I'm preparing a woman for her biggest game, so many games in her life, and I need to get her ready in the headspace and feeling the best that she can, so she has the strength and the beauty to really own that moment and enjoy it. When you were a kid, fifth grade or sometime around, what do you want to be when you grow up? What would you have answered? Definitely a doctor. I've always wanted to be a doctor. My mom and my aunt, I was raised in a urology office, which makes a lot of sense to get to know me, but they both were nurses and they were able to bring me to the clinic and I would hang out in the waiting office. So just being around that, I really had an interest in medicine. I did have a coupling of that. My mom is a real badass and was a pioneer with gerontology and was studying to get her doctorate during like when I was six, including us with a lot of her assignments, and she ultimately opened an adult daycare center with a childcare center, which I think was 10,000 square feet. It was a big business where the one side would be a childcare center and the other side would be the adult daycare center and they would do things with themselves, like the kids would play with the older people, which I think is the best way. Yeah, there's been a lot of research on that lately with that. It's good for both parties, good for the elderly as well as for the kids. Yeah, my mom's a great business person and she was sort of a pioneer with that in the 80s, and so that's where I would go to work with my mom, so I wanted to be a gerontologist. I'm actually my associate's degree is in gerontology, so I really loved the elderly, and that's how I put myself through college was being like a home health aide or a nurse's aide. So that's, I've always been interested in helping people. I think I want to be a lawyer for one week, so I used to like LA law, but like the lawyers came to our high school and I was like, you guys are boring, so I definitely wanted to be some sort of a doctor. My wife is in palliative care and geriatrics, so she works specifically with hospice and patients towards the end of life, so a little bit of a connection there. And the funny thing is she sometimes says she wish she was a lawyer. Yeah, I have sarcasm as my default, so I thought I'd make a great lawyer for a week, but in hospice is like one of the greatest honors in life, and it's funny because in terms of chiropractic, that's not a population I enjoy to treat at all, but I love, I love older people and I'm becoming one of the older people, so they just, they're so appreciative and they're just, they're so easy to make their day. So it's just a great population, their wealth of knowledge. Interesting niche there for chiropractic, and I agree, for some reason I just don't feel comfortable, you know, treating that population, but I think with a little bit of training and experience, I think there's a lot that can be done there. Absolutely, and I think a lot of people feel the same way about pregnancy, yep. I feel the same way with pediatrics as well, like people ask me all the time, would you adjust your son? He's one year old, I'm like, not really, because I never took any type of hands-on class, and so I just, and so there's just kind of a learning curve there, a step you got to take to become comfortable with that. Now you are known to paramedic, how did you make that transition? So I got out of college and I don't come from a lot of means, so my parents didn't have the money to send me to medical school, which is, that's an entitlist way of looking at it, but I never expected them to help. So in the interim, I thought it'd be great to be a paramedic, and it's funny that it takes a normal person and takes their self-esteem to a level 10. Like a God-like complex, I had low self-esteem, so it brought me to a normal level of self-confidence, but it's definitely set me in a place where you can handle everything, and nothing's really a big deal. So I did that for a number of years, and I just had resorted my paramedic as a president of an ambulance, because I'm very, as a leader, I'm very into having them understand that I understand them by experience, do you know what I'm saying? By being there and doing, and so I got to run as a paramedic with a uniform and go on an ambulance, and it totally still excites the heck out of me. But I recently, I guess it's been about a year and a half, certified as an EMT, specifically Wilderness Medicine EMT, because I'm interested in the outdoors. And I've kind of wondered what other people's experiences are and how that relates to chiropractic practice. What have you learned from being a paramedic that you take? I use it every day, and I think that sets my office apart. We had three weeks ago an OB sent a woman in intense pain to my office and like directly from the office, sent her to my office and said, please help her and in doing her exam, she just didn't look right.  Her whole body was sweaty. Her, her skin was gray. Her problem was in the left lower quadrant and I palpated as a chiropractor. Felt like an intensely tight muscle. And actually one of our CAs is going to chiropractic school. And I was like, feel this because you're never going to feel this again. Oh, wow. The patient of what I thought was happening because she was sent by her OB and was cleared by her OB was that she had like an intense, like one of her six pack muscles were pulled, you know what I'm saying? So when I did our exam, I said, we're going to time out on this exam. Like I need you to go to the ER because you just don't look right to me. And you're not having contractions. When I went back, I checked on her that night and here's her uterus had ruptured. So I know that I wouldn't have had that, that gut of like, this person looks like they're having a heart attack, that gray skin. So I, I've loved being a paramedic and the fact that one, I'm much more calm with people out of my office because they haven't eaten or had a staff member pass out. I'm very adept in handling that and knowing what's ours and what's not ours.  