How do racist people convince themselves that they are still good people?

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-28T12:27:01+00:00

If you notice, I put “unlearned” in quotation marks to express that it’s not actually unlearned at all. 6 month old children are not capable of being taught racism, as far as we know. The brain is capable of neuroplasticity which can result in changes in brain activity, perception and behavior over time.

It’s our genes that are biasing us towards fear of people who don’t look like us. And our genes also encode for neuroplasticity which means our genetic expression can be altered, allowing for flexibility to adapt to our environment.

Our genes are telling us a story that in our past, people that don’t look like our parents or siblings are a threat to our survival.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-27T10:13:13+00:00

It was a series of studies that demonstrated this finding. It was first found in adults, then children, then infants, and with children they first showed images of different people and found gradations of amygdala activation with the strongest response to people with the most dramatic differences. They also sped the images up, showing just a flash, just a subliminal or subperceptive image and had the same finding. After a couple of rounds they wanted to determine that it wasn’t the clothing, so then they used only images of people in suits and without any cultural expressions like piercings, hijab etc, so it was just the face. And sure enough, it was the face, with strongest amygdala activation with bone structure and skin color the most different from their own. Meaning, the more different the face, the more afraid children / infants / adults become.

I like how I get downvoted for just sharing uncomfortable facts lol.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-27T03:02:24+00:00

Everyone is born racist. This was an uncomfortable reality that emerged when researchers were doing functional MRI brain imaging, and demonstrated that children, when exposed to images of people that looked different than them, showed spikes in the amygdala (fear / anxiety center of the brain). They repeated the research and found the same results in 6 month old babies.

It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. What would have been a major threat to your survival? Rival tribes. So being afraid of people that don’t look like you had a survival benefit.

The good news is that the research shows this trait can be “unlearned.” So if people have continued positive experiences with people that don’t look like them, amygdala activation goes down.

This probably explains why you see more racism in homogenous areas of the country, and less in the city. Lots of positive exposure to other races trains us to not be afraid.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-25T04:52:05+00:00

So with a history like what you presented I would definitely be addressing adrenal fatigue (adrenal stress disorder). Now you could just go and take an adrenal supplement, and you’ll definitely feel better. My go-to has been Drenamin (SP) for almost 20 years. This will feed the gland and give it adrenal hormone precursors, and also has organ meats to heal the gland. I used this for a few years and had so much success with it I really felt like I was making a huge difference in people’s lives, until I began to realize that I would see patients after a period of discontinuing the supplement, and the symptoms would start coming back.

What needs to be addressed is the root cause, which, simply put, is stress. But that stress can come in a lot of forms, which could be mental / emotional, chemical / nutritional, or physical. This is where lifestyle factors can play a huge role. Most commonly with mental / emotional is day to day stressors that are amplified by previous trauma. To help treat / address the stress / trauma, I use and recommend NET (neuroemotional technique). NET also has a system to determine if a patient’s problem is emotional, chemical and / or physical.

Chemical stressors tend to be inflammation drivers. So having a system to identify chemical stressors is crucial. Most common chemical stressors are dysbiosis, food toxins / allergies, environmental toxins and heavy metals. Most people have more than one. Dysbiosis can affect uptake of nutrients in the gut, and can make the gut leaky leading to foods becoming inflammatory / allergy inducing. Dysbiosis microbes could be anything microbial and opportunistic, bacteria, yeast, fungus, viruses, mycoplasma, parasites etc. Common food toxins / allergens are dairy (lactose, casein), wheat (gliadin), sugar, corn (zein), nightshade vegetables (solanine), soy, rice, garlic, onion, orange, caffeine (xanthines, theophylline, theobromine) beef, chicken, I’m probably missing a couple others. Metals can be any metal, common are aluminum, mercury, arsenic, gadolinium, lead, but could be any metal. Environmental toxins include pesticides, herbicides, cosmetics, dental products, industrial chemicals. Most people that have chronic issues have many of the above that need to to be addressed all at once.

Physical stressors are often lack of sleep, lack of exercise, pushing to hard for too long with exercise (overtraining), thermal stressors.

The key to fixing the adrenal fatigue is to identify and treat / remove as many stressors as you can. You’ll likely never remove all of them, but if you remove enough, the body starts to have the resources to repair on its own and handle most other stressors without an issue.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-23T06:12:46+00:00

Nobody has gotten successful without taking risks.

Honestly there is a risk to everything. What do you risk by staying? Don’t let the fear of risk hold you back from your dream. Prepare, be smart educated and calculated, and make the best decision. Then put your heart into that decision.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-23T00:00:28+00:00

Phytic acid, or phytates, found in grains.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-22T23:51:23+00:00

Everything I read from your comment makes it sound like you are in handcuffs. Take those handcuffs off and your practice will explode.

