WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Healthy as a Horse: Episode 6 - Chiropractic Care

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Dr. Chris Netley joins Ella to explain the full scope of chiropractic care. It has many more benefits than most people realize, especially athletes. 

Welcome to Healthy as a Horse, where we discuss health and wellness for the Hillsdale Chargers. I'm Ella Malone, and our guest today is Dr. Chris Netley. He is a chiropractor specializing in active care beyond pain management. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Most college athletes associate chiropractors, I think, with, like, the satisfying, cracking TikTok videos. So could you briefly explain what your job actually is? Because I know it's much more than that.

I take a slightly different approach to chiropractic. then I think what most people would be familiar with, I do manipulate joints, so a lot of my patients do get that cracking sensation. It's just not a primary part of what I do. I use it to augment a larger treatment plan, which usually has more to do with lifestyle changes and then active care, like exercise and rehab. Okay, awesome. So what is typical pain management, and how is your active care beyond pain management different from that? Pain management. I think a simple definition is just decreasing pain. And I think a lot of people want more than that.

So it's not just enough to get out of pain. It's what the pain is stopping them from doing, I think is the bigger picture, because most people, when they're in pain, they don't go straight to a health care provider. It's only when the pain gets bad enough where it's affecting the fun stuff or the important stuff. So I like to focus on what's beyond getting,

rid of the pain. So getting them back to jobs or getting them back to their active lifestyle or getting them back to their sport. Okay. So how is this helpful for athletes with, I'm a swimmer, so we deal with mostly chronic pain and injury? I think athletes benefit from this type of care in two different ways. There is the short-term pain relief that can be quite valuable if you have to compete and you wake up in pain. So we do have those skills to go in and work with someone and decrease pain and increase movement very quickly, essentially put a band-aid on it just so an athlete can compete. But then athletes will, they'll respond well to this beyond that because they don't want that pain to come back. Or if it does come back, they want

it to be more manageable. Or even if it comes back and it's the same level, they want to have a game plan. Athletes like consistency. So it's not enough to just take an athlete and get them out of pain. You usually have to have some type of long-term plan. And that usually involves more than just getting your back cracked or getting a joint or a muscle rub down. Okay. So what would that entail like exercises, PT, that kind of stuff? All of the above. I think with athletes, the mental game is huge. So not being labeled as injury prone is massive. So if an athlete has an injury, there's a very good chance they're going to injure that

area again at some point. And I think as a health care provider, I have to recognize that. And I have to put a positive spin on it as quickly as possible and show them a realistic plan to get them back as quickly as possible with as much confidence as possible. with as much confidence as possible, keeping a positive mental attitude and then giving an athlete a realistic goal and a realistic timeline and some realistic expectations can go a long way. And that's just thinking from the mental side. In addition to that, yeah, you have rehab, you have exercise. Most athletes are specialists. So swimmers are really good at certain things,

really bad at other things. So we look at general physical preparedness and try and find as many holes in your game as you can. There could be nutrition. I think for a lot of athletes, the nutrition piece is really, really challenging. It's hard to recover if you're not sleeping well, if you're chronically stressed out. So for collegiate athletes, that's a problem. So if you have an athlete that has an injury or pain, especially chronic, and you're not looking at all of these things and trying to prioritize them, and you're just rubbing down a muscle or using a stretch or cracking a joint. I don't think you're serving that athlete very well. That makes sense. I never thought about what you said about being labeled as injury prone. I've definitely seen, even on my team,

it becomes kind of an identity, and that definitely affects their mental game. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Dr. Netley, where can listeners find you? So on YouTube, it's just at Chris Netley, DC. One of my Instagram handles is at Chris Netley, DC. And then I have my company It is called Bill Beyond Health. All right, thank you. I'm Ella Malone, and this has been Healthy as a Horse for Radio Free Hustale 101.7 FM.