So I'm grateful. Yeah, I feel the same way. And, you know, I did a sports program, a master's in sports medicine at my school. And so we had a little bit of that, you know, training on the field and talking about advanced CPR type things. But I agree once I did the EMT program, I was like, man, I really, really didn't know anything as far as that goes. So is that where you feel you've, you imagine as a paramedic, you're seeing people in pretty nasty injuries, pretty bad states with internal medicine conditions, perhaps even close to dying. Did you have all the time, all the time I ran in Elizabeth town, Pennsylvania. I've been looking for people's heads that jump off. People have heart attacks right in front of their spouses. Just really hard stuff to sit with somebody in that space and returning to it at 43 and 45 now, but returning back to it. One of the reasons I quit being a paramedic is I had a baby and it's not the physical limitations of being pregnant and having a kid. But my heart change still carries with me as a paramedic today as a chiropractor, because if somebody is in immense pain, my heart physically hurts. And I used to be able to stick kids. I could do IOs, which is like a IV into the bone, no problem. But as soon as I had a baby, like I couldn't run a SIDS call or do a baby, like it would this really hurt me. And it's sort of a buzzkill to have the paramedic once you're crying when your kid fell down. It was like, you need to be like detached. So coming back to it at 43 and having now a 20-year-old and an 11-year-old, I don't have a baby anymore. And obviously, I'm not post-partum, but that has never gone away. I've always. It still physically hurts to see people in pain. And even deeper than that, like to walk into somebody's apartment. They're 80 years old.  And he's dying and she's going to be alone. So the stuff we do as chiropractors is equally deep and you can change their life in a different way. But going through being a paramedic first, I definitely took the edge off where like, this is no big deal. Like I know this is a very big deal to you right now. You know, and being like there's bigger things and not minimum, but as a provider being very calm and saying, you know, like this is, I got this, I've delivered 10 babies. So like sometimes patients will say, I want to get lined up before I go to the birth center and my team is like having a condition because they're like, oh my God, they're going to have a baby right in the office. And I'm like, if they do, we're good. Like I'm sort of like to do this because of any of this. I wouldn't say I'm swagger about it, but it just I've seen bigger stuff. You know what I'm saying? So it's everything. I mean, I think back to, you know, my first kind of really acute patient as an intern, um, workers comp injury fell on an icy sidewalk at the curb. And he walked in just couldn't stand. And man, I cold sweat started coming on. I was so nervous. But if I had experiences like that, I'd be like, yeah, whatever. Oh, no, no, whatever.  No, I wouldn't be like that. But it's like some people like think, I don't, I don't know. Like when patients tell me stuff and that sort of thing, I've seen worse. And I always try to like better that way where it's like, I've seen some horrible stuff.  Do I'm saying and not hard? And I'm sure, you know, externally, you express the empathy for those patients, but internally, you know, even though for them, it's a, it's a big issue. As now you have a book, um, what you don't expect when you're expecting, um, you as a chiropractor, you treat lots of pregnant women in your practice, but your path to becoming a chiropractor, especially one who specializes in pregnancy happen in your book, you write, I'm the least likely person to specialize in pregnancy. I don't adore the birth process, but after attending a few births, I have to admit that it is indeed magical. So, and then you mentioned as well, you have severe misophonia.  So as the least likely person to become a chiropractor who specializes in pregnancy, how did you get there? Yeah, it was due to my daughter. So I became a chiropractor because of my older daughter that's now 20 and she's at Ithaca college, like she had broken her leg when she was your child's age. And, uh, we kept taking her to different doctors.  