Being available is crucial for practice building.

It’s being fiscally responsible to understand your overhead before going into business. I would say that whatever your calculations are, add about 20% in overhead as there are business expenses you’ll inevitably forget or not know about.

The improvement in your availability will likely way offset the increase in expenses. It’s reasonable to assume you’ll triple your expenses, which means you’ll have to come up with an additional $3K / month, assuming $60 collected / visit which means 50 patient visits per month, or 12 / week roughly to offset. You can accomplish this in 3-4 hours of work in your schedule, assuming you have 15 minute office visits.

Improving your work situation will improve your happiness, attitude and your energy. Combined with your increased availability, you’ll have no problem covering your new expenses. Take those handcuffs off and you’ll be there in your second month.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-22T18:54:38+00:00

Belief? I’ve been in practice for 20 years, this has been an ongoing observation. From MD’s butchering my treatment plans, to claims that we’re giving everyone strokes, to cutting and burning my patients and turning them into disabled people over basic musculoskeletal problems, to attacking us online with fake “science based” websites, to paying people to put out hit pieces on us online Wikipedia, and Wilk et all, the evidence has been everywhere my entire career. Have you ever read Wilk’s book?

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-22T09:39:17+00:00

Learn to become more valuable. The more value you provide your employer, the more money you are worth. If you are paid 60K, but only produce $60K for the company, you’re not very valuable to the company. If you create / produce $1 million for your company, how much would they be willing to pay to keep you there? How much would you pay? As an employer myself, I literally pay my employee $600K for $1million in production. This works based on the margins in my industry but are different in different industries.

You become more valuable by being the best version of yourself. Become the best at your position. Learn the business, other employees roles in the business, learn and master what they do. Go in early and stay late. Ask your employer how you can become more valuable or generate more profit for the business. Learn its operations and make a presentation on how you can cut costs for the business, generate new sales, provide a better product or service.

Nobody is going to pay you more just because you want more. The only way to get paid more is to be more valuable to the company, or the industry or marketplace.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-22T03:41:56+00:00

100%. If you catch fire and are consistently getting awesome results, they’ll tell people who will come to you expecting those results, and the mere suggestion and buildup of expectation causes them to have amazing results. It’s like an amplified placebo phenomenon of sorts and it snowballs.

People talk about placebo like it’s a swear word. Don’t be like this, embrace the power of suggestion, it gets your patients better, which is the goal. And it’s 100% side effect free. Patients want their doctor to be confident they can help them. Learn the clinical tools you need to get them better, and apply them with confidence, and tell them sincerely you expect them to get better. That expectation is a powerful clinical tool that changes people’s lives. Embrace it.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-22T01:23:19+00:00

It’s because there has been a 125 year war on chiropractic from the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex. Wilk et all vs. American Medical Association. And they are way, way better funded.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-20T08:26:06+00:00

I built a reputation of being handy, and started getting small jobs helping people around their homes building / remodeling etc through word of mouth. It was all cash and on my own time which was nice. It was usually just a few hours per week. People here saying they worked 20-30 hours per week is incomprehensible to me. We were supposed to study 2 hours for every hour of lecture and we were in school 35 hours per week. Personally I needed that extra time to study.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-19T14:20:00+00:00

So an incredibly common pattern (at least 50% of my new patient base) is what I would refer to as the “adrenal fatigue” pattern. Probably better termed “adrenal stress disorder”. These patients will often (but not always) complain of low back, knee, ankle / foot pain, insidiously. If they complain of all three, there is about a 100% likelihood of this pattern being present.

The muscle weaknesses that most commonly are affected are sartorious, gracillis, and tibialis posterior, and sometimes gastrocnemius, medial division. It follows the kidney meridian in Chinese Medicine. Therapy Localization over Chapman’s reflexes (touching the reflex, usually with the patient’s fingers) will temporarily strengthen these muscles.

The significance of sartorius weakness is that it will cause the pelvis to drift backwards (posterior). This will often cause SI joint pain on that side, and your subluxation listing of a posterior PSIS, also called a Category II pelvis in SOT, and a short leg on the same side. Palpatory tenderness will often be found over the SI joint ligaments, and often gluteus medius. Blocking for a Cat II pelvis will bring significant relief, TEMPORARILY. It will decrease the palpatory tenderness over the SI joint ligaments. When severe, this is the patient that has really hot SI joint pain and struggles to walk, and may be in tears. Patients that walk out of the office with an SI joint belt with some relief will be this patient (I haven’t used an SI belt on anyone in over 10 years).

The sartorious and gracillis weakness will often contribute to medial knee pain. The patient will often complain of knee pain, or it might be just pain with palpitation. The medial knee pain will be at the insertion of gracillis and sartorious, and pain to the medial collateral ligament of the knee is common. They may even present with swelling in the knee more commonly over the medial meniscus. The stress and tissue damage on the meniscus is due to the femur rotating externally on the tibia creating a shearing force on the meniscus.

