P: I would say the favorite part of my job is giving people reality that their bodies are amazing and wonderful, even if they have felt sick or broken for years. Even if they have had all these labels and diagnoses, their bodies actually have been working as well as they could, given the fact that they have been twisted and blocked. I love finding those blockages and then removing them. I love watching people get well and getting them to become friends with their bodies again, and appreciate how marvelous they are.

P: Well, let me see. I first started getting interested in spines when I was 19 when I picked up a book on yoga and started learning how the postures and breathing could alter the flow of energy in the body. I began doing yoga regularly at age 19, and also became trained in shiatsu and massage therapy and the eastern ways of looking at the body.

I got pretty seriously hurt while in my mid 20’s and began having a lot of health problems. I quickly saw how little the medical profession had to offer me. At that point, in the early 80’s, I received traditional acupuncture (which saved my life), and I also went to a chiropractor for the first time. I wasn’t impressed with him at all really. I was more impressed with what the pamphlets in his office were saying than with what he was doing. There seemed to be a large discrepancy between the philosophy of chiropractic and what he was doing in his office. I kind of let it go at that.

My spinal and health problems continued, and eventually, while living in Seattle , I went to another chiropractor, and although it wasn’t terrific, it was enough for me to know that I cared about spines and that I wanted to work with people and their spines. I wanted to become a doctor, and chiropractic was the best thing I’d seen out there so far. So I thought I’d just get the degree and call myself a chiropractor and do whatever I wanted to do using that license.

I went to chiropractic school as a second career in my 30’s. Chiropractic school was four years. I really appreciated all the time we spent (the whole first year) exploring cadavers, inside and out. I was always the first person in the lab and the last person to leave. I was awed at seeing how the body was put together.

In the late 80’s, I came across Dr. Donald Epstein, who had developed a system of spinal analysis he called Network. It was a brilliant, approach to examining the body and checking for the health of the spine and nervous system. I threw myself into that for 14 years. I learned a lot. I grew a lot. I learned how to be with people in an authentic way.

I learned from a master how to listen and how to observe and how to develop all my senses. I learned how the shape of someone’s spine has a tremendous influence on their health, and on their outlook on life. I learned how spinal flexibility and physiological and emotional flexibility are all related. I discovered this all within myself as well. I was undergoing tremendous personal changes as my spine was changing and my breath patterns were changing. I am extremely grateful for some of my early teachers and experiences.

P: Well, I came to a dead-end in the kind of work that I was doing (Network at the time), and the early gains that I’d gotten were diminishing. I was in my mid 40’s and was feeling worse and worse [I now know why]. I felt like I needed more and more things just to get by. I had to take hour-long naps every day. I took a month off from work and went to Costa Rica , and that really didn’t do it. I became a yoga teacher. I thought more rest would do it. My spine was very twisted up, and I was basically trying to convince myself that I wasn’t getting sick or wasn’t breaking down. It turns out that I was. I was also getting frustrated with not being able to produce the results that I told people I wanted to produce. The theoretical clinical gains really weren’t showing up for me, and I saw that it really wasn’t happening in other offices either, so I wasn’t taking my results personally. To make a long story short, I came across the writings of Dr. Jesse Jutkowitz describing Advanced Biostructural Correction ™ , and it made sense to me. It made so much sense that I said, “It can’t be that easy. If it was that easy, why wouldn’t everyone be doing it?” I showed some of the materials to some colleagues and, big mistake, I let myself get talked out of it. It all made sense and felt worthy of investigation, but I let myself get talked out of it for several reasons. People don’t like to change sometimes.

Anyhow, I began a cautious, year-long dialogue with Dr. Jutkowitz over the phone and by email. He made some pointers, and every thing that he pointed out to me over those months made sense. When I would try it out on patients (we call them practice members here), it would produce results.

It was a fateful time one August. I had taken a two-week vacation, and when I came back, I was more tired than when I left. I will never forget this, it was shortly before my office hours were to start, and I called Dr. Jutkowitz and said, “I’m finally ready to experience what you are doing. Is there anyone in Central New York or Pennsylvania that does ABC ™ ?”

He said “No. Why don’t you come down here and meet me. Let’s do it”. So, I arranged to meet him in Connecticut . I really thought I would just stay and visit him for an hour or two and then go off to visit friends.

