Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
How To Get Healthy Without Overwhelm: Beginner-Friendly Tips | Dr. Mike Pierce, DC
30 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What misconceptions do people have about chiropractic care?
If people are seeing a chiropractor and they're not asked to have an x-ray done, should they be running out of that office?
There's only two times that I would adjust somebody without an x-ray. If it's a baby or a kid under five. And number two, if it was a pregnant woman. Everybody else gets an x-ray. specific care. If you want the most intentional care, you need an x-ray to see what's going on in your spine.
There was a study done that showed that people who are under consistent regular chiropractic care, 85% less pharmaceuticals. So in our office, we celebrate people coming off drugs all the time, but it's not because I told them to come off a drug. I say, hey, where's the dysfunction?
We're going to help that heal through good nutrition, through good chiropractic care, through good movement, through good supplementation. And then you're going to watch your body get so well that it doesn't need the medication.
Most people think chiropractic is just about cracking backs, but what if it's actually about rewiring your entire nervous system, reversing chronic illness, and teaching people how to eat, move, sleep, and live like their health depends on it? Because it does. Today, I'm joined by my chiropractor, Dr. Mike Pierce from Empower Family Chiropractic in Chandler, Arizona.
Dr. Mike is a chiropractor who doesn't just adjust spines. He literally takes patients grocery shopping. He helps families detox their homes. He'll talk to you about your breakup. I mean, I don't think he really wants to, but like if you bring it up, I'm sure he won't tell you to stop. And he will walk people step by step out of chronic pain and hopefully eventually disease.
We're breaking down how beginners can start getting healthy without overwhelm, what actually works in the first 30 days of your health journey, and why modern life is secretly making you sick. Whether you're new or been listening for a while, please take 10 seconds to leave a five-star review. This tremendously helps the show.
Watch this interview on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. Please welcome my chiropractor, Dr. Mike Pierce from Empower Family Chiropractic in Arizona to Culture Apothecary. You said that chiropractic actually changed your dad's life, which is how you got into it.
I think a lot of people have this idea like, a chiropractor, what can they do for my overall health? All they're gonna do is crack my back. What are the misconceptions about chiropractic care and whole health care?
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Chapter 2: How can beginners start their health journey without feeling overwhelmed?
Like stuff that we know are pretty highly toxic that we use in everyday stuff. It's a questionnaire that gives us a breakdown of how are you using those things?
And then we can have an idea of, okay, if someone is wanting to be better, but they just are on the fence or someone who doesn't even have any idea and they're just buying Tide and whatever else, then it gives us a breakdown of saying, okay, do we need to start with a toxicity approach or do we need to look at more of a deficiency approach?
So many chiropractors are adjusting people and are not asking to get an x-ray. If people are seeing a chiropractor and they're not asked to have an x-ray done, should they be running out of that office?
There's only two times that I would adjust somebody without an x-ray. Number one, if it's a baby or a kid under five. And number two, if it was a pregnant woman. Everybody else gets an x-ray. And I'll tell you a story to help make this make sense. There was a gentleman one time, he came in, he said, hey, I've been adjusted my whole life. I just need someone to crack my back.
And I was like, well, that's not what we do. We need to do some testing to make sure we know what's going on. We've got to be specific. And he goes, no, no, no. I just need a crack right here. Crack my back. And we went back and forth and argued. Long story short, I won. We got the x-ray. And he had a fracture in his lower spine that he didn't know he had.
And if I'm not a little guy, if I would have gone up and adjusted his low back, could have made that significantly worse. Wow. And so many times we have no idea what's going on in the inside if we don't see. There's times where I'll take kids. This happened two weeks ago. I had a nine-year-old little girl come in the office, asymptomatic. Mom was just like, hey, she plays sports.
She's pretty rough out there on the field. We just want to get an x-ray and see how she's doing. She had scoliosis. But if you have the x-ray, now you say, hey, this little girl has scoliosis. Now it's a very intentional way to help this little girl.
So with anybody coming in, if you want the most specific care, if you want the most intentional care, then you need an x-ray to see what's going on in your spine.
I mean, not only are there chiropractors out there that are not requiring x-rays, but nobody is asking what cleaning products do you have in your home? Are you on different medications that you'd like to get off of? What's your diet like? So why do you as a chiropractor do all that, but some chiropractors don't?
