Dr. Chad Nowlin began his physical therapy career in a traditional practice and very quickly became frustrated by the limited time he had to help patients.
To treat his patients the way he felt was best, in (year) he founded his own practice, NRG...
Dr. Chad Nowlin began his physical therapy career in a traditional practice and very quickly became frustrated by the limited time he had to help patients.
To treat his patients the way he felt was best, in (year) he founded his own practice, NRG Physio. With the freedom to take his time and give every patient his full attention, he devoted his attention to identifying the root causes of each patient’s issues and discovered that injuries were often resolved by treating a part of the body unrelated to the specific issue.
Dr. Nowlin’s wider, more thoughtful approach led him to develop the Keystone Reset, a simple but revolutionary approach to optimizing joint function for better movement and faster pain relief.
Because Dr. Nowlin is a firm believer that everyone can help themselves if equipped with the right knowledge, the Keystone Reset available both in-person and online.
Click to learn the Keystone Reset and try it for free!
To learn more about Dr. Chad Nowlin
Follow Dr. Nowlin on Instagram @dr.chadrnowlin
Subscribe to Dr. Nowlin’s YouTube channel @chadrnowlin
ABOUT MEET THE DOCTOR
The purpose of the Meet the Doctor podcast is simple. We want you to get to know your doctor before meeting them in person because you’re making a life changing decision and time is scarce. The more you can learn about who your doctor is before you meet them, the better that first meeting will be.
When you head into an important appointment more informed and better educated, you are able to have a richer, more specific conversation about the procedures and treatments you’re interested in. There’s no substitute for an in-person appointment, but we hope this comes close.
Meet The Doctor is a production of The Axis.
Made with love in Austin, Texas.
Are you a doctor or do you know a doctor who’d like to be on the Meet the Doctor podcast? Book a free 30 minute recording session at meetthedoctorpodcast.com.
Dr. Chad Nowlin began his physical therapy career in a traditional practice and very quickly became frustrated by the limited time he had to help patients.
To treat his patients the way he felt was best, in (year) he founded his own practice, NRG...
Dr. Chad Nowlin began his physical therapy career in a traditional practice and very quickly became frustrated by the limited time he had to help patients.
To treat his patients the way he felt was best, in (year) he founded his own practice, NRG Physio. With the freedom to take his time and give every patient his full attention, he devoted his attention to identifying the root causes of each patient’s issues and discovered that injuries were often resolved by treating a part of the body unrelated to the specific issue.
Dr. Nowlin’s wider, more thoughtful approach led him to develop the Keystone Reset, a simple but revolutionary approach to optimizing joint function for better movement and faster pain relief.
Because Dr. Nowlin is a firm believer that everyone can help themselves if equipped with the right knowledge, the Keystone Reset available both in-person and online.
Click to learn the Keystone Reset and try it for free!
To learn more about Dr. Chad Nowlin
Follow Dr. Nowlin on Instagram @dr.chadrnowlin
Subscribe to Dr. Nowlin’s YouTube channel @chadrnowlin
ABOUT MEET THE DOCTOR
The purpose of the Meet the Doctor podcast is simple. We want you to get to know your doctor before meeting them in person because you’re making a life changing decision and time is scarce. The more you can learn about who your doctor is before you meet them, the better that first meeting will be.
When you head into an important appointment more informed and better educated, you are able to have a richer, more specific conversation about the procedures and treatments you’re interested in. There’s no substitute for an in-person appointment, but we hope this comes close.
Meet The Doctor is a production of The Axis.
Made with love in Austin, Texas.
Are you a doctor or do you know a doctor who’d like to be on the Meet the Doctor podcast? Book a free 30 minute recording session at meetthedoctorpodcast.com.
