Warrior Mastery Method Interview: Dr. Stephen Wellens

Just recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Wellens who is one of only 500 board certified Chiropractic and Functional Neurologists in the world.

Originally from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, he completed his undergraduate education at Florida State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Food and Nutrition in 1998.

Dr. Wellens is the only board certified chiropractic neurologist in Walnut Creek, and Wellens Chiropractic Neurology Center is one of the few chiropractic neurology offices on the west coast.

Dr. Wellens’ protocols differ greatly from traditional chiropractic because of his deep understanding of how musculoskeletal injuries and other disorders may result from imbalances and altered function of relay centers in the human nervous system.

Chiropractic neurologists are trained to understand that the primary dysfunction experienced by a patient might actually be a secondary symptom of dysfunction elsewhere in the nervous system.

Dr. Wellens utilizes this understanding to implement non-surgical, non-pharmaceutical, and safe procedures. Much of this understanding comes from over 600 hours of post-doctorate study in Neurology where the training includes the utilization of non-traditional chiropractic joint manipulation, and the application of neurological and musculoskeletal rehabilitation protocols designed to address neuromuscular imbalances.

Dr. Wellens has had success with patients suffering from a myriad of disorders including: neck and back pain, sports-related injuries, balance disorders, movement disorders, chronic pain syndromes, peripheral nerve injuries, learning disabilities, mild depression, and repetitive stress injuries.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed interviewing him.

Raquel Otis: Hi, it’s Raquel with the Warrior Mastery Method and today I am interviewing Dr. Stephen Wellens who is part of my healing team and for those of you warriors, my students, my clients, you know that I always talk about the importance of being an advocate for your own health and well being for your journey through a painful experience and the importance of having a team.

Dr. Wellens is on my team and I feel very blessed that he is.

I met Dr. Wellens because my daughter had an injury on a treadmill and I was really impressed and very touched by his bedside manner and just in communicating with my daughter who’s a teenager and then he started working with me and my neck and my shoulder injury from my ATV accident.

I also was really impressed with the manner in which he approaches the bodies that he’s working with and I think that makes you, Dr. Wellens, so unique and so special is your understanding and your background in neurology and the role that the central nervous system plays in our overall health and well being.

I feel so safe with you. You know to have my daughter and my son be seen by you that also referred my sister to you, my husband has seen you. My friends, so many of my friends as well as my students and my clients.

With that being said, thank you so much, I really do appreciate you taking the time to just talk with me about health, well being, the central nervous system, persistent pain. Thank you, and welcome.

Stephen Wellens: You’re welcome, thanks for the invite, I’m happy to be here.

Raquel Otis: Yeah, Dr. Wellens, would you mind talking a little bit about your background. Not just in terms of your education in chiropractic care but also how neurology or even neuroscience comes into play and maybe even your background in food and nutrition and how that all comes to play when you see a patient walk through your doors?

Stephen Wellens: Well it started for me at an early age, when I say early, like 18, 19, when I was in college and I was taking courses to do the pre-med thing. Thought I would go into orthopedic surgery actually. I had a passion for sports and working with athletes. That was my mindset.

Trying to get that four year degree, I went the nutrition approach. That was my main degree was in nutrition. It started to sink in terms of the idea that you are what you eat kind of mentality.

Understanding how different foods could physiologically create problems and then at the same time could physiologically could help problems.

I started to realize that I had a passion for wanting to fix things but maybe no longer fix things once they became a problem, which is typically what surgery will do, but maybe try and fix things before they become a problem.

There became a deep seated desire to want to try and find the cause of problems as opposed to then treating the effect. That got me through to the four year degree parts, my degree in nutrition and food science.

The science part of that is understanding the physiology of actually how the body works.

I then went to chiropractic school and did four years there and then concurrently during those four years, I did a three year post doctorate study in neurology.

I did that mainly because I felt like the chiropractic education was great but I needed more personally to understand now on a different level exactly how different problems come up and more importantly, what types of natural remedies can be done to help those types of problems.

For me, whole health in terms of what I provide is a mixture of understanding the physiology of the body, the neurology of the body and then the chiropractic side being the muscular, skeletal side of the body and basically trying to bring all of that into balance.

While also knowing that there’s many causes for a variety of ailments that don’t necessarily fall in any of those three categories but then knowing how to refer out when needed when I feel like a problem is falling into something that I’m not able to remedy.