And so I was terrified to take her to a chiropractor. I actually used that expletive and said, well, somebody said, if you ever try to chiropractor, like you've something kidding me. And, um, because I thought that they were just, I don't, I thought they were like podiatrists of the spine. Like I had. And when they restored my daughter's gate in one visit, I was like, damn, like this is magic. And I wanted to fix all the kids with limps. So they didn't have to go through the same stuff of people stopping them in a store and saying, what's wrong with your kid? Um, so that's how I started to get to school. Then I get in school. Sports, because my first associate ship was at a golds and a ballies. And I'm a former athlete. So I'm like, this is badass. I'm going to get my CCSP and I was doing shoulders and shoulders and more shoulders, um, and anything but the spine. And I really loved, um, being a badass with sports, like being able to adjust any joint, take any situation because I'm a paramedic of fixing something really quick. And with my background of only, you know, my kid getting adjusted once and it being like this miracle thing of one visit, that really sort of hurt my, um, easing into easing into the chiropractic profession. So I'm like, I could fix this in three visits. Do you know what I'm saying? So I didn't have that reference of like healing. I wanted results now, uh, as a paramedic. So it wasn't till, uh, I left, I started my own practice, which I've talked about extensively on other podcasts. And it was not what I thought it was. And it took me about, I think we started our practice in 2003 and it took till 2004 to stabilize financially to be able to afford a second child. The 80 hours a week with a four year old and dragging her to the office and she would sell pillows and like he made the best of it, but it wasn't an ideal situation. So when we finally got kind of stable, we started having our second child and at 17 weeks, I was adjusting somebody's foot and something popped. And I had a pro, and I went to the front of the office and I said, I think I, I'm like having an issue without getting into TMI or whatever. And, uh, my office manager, like you have to go to the hospital now. And I said, well, let me finish with these five patients and then I'll go because I felt bad that they're waiting. So he or she had to call my husband with my daughter who we worked together.  Right. So someone's got to take care of the patients and that was really hard for him. I want to leave that as a cliffhanger real quick because we need to back up and clarify a few things. First of all, you're in practice with your husband. And while you were a paramedic and you had your first daughter, Ali, so this was before you became a chiropractor and before he did. Now he was a medical doctor and you met at the hospital. Okay. And you take Ali to get her leg fixed. Well, what, what seemed like it was her leg, but you kind of, because then you both became chiropractors. How did it go from both being in, so he was practicing as a medical doctor here in, no, he was working, he was a, he was a medical doctor in Russia for seven years. He had his own practice. He was a ship doctor. He had a very extensive in Russia. It's actually interesting you to serve in the army. So we have a really cool picture of him with an AK-47. Say pay your copay. But he and I, like when we had that cathartic moment with chiropractic and my husband, it's funny because he's from Russia. So they lost their entire economy. My husband's family was very rich. They had a lake house. They had cars. They lost everything when the wall went down. And so basically as a doctor, he wasn't able to have access to. The economy got so bad. So as a medical doctor, if somebody comes to you and you're like, dude, you have a gallbladder problem or you have a heart problem and you can't get access to medicine, what good are you? Did I'm saying so? I think he had turned to more alternative stuff like laser and massage. And so that's what, when I met him, he was working in intensive care. We were drawing blood, doing AKGs, doing. Was our job. So I worked in the ER and that's how we met. So when this cathartic thing happened with our daughter, we dropped everything and moved to Kansas City, Missouri. My parents thought we had lost our minds. They were furious because I took their only granddaughter away 20 hours away from them. We bought a like a bankrupt house. Like, I think literally everybody thought like you guys have gotten crazy. Um, so it just, it's, we were passionate about because we had suffered so much with our kids. You know what I'm saying? And it was like, damn, this makes sense. Like I can be a doctor and not that it, like being a doctor is a big thing, but I could help people, you know, I could help people and he could use our hands. We don't need electricity. We don't, we have ourselves, you know, we can just do things with our hands. So, so that's how that happened. That's a big decision to happen just after one adjustment. Yeah.  Is it, it's not like we're going to put weeks and two times weeks or four weeks. That to me took a lot of time and I'm still not there because I got really good at what I do and got quicker results in getting a problem under control. But it's taken an evolution for me to understand wellness and to understand the, um, the benefits of wellness that are not organically derived. So it's been a process just for myself to with that. It's so fascinating to me.  And it's no secret that the profession is a lot of ways. Right. Students come out of school with lots of debt and no business skills. Yeah. No business skills, low earning potential compared to other professions. Poverty complex stuff. Yeah. And I say, you know, think about it long and hard. If there's anything else that you think you would enjoy doing, you probably should choose that.  