Eva Sheie (00:03):
The purpose of this podcast is simple. We want you to get to know your doctor before meeting them in person because you're making a life-changing decision and time is scarce. The more you can learn about who your doctor is before you meet them, the better that first meeting will be. There is no substitute for an in-person appointment, but we hope this comes close. I'm your host, Eva Sheie, and you're listening to Meet the Doctor. Welcome back to Meet the Doctor. We're in for a surprise today and I have my very first doctor of physical therapy joining us. His name is Dr. Chad Nowlin and he's the founder of NRG Physio in Plainfield, Indiana. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Nowlin (00:46):
Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.
Eva Sheie (00:48):
So I mean, I have a lot of burning questions, but why don't you start and just tell us a little bit about what you do and where you are in the world.
Dr. Nowlin (00:58):
Sure. So classically trained as a physical therapist. We're in Plainfield, Indiana. We moved here about eight years ago and it's been good. I'm a Texas native, but I like it here. We do physical therapy. We don't always like to say that because people have plenty of bad experiences with physical therapy. Certainly not everybody, but we just do things quite a bit different, in person, online. We've come across some interesting things in the last five years that allow us to help people in some different ways, get results a little faster, and ultimately it's been a lot of fun.
Eva Sheie (01:37):
Now you worked in a traditional physical therapy practice when you got started, right? And that's kind of, I don't want to call it a factory, but people move in and out of there really fast, don'they?
Dr. Nowlin (01:49):
Sort of. They move in very fast and they move out very slow and that's what creates the kind of volume jam. The place I worked in Texas as well as when I first moved to Indiana, I was treating four patients an hour almost every hour of the day. That's a lot. It's a lot. We're expected to bill everybody for 60 to 75 minutes and you got four of 'em there. So you're doing four hours of work inside of one hour.
Eva Sheie (02:21):
Sounds a little like daycare, like you're trying to keep them all occupied with activities for the entire time.
Dr. Nowlin (02:26):
Yeah, sort of. Yeah. So I only got to spend maybe 10 to 15 minutes with each client. And so really my early career was I would do 15 minutes of manual therapy just working direct, hands on. I did a very specific style of manual therapy, which kind of paved the way for where we are today. So it wasn't all bad though. Quality comes through quantity and so I got a lot of opportunities to get a lot of reps in doing certain things and kind of went nuts. I thought I could provide something different and better but couldn't do it in that setting. That's ultimately what pushed me out.
Eva Sheie (03:07):
I only have one experience with PT and it was kind of what you're describing. It was not positive in that I just felt like I was showing up and nothing was really happening. The thing I was there for wasn't getting fixed in my case it was frozen shoulder.
Dr. Nowlin (03:22):
Ooh, that's that's a dirty one.
Eva Sheie (03:25):
And I actually have it again on the other side right now. I must have gone 12 or 15 times and paid the hundred dollars copay every time and got really frustrated. Not so much with the money, but with how much time it was taking with zero progress. And so in reading about you and what you've done, it sounds like something happened that led you to say, I'm going to change this for people. Can you talk about your own experience that led you to the place where you said, I have to be in charge?
Dr. Nowlin (04:00):
Yeah, I mean, my grand vision was I got to get out of here, I'm going to lose my mind. I just couldn't take it. I had so much cognitive dissonance between what I was actually doing every day and what I thought I could. And it just got to the point where I was like, you know what? I know I can do it different. I know I can do it better. I don't know how, but I'm just going to go do it. I'll figure it out. And so that was kind of how I got my start. And what that led to was I just committed to check every joint. I would start at the ankles and work my way up in the evaluation. And my thought was if I just check every joint, then I can never run out of things to do. Now I didn't get stuck there, but it at least gave me a pathway where I could provide value to people beyond 30 minutes. And it's evolved a lot since then, that was seven years ago. And that's what helped us uncover some real interesting things going on in the body that have kind of changed the way we think about things in practice completely, here within the last three years.
Eva Sheie (05:10):
Can you expand on that? What were you noticing?
