I’m very excited to talk with Dr. Dave Heitmann, DC. Dave is a former rugby player, self proclaimed “strength geek” and our Medical Director here at NeuFit headquarters. In this episode, Dr. Dave explains how the Neubie is the perfect compliment for any chiropractor’s office and how it leads to scalability and profitability quicker than anything else on the market.
Dr. Dave’s approach to his practice has been to add just “a little bit of juice” to aid in the body’s natural propensity to heal through an input-based approach to rehabilitation. It was that common thread that united us and we’re so fortunate to have him on our team.
Garrett (00:35)
NeuFit nation. I am here today with Dr. Dave Heitman. Thanks for joining me, Doctor Dave. And we got to show off everyone. We got to do a fist bump and a handshake. We both have the five finger shoes on, Doctor David and are both big fans.
Dr.Dave (00:56)
Geeks. I would call it geeks, not fans.
Garrett (00:59)
I’m good with that. So for those of you who don’t know, Dr. Dave is our medical director here at our clinic, our headquarters in Austin, Texas. He’s a chiropractor. Got a very interesting background that I’m excited to dive into here and also what I think you’ll find is a very interesting perspective. So I’m really excited to have this conversation with Dr. Dave. And can you start Doctor Dave, just by sharing a little bit about your background and things you’ve been doing in your career before we even met?
Dr. Dave (01:30)
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me out here. I’ve been into health and wellness basically since fourth grade. I have a proclamation in the sand where I still have the piece of paper that said that I wanted to be a professional athlete and basically everything around my childhood revolved around strength and conditioning and health and wellness and nutrition. By 6th grade I was reading Muscle and Fitness magazine and I was skipping school to go read about amino acids because I see these supplements coming out and I was that odd child that was just really into it. Leaving up through college, I was just obsessed that I knew my path. I had no idea what I would do with biochemistry and molecular biology degree. I just went and did it and it was fun. And I explored and got into biomechanics and then that led me to chiropractic school. And I was waiting on the fence between oncology research. I was either going to do MD, PhD, route to go oncology or I was going to do chiropractic. And so I decided after some long hard thought to go chiropractic. Then I specialized in sports medicine.
Dr. Dave (02:39)
I’ve been an athlete the whole time and it was just a natural fit for me. So dove right into all the specialty stuff around sports. Got a master’s degree in sports science and rehab. I went and did an internship at the University of Wisconsin in their sports medicine department. And through that, got enough hours and time in around clinical exercise physiology and being a certified strength and conditioning coach through all of that. Then I did the whole rabbit chase of letters behind my name, right? Kettlebell certifications and K taping and all of that thing. It’s just the wild goose chase that a lot of providers go on these days. That’s where the background really came from. And then I owned a sports medicine clinic for ten years, and we had everything there that was in Madison, Wisconsin. Yes, thank you. If you cancel my Wisconsin a little bit, yeah. And it was a lot of fun. We had 7000 square foot playground, essentially. We had indoor cycling, we had triathlon coaching there. We had personal training, we did decompression tables, cold blazers, nutrition. We had a full kitchen there. And so it was just the one stop shop, so to speak, of health and wellness.
Dr. Dave (04:02)
Even though I was a chiropractor, I really just believed in bringing all aspects into the business, and the sports teams loved it. So I was involved with a lot of sports teams. I was involved at the corporate level of doing self programming for corporations. And then I also had a contract with a hospital system to do all of their rehab for them. So I was considered their main referral site for sending patients, which was really cool.
Garrett (04:31)
And I love hearing that because you have this kind of broad perspective of having had a facility, having a lot of private pay patients, which many of our practitioners are in that type of world. And then you also have the perspective.
Dr. Dave (04:47)
Of a little bit more of an.
Garrett (04:48)
Issue institutional that type of interaction.
Dr. Dave (04:51)
Yeah, I started off with playing the insurance game fully and fully, accepting insurance in my office, and then with the hospital system, that was all part of.
Dr. Dave (05:00)
With Medicare and Medicaid and different aspects that way. And then I transitioned about halfway through my career so far. I transitioned away and went cash only. And then when I closed my office, which was three years ago actually, when all virtual. And so I’ve had every single experience that you can have from a health care provider standpoint. And then I even also helped coach businesses. So I helped coach chiropractors around integrating in therapeutics and techniques into their office to help them grow and really treat their patients the way that they wanted to.