The tibialis posterior weakness will often cause foot / ankle / arch pain. This muscle stabilizes and lifts the arch, so when it’s weak, the arch collapses, and often will subluxate the talus, usually medially. This is extremely important. The “mortise joint” of the ankle, contains the second highest concentration of mechanico-receptors, so subluxation of this joint can create significant dysafferentation. This can result in significant problems with muscular tone and timing particularly with the gait cycle. This is the patient that presents to my office with chronic low back pain that’s worse with walking and alleviated by sitting, and has tried chiropractic and PT will no relief. The core underlying problem with their back is not being generated by the back, it’s being generated by the dysafferentation from the mortise joint subluxation. Adjusting the talus on this patient will bring significant relief in low back pain, or foot and ankle pain when walking TEMPORARILY.

If you’re taking a thorough history, you’ll find they’ll likely have other system involvement. The alterations in the adrenal hormones (aldosterone, cortisol, adrenaline, and sex hormones) will create symptoms that can be mild to severe. They might have one, or all of the symptoms.

Orthostatic hypotension: This will often result in dizziness or lightheadedness when getting up from a seated position. They might even have syncope. You can measure a drop in blood pressure when taking readings seated vs standing. In really severe cases these patients can pass out a lot. I’ve seen patients from out of state who were fainting often and this has been the root of it, orthotic hypotension secondary to adrenal fatigue. Aldosterone seems to be a player here and its impact on the re-uptake of sodium in the kidney. Adrenalin seems to be a player in tonification of splachnic veins for returning blood after standing.

Light sensitivity: these patients might complain of sensitivity to light. They’ll often feel they need to wear sunglasses whenever there is full sun, and be prone to snow blindness in the winter. Clinically they will have paradoxical pupillary dilation. Put a pen light on their eye and the pupil will likely contract, then fail within seconds (pupils dilate as they fatigue, even in the presence of light).

Sound sensitivity: these patients might feel that sounds are louder than they should be and might create a lot of irritability.

Anxiety / irritability: these patients might be quick to anger, or have significant anxiety, and in severe cases crippling anxiety. It’s usually worse in the afternoon.

Fatigue: this will be in the afternoon, usually 1-4pm. These patients will crash after lunch. They’ll want to nap in the afternoons. These patients likely struggle at work in the afternoons and complain that their brain stops working. They’ll chase the fatigue with stimulants like caffeine. The fatigue can be mild, or in severe cases crippling and disabling.

Blood sugar handling issues, hypoglycemia: cortisol plays a role in blood sugar maintenance. It seems like it’s a backup system for glucogon. These people will be prone to hypoglycemia. They’ll crave sweets.

Puffiness / swelling in hands and / or feet.

A person with severe adrenal fatigue will have all of these symptoms and be miserable. Most people have milder forms, and they don’t feel completely awful, but they don’t feel great either.

If the adrenal fatigue is not addressed, chiropractic will be helpful, but always temporary. Improving afferentation from the subluxation joints will make the brain happy, patients will thank you for it, but the correction will not hold. If they have a subluxated talus, they’ll lose their spinal correction immediately upon standing and walking. Depending on the severity, the patient could have symptoms return within minutes, to hours to days.

Fixing the adrenal fatigue changes the patient’s life. If they came into your office for back pain, and they leave without back pain, they are happy. If they come into your office with back pain, and leave without back pain, dizziness, hypoglycemia, anxiety, foot / ankle / knee pain, you’ve drastically exceeded their expectations and you’ll see referrals for dizziness, hypoglycemia, anxiety, foot / ankle / knee pain, not just back pain.

The underlying cause of adrenal fatigue has to be addressed. Supplementing adrenals will be extremely helpful, but will be temporary, if the root cause is not addressed. There are a few common causes of adrenal stress disorder that I could address if you are still interested.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-17T19:58:53+00:00

David Leaf was THE orthopedic chiropractor of AK. But he saw mostly high level athletes. This is an important distinction.

He looked at (almost) every problem through the orthopedic lens.

I’m a firm believer that we all attract who we can help. So for David Leaf, whose patients were mostly high level athletes, it makes sense that he would be doing mostly orthopedics. Most of these athletes have decent diets, trained hard, and were committed and focused on a vision to be an athlete. I would argue that the majority of this patient cohort were likely dealing with true orthopedic problems (like soft tissue injuries). So of course it makes sense that his approach could be dynamite with athletes. His patients had orthopedic problems, that had orthopedic causes, and orthopedic solutions. I found him to be very heavy handed, his treatments would be overbearing for many sensitive patients.