Raquel Otis: Many of the students that it work with and my clients live with persistent pain.

Persistent pain came to have significant meaning to me in terms of how I defined pain and how I related to pain as an instructor when I’d have students come in and share with me their concerns or things that they were working on and then living with persistent pain for five years, that relationship changed completely.

It really humbled me as a teacher, as a student but as a mom and a wife as well. Can you share your definition of persistent pain from your background and what you see in your patients and also if that definition has evolved as more and more research is coming out regarding fascia, connective tissue and the central nervous system?

Stephen Wellens: I would say that my definition is quite Websters, quite medical in terms of … the idea of chronic pain is pain that’s persistent for longer than three months. I still believe in that type of definition.

Then probably the biggest thing in terms of what chronic pain means and why a lot of alternative therapies are helpful with pain is because medicine can’t … doesn’t always treat this part of the definition and that is pain that persists long after tissue healing has occurred.

That’s probably the biggest component of what I see is my focal point in treating patients with chronic pain is, by definition it’s more than three months but for me, if an injury should have been recoverable in a month, then technically, any pain a day beyond that one month is chronic pain in my eyes.

I think the biggest thing is, and we see a lot of this is pain that is persistent when there is no tissue damage. That would be a situation for instance where lets just say, for instance, in your case maybe like a rotate or cuff or a shoulder were injured and months go by and now you go through the orthopedic tests and technically it is now strong.

You can get an MRI and you don’t see any type of tears in there. Sometimes those things aren’t even done, it’s just the assumption that, hey this much time has passed, all that tissue should be healed, yet the person is still complaining of pain.

The search has to be on for at this point what is causing that pain, if in fact we’re looking at the tissues having been healed.

Is there an inflammatory state that’s affecting sensitive nerves in that area? Are the nerves themselves more sensitive for some reason?

Are the pain fibers in that area more active than they should be?

At that point that’s where the fun of what I do kind of comes into play is, well what are the different things that could cause that pain and when you get that, you’re not gonna treat everything all at once but you’re gonna create this flow chart or this list of things where okay,

I think it’s most likely, this, this, this, this and this and we’re gonna attack it in those orders.

Sometimes you can do a few things at once but a lot of times it just got to be done one at a time and it’s a process of elimination type of thing.

Raquel Otis: I experienced that, so I do know what you’re talking about. When you are working with a pain patient and this individual comes to you, can you talk a little bit about maybe the nervous system as well as maybe the importance of stability and balance with respect to the whole body.

Stephen Wellens: Yes, so these are kind of … we don’t have an entire day for this discussion otherwise we could speak hours upon hours about individual types of causes.

Lets just say for instance, I find that the top two things that I’ll always look at in a chronic type of condition is the possibility of there being a scar tissue involvement, as well as the possibility of an inflammatory problem in the body as two types of things that need to be looked at.

I’ll take the inflammatory side of things. If we deem that there is either a localized, I’m using a shoulder here, a localized or a systemic inflammatory problem, well we know that inflammation makes nerves more sensitive, especially pain nerves. The idea has to be well what is causing that inflammation?

I could use the example of if we have a systemic inflammation, your body physiologically makes energy two different ways … two different systems, either aerobically or anaerobically.

Obviously aerobically most people would kind of venture to guess, well that’s when you have oxygen in the system, and that would be true.

That’s the most efficient way to make energy for the body is with oxygen. When oxygen levels start to decrease and there would be various reasons for that but I’ll just stick with the physiology part but when oxygen starts to deplete, your body will make energy but the byproduct of that will be lactic acid.

Your lactic acid levels will rise in the body and that creates an inflammatory state in the body and then consequently, that inflammatory state in the body is gonna make nerves, especially pain nerves more sensitive.

Now, if we look at, lets say scar tissue, this will be the second non physiological part but a localized type of inflammatory problem, lets just say a shoulder has healed. Rotator cuff is healed, the muscles are healed, tendons and ligaments, there’s no tears in there, but the person still has restricted range of motion, still has pain in there … we know that the fibrous adhesions in scar tissue will make the joint feel more stiff. Along with that stiffness, scar tissue gets its own nerve supply over time and that is pain fibers.

You’ll get pain fiber infiltration into tissue that is not normal tissue, it not as elastic as it should be, it’s not as functional as it should be. Now every time you kind of create this movement, you feel pain and the idea is that joint is not working properly.