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Chapter 3: What are the most common health issues that chiropractic care addresses?
think everybody has great intention right i think that when you look back though as a doctor if my job is to help you create whole healing i have to understand that in today's society those are factors that that matter i think when chiropractic you know you look at this 50 to 70 years ago then yeah you could just adjust somebody and we didn't have all the chemicals in our food we did 100 years ago we didn't have a lot of the same stressors we had 100 years ago
But you look at it today and it's I mean, you know, more than it is worse than ever. So that has to be an intentional focus point. If you want to help somebody create whole healing. I think a lot of chiropractors or I think people who don't actually I'll say this. I think that their their their job is probably to just try to help somebody mitigate pain and get out of the initial pain.
but it's not looking at the underlying root cause of dysfunction in the body. It's not looking at how to re-regulate the nervous system fully. It's not saying, how can I get the nervous system to be functioning at its highest potential, getting health to express its highest potential.
I mean, everybody knows all those pillars of health will have a factor in getting somebody to express their highest level of health.
There is a ton of people out there that think chiropractic is quackery, that it's just, you know, making a pop sound, that it actually does nothing or that it actually makes any pain that you're experiencing in your neck or your back worse. And that's why you have to keep coming back. And it's this whole pyramid scheme of Dr. Quackery. What's your response to that?
It's like saying if your pastor was like, you got to keep coming back every Sunday to church. And you're like, why? You're like, because I need you to keep coming back. You got to keep tithing. It's like, no, people choose to keep coming back to church every Sunday because they want an intimate relationship with Jesus. If someone said, you have to take your wife on a date night every week.
I'm like, yeah, I choose to do that. If someone said, Alex, why do you got to keep brushing your teeth every single day? Like you brushed them once, why do I gotta brush them again? Because every day you put things in your mouth that re-dirty your mouth. So you have to re-clean them every single day.
Your spine, you have physical, chemical, and emotional stressors every day that are damaging your nervous system, that are putting pressure on your spine. We have to get that reassessed and aligned and put back in place at some level of maintenance, some level of consistency there. And this is why we're seeing people, their spines are breaking down so much more early than they should.
There's people in their forties now that are getting arthritis. Like that's not normal. But at the same time, if you've never done anything intentional with your spine for your whole 40 years of life, but you've played sports and you've had accidents, you've had falls. If you're under stress, your posture is like this because of, you know, computers and things.
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Chapter 4: How does chiropractic care impact the nervous system?
We both know that's not the real answer. So I would say, well, why do you want more energy? And they go, well, I want to be able to play with my kids. Why don't I play with your kids? And you ask the why seven times, and eventually you will get down to a very deep, emotional rooted reason. Whenever that person is going to start making health changes, it doesn't matter what the health change is.
You can just tell them to start drinking more water. They will break out of that habit and not be consistent if they're not rooted to a very, very big emotional why.
So like that, what you just gave an example of, if you took that why seven times, I'm just being hypothetical, but like you could get down to their root cause reason. It's like, well, because, you know, I didn't have a dad that played with me when I was little. Something like that. Like an emotional trauma type of thing. Yeah. Yeah.
So true story. My dad was so unhealthy. And I genuinely say this, that there's five times in my whole childhood I can remember my dad playing with me, throwing a ball, being outside, doing anything physical, engaging. And he was a good dad, but he just didn't have the health to do it. My deep rooted why is I saw what happened to my dad. I saw him be so unhealthy.
He could not play with me and he had to say no. And then I saw him have the heart attack and what my family went through. And now I have three little kids, a beautiful wife. I have one more kid on the way. And I tell myself, I will never, I will never put myself in that position where I'm not healthy enough to do anything with my children or anything with my wife.
I will go walk over broken glass to make sure that I can get to that point. So now here's, if that's my deeper rooted why, you better believe that when my alarm clock goes off at four o'clock and it's time for me to go work out and my brain says, you should hit the snooze button, that why will trump that snooze button every single time.
For people just starting clean living, the overwhelm is real. What is the simplest place for someone to begin that won't make them quit immediately?
God-made food versus man-made food. In my office, we say God-made food versus man-made food. I think if we try to get super complicated and super over the top with it, then it gets hard. And then when it's hard, we stop doing it. But with our kids, again, I have a six-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old. And with our kids, we teach them
We put whole, real, unaltered, unprocessed food in our body because it fuels our temple. It fuels our body that God gave us. It helps us be stronger and healthier. And we wanna put those kinds of foods in. So at the end of the day, I would tell most people when they come in, Don't get over complicated. We can dial things in more specifically when we get to that level.
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Chapter 5: What are the foundational principles of achieving good health?
But if it's not, it goes back.
People wonder if organic or natural are just marketing buzzwords. What do you tell your patients?
I would say that when something says all natural, I, my head goes, just because I'm, I don't know anymore, but.