Well, that short trip turned into a four-day stay at his home. What he did and what he showed me on my own body and those of others that we looked at together that weekend amazed me. I couldn’t argue with anything he was saying because it was all being demonstrated to me on my own body. After a lifetime of yoga and breathing exercises and amazing experiences at different healing events over the previous 15 years, by the end of that four-day visit, I was breathing and moving in ways that I hadn’t ever done before. I was very excited to say the least. It was like being released from a straight jacket.

I remember on my drive home (this was before I had a cell phone) I stopped twice to use a pay phone to call colleagues to tell them what I had experienced. I remember spending 45 minutes standing up outside a gas station talking to a friend saying, “You are not going to believe what I just found”.

The neat thing was, Dr. Jutkowitz taught me a lot in those four days, but he said, “Don’t get too excited, Pierre. I don’t want you to believe a word I am saying. I want you to go home, try it on a few people, and then tell me what you find”.

I don’t know if you can realize how empowering that statement was, but most developers will not tell you that. They will tell you that their way is the right way and the only way. Part of Jesse’s brilliance is that he is a keen observer. He wasn’t afraid to be directed by the scientific method to conclusions that were completely opposite of what he had previously believed or what conventional wisdom or first impression would tell you. He and his colleagues and students kept investigating and developing this work, which has been in its current form since 1989.

He told me “Don’t believe a word I am telling you. You go up and try it at your office and see what you find.” The rest is history.

P: Well, I thought I would slowly introduce it to the people I was seeing. I was seeing 180 people a week at that point, and here I was learning this whole new thing. My own body was still broken down, so the physical demands on me as the doctor were not easy to deal with. Believe me, I know what unwinding is! But every person I tried this on had results 3 or 4 times greater than with what I was doing previously, so I just could not hold back. I basically did the insane thing of changing the whole practice over. I didn’t take on any new patients because I could barely handle the people that I already had. I did the best I could to educate them, the best I could to fix them.

My body was still in major collapse mode, and I had no reliable ABC™ care for myself for the first few months. It was totally insanity because, as you know, this work takes a fair amount of physical effort on the part of the practitioner, and I was still climbing out of a mechanical break down state.

So, to fast forward, I have confirmed the claims that Dr. Jutkowitz was making. All those claims which, in all honesty, completely put me off at first. This is why it was over a year before I finally dipped my toe into it, because, “how can someone make these outlandish claims? How can you say that you can fix almost anything in the body if it isn’t cancer, fracture or infection? That is ridiculous. That can’t be right.”

Actually, it turns out that it is true that the body can physically recover from almost any trauma that has happened to it, and the body can physically unwind or uncoil through all the things that have gotten into its current shape.

I won’t get into the details here, but getting the body’s mechanics handled, like ABC ™ does, coupled with what I know about spinal energy and the emotional aspects of the spine, has been, beyond a doubt, the revelation of my lifetime, the most amazing thing of my lifetime. With what we are doing now, we get to see miracles on a regular basis.

P: The funny thing about telling you success stories, it is supposedly unethical under the Chiropractic State Board regulations for me to even use testimonials or talk about testimonials, and yet these clinical outcomes are commonplace in ABC ™ offices. There are dozens of testimonials on our office website, and they are but a sample. I am not taking credit for these stories; they are the result of people’s own innate healing capabilities. It is just that we know how to help the body and nervous system work better, and amazing changes occur from that.

We live in this crazy society where I am not allowed to share the successes that regularly happen in the office, and yet the television is filled with commercials with supposedly depressed people taking pills and smiling and dancing through fields of amber grain. They are using models and actors to tell these stories that don’t happen. People’s lives do not change from taking medications, at least not to the degree we are talking about. The structure of their bodies does not change by ingesting chemicals. So, there is irony.

For example, we have numerous stories of people that had been living with debilitating migraines for years, who are now migraine free. I can hardly imagine how these folks survived. If I had one headache like they had, that would freak me out.

Within a week or two weeks, their headaches are gone and don’t come back. We get to the cause . I love the look on their faces. They grab me by the shoulders and say, “Do you understand, I haven’t had a headache since last Wednesday!” I say “Great, I am very sorry you had to put up with that all those years.” The headache stories and the kids’ stories, and the personality changes in the kids as their spines get fixed up and untwisted. One boy brought his teacher flowers the day after his first adjustment!

We recently had a woman who has been virtually disabled with pain for 27 years who is astonished at how good she feels after 6 visits. She no longer needs to use the motorized carts at Wegman’s and such.

It’s not that they just straighten up mechanically; it is so much more than that. You see it in their faces and their eyes, the change in their beings. A whole host of people whose lives had been completely dominated by pain and misery. People should not put up with this. I just won’t tolerate it.