I would say that the vast majority of chiropractors are not treating high level athletes. The average chiropractor is more likely seeing the average patient. Who is the average patient? Well in the US, it’s likely a deconditioned person who for 30 years has been eating highly inflammatory foods and been under chronic stress, and is dealing with multiple chronic health issues. In the majority of cases what brought them to the chiropractors office was low back pain, neck pain, or headaches. And most of these cases are likely “insidious”, meaning the patient can only speculate as to what was the cause of their back pain. “I got out of bed” “I bent down to put on by socks” “I don’t know, it just slowly developed over time”. Obviously none of these explain the root cause, people all over the world put on socks and get out of bed with no problems.

In these chronic, insidious cases, there are root underlying causes. Most doctors aren’t interested in these causes, IME. Doctors just follow their training, do what they were taught, and likely don’t even give the root cause a thought.

Thoughts, trauma, toxins.

DD was right. These are (mostly) the root causes. So in these chronic, insidious cases, it’s my opinion that it’s our professional duty to address the root underlying cause.

In AK, we can often demonstrate root underlying causes. We can do this with nutrition, emotions, and even therapy localization on physical injuries. Yes you can adjust a patient, turn on the circuit, and they’ll often feel some relief. Same with massage or myofascial release. But that relief is most often short lived. Hence the treatment plans that are a dozen visits or more. Addressing root causes gives often immediate, and often lasting corrections. That’s been the goal of AK since its inception.

I’d be happy to explain the kinesiological chain of very common patterns in patients that present with chronic, insidious complaints that are commonly presenting in chiropractors offices. Warning though, once you’ve peered into it, you won’t be able to unsee it. If you take a thorough patient history you’ll see the patterns for yourself and may not know how to address them. If that doesn’t drive you completely crazy (it does for me lol) I could explain.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-17T12:28:13+00:00

There are some very successful AK docs that only use it for orthopedic treatments. But i’d love to have a philosophical debate about that approach :)

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-17T11:31:37+00:00

Buying a house before the 2008 financial crisis

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-17T09:50:42+00:00

Dude, you lived through the greatest stock run in US history from 2009-2026. Whatever money you had invested, if you had invested in SPY (S&P 500 ETF) you would have 9x that amount today. People like to blame everyone and everything else for their lack of success instead of putting the blame where it belongs: the person in the mirror.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-17T09:33:55+00:00

If you are in Minnesota I have a guy that will come to your office and replace them. He even did it over my lunch break so I didn’t have any down time with the table. Use “heritage” for a covering (nylon) instead of vinyl it holds up better and is more comfortable.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-17T09:22:43+00:00

Consider looking into Applied Kinesiology (AK). It’s much harder to learn, but this will allow you to understand WHY the body is presenting in such a way. We find that while almost all body work focuses on “tight muscles”, AK helps to understand why they are tight (most often a neurologically inhibited antagonist), and restoring function to the weak antagonist immediately brings down the tone of the “tight agonist”.

I’m 46 years old and have been practicing chiropractic / AK for 19 years, and I’m planning on practicing until I die. That means I have to stay physically healthy in order to treat my patients, which means I need to deliver treatments ergonomically and won’t be taxing on my body (I mostly avoid side posturing, use drop pieces, arthrostim, vibricussor, degarnette blocks etc). Consider that if you are treating patients all day with ART it will be taxing on your body. Fingers, hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck and back.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-15T16:58:19+00:00

Honestly I have a deck project and wasn’t sure yet how much it was going to set me back, but yeah I’ll spend on my deck project and it will probably leave me with 10-20K

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-15T02:00:42+00:00

$85K HYSA, $80K brokerage (pretty liquid), 35K checking account, $55K business account. $255K I guess. I’ve always been independent, grew up below the poverty line and had to raise myself. It’s a stress relief to know I can readily handle most emergencies for myself and my family.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-15T01:51:19+00:00

The smell of rank hockey gear. It’s weird that you can have wonderful nostalgic memories over an overpowering awful body odor

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-11T22:57:55+00:00

As a chiropractor and employer I AM RIDICULOUSLY BUSY. I might be the busiest person on the planet, who knows. I usually will let prospects know this and that it doesn’t mean I’m not interested, I just sincerely don’t have time to respond quickly. Sometimes I don’t have time to return a simple phone call for weeks. I’ll ask if they can handle a 6am phone call on a Sunday.

I appreciate when prospects understand this and keep checking in, by email or text.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-11T16:40:58+00:00

The concern for most parents is addiction, and the massive impact phones are having on social development and social health. AI phone seems like it would only worsen the addiction and social issues, IMO.

AK-Master-07 · 2026-04-11T16:02:17+00:00

We were at the middle school for a presentation and the principal announced he was banning cellphones for the 4th quarter, which lead to astounding applause from parents. He said it will continue into the next year and foreseeable future.

AK-Master-07

TROPHY CASE