It just says natural and then the packaging is green and that's all it says. I'm like, no.
They'll usually have some like picture of a girl in a prairie.
Yeah.
You know, I think marketing is smart and they know that we, when we see a farm and we see like natural thing, pictures on the thing, then we're like, oh, this must be good. But again, I think when something is certified organic or certified non-GMO and they've gone through the testings, Is it going to be perfectly clean? Like, probably not. Is it better than the stuff that's not?
Yes.
Yes. So for me and my family, we buy organic every chance we get because it's better. Anything we can grow or make ourselves, ideally better. That's always the better option.
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Chapter 6: How can nutrition affect overall health and wellness?
Same diagnosis, same doctors, same urgency. The only thing that changed was someone in an office deciding, you know what, this is just too expensive. That's when you realize that this system isn't just frustrating, it is totally broken and evil. Health insurance feels like trying to solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded underwater. And when your life actually depends on it, the answer is still no.
Last year alone, one in five Obamacare claims was rejected. These companies are incentivized to deny care and raise premiums. They are not on your team. So I talked to my friend Andy. Who's Andy? He's the CEO of CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth was built by people who see this insanity for what it is and said there's got to be a better way. And there is. CrowdHealth is a health insurance alternative.
By joining CrowdHealth, you get access to telemedicine, discounted prescriptions, and a database of cash-paid doctors. No networks, no middlemen. The best doctors that you guys say, well, this isn't in my network, so I can't go see this functional medicine doctor. You can. Each month, members help fund one another's medical needs or home births or whatever it is.
And when it's your turn, the crowd steps in. No insurance, just people helping people. Let CrowdHealth help with your health care needs. Get started today for just $99 a month for your first three months by using code CULTURE at joincrowdhealth.com. CrowdHealth is not insurance. Learn more at joincrowdhealth.com. That's joincrowdhealth.com, code CULTURE. Is going completely non-toxic realistic?
If not, what is a realistic goal to aim for?
So what I teach my patients is this. When it comes to the toxic world, look at everything that you're exposed to the most on a daily basis and start changing those things first. For women, for example, I would say, look at your products you're putting on your body. If you're putting a product on your body every single day, start changing that product first, right?
That's like your shampoos and your makeup and your deodorants and stuff like that. Like start changing the things that are gonna be on you and in your body the most. And you start there and then you start to work your way. There are some people out there, they're going to be like, yeah, I'm changing the whole house tomorrow.
That's me.
Yeah. Right. And I had a lady one time I did a seminar. She came the next week with a black garbage bag full of toxic stuff. And she goes, we cleansed everything.
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Chapter 7: What role does mindset play in health transformation?
Start changing all your bathroom products. And then once you've got that turned around, then maybe go to the laundry room. Then we start changing the laundry room. Then we go next to the kitchen. So pick a room and start cleaning out all the chemicals out of that room and then move to the next room.
I think people want a timeline. Like they want to know, you know, when can I expect to start seeing real changes if I start a holistic health journey? What do you say?
I say be attached to the journey, not the destination. like fall in love with the journey, not the end goal. Because at the end of the day, if I am in love with the everyday process of waking up and reading my Bible, moving my body, eating something healthy, connecting with my kids, if I am in love with the daily habits I'm gonna be doing,
then you can make it consistent and sustainable because you love every single day of it versus if you're just always looking at the horizon. If you're always looking at like, okay, I know this will be six months and your mind's on six months and you're always focused on six months and you're never fully present and engaged in the today.
How do you know if your nervous system is completely fried? And how does chiropractic care help with a messed up nervous system?
So I think there's a lot of symptoms that can look at chronic fatigue or something like fibromyalgia where it's like your whole nervous system is just on sympathetic overdrive. And when you think about the nervous system, let's talk it this way. Here's your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. And I think that we like to live in today's culture of like all or none.
And we believe that God gave us both for a reason. There's moments in my day when I want a sympathetic nervous system. The other day, I walked in the room and my one-year-old had a marker walking towards the wall. I want a sympathetic nervous system to give me energy to run towards him and not let him color on the wall, right?
But then there's a moment when it's like, okay, I don't want to live there. You shouldn't have your body staying in that state. It's not healthy to have your nervous system firing on all cylinders all the time. But I think today, a lot of us, that's where we live. We go to bed looking at emails and then we go to sleep and then we wake up, more emails, more social media.
Do I feel validated by my likes? Oh my gosh. And then we go into work and then we're always on something. And we're just so driven all the time that you can see someone, they're just like their shoulders are so stuck here and they can't even relax and breathe. That's me. And we look at this, it's like they don't know how to breathe.
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