Dr. Nowlin (05:13):
Yeah, so I would always start at the feet and there were some things that I would typically, I would only check if somebody had low back pain. So there were things that I would check around like pelvis symmetry with low back pain, but I really would never check it otherwise. And well, you check that at the ankles, if there's a pelvis asymmetry, it shows up, it makes one leg look like it's a little longer or shorter than the other one. And so because I started always checking the ankles and always starting there, it didn't take many clients to see, wow, everybody that's coming in here has a leg length discrepancy and not all of them had back pain. A lot of people do and they just normalize it so much they won't even mention it. So I'm always explicit, your low back never hurts ever?
(06:05):
And they're like, oh yeah, well sometimes. So we always get to the truth. But it was super interesting that somebody would come in with shoulder pain or ankle pain or hip pain or whatever, all of them had the leg length discrepancy. And so we really quickly just started noticing regardless of why people were coming with pain, the human body just had the same patterns of restriction at every joint. The ankles were stiff and asymmetric, to varying degrees, but stiff and asymmetric. Same thing at the hips, same thing at the shoulders. And I thought that was interesting. Then it got really interesting about three years ago, and I can't remember who it was, but they were explicit like, Hey, my low back hurts and my shoulder hurts. And I ran through the evaluation and then I came back to do the reset on the pelvis. I just started there and then I went right back to their shoulder, which I had just tested to start working there.
(07:04):
When I came back to it, it was completely different. I had just done a mobilization around the pelvis and I went back to their shoulder and it was normal, and I was like, that really threw me for a loop. And I was like, that's got to be a fluke. So I just committed, okay, well I'm going to do this to the next 10 people that come through the door, and after 10 people, I was pretty sure that's just the way it was. So then we started looking at, okay, well how many people can we see and do this to and what all types of changes do we get? And the hips change, the ankles change, the shoulders change every time. So what we realized was that the first glance is some half version of the truth, and once we start here at the centerpiece and then go back and recheck, now we can be really accurate in understanding what actually needs work and not work on a bunch of fake stiffness.
(08:01):
And after 50 we figured out we better figure out why does this happen? And so I started studying anatomy, the fascial system, and started tying together some of these other networks of connective tissue to explain why that might be. And ultimately it's just changed the way we start our process knowing that starting here in the centerpiece really changes everything above and below. It's created some really cool stories for people. We had a lady who went to 30 therapy visits for plantar fasciitis, had the stretching, the cupping, the scraping, the needling, the whole bit. And she came in, I was like, Hey, look, here's the deal. Let's try this. We call it the keystone reset now, and we can talk about that later if you want, but we did just the reset. I had her stand up, she walked pain-free for the first time in six months. We did not touch her foot, we did not do anything else, just the reset.
Eva Sheie (09:01):
Did you think it was going to work?
Dr. Nowlin (09:04):
At that point, I've seen it so many times where I kind of anticipated there would be at least some change, just because we've seen it change the mobility in the ankle over and over and over and over. That just happened to be our first case of plantar fasciitis since we really started picking up on that. So I expected something, but that was like a total resolution was a big win for everybody.
Eva Sheie (09:28):
And she never came back again.
Dr. Nowlin (09:31):
She did. So this is the problem with the medical marketplace in general is they treat pain and then they think when pain is gone that the problem is gone, and that's not true. And that's why so many people get stuck in these chronic cycles of pain is because no one's getting to the root cause of their problem, which is not have anything to do with anatomy or biomechanics. It has to do with movement. And so if you don't change the way you move, you won't change the way you feel. That's it. So if we could simply just state what we do, we help people change the way they move so they can change the way they feel. It's pretty simple.
Eva Sheie (10:10):
What problems are you seeing most often with the way that people move?
