Dr. Guy Gunter is a chiropractor in Atlanta, and his practice is unique. That’s an easy thing to say, but what does he mean? Well, the trope about chiropractors is that they sign up patients for a long series of adjustments from the get-go.

Gunter’s approach is different. “What I discovered when I was first beginning my practice in Hickory Flats was if you combine nutrition and other remedies to make the body strong and you use chiropractic to correct the misalignments, the body will heal in a very short period of time. You only need from one to maybe three visits at most to correct almost any source of pain,” he says. “The chiropractic dogma is that you have to adjust the patient again and again to reset the body and then wait for it to heal.”

According to his own statistics, Gunter notes, “Over 90 percent of the people I see are fully recovered in three visits. I can also tell when my patients need medical intervention. If they need an M.D., that’s where they ought to go. If they need an acupuncturist, that’s where they ought to go. I just want folks that come see me to get well.”

Gunter was born in Atlanta and says, “I had an interest in science and medicine as early as I can remember. Studying animals, studying nature, that’s what fascinated me; I didn’t play sports, I studied all the different animals, how animals work and how people work. By the time I was 9, I knew every animal on Earth. The same year, I got a book on the history of medicine for a young person. It had a chapter on medical superstition and there was acupuncture. I remember looking at that and thinking it wasn’t superstition. I was fascinated. What could they be trying to describe? Thirty-seven years later, I went to Chinese medical school and I found out.” Gunter explains that much of the confusion can be ascribed to the faulty translation of Asian texts when acupuncture was introduced to the West hundreds of years ago.

Beginning his studies with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology at Florida State University and the University of Georgia, Gunter then obtained a master’s degree in bacterial genetics at Perdue University; did research at Emory University and then graduated from Life Chiropractic College and the Jung Tao school of Chinese Medicine.

Along the way, his views on medical practiced evolved. “I was disillusioned with what medicine was becoming, and the more time I spend with medical doctors, the more I became interested in alternative medicine. They were stuck in a box; they were not achieving health, just treating disease. I felt that there had to be a better way. Once I was a chiropractor, it became obvious that nutrition was a big part of restoring people to health,” he says. Gunter’s perception of the situation is insightful. “It think it originated through specialization. As medicine became more and more specialized, you stopped having people who needed to deal with many different disease processes. The family practitioner was no longer trying to heal the patient, he was identifying what specialist they should go to,” he notes.

“Once everybody started going to specialists, and we see this big time now, each different specialist you go to doesn’t really know what the other specialist said. They even give you conflicting medications. There’s no one person trying to maintain the view of, ‘What is wrong with the patient and how do we fix it?’” Gunter says. “Finding the answer to this question is what makes my practice so interesting and gratifying.”

He uses the analogy of a farmer to the concentration of care. “Back when I was a boy, my grandfather had a farm, and if you wanted to survive on a farm, you needed an average of 20 crops, close to two dozen separate crops, otherwise you couldn’t really survive. Back in the 50s, you had peach trees, you had apple trees and corn in the bottomland, and you had to grow all of these different things so that you could make a little money and have enough to eat. And then then it turned into monoculture.”

Gunter does not accept insurance because he refuses to compromise his care to meet the companies’ requirements. The first visit fee is $150, including extensive examinations and treatment.

Healworks is located at 5150 Roswell Rd. NE, in Atlanta. For appointments, call 404-255-3110. For more information, visit Healworks.net.

Martin Miron is the editor of Natural Awakenings Atlanta.