They should visit offices that are successful, do you know what I'm saying? And we have people visit us all the time and we will tell them. Like chiropractic is not for the week. You have to be able, we like to give them the chance to see a successful office. And there's a lot of time when you're a student, especially undergrad, you can go out or even if you're in school and you've already made the decision, go visit as many offices you can and learn everything that you can while you're there. If you're in school, like you're in school, you're on that path and you've already made the decision. But we encourage, like we go and speak to high schools and colleges, we're very upfront with how hard it is. It's not easy. It's not easy to be a medical doctor either, but it's not, it's really a chiropractor that's not for everyone. So, so despite my recommendations to think long and hard about it, I find that from the people I've interviewed on this podcast, who are successful doctors, most of them just made the decision on the spur of the moment. I interviewed a year or two ago, who's really well-known, has two textbooks, Clinic Reason and Smine Pain. For him, it was just, I think I'll do this. And that was his decision. It's kind of similar for you and your husband. Just one experience said, OK, we're going to do it in no turning back. So I find that so fascinating and it makes me ponder. Yeah, it's a big decision. And I don't, I don't know if somebody has asked me, like, would you go back and do it again? Because it's been excruciating at times, financially and mentally. But like to get on the other side of it and actually understand it, it was worth a journey. But it's still not easy. We just opened a second office and we're going to open a third. I now have six doctors, the seventh is starting in the spring. It never gets easy. But the reward in changing people's lives is amazing. But it's not for everyone and it's not for the week. Right. And that's what I want to clarify, I guess. Sorry. The other side, how many people successfully do that? And what does it take to do that? It takes grit, like it takes straight up grit. Like if you don't have, I think that that's the delaying factor when we bring somebody in and they're considering physical therapy school versus chiropractic. If you don't have grit or resilience, this is not the profession for you. If you. This is not the profession for you.  And I have a lot of chiropractic friends that really relish being different. Like they like being an outsider, they like being different. I hate it. I absolutely hate being different. I want to be accepted. At this point in 45, I don't care as much about being accepted. But because it was really hard to be shunned or to be dismissed or to be put down when people didn't even know us just based on what I do. That was really hard for me. And I think if you don't have the wherewithal to be cool with what people think, this is not the profession for you because you have to do your thing. A big need. Winners focus on winners and losers focus on winners.  And she was so bothered by it. You like you just have to keep doing good in your way. Like don't spend energy on something that's not going to help your practice and it's going to actually make you seem bitter and negative in your practice. So if you can't focus on your goals, your patience and your dreams, it's not it's not a good profession for you. You really exactly your book. Chapter nine begins with this quote from your diary at 14 weeks pregnant. Sorry. Yeah, 14 weeks, I thought I would have a nervous breakdown. Work is so stressful, money is tightened and died. I almost lost her baby. This business is sucking the very soul out of me. So let's let's return to this part of the story where your experience with your second pregnancy led you to focus on pregnancy. So can you pick it up there?  Yep. So basically, as I said, like I adjusted it. And I just felt something and I was like, oh, my God, I'm in trouble. And I just excuse myself.  I was terrified that I was going to lose our kid. And he couldn't be with me. You know what I'm saying? And that was that like was a trade off of practice where you're like that. It's your relationship, if that makes any sense. And some people might have made the decision to close the practice down. But we really care about our patients and he knew I was in good hands. Do I'm saying? So that always haunts me a little bit. You know what I'm saying? Where when I got pregnant, everything was under control and then all hell breaks loose. And as I say in my book, like it's. Cockpit and you can't step out and think rationally because you're in it like there's you have to fix it while you're in it. And that pregnancy, I really didn't hold my stuff together as much as as much as I plan that pregnancy. And I think that that's why I'm so passionate about that book because I got into a situation that I didn't expect.  And people are telling me that doesn't happen where you just get pregnant when you want. And some people struggle with that. Luckily, I wasn't one of those people. But I put so much work into this is before Pinterest, but so much work into like when it's going to happen and dreaming about it because it was like a dream of mine. Suddenly they're like, nope, you can't bring in income to your practice. Like that stops overnight. You have to make a decision between keeping your household going with your other child and being able to feed your other child and risking the baby that you have inside of you to work. Do you know what I'm saying? And that's that's a gut check. So I second pregnancy in terms of being stressed out because I didn't know how to operate. I was seeing three forces of patients. My husband was seeing a quarter of the patients and I was also running the office. My husband has never run our office.  