Dr. Nowlin (10:15):
Nobody's a special snowflake. People's experiences with pain are different, people's goals are different. The way we help them achieve their goals is different. So in that way, what we do is very custom, but when the body compensates around a problem, it's always the same. The body follows the path of least resistance. So the ankle always collapses in, the knee collapses in, the back either flexes too much in the bottom of a squat or extends too much at the top. And so the movement characteristics we see are the same across the board. When a shoulder is stiff, it compensates in the same way for everybody, which makes problems very easy to solve if you know what you're looking for. So we don't have to do a lot of guessing anymore. We still like to tinker, you know what I mean, and find, like how can we do something new or different to speed up how people get to their goal.
(11:08):
But really we know exactly what we're looking for when people move. If we see certain things happening, we know what joints are already involved. We really go through the evaluation to create an aha moment for the client. If we watch 'em squat, we already know their ankle is stiff, their hip is stiff and their shoulders are stiff. But it's a way that we can show people, Hey, look, your movement looks like this and your joints look like this, and that's why your movement looks like this. So then it's like, oh, I get it. And if we're going to change the way you move, we have to change the way your joints work so that your movement can work better.
Eva Sheie (11:45):
How do you show them? Are you showing them in a mirror? Are you taking a video? What are you doing to show them what they look like?
Dr. Nowlin (11:52):
In the clinic, we're just observing and what we will do is we will actually observe the movement, let them do it. We don't show them anything. We're just like squat, pretend like we're not here. And then we make small changes in the way they do their squat. And most often they will be pain free right then, just by changing position a little bit. And then it's just a matter of reverse engineering the process so they can get all the way into the squat normally. Online though, which is our favorite way to work with people, we do video and then we break down in slow motion. Very, very valuable tool. Then everybody gets to see it. In the clinic only, we get to see it online it's better cuz everybody gets to see it.
Eva Sheie (12:33):
So you're actually recording the video and then posting it somewhere?
Dr. Nowlin (12:38):
We have a platform that we use where people will record themselves and upload it into this platform. And then it allows us to go really, really slow, mark it up, voiceover and do a little coaching right there in the moment and then send it right back to him.
Eva Sheie (12:53):
Yeah. My husband is a coach and he does this with his players all the time.
Dr. Nowlin (12:58):
He probably uses Onform. If I had to guess, you can ask him about it. That's the platform we use called Onform.
Eva Sheie (13:04):
They use it for sports too?
Dr. Nowlin (13:06):
It is for sports.
Eva Sheie (13:07):
Oh, you just adapted it for PT?
Dr. Nowlin (13:10):
Yeah, yeah. They do have a section in there that's like, what's your sport? And it says physical therapy. So there's obviously a need for it in therapy, but
Eva Sheie (13:17):
That's some smart software people that figured something out there. I like it.
Dr. Nowlin (13:21):
But it's a very valuable tool.
Eva Sheie (13:24):
Yeah, well, seeing it yourself, seeing yourself with your own eyes is important.
Dr. Nowlin (13:31):
It's different and we hate the mirror. It's impossible to watch yourself in a mirror and have good technique because you're always turning your head or doing something you shouldn't be doing to watch yourself. So we're big fans of the video.
Eva Sheie (13:46):
I've heard you say root cause a couple times. Do you see patterns there too with certain things that are causing lots of people trouble? For instance, more people working at home, sitting at desks all day, not moving, not moving enough.
Dr. Nowlin (13:59):
And when we say root cause can always be traced back to a movement problem, movement problem is pretty broad. Sometimes the movement problem is that people are moving a lot and they don't have the physical capacity or the prerequisites to do that in a way that doesn't set them up for pain. If you're doing things on top of an operating system, it isn't operating like it's supposed to, eventually breakdown happens. So that's this side of movement, which is like you're doing a lot of movement on top of an operating system that's not really online, creating problems. The other side is kind of multifaceted where we see the American way of, well, I sleep on my side in fetal position, and then I eat breakfast at the table in fetal position, and then I sit in my desk chair all day long in fetal position, I drive my car in fetal position and then I attempt 60 minutes of aggressive workout at the gym in not fetal position, and then they wonder why their body hurts.