Garrett (05:34)
That’s awesome how you’ve been able to kind of build into this new phase of your career. You mentioned you went virtual and gave you the flexibility to live anywhere. And we’re grateful that you chose Austin, Texas.
Dr. Dave (05:45)
Yes. Well, it’s because of people like you. Yeah, I mean, this is a crazy serendipitous journey where it is three or four years ago that I came to Paleofx and through a mutual connection, we ended up connecting and I started seeing the technology and I was just like, that’s the future right there. It’s just like I’m getting goosebumps right now. It’s one of those crazy stories where I wasn’t living in Austin, I was still living in Madison. I still had my practice when we first met and then all of that stuff. I just started phasing that through and closing that down and traveled the country for a little while and then ended up here in Austin. And we reconnected and the rest is here leading to these seats. That’s right.
Garrett (06:32)
And so given that body of experience that you have and different perspectives, I think it’s really valuable to hear your answer to this question. I’ll ask you, how do you think that, particularly in the chiropractic realm where you have your experience, how do you think that chiropractic practices can incorporate the newbie? What do you think NeuFit in this technology and this approach can do for them? And I just love to hear your perspective on that type of integration.
Dr. Dave (07:06)
Well, back way up and let’s just put the name aside that chiropractic in itself, the foundation of Chiropractic, is trying to heal the body naturally through the nervous system. We believe that when you get a chiropractic adjustment, it stimulates all sorts of processes in the body. Match that with your technology. It’s the exact same thing, it’s the exact same philosophy. And so we’re trying to heal the body naturally through just adding a little bit of juice to it, so to speak. So chiropractic is adding a little bit of juice. NeuFit and Neubie are adding a little bit of juice to it. And it’s so basic of a concept and it’s so beautiful of a concept that it fits together so naturally. And that’s what excited me about it originally, is when I looked at things like cold laser and decompression and all of those things that I used in my practice, I always had to make sure that it fits my philosophy first, of trying to heal people naturally, trying to stimulate their own body. This is what attracted me to functional medicine as well, right? We’re trying to incorporate the body’s natural processes. So that’s what sold me in the big scheme of things.
Dr. Dave (08:16)
Then I came and experienced it. And I was just like. Man. I was just blown away at what I felt for the first time ever. Of all of the different things that I’ve experimented and played around with in my life. All of the different gadgets and gizmos that I had an opportunity to when I was in school in what was called the biofreeze area. And we had equipment people coming all the time. And it was myself and a couple of other geeky students with the professor. And we would, like, test all of these different electronics and different devices that people were trying to get into the chiropractic profession and what the experience that I had here when I came here and experienced this was just blew my mind on. We actually specifically worked on I separated my shoulder three times and had a lot of issues with it, even with all the different rehab things that I used to do. And man would put this on there, and I immediately felt that connection right away. It immediately made a difference. And I was like, I’ve never experienced that before. And so that was what sold me, is I started off at the philosophy doesn’t match my philosophy checkmark. Come experience it. It blows my mind away in one visit. Okay, now I’m sold. Yeah, that’s the story of how we became addicted to this.
Garrett (09:38)
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that. And thankfully, that’s an experience that we hear often. That a vast majority. In fact, one of the things that we’ve measured, looking at our own results here, is that we’ve seen over 90% of people make tangible progress in their first visit using this technology. And so that’s one of the coolest things about it.
Dr. Dave (10:03)
And it’s a permanent change, too. That’s what I love about it. It’s not a band aid effect onto something. So you’re rewiring the brain along with rewiring the muscle structure in the nervous system and the vascular system. It all actually creates a permanent change within one visit.
Garrett (10:24)
That also brings up an interesting point. I just actually got to give a talk for Dr. Walls for her seminar on neuroplasticity, and that will be another podcast episode here too. And in doing some of the research and reviewing that, just seeing I got to see again how quickly the brain can actually start to make changes, and good or bad, if we use it or lose it. So those changes, I would say they can be permanent if they’re reinforced, but if you don’t do something, you can lose it very quickly as well, which is so interesting. But the potential to make changes that quickly is just profound. There are studies looking at monkeys where they’ll cut a nerve from their finger, and within a day or two, the maps of their brains have already started to change. A lifetime of patterning can be rewired and seemingly in the blink of an eye. That’s a good, really good perspective. Thank you for sharing that.
Dr. Dave (11:26)
Yeah, for sure.