And that's a real, I think being a paramedic and having that empathy with patients where they're really I didn't expect this.  This didn't happen with you. Like, why are you being so weak? This is this is the stuff I hear every day.  It's extremely similar sports. And I think that's why I get high on it because because I'm preparing a woman for her biggest game, you know, she only gets so many games in her life. And I need to get her ready in the headspace and in them and feeling the best that she can. So she has the strength and and the beauty. Do you know what I'm saying? To really. Enjoy it as much as labor is not enjoyable, but yeah, it's it's not. You know, but the movies really do a disservice. But like it's it's that's the magic of life. You know, I don't think there's any like you were talking about your wife being in hospital. That there's a beauty in that there's a beauty in the. And if I can get her in a headspace where she's strong and she feels really good and she had a good experience and could bond with the baby instead of being like this thing's killing me or this thing's like killing my back and I can't work and and and all the cortisol, the cortisol in their in their system. Do you know what I'm saying? Like getting them in the best place they can to. That's magic. I really love the story you share of a patient who came in while she was pregnant and just had severe neck pain and it was the simplest solution that you discovered. Yes, top 10. That was like a top 10 moment because like if I could just die with. Did I'm saying like she was literally about to shoot herself and just she became like we became really close because it was such a simple solution. And it was something that she wanted so badly and to be able to get her in a space where she could think clearly was awesome. There's that story. I mean, she came in and she just couldn't even look at you. So much pain and within a few minutes. Yeah, she did.  She was like borrowing on a mental health emergency where she couldn't stop shaking and she was just jumpy and she was crying and. She had these debilitating migraines. She had a bit of cancer survivor. She did a lot of IVF. She had an egg donor, so it was a very expensive pregnancy that she had tried. She wanted to carry those babies and they were her husband's babies. And she was having these 10 out of 10 migraines and she was a professional woman. She wasn't able to count on working. She was a designer. So she was pregnant with twins? Twins. Twins. Yep. So she had an egg donor and she had IVF. And this is something she dreamed of it. And within, I think she said, within nine weeks, she started getting these 10 out of 10 migraines that she had never had in her life.  Make her chest was like she had ginormous chest.  But she had gone from a normal bra size to like a double F if I remember straight. Just because the increased volume of all the hormones that they had her on for the IVF. So here's. What woman who is perfect weight and gets pregnant and is on hormones and has these ginormous breasts with this tiny frame that's pulling on her SEMs and her traps and it made total sense she had been going to a carpenter refusing to have her neck done, which is cool. We respect that in our office and I said that there was others. But she had ginormous first rib subluxation. On did the in practice. I see that all the time where there's a first rib subluxation on the side. It goes up to the atlas on the same size. It goes up over the greater occipital nerve and stabs you right in the eyebrow where it's like your eye actually shuts down a little bit. Like if you're looking at the patient, you can see the whole way. It's not like just hurts. So when when I brought her sunglass, she had the whole package of that. So I had not only referred her after her adjustment where I just her first rib and she sat up and she's like my pain is completely gone. So I didn't have to do her neck. But I sent her to Norseman to get a decent fitting bra. You know, just. So it's not pulling her up or back so much. That's amazing. Now, what was it though about your experience as a child while you were trying to, you know, just started up this practice? What was it about that that led you to be compassionate about treating pregnant women? Yeah, just like I said, I think it tied into like that realization of being in a situation where you can't practice, you know, or you that I think I think that turning point where it gets me in the. Vision a woman makes between her job and her child. And that's a hard. It sounds like it's a no brainer. But when you're in it and your husband makes comments like we're not going to be able to support ourselves or we're going to lose our house or we're not going to be able to like in our situation, we wouldn't get our kid. That's a really like give a kid that's here. You don't work and I was running a practice so it's not like I could step out and be like, I'm going to work at Home Depot or I'm going to work anywhere else. I had to continue on what I'm doing to keep that practice going or we're going to be in deep financial stuff. So how do you how do you make that decision in your mind of getting to still generate income and not kill your. So that's where the gut check of like I'm going to fix this. The two major ones I typically see in practice where somebody needs to be taken out of work is like a pubic issue, like a pubic synthesis dysfunction where they can't stand. They can't put their pants on. They can't sit. It's excruciating work and they can't sit there. The other one is sciatica where they it's so painful to sit and their work won't mod it. Like one of our bigger insurance companies in our area, they won't let them up from the provider services section for 10 minutes just to stretch their piriformis or ice. They won't let them do that.  