the body that they control. She follows up the diagnosis by stimulating points in the spinal cord and by engaging other methods—including rehabilitation, physical therapy and corrective massage—that restore harmony and function where they are needed. “Any time there’s a physical illness, there’s also a corresponding conflict in the subconscious mind at play,” she says. “If we can give patients an idea how they are looking at things in a limited fashion, we can stimulate the subconscious mind, which is where the power is.” Every unresolved experience gets stored as a conflict in the subconscious mind, she says. Unresolved anger or a broken heart, for example, are often stored and can get re-stimulated in stressful situations. “To cure something, you have to acknowledge the emotion and thought around it. That changes the vibration of it, to transmute and heal it.” “In order for the body to express health,” says Franklin, “there are certain principles we have to put to work, like feeding it properly, moving it, resting and having fun for balance. Then the natural cleansing of the body takes place fairly easily.”