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Garrett (12:02)
Anything else on your mind that you think if there’s a chiropractor or other doctor professional watching this, anything else that you think they might want to hear or anything else that you feel compelled to share with them?
Dr. Dave (12:17)
Yeah, well, there’s two main categories that I see with this is that one is you have to believe in the technology, right? And we covered that. It fits with the philosophy. It fits in to the integration. The other is, like, can you make money with it? Can you grow a business, and can you serve your patience the way that you want to with it? And there’s a lot of confusion out in a lot of practices. How do you integrate things as these new cool things come out? Like, how do you actually put them into your practice? And there’s a lot of different levels with this. This is what I like. The flexibility that this machine has to offer is that you can really get the benefits out of it. From doing just a little bit or you can run a full scale secondary office with this type of thing and everything in between. So really what I would challenge everyone on watching this is that think about how you are already doing things and how you can integrate in to better serve your patients and make more money. Those are the two things that we have to satisfy.
Dr. Dave (13:18)
So in the beginning, we haven’t even talked about this, but you can actually put a glove on and you can do manual therapy with this, which has drastic performance changes. Using that here in the clinic, I can break apart tissue and just loosen it up and then I can adjust that thing like no other because the body just relaxes after you use it. So you can do all sorts of trigger point therapy, hands on coordinate right, with your normal visit structure. So this would be maybe you just start charging a little bit above and beyond what you’re already charging for that extra glove manual therapy, right. Just like you’re adding art into your office or Gushaw or something of that nature. Then the next level structure would be to add rehab. You can do a certified practitioner can come in and do rehab with you. You can charge for that as a separate service and or service, or you can do strength and conditioning with it, which is another benefit that you could have a rehab division, you could have a strength and conditioning division and all of that could be in your office. Or if you really wanted to get all fun and crazy and really not confuse the marketplace, if you wanted to have a separate clinic aspect where your Chiropractic office is this, and then a strength and conditioning rehab clinic is this.
Dr. Dave (14:43)
And they could be right next to each other, they could be in the same office, but they’re actually marketed as separate entities where the Chiropractic office stays the same. But then you’re just sending people over to do the strength and conditioning, like, okay, you’re better now. Cool. I want you to continue your journey with our strength and conditioning program here. Go do this. Or the Chiropractic is good for this part, but we want to get some rehab going for you, so go do this. And so that’s how you can build up these business structures. So the awareness that this actually covers all of those different aspects, a lot of people don’t see those opportunities and that’s where they just need to reach out to us and we can help them guide that and navigate through that to make sure that it’s the right fit in doing the patient’s service and not watering down your messages and all of those sorts of things.
Garrett (15:33)
Absolutely. I think that’s a great point where there’s that whole range. Either the doctor can integrate it into his or her daily practice, he or she can hire someone to do offer it as a service so that the doctor doesn’t have to do it themselves. We’ve seen that be successful and also potentially hire even a personal trainer or massage therapist or someone who can handle the strength and conditioning side as well. And that’s allowed. We’ve heard that allow practices to retain clients for longer where normally they might leave after a few minutes or a few weeks, but now, once they come to know, like and trust you, if there’s an opportunity to keep them as long term training clients, that’s been something and that can be done out of an exam room.
Dr. Dave (16:17)
Small how you build a business. It costs so much to get someone, but it’s very little to keep them coming back. And this is something that people will keep coming back for that you can keep on a regular basis. Like, personally, when I was taking care of helping youth student athletes, so football, soccer, like, all of that stuff in both middle school and high school, I would have loved to have something like this that, yeah, I’m doing all the upload of training services and concussion management over here. And then the other part of it is, hey, come in and actually work out once a week, twice a week, something like that, on these machines. That would have just added this whole extra layer of development of my office that would have created a whole culture of people wanting to come to my office.
Garrett (17:08)
Heck yeah.
Dr. Dave (17:09)
That’s awesome. It’s good.
Garrett (17:12)
We cover a lot of ground here. I know you also have another exciting project. We’ll have you on a future episode to talk about that. This is great for today. Thank you so much, Doctor Dave for sure.
Dr. Dave (17:27)
Be sure anyone wants to reach out to us, I’m here. You can contact us through NeuFit. If you have chiropractic questions on how to integrate this. If it’s a good fit for you, I’d be more than happy to hop on the phone with you. Awesome.
Garrett (17:39)
Thank you, sir. Yes, we’ll do that.