And I think again, tying that like I miss my sports people. I love adjusting athletes. But there's if you think about there's an element of that. And that's where I developed that bloom program. Bloom program is basically CCSP protocols extrapolated to pregnancy that's safe. And I always have to be busy with my ADD. But I put that program together and I rebranded it because everybody would say, oh, my doctor says I'll be back after I'm done having these baby or I'd love to come to a firefighter, but I'll do it after. It's like you need me now. So there's a lot of stuff that we can do to get you out of this. And I started to think especially want to spend time with my kids. So how do I replicate? And that's why I wrote that book is to connect with them not only to say, hey, I understand you're going through this. This is completely common. It's not normal. So please don't say it's normal. It's common.  These are some things that you can do to find an awesome chiropractor and take care of you if these fail. But at least it gives them some power back where it's like instead of being like there will be and shrugging their shoulders and like you're screwed. This is like, let's try these things first. And if they don't work, then let's try the next level, which is to find a pregnancy safe chiropractor. Those are pretty inspiring. And I'm sure some of the listeners are going to be really excited about the prospect of working with pregnant patients as well. What are some of the pathways that students can take to specialize or get experience treating pregnant women? Yes, basically we shadow all the times or 85 percent of my practice is pregnant. We have one of the biggest practices in the state. So finding somebody who does what you want to do and shadowing them because I will share whatever I have with people. In terms of formal education, Webster certification is definitely a no-brainer. There's on and I know other people working on more evidence-based protocols for pregnancy. I'm trying to do that my spare time of starting three offices, but like I hope somebody does it and I'm hoping I have them written for myself. And I'm already started on my second book, but like a formal program with evidence based pregnancy protocols similar to CCSP, but needs to be back on the field, so to speak, that a pregnant woman. And there's certain things that chiropractors do when they're not trained that puts them at risk. And I talk about that in the book, like there's certain things that they should not be doing.  Or take a course with the ICPA or take a course with the ACA some great pregnancy programs, but just shadow people that do it all the time. Like my only referral source is OBs, midwives, and moms groups. That's it. It took me 13 years with the birth centers and the OBs to actually say, hey, she doesn't have horns. She's not going to talk about vaccines with our patients. She's not going to override our thing. And I think you've heard probably talk about in another podcast where I had an intern in my office on his first event with me going to an OB's office. He's like, why don't you recommend more natural treatment or like OB care for this patient?  That would be like us sending an ortho patient. They sent him out for PT. That's just dumb. So he had a respect relationship. Right. So you're not inserting yourself between the patient and the OB, but we're Yep. It's their moment. I'm very big into parents' rights and that mom's rights. It's her right to decide. It's not my right to insert my opinion about what she should do. I'm here to support her or whatever she wants to do. It's her choice because she's the one that has to live with it. So your bloom program, that's that's your program with patients in your clinic. Into training for chiropractors to learn those procedures. Yeah. So as I said, I just hired four doctors. I have three doctors currently in the office. So we've developed in my office a certification program because when I first I blew a disc this summer that was extruded and I had to get a neurosurgical consult. So I was it was right after conference. I could not use my arm at all. It was cold. So I had to develop quickly a way to certify my doctors that I was confident the new doctors in taking care of pregnancy patients where my OBS would be cool with them seeing them that they did everything that I did. So I'm developing. Office that they're certified. I also have a program built for our new doctors. It's already built out for our doctors to be certified on our culture and our philosophies. And that's that's not negotiable. So when a when a doctor starts with us, they I'm very transparent that this is the way that our office believes we're very evidence based. We're very treatment plan focused patient focused. So this is the way it is and building a program for them that they can learn once we establish that the patient is first. We're not. Yes, we're doctors. Yes, we have authority, but I want to do what's best in that patients interest, even if it's not me, you know, I'm saying and that's that's the culture of my practice and it's been very successful. That's great. Well, I'm certainly grateful for the opportunity to read your book. I appreciate getting a copy of it ahead of time. And it's I recommend it for