By Katie Northcott, News Director
StartWell Chiropractics is a neurologically focused family and pediatric chiropractic office and a new business in Tullahoma.
Chiropractor Dr. Chantal Shelstad opened StartWell about seven weeks ago with a goal of helping families thrive.
“Our mission is to see families start strong and start well,” Shelstad said. “We are helping families with holistic drug free options to help them thrive and heal through challenges.”
Shelstad’s family has encountered the same challenges she sees some of her patients face. She first realized the healing power of chiropractic medicine after she dragged her husband to a chiropractor for his back pain.
“That man–I’m pretty sure–saved my husband’s life,” Shelstad said.
Her husband had been experiencing back pain so severe that he would come home from work and not be able to move from the couch without pain. After going to the chiropractor, he was able to walk, and the numbness and tingling in his legs went away–all without surgery.
Shelstad was pregnant with her first child when her husband first went to a chiropractor. After her daughter was born, she became a birth doula. Though she still believes birth doula work is very important, Shelstad decided she wanted to help families further around 2015 after her second child was born.
“That’s when chiropractic popped in my brain again. I remembered that experience that my husband had had and decided to pursue that as a career,” Shelstad said.
After waiting a few years for the circumstances to be right for her family, she began chiropractic school in January 2020.
Shelstad received her PhD. in Chiropractic in April 2023. She was an associate at a chiropractic office for a while before deciding to open her own office in Tullahoma. So far, her business has been thriving.
“We have been very blessed. Our first month we had a lot of new patients. This past month we had a lot of new patients.” Shelstad said. “These patients have been sticking here and been already seeing plenty of awesome results.”
Shelstad sees patients of all ages, but she said her patients tend to be young families. She can help moms and dads as well as kids and babies.
She said babies and kids often don’t express their discomfort through saying they have back pain. They might experience colic or throw tantrums or act out at school.
Shelstad’s daughter went through all of the above stages. Shelstad said her daughter would arch her back in pain as a baby. She saw improvements after she started giving her daughter chiropractic care at age 8.
“I remember the struggle of having a child that was just struggling,” Shelstad said. “And we almost didn’t have more kids after [our first child] because it was just so difficult. We did end up having two more, and I’m so glad that we decided to.”
Shelstad said it can transform families when there is a child who is struggling. She believes that when the kids feel better, the whole family feels better, which helps families grow and thrive.
“One of my personal goals is to help families as much as possible, … to help them thrive and feel good and be happy and grow together and maybe even have more kids in the process,” Shelstad said.
She offers noninvasive insight scans that are friendly to all ages to help investigate if the source of the problem is neurological.
The three-step insight scans can find out what a patient’s nervous system is doing. A patient might be stuck in fight or flight or completely drained or tense in a certain area. These scans involve measuring the heartbeat, measuring temperature with thermal lights, and measuring muscular electricity.
Shelstad does progress reports with her patients after 12 visits. She sees the impact chiropractic medicine had on her own family reflected in her patients’ results.
“These patients are sleeping better, they’re feeling better, they’re moving better,” Shelstad said. “The women are able to work better, the babies don’t have reflux, the kids are getting better reports, no more anxiety and impulsivity.”
Shelstad she would love to see more people seek out holistic care.
“For my family, we definitely try to do more holistic stuff first, knowing that we do have the support of a medical community that can help us,” Shelstad said. “I would love to see everybody under chiropractic care somewhere because when you have a working nervous system, the rest of your body can just function so much better.”
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