(15:01):
So in that case, the movement problem is not that they're moving too much or even necessarily moving incorrectly, it's that they've not moved so much to the point that their body is now restricted in a way where they couldn't move correctly even if they wanted to. And so it kind of catches both ends of the spectrum. I will say though, it's pretty rare. I think maybe in 10,000 clients we've had one person test out with normal mobility. That's just not common. So most people are restricted in their joints and those joints don't hurt. And this is where it can be so hard for people is because they think it's only messed up if it hurts. And that's not true. It's just like going to get a screening at the doc. You don't screen yourself because you already have the problem, you screen to pick up on the predictors of the problem. And movement is highly predictive of future problems.
Eva Sheie (16:00):
What did the one person who didn't have any issues due for a living, what was their job? Do you remember?
Dr. Nowlin (16:07):
Oh gosh. I don't know. I couldn't tell you. That's probably like five years ago.
Eva Sheie (16:12):
I just was pondering how much of this is occupational. And my own example would be as a musician and then sitting at a computer for my entire adult life. I'm constantly forward, I stay forward, my whole body is oriented forward, and when I was young it was no big deal, but I even had pain when I was young, and now those things are turning out to be very hard to reverse. And so I think what you're saying is just pretty much everyone is going to have something like that. Are most of the people you see, it sounds a lot like old people problems, what you're describing?
Dr. Nowlin (16:51):
No.
Eva Sheie (16:52):
Is there an age that people start showing up and saying, I really need your help, Dr. Chad. This is starting to happen.
Dr. Nowlin (17:00):
It's any age really. People have lost all the mobility they're going to lose by the time they're 25. Then the problem becomes all the things they're doing on top of that lost mobility, are eventually going to turn into pain. And so this is where we see the 30-year-old who does CrossFit get the same problems that you typically wouldn't see until someone else is 65 who's had a relatively chill lifestyle. Because the weight and the volume and the activity speeds up the process, it brings the future forward because they're challenging those limitations frequently and consistently in dramatic fashion. If I looked back across the last eight years, they're probably between the ages of 40 and 55.
Eva Sheie (17:49):
Do you find that most of the people who are finding you are men or is it about 50/50? Your brand is very, looks very masculine, that's why I'm wondering.
Dr. Nowlin (18:01):
We're geared a lot in the marketplace towards people who are active
Eva Sheie (18:06):
Athletes or former athletes, weekend warriors?
Dr. Nowlin (18:09):
Well not even that. Probably more like the recreational athlete, like the 44-year-old CrossFitter who they're there for the community and to get a good workout in and they're just trying to be healthy. You know what I mean? The Orange Theory.
Eva Sheie (18:25):
Pickleballers.
Dr. Nowlin (18:25):
The runner. Yeah, the runner, the cyclist. We're not really trying to hit college athletes, high school athletes. We want your average Joe, but I would say it's probably 60/40, 65/35 more female. I think females are just a little more open to taking care of themselves than dudes are. At the same time, it's a no brainer for a guy who's like, I love lifting weights and I can't right now because my body hurts. That's a guarantee almost.
Eva Sheie (19:01):
We can see you online. You work with people online, you've already told us that. How do you translate something that is so tactile and physical to an online experience that's just as good as coming to see you in person?
Dr. Nowlin (19:17):
That's a really good question. So the Keystone reset, because that's kind of opened the door to helping us understand what's actually going on with somebody has made it really easy to work with people online. It's super easy to test to see do you have an asymmetry in the pelvis? And we know now that if you do, however your other joints test out is not correct. And so everything we do, we've been very intentional around creating it in a way that people can do for themselves. We've always believed that if people have the right information, education and tools, they can take care of themselves. And people should take the first crack at solving their own problems. We don't want the first decision people make to be, who do I go see to solve this for me? We want that to be their next best decision once they've done their due diligence to solve it on their own.