students who are interested in pregnancy. It's a very simple read. I actually read it over a weekend when I was at the acupuncture course. So so it's a. I probably should have been focusing more on the class, but it's done in just a few days. It was an entertaining read and informative. Now, it is written for the patient, but I do think there's plenty there for students and other chiropractors to to pick up and to learn and. In working with pregnant patients, it's certainly something they should read. I think that you share a lot of as you've kind of dropped through this interview, just some some insight into how to communicate with the patient who is going through a very stressful time. It's not easy to carry. Getting anxiety for for nine months or so. So recommend the book to my listeners and I hope they can pick it up. Where is it available? Where can they go to find the book? Yeah, it's on Amazon. It's on Kindle. It's also on Bards and Noble. And as I said, I'm building out right now a program for chiropractors. Comfortable with pregnancy. I think that that's crucial. There's some just down and dirty rules. And also I think the book would be an excellent primer because I basically give away all my secrets in that book to help the patient that are safe. Obviously chiropractors can do a lot more with adjustments. But the money, like in terms of the pubic symphysis stuff I have, I learned. Or M.D. And that has been golden in my practice, obviously at the right. Communication saw because you're touching a sensitive area. But but I sort of joke in the book how I handle that with patients. They really get some some great relief. So you can read that first as a primer. And as I said, if anybody ever wants to contact me. Dr. Brandy, D-R-B-R-A-N-D-I-E at gmail.com. I will help anybody that needs help because I've had people help me. And that's why I'm here today. I'm very transparent about my journey. And I just I would love to help more chiropractors be successors because typically they're the biggest hearted people. And I just love them. So if I can help anybody in any way, please let me know. I appreciate this thing, Nathan. Where can people find more about your practice? So my practice website is experienced chiropractic now. Unfortunately, the huge domain name. Practice. And then that's my practice with the we're updating it with the second location and second location. I'm here today in Kachahakan and the third office will be in June. So as I said, I have six current doctors and we have a doctor starting with an internship in March and she'll be my seventh doctor in April. So very exciting of growth, which is awesome. So I'm very excited about our future next year with these doctors. They're great. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Nathan. I appreciate your time and it was nice to have your child on here. Well, I think that's really, I think that's really cool because like, that's what we do. You know, I got. So it was awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciated. Hope you have a great.


Hi everybody. I am happy to present recent project updates that have happened in OpenStack Ansible during the last release. Along with that, I will also tell you what the project is and what goals we have. As you can see from the name, OpenStack Ansible is an official OpenStack project that provides Ansible roles and playbooks for deployment, configuration and date to operations such as upgrades. Our Ops repo also has roles that can help with monitoring and observability.  Originally, we started with deployment inside LXC containers, but since time, we also support bare metal deployments with no containers. OpenStack services can build from source and installed with PIP inside Twitterlamps, which is the preferred and most reliable way, but they also can be installed with distro packages. We support and test pretty wide selection of distros as well. You can use Ubuntu, Debian or CentaurStream on your hosts. Oh wait, I've almost forgotten. Since Yoga we also support Rocky Linux. If you are about to deploy OpenStack the first time or looking at how to improve or ease the deployment process, you will definitely ask why OpenStack Ansible should be picked over other deployment tools. And that is a really good question which we will try to help you answer. First of all, we are trying to stay as close to Ansible philosophy as possible. 98% of our code base is just simple Ansible roles and playbooks without any magic. We also try to make deployments as flexible as possible by having overrides for most of the config files or deployment options you can sync off. You can control what version of each service will be installed and use your own folk if it's needed. Because we have a way to manage Ansible inventory and a pretty wide selection of predefined groups and variables, you can scale out service components like Nova API and Nova Conductor on different hosts or have different Rebit and Kuglero clusters per OpenStack service. Also, you can have a mix of operating systems in the deployment like having some hypervisor nodes running CentaurStream and some Ubuntu. So there is no easy answer on what deployment tool to use but I hope I've provided some information to help you choose. Let's talk about the project history and contribution has. OpenStack Ansible was first released in Kiva and has evolved dramatically since then. It was founded by REC Space but became widely adopted and used by other companies. During your release, we had more than 30 contributors with 570 