The scar tissue is essentially what you’re irritating and every time you irritate that, you are going to have pain. That type of issue would require us doing various therapies to break down that scar tissue.

Those are just a couple different types of sort of scenarios that could happen. I think maybe one of the biggest takeaways I would say for this type of a meeting or podcast type of thing if you will, will be inflammation. That’s the biggest thing that I see. If you move joint under stress, its not working right, you’re gonna build inflammation up that way.

You can build inflammation up because you have a gluten sensitivity and all the gluten that you’re eating is creating this inflammatory response. You could have a hypoxic situation as a result of your body working more with through anaerobic system versus an aerobic system and develop an inflammatory type of issue.

When they look at autoimmune problem, this kind of strain a little bit off topic but autoimmune issues, nearly all if not all have an inflammatory component to it. For me again, the biggest issue is figure out what’s creating that inflammation.

Raquel Otis: I am hearing all of it and I love that you talked not just about the body and the tissues but also nutrition and food sensitivities or food allergies because I think oftentimes.

I personally have a gluten sensitivity and I’m lactose intolerant and I have friend who just always teases me about being high maintenance when we go out or what have you and I just know at my age what I can get away with and what I can’t.

I know in my own pain journey, when I was as you had put it in your office sometime ago, how I was self-medicating, always trying to get a fix to just feel better because I felt so horrible.

I have question for you regarding kind of the primary versus secondary or secondary versus primary.

I had worked with different specialists and doctors, even neck specialists and every one who worked with me, focused so much on my neck. It was the most obvious, that’s where the pain radiated for me physically and my migraines or what have you. Then I went and I saw you. You weren’t interested in my neck. You went straight away to my shoulder and literally just after a couple of adjustments, it was genuinely transformative.

I say that not just in a physiological way but also that in my mind, I finally was living without pain.

A couple of things, can you talk about that. How you went to my shoulder instead of the neck, why that went on for you. What was maybe a trigger for you and then secondly, as my pain diminished, I remember still driving and still moving like the tin man and its taken such a long time for my brain, maybe my heart, I don’t know to trust that I could actually … I can actually move my neck, yay. Those two things.

Stephen Wellens: I believe you had treatments by a colleague of mine, correct?

Raquel Otis: Yes

Stephen Wellens: Okay. That’s why I went to the shoulder is I had worked under the assumption that if you had your neck adjusted before and by a colleague that I trust, that if it your issue were neck related, I feel pretty confident this practitioner who I trust, if there was a neck to be fixed, he would have fixed it as it related to your problem.

That’s probably the number one thing that I did and it’s something that I taught for six years in chiropractic college. The one thing I told my students was always listen to the patient. You can glean a lot of information of where you think the problem is and what treatment should be done simply by listening to the history.

In listening to your history, I really wasn’t interested in kind of going into an area that I felt would have been well treated by the colleague that I knew.

For me, it was easy to just say, “Well I’m not gonna go there.” I’m not gonna have that mentality, “Well my adjustment in the neck is gonna be better than that adjustment. My neck adjustment will fix it better than the other colleague.” That can happen sometimes by the way, but I just didn’t want to start there with you.

I went to the shoulder and for you, and this would be for a lot of people. There were a couple different things.

I think your shoulder issue and what the exam showed kind of screamed of a fixation that was indicative of, she’s passing her muscle test so I think that the muscle is strong enough. I don’t think that there’s any tears but the pain and what limited range of motion that was their kind of getting stuck in certain positions to me spoke volumes of fibrotic adhesion, which is a fancy terms for scar tissue.

For us, it was simply a matter of breaking up that scar tissue but then the trick with that is breaking up the scar tissue is gonna create this inflammatory response that we want to control as best we can.

We want to be able to kind of do work, create this inflammatory response that’s just a byproduct of the treatment but not have the treatment be so intense, thus the inflammation being so intense that you wouldn’t recover quick enough prior to the next treatment.

It’s almost why if you’re a masseuse why you wouldn’t want to necessarily massage somebody every single day is the idea of getting a massage and drinking water is to flush out that inflammation that’s being created as that practitioner is releasing lactic acid out of those muscles as well as creating some lactic acid as they themselves breakdown fibrotic adhesions.

The idea is to employ a treatment that the patient can recover from so that you’re ready to go for the next treatment.

The other thing is we did do some adjustments for you that dealt with rib mechanics, middle back mechanics and the idea behind that is actually oxygenation for the system.