(20:18):
And so we want to give people a new perspective on what does it look like to take care of yourself physically? We want to remove the tremendous amount of uncertainty that people have, both because of their own experiences and some of the baloney that gets pushed out through the medical marketplace. And we want to do those in a way that allows people to really build resilience in their body and in their life. So when we're creating these things, we have always created them in ways, even if people come into the clinic, where we're going to teach them how to do it to themselves. The clinic is just like the done for you where we do a lot of physical work to you to give you a giant headstart, but you still have to do the work yourself. You still have to go home and do it. 10 minutes a day on your own doing the right things is far superior to 60 minutes a week with me or my other doctor, whoever. And so we teach people, how do you test to see if your body has enough motion? And if your body doesn't have enough motion in the simple test, you can guarantee your movement's not going to look like it should. And if your movement doesn't look and feel like it should, you are not going to look and feel like you should. And so we take our system that we do in the clinic and we just distill it down into, here's how you test this on your own. Then you do your keystone reset and then you recheck to see, okay, and what were the changes after starting here at the centerpiece? And then once we have that, now we know, we've zoomed out, we've looked at everything, and now we know exactly what to zoom in on.
(21:52):
And we've got all this stuff inside of what we call NRG University where it's just if you can watch a video and follow along, you can do the work. It's super simple. Loosen length and load, that's our process. I've not encountered a lot of therapists who had similar manual therapy training that I did, and they call it manual therapy just to crank the arm back over the head, which is incredibly painful for someone with a frozen shoulder. And what's going on inside the shoulder is that the joint capsule is actually small, it's shrunk and doesn't have space. It's like squeezing the two bony surfaces together. And so as you raise the arm, it's just winding that up and pressing the joints into each other because there's not enough space. But that's just stretching the arm over your head. It's not manual therapy. The function of manual therapy is not to force the limb into a position that's not readily available.
(22:53):
It's to create space in the joint that allows normal motion to happen naturally. And it's way less painful and it gets results 10 times faster if you do the right types of things to the joint first. And so we have a lot of success with frozen shoulders just because they're kind of beating their brains out with pain, getting their arms yanked over their head. It's like, Hey, let's try this different way. It's better, feels better, goes faster, get functioned back way quicker. It's harder work on the therapist's end, but you don't have to work as much because you get to where you want to go so much faster. So I'm comfortable putting in work to get the result faster, especially if it feels better for the client, helps them get what they need, for sure.
Eva Sheie (23:44):
I'm pretty sure one of the takeaways from this interview is that Dr. Nowlin is not afraid of the work.
Dr. Nowlin (23:52):
I'm also not afraid to hurt people.
Eva Sheie (23:55):
If you know what you're doing. Yeah.
Dr. Nowlin (23:57):
Yeah, yeah. I remember when I first came out of school, I was already doing things different. I did not fit into the clinic I was in. One of the first things people noticed about me that they said to my face was like, dude, what are you doing? They're over there squirming and complaining and our patients don't do that. And I was like, yeah, man, I'm tough on 'em, but that's why they're here half the amount of time that your patients are. It's because I'm going to get their motion back. It's not going to be fun, but they're going to be better for it. Pain with purpose.
Eva Sheie (24:31):
Well, who were you before you were a PT? What were you doing and how did you even end up here?
Dr. Nowlin (24:38):
I was working with my dad. He builds custom homes. And so I grew up in the construction world and I told him I wanted to build houses for a living. He said, no, you don't. He said, do something else. You can build houses on the side if you want to. And we ended up building a house for a physical therapist and he's, who kind of put me on that track. And at the time I thought, wow, look at this house this guy's building, he must make a bunch of money. So there was a financial draw, and when you're 22, the median salary of a therapist seems like a lot of money.
Eva Sheie (25:13):
It sure does.