commits made. As you can see on the graph, contributions are split between several companies so we managed to keep balance of interest. According to 2021 users survey, about 30% of users either run OpenStack Ansible in production or try it for testing. And about half of all OpenStack users say they're comfortable with Ansible and use it for managing the infrastructure so we even have space to grow. Now let's talk about project achievements during the Yoga Cycle. First of all, we finally removed LCND from repo containers. The repo container is used for building Python wheels to reduce outgoing traffic and spend less time building packages for installation onto the all hosts. When wheels were built, we were thinking between several repo containers using LCND. However, there were several issues with that. LCND was barely maintained lately. Also, one repo container acted as an origin which made OS upgrade streaky as well, giving problems supporting multi OS deployments as we are always dependent. Now we've replaced LCND with a shard file system. By default, we deploy Gloucester FS. However, if you already have a file system like NFS or ZFFS, just define a variable to use your mount and it will be used inside the repo containers. The system demount role is used for managing mounts. Next, we have replaced SSR key based authorization on Keystone and Nova Computes with SSR certificate based OS. SSR key pairs role is in charge of this process now. As a result, you don't need to run Nova Playbooks across all computers to send keys needed for live migration when adding another node to the cluster. Octavia was the last role that wasn't using PKI for certificates management and we finally managed to fix that. But you should be careful during upgrades. You have an upgrade Playbook to migrate existing certificates for general cases, but if you have overrides or some special scenario for Octavia unforever certificates, better to double check. We also have added support for several new distributions. Nail has brought in Rocky Linux and helps with its maintenance and support. Also, we've just merged CentOS 9 stream support. As in that OpenStack drops Python 3.6, it's highly likely that Yoga will be an upgrade release for CentOS because CentOS 8 stream doesn't have Python 3.8 bindings for Livered. And finally Ubuntu 22.04 experimental support added. At the moment, some repositories like MariaDB or RabbitMQ ones still don't have Yammer versions. So its support is really experimental. We expect things to stabilize in that. So why are we talking about Yoga, while OpenStack and SableStick haven't released it? Shouldn't also as an official project released with the whole OpenStack? Well, no. Also, it's trailing release project, which means that it releases several months after the official OpenStack release. It's done this way, so we could properly test the Yoga deployment after the main services make their release. Because in practice, some breaking changes can land in projects close to the release that would break deployment. So to be safe and provide good quality real estate later. And talking about testing, our better release of Yoga should be already ready and you can try it out. The first supported release of Yoga for OpenStack and Sable will be available on June 23. As we've covered since for Yoga, it's now time to talk about the future. That was going to happen there. First of all, bad news about self-ensible. As you might know, the project has been deprecated by maintainers in favor of self-harm. There is no other choice but to deprecate it as well in also. We haven't agreed yet on how we are going to proceed with self-deployment in the future, as the plan doesn't really fit us. We don't have a decision on this topic yet, so feel free to chime in with suggestions. Next, we're looking into implementing encryption between our load balancer and the service APIs. You only have proof of concept that looks very promising. Who knows, maybe we will land it even before the final release. Keystone system role assignments. As you might know, this is huge OpenStack wired work that has been started during Victoria release cycle that aims to get better role-based access control in Keystone and policies and projects. Of course, this has to be handled properly by deployment projects. And also, we are going to provide experimental Skyline dashboard deployment. Skyline is an alternative to Horizon, but it has a quite big feature gap. It's under active development, so we have a big expectations here. As with many open source projects, we have more ambitions and time to work on them. So we are not unique and need some help maintaining things. After that sent us through announcements, a lot of deployments moved to different operating systems, which resulted in the lack of contributors to keep that center support alive. We believe that supporting Roque Linux should bring some new blood, so if you're interested, let us know. We always appreciate contributors and trying to bring in more use cases and capabilities to the code. If you have some news scenario in mind, please don't be afraid to share that with us so we can improve OpenStack Ansible for everyone. And of course, we encourage everybody to contribute at least with patch reviews. Code review is vital as it shows that we are heading into the right or wrong direction. So don't hesitate to spend several minutes of your time on reviews. They do matter. In case of any questions or suggestions, please reach us via IRC on the OVDC network. Thanks for your time.