Your lungs reside inside this ribcage and the more shallow this ribcage moves, the less those lungs can expand. The better those ribcages expand and move, the bigger the lungs expand within them and you are able to get in more oxygen per breath than you would if this are were constricted.

You can do pulse oximetry to kind of see that type of stuff and I’ve done that before where you know you put a pulse oximeter on a patient and they’re at about a 95, 96, you do this particular adjustment, they breathe better, you recheck it and they’re at 99 or 100.

Again, the importance behind the breathing goes back to that physiological explanation of hypoxium or low oxygen, kicks in the anaerobic system, your body makes energy when it’s inefficiently, bi-product is lactic acid that is inflammatory and now you’ve go this inflammatory type of deal going on.

One thing that we didn’t have to touch with you that might be interesting for others in terms of chronic pian is, when you talk about pain that persists long after tissue healing has occurred, many people actually suffer from a brain based mediated pain.

In other words, your world is based upon your brain’s perception. How you see your world is a perception that is dictated by what your brain decides to perceive.

Can you be in pain simply because your brain is telling you that you are in pain?

The answer is yes.

The analogy I give there would be people who are amputees. Someone who might be amputated from the elbow down might still complain of hand pain.

How could that be if they don’t have the hand anymore? It’s because the nerve information from that hand while that part is gone, the ultimate endpoint of that information in this part of the brain is still there.

You didn’t amputate the area of the brain that once served that hand.

Unfortunately due to a mismatch of information, the hand not being there, the nerves being irritated and that information going to the brain as the brain is having this sort of miscommunication between I have information here that should get information from the hand but the hand’s not here.

Your brain may sometimes default that perception as pain.

Can that happen without being an amputee? Absolutely.

There’s no reason why it shouldn’t and so could a fibro-myalgic experience body pain because of the pain’s perception of pain even though there aren’t tender nodules, there aren’t the muscle imbalances in the body.

The answer is yes. Your being is based upon your brain’s perception and that would even go far beyond pain.

We see that with depression. Can you be depressed even though everything in your world is great and everything in your life is great yet someone still be depressed, we certainly heard about that type of situation, seen that type of situation.

You can never underestimate the power of what your brain is perceiving whether it’s due to pain, emotion, self-worth, self-analyzation that type of thing.

That’s a big component there.

Raquel Otis: It is and I actually speak about neuroplasticity. Pain catastrophizing because when you lived with persistent pain for such a long period of time, your glass is half empty.

How do you address moving towards from pain towards peace when your glass is half empty and what role does that pain experience have on the brain?

I think its really just fascinating what the research is starting to say about that.

Stephen Wellens: Absolutely. We definitely know that there’s something called the pain gate, or the gate control theory of pain and its really simple.

Basically, the most important fibers to activate would be your, what they call mechanoreceptor fibers. Those are coming from muscles, those are coming from big joints and when they are active, this pain gate works on a sea saw such that the more those large diameter mechanoreceptor pathways are firing, the less the smaller fibers, which are your pain fibers, the less they will fire.

Stephen Wellens: There is this constant sea saw that you’re always trying to establish where these larger fibers, these mechanoreceptive fibers are firing because it will inherently reduce the firing of those pain fibers.

Example to that would be you hit your hand against a sharp corner and what would you immediately do? You shake and then all of a sudden you don’t feel that pain, why is that? The shaking stimulates those large diameter mechanoreceptive muscle fibers, which then degate the pain fibers from firing and then all of a sudden that pain’s not there.

Certainly, once you stop shaking, your hand, that pain might kind of come back.

That’s the essence of why people do that inherently. It’s the essence of why Tens units work. The idea is it stimulates those mechanoreceptors such as you feel those fibers and its blocking through the pain gate, blocking those small diameter fibers.

That’s why walking is important, that’s why mind exercises are important.

Exercise, physical exercise in general is important. Stretching, yoga because you really want to live a life where you aren’t trying to stimulate those large fiber mechanoreceptors, which deal with movement to avoid any small diameter firing.

That’s actually been the core of traditional chiropractic for a long time. The idea being if you have a neck pain and you have two joints that work as one together where there is a misalignment and that join isn’t moving the way it should, then you don’t have as much mechanoreceptive drive coming out of that area, which is imbalancing the pain gate and allowing the pain fibers to be more active, which is why you feel pain.