Dr. Nowlin (25:14):
And then you get out and you get a wife and some kids and a car and a house, and you realize, it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but this guy was a business owner. So that was the difference. But I was super interested in science and anatomy. I didn't really know where that would lead, but he kind of put me on that track. So that's kind of how I ended up there. And then really, I was in my teens working with dad. I came straight out of college. I had a little bit of time off, but during that time I was working as a therapy technician at a PT clinic and I went straight into PT school. That's when I was 23.
Eva Sheie (25:54):
You told me you grew up in Texas. Where was that?
Dr. Nowlin (25:57):
We were about an hour east of Dallas. Greenville, Texas.
Eva Sheie (26:01):
I'm in Austin, but I don't know that area very well.
Dr. Nowlin (26:06):
It's big state.
Eva Sheie (26:07):
It is a big state.
Dr. Nowlin (26:08):
It's not like Indiana where everybody knows where everything is.
Eva Sheie (26:12):
It's true.
Dr. Nowlin (26:13):
You can fit like eight Indianas inside the state of Texas.
Eva Sheie (26:18):
You can fit most states inside of the state of Texas.
Dr. Nowlin (26:21):
Multiples.
Eva Sheie (26:21):
Several times. Yeah.
Dr. Nowlin (26:23):
Yep.
Eva Sheie (26:24):
Yeah, it's crazy how that entrepreneur thing, it hits you when you're young and either you go toward it or you go away from it. And somehow some of us recognize really early that we have to go toward it and it's just a question of how and how long before we get there.
Dr. Nowlin (26:43):
Sure. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, looking back, there are a lot of things I would do different, knowing what I know now. I mean, you go far enough back, I probably wouldn't be a PT, you know what I mean? Just learned so much about life and business and what's real and what's not. But ultimately this is the highest skill I have and it serves people really well and I've got a big mission around that. We work with people, we work with companies. It's a big problem to solve inside of corporations that are paying for people's insurance, and it's also a way to get to access a lot of people who need what we do all at one time, which is great. If we partner with one company that gets us access to 500, 6,000 people, you name it. So it's a great way to drive our mission forwards for how can we help as many people as possible, just connecting with 'em through their workplace instead of trying to find 'em one by one.
Eva Sheie (27:40):
When did you set out to build something online to help more people than just who could show up in the office?
Dr. Nowlin (27:47):
January.
Eva Sheie (27:48):
Oh, just this year?
Dr. Nowlin (27:51):
So it was a pretty heavy lift getting everything online, all of our protocols that we use, our system of evaluation. We've always been sending people videos, so we had the stuff we just kind of had to reiterate it to make it make sense for how we were trying to deliver it. Since January, we've packed in probably 50 clients and it's steamrolling. I mean, they're getting great results. I mean, it is going better than I thought in terms of getting the results that we want to get for people. The entrepreneur curse, I wish we had 150 people by now, but I'm more excited about the ability to get results for people than how many people we have in the program, because it's proof of concept. And literally 100% of the people we talk to have already tried and failed physical therapy, chiropractics, medications, and injections. I just talked to a guy today, he's failed surgery, and so we just don't work with people who haven't already been through the ringer because we won't even talk to 'em. If they hadn't tried physical therapy yet, we'll just weed 'em out, because they're not going to understand what we do. They're not going to have a frame of comparison for it to make sense.
Eva Sheie (29:09):
Nope, you must have already sunk a ton of time and money into something and gotten nowhere, and then you know it's worth it because you know what's going to work and not work.
Dr. Nowlin (29:21):
Sure. And once people do that, it's easy to show them the differences, which makes it easier. So people will be like, Hey, if you tried therapy or anything yet, this is just conversations that we're having, and the answer's no, it's like, Hey, look, it's going to be hard for you to make sense out of what we do without having that as baseline. If you're the type who wants to go straight for a guaranteed result, then I'm happy to chat with you. But if you're on the fence about investing in yourself to solve this problem in the right way straight out of the gate, then maybe let's just pause our conversation until you've tried some things that didn't work out for you.