Then you have a chiropractor that realigns that joint. That joint now moves better, that movement allows for the better firing of the mechanoreceptive large diameter fibers to fire and now you don’t get that paint fiber sensation anymore.

That’s been the core of what traditional chiropractic has done from a spinal element for years, hundreds of years.

Raquel Otis: Well and it makes me think … I know we have to wrap up our time here very shortly but I remember after working with you for sometime, you finally kind of encouraged … pushing out the door kind of thing where it was like, “Okay now you can start exercising again, you can start lifting weights,” and it’s funny because on some levels, “Oh yeah, isn’t that what I wanted?”

Yeah, that’s great but I would tell Brian, I would tell my husband, “I’m scared. I’m scared to lift the weights because I’m feeling so good, I don’t want to go back to that pain experience.” … I tell my clients all the time, I’m in a place where I can say I’m living pain free.

I can say that and it brings so much joy to my heart. It makes me a better wife, a happier mommy, all of those things.

I’m at a place now, the season in my life now is, okay I’m not living with persistent pain but I’m not as strong as I would like to be. There’s this whole … this dialogue that goes on in my mind like, “I know Dr. Wellens said I really need to start picking up those weights and maybe I’ll pick up a few … ” can you just talk a little bit about that?

Stephen Wellens: I think I already did, it’s perception.

Raquel Otis: Yeah, but also with the body mechanics.

Stephen Wellens: Yes.

Raquel Otis: I’m okay to work out and I’m okay to drive and move my neck but in my head, I’m still …

Stephen Wellens: This is that perception thing. There is a perception again, where does the body still fall into those bad habits of perceiving that there’s a problem or perceiving that there’s a worry when we shouldn’t have one. The answer’s yes and here’s why.

This is probably … like you said, it being such a short time in trying to condense all these things in this short meeting and maybe you’ll have me for another meeting down the road.

The big thing is learned to responses. The analogy that I’ll give to chronic pain patients that … or difficult cases where it’s gonna take time for us to fix this is, I’ll ask Raquel. Raquel, do you know how to ride a bike?

Raquel Otis: I know how to ride a bike.

Stephen Wellens: Okay good.

Raquel Otis: I do.

Stephen Wellens: Do you think there would be any point in time where you could get on a bike and not know how to ride it?

Raquel Otis: No.

Stephen Wellens: Right. And so the issue is you had ingrained pathways and that’s the danger sometimes of chronic pain and not getting it treated at all or not getting it treated early enough, the same way that you can learn to ride a bike and never forget it.

You can learn to be in pain and not undo it, not from a physical standpoint because as we said, this could be pain that you still have long after tissue healing has occurred but it could be pain that has become a learned response.

The plasticity that you talk about, which for your viewers, plasticity is the ability to grow new connections in the brain and that’s the key to stay neurologically healthy is we want one brain cell to connect to as many others and we want all those others to connect to as many as others.

That’s plasticity, that’s the neuronal growth.

You can plasticize pain pathways unfortunately. You can make pain pathways more efficient. You can call on pain pathways more efficiently and easily, the more those pathways are activated and have learned to plasticize.

Sometimes there is difficultly in when we’re dealing with this pain plasticity, trying to unlearn to ride that bike, and that can be difficult.

A lot of what you’re talking about is trying to unlearn this thing or unlearn that protection that you self-taught consciously and subconsciously, “Oh, I don’t want to mess this up. Oh I don’t wan to go into the gym because this is good, it can only mess it up.”

That unfortunately is probably not how you felt or thought of life and your body when you were 18 and 19 and 20 years. These became learned responses and this is why chronic pain, as you mentioned earlier associated with depression becomes a big type of thing is it often times will lead to that because we’re plasticizing these protective pathways such as you become scared to do anything.

You then don’t have confidence in your own body and if you don’t have confidence in self, that’s not typically something someone’s gonna live a happy life with.

These are things where work that you do, work that I do, work that other practitioners do, your students that will someday do is getting someone to be pain free, to be confident in their body, to have confidence in my big takeaway is hopefully that changes their perception that the perception of themselves and their world improves such that they can go on to live life more fully.

To embrace everything that’s robust about life and not avoid … you don’t live life avoiding things, you live life attacking things, wanting to go out and do things.

That’s the big takeaway.

You mentioned something about a warrior story from me, I mean, I don’t have any one.

I would say that so many people who have improved under my care, I’ve heard people whose wives have come in, said “Thank god you fixed my husband because I wanted to leave him. It was getting miserable, it was very negative in the house.”