Eva Sheie (30:00):
It's remarkable. What do you like to do when you're not at work? It's probably a little all consuming right now since you're in a building mode.
Dr. Nowlin (30:09):
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. My golf, my frequency of golf has drastically declined over the last five years. I like to play basketball. I like to golf. Still working out regular, that's just part of the self-care bit. Probably the thing that I most enjoy that's easy to do is playing guitar. That's always fun. Me and a buddy played together for about 85 or 90 people at a party yesterday. It was the first time we ever played together. He plays piano and he is amazing. And we never played together, he didn't know any of the songs I was going to do, and basically I'd just play him like the verse, the bridge and a chorus. He'd figure out how to play, and then we'd launch off into the song we played for about an hour and a half.
Eva Sheie (30:53):
In front of people.
Dr. Nowlin (30:54):
Oh yeah.
Eva Sheie (30:55):
You guys are brave.
Dr. Nowlin (30:56):
I've been singing and playing for a while though, so I don't even get nervous anymore. It's kind of old news. A lot of fun though.
Eva Sheie (31:03):
Yeah, that comes with a lot of baggage too, if you let it.
Dr. Nowlin (31:09):
Yeah.
Eva Sheie (31:10):
Yeah. Well, if somebody's listening today and they want to learn more about you or book a call and talk to you directly, what do you recommend they do to do that?
Dr. Nowlin (31:22):
I would say best place to get connected is Instagram, that handle is dr DR dot Chad R Nowlin. And if you just drop us a DM in there, we'll have as much conversation as you want right there in the DM. And just want to mention, Hey, I heard from you on Meet the Doctor podcast, that'll let us know where you came from so we can be sure and send our thank yous out in a big way. But also that'll let us know kind of what conversation you're looking for. And ultimately we just want to kind of demystify some things. We're not trying to hard push anything on anybody, but we are going to tell people the truth and make sure that they walk away, if we've got something that we believe can help, we don't care if you say no, we just want to be sure you know what you're saying no to.
(32:17):
We want you to have all the info you need to make a great decision for yourself. If we don't get one more client today, our lives don't change much. But I like to say you're one shift away from changing the trajectory of the rest of your life. And people can probably see that in all different facets of their life, just in a moment, things changed and it changed the way they did things forever. The diet, the workout program, the morning routine, the little habit that you finally, finally committed to, and it just changed everything. And that's how it is with pain. So many people are still looking and they're caught up in all the old things, and just one little shift can change everything for you and how you take care of yourself for the rest of your life. And so we just want to make sure people have some really good information. If it makes sense to do business, happy to help 'em out.
Eva Sheie (33:07):
Well, you've certainly opened my eyes and I'm going to try to get rid of you now so I can go try it myself.
Dr. Nowlin (33:14):
Well, yeah, and I'll be sure and send those a link for the Keystone Reset, and so we can drop that in the podcast, maybe. Anybody wants to click it, we'll get 'em free access to it, it'll show 'em how to test it and how to do the five key positions just to see where we start, the type of changes it can make. Obviously a lot of work to do from there, but be a good way for people to check it out.
Eva Sheie (33:38):
Sounds great. It's been a pleasure getting to know you, and I really appreciate it.
Dr. Nowlin (33:43):
Yeah, I appreciate you as well. Thanks for having me on.
Eva Sheie (33:49):
If you are considering making an appointment or are on your way to meet this doctor, be sure to let them know you heard them on the Meet the Doctor podcast. Check the show notes for links including the doctor's website and Instagram to learn more. Are you a doctor or do you know a doctor who'd like to be on the Meet the Doctor podcast? Book your free recording session at MeettheDoctorpodcast.com. Meet the Doctor is Made with Love in Austin, Texas and is a production of The Axis, theaxis.io.