I’ve had patients that say that they wanted to do harm to themselves because they just couldn’t live with that pain anymore.

I don’t think there’s any one warrior story, I think I just am grateful for the fact that you become surprised every day at how much healing work of any kind really changes people and you really will sometimes will never know how much of an impact its really made on somebody.

I get these off stories quite a bit but there’s a lot that I don’t get and then I think to myself, “I bet there’s many more stories out there that they just didn’t tell me.” They’re just probably keeping things private but that’s probably the big warrior takeaway I think for any health practitioner is you start to realize, you’re helping more than just the pain, you’re helping one’s life and that’s probably the biggest takeaway that you can get from anybody that does healing work.

Raquel Otis: Yes, and you do that. That’s for sure. You definitely do healing work.

Stephen Wellens: I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

Raquel Otis: Thank you. I know that our time is up but if you could just leave maybe some last words to, not just to individuals who are living with persistent pain but maybe people who aren’t.

Any last words regarding self-care and from your perspective, what you would like to say to somebody?

Stephen Wellens: I am very big on self-care. I implore people … there’s three things that nerve cells of any kind, brain cells, muscle cells, whatever it is, heart cells or whatever organ you pick. Cells need three things to survive. It’s food, its oxygen and its activation.

Activation for me on the chiropractic end being either stimulating those large diameter mechanoreceptor so you don’t feel pain or activation of brain when I do neuro rehab to change perception and brain function, that’s the activation.

Food, you could look at diet.

Oxygen, you could look at exercise, aerobic exercise.

What I’m big on is, if you think of those three things that nerve cells and brain cells need to survive and you think of self-care in terms of, well what can I do that will make a difference in my life?

It’s hard to kind of do a bunch of different things at once if your health has been bad for a long time.

Some people don’t even get started on the path ’cause they think its so daunting but I would say pick something.

Pick exercise or pick yoga or pick stretching or pick chiropractic care.

Pick something that you can improve … diet, pick something that you can focus on and improve and start adding things as you progress through life.

The reason why that’s so important to me is we are getting to a point in life, in health, where often times your first symptom could be your last.

How many times have we heard, “Yeah, you know what? I felt this lump, I thought I’d get it checked and stage four cancer.” Person had no other symptoms whatsoever anywhere else or maybe they did but they weren’t self-aware of their body.

How many times do we hear, so and so, 45 years old had a heart attack, died. Wasn’t even a recoverable heart attack to be given a second chance. Did that person have a symptom of chest pain or a blood test that showed cholesterol or needed work or triglycerides needed work or blood pressure was too high.

The point of all of this is, self-care is important because if you yourself don’t advocate for yourself, if you aren’t aware of your own body and body changes, it might be too late if you finally decide on that yearly physical, or some people don’t even do a yearly physical, it might be too late to treat a problem that you find out that you have.

No matter what the problem is, whether its pain or whether its cancer, the earlier you find it and detect it, the quicker and more easily its treated and usually the success rates on these things are better whether its back pain thing caught early or a cancer thing caught early.

Your success rates are better the earlier its caught and unfortunately I don’t think that can necessarily be done unless one is doing self-care.

For me, self-care is take care of yourself but also be aware of yourself. Be aware of any ailment.

Maybe somebody thought that they had a left arm pain and it’s referred pain from a heart angina. Maybe somebody is getting right shoulder blade pain and maybe it’s the shoulder on the right side or maybe your gallbladder and your liver is referring pain up into that area. Those are known referred pain points.

The idea is if you’re not aware of your body and you’re not taking care of yourself, then you’re gonna be slow and late to react.

I’m grateful for people like you that are putting things like this together to get people to be more aware because it goes beyond just pain. It could be their life.

Raquel Otis: Yes, so true. Thank you so much Dr. Wellens. I really appreciate what you’ve shared and yes I’d love to talk again on the Warrior Mastery Method, you just know so much and I’m so glad that you’re in, not only in my community, but I’m so grateful that you’re on my healing team.

Stephen Wellens: Well I appreciate being here, I appreciate you being a patient of mine. It’s been fun to work with you as well as the patients that you brought in as well. Two way street, so I appreciate you as well.

Raquel Otis: Thanks so much. Alright Dr. Wellens, take care.

Let’s chat about your self care strategy. Email me at raquel@twotreesyoga.com to set up a call.