Activate Your Practice Podcast
The Activate Your Practice Podcast is hosted by the Chairman & Founder of Activator Methods, Dr. Arlan Fuhr. This podcast will cover a variety of subjects. Dr. Fuhr will interview guests from different backgrounds and professions, as well as talk about his 50+ years in chiropractic care.
Activate Your Practice Podcast
Challenging Convention: Dr. Bob Martin's Chiropractic and Broadcast Journey
Discover the inspiring journey of Dr. Bob Martin, whose early struggles with asthma and immune issues in Davenport, Iowa, led him to a life-changing encounter with chiropractic care. We explore how a seemingly simple adjustment transformed his health, igniting a passion for chiropractic that would shape his career. Dr. Martin's story highlights the profound impact this approach had on his own life, setting the foundation for his future as a pioneering radio host and advocate for holistic health. His tale is not just about personal healing but about the power of perseverance in the face of skepticism.
Join us for an engaging conversation about Dr. Martin's transition from a dedicated chiropractor to a celebrated syndicated radio show host with iHeartMedia. Despite facing resistance in the 1970s due to his lack of an MD, Dr. Martin's unwavering commitment to integrating nutrition and lifestyle medicine into his practice expanded his reach. We delve into the influence of figures like Chester Wilk and the strategies Dr. Martin used to confront critics and champion chiropractic care. As listeners, you'll gain valuable insights and inspiration from his dedication to advancing the field and his unwavering belief in the benefits of holistic health.
Hi, I'm Dr Arlen Foer, the founder and chairman of Activator Methods International, and today I have an old friend that we're interviewing I've known for many years. He's famous in the talk radio world and so we're going to find out all about that. And Dr Bob Martin is his name and he is a syndicated radio host and we're going to learn more about that. And Dr Bob Martin is his name and he is a syndicated radio host and we're going to learn more about that as we go. Good afternoon, dr Martin. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you, arlen? Good to see you, sir. Thank you, and same to you. Now Dr Martin lives in Hawaii, so he says the weather is really good the year round and so he doesn't have any of the snow, storms and other hurricanes that we have here in the US. That's probably why you moved. But anyway, tell me, bob, a little bit about how you became a chiropractor.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, some people say well, how did you find chiropractic? I think, basically chiropractic found me. And the way that it found me is that at the age of 15, I started working at a grocery store in Davenport, iowa, which is my home city and Iowa is the state my sister was the head cashier at a grocery store. My sister was the head cashier at a grocery store and she knew that at age 15, I was starting to become interested in cars and girls, and so I wanted to find some money so that when I did turn 16 years of age, I could buy a car. And there in the state of Iowa, you could not work until you were 16 in this particular store. So she went to the store manager and said I have a little brother who wants to work in this store, but he can't because he's not 16 yet. Is there anything else he can do to earn money? And the store manager said, well, let me check, got back to her and said yes, as long as he stays in the back room and we'll get a job for him, he can work at the store. And so what I did in the back of this grocery store in Davenport, Iowa? I took these big boxes of frozen chicken and I stuffed them in other bags, put them in a grocery cart and then they tagged them and put them out onto the shelves.
Speaker 1:And I did that for a year and during that year that I was working I had been sick my entire life, arlen with asthma and bronchitis and eczema and sinusitis all kinds of immune system problems. So I was one day in the break room eating and this chiropractic student was in there and he noticed over time that I had been out of work, calling in sick, constantly blowing my nose, sniffling, sneezing, and he said have you always been like this? I said, yeah, I've been like this my whole life. And he goes well, that's not normal. What are you doing about it? And I said well, I go to the, I go to the. My parents take me to a medical doctor. They give me antibiotics, they give me antihistamines, they give me all these drugs, and this is, isn't this the way it's supposed to be? And he said no, something else is wrong with you. Maybe it's your nervous system. What's that? And so what happened was, eventually he talked me into lying down on these gigantic boxes of Charmin toilet paper that were in big boxes that were not yet on the shelf of the grocery store and he said I'd like to examine you Now. Keep in mind he's in clinic right now. He's not even licensed, he hasn't graduated from Palmer. So, being as naive as I was, I said, yeah, well, what the heck, go ahead. You seem like an honest person.
Speaker 1:He laid me down on the table, checked me out, he goes oh, you have some major problems in your neck and that could be interfering with your immune system. That could be the reason why you're sick and that needs to be taken care of. And I said well, what do you mean? Taken care of it? He said, well, I can take care of it right now if you like. I said, yeah, go for it. So he turned me over and felt my neck and was poking around in my neck and gave me an adjustment of my upper cervical area, my atlas, and it was like this loud, massive cracking in my neck and I got up off the table. I was actually a little lightheaded, but I just felt like there was something changing in my system and so my head felt lighter, my body felt lighter, and over the next year he continued to treat me in the back room of this grocery store and my asthma cleared up, my sinus problems went away, my eczema went away and I hadn't been. And now all of a sudden my parents are saying, hey, why aren't you sick anymore and we're not having to every six weeks, go to this doctor and get more drugs. I was hospitalized like three or four times with walking pneumonia and suddenly I'm getting well and everybody's noticing it around me.
Speaker 1:And this particular chiropractor said, well, after about a year of this, I was just getting ready to turn 16. He said well, you know, you ought to consider what are you going to do after high school? And I said, well, I'm going to go to work for JI Case or Caterpillar, because there's a lot of industry there in Davenport, iowa no-transcript there and sit down with them and tell them your story and see if they can do something for you. Now, arlen, at the time they were phasing in the pre-college that you needed to get into chiropractic school the two years of prerequisite you had to have some. You know liberal arts.
Speaker 1:Well, I sat down and the guy said well, you know, what would you like to do? And I said, well, and he goes how's your grades? And I go. I wish you wouldn't have asked me that my high school grades are horrible. And he goes I'll tell you what your story is unique and we will start you out, even though we're phasing us in. But it's going to be a hard schedule at first and those classes that we had to take in conjunction with Palmer Chiropractic College were integrated with Palmer Junior College. So we had to take English and terminology and all these other classes and he said if you can get through that the first quarter, we'll start you into the regular curriculum at Palmer Chiropractic College. And it was tough. I was actually 17 years old when I started Palmer College. I was one year out of high school and I was still 17. I turned 18 in a couple months, but that's sort of how I got started in chiropractic. And it was a rough go in the beginning because I didn't know how to study or anything.
Speaker 2:And then finally I caught on on and things became fun for me. Yes, Well, it sounds like a familiar story because I kind of went through that same thing. I was sick and I went into the chiropractor with my mother and she said I wish there was something you could do with this. 12 year old and six adjustments later, my sore throats left and all of the upper stuff I had in my respiratory system, just like you. So now, when you get out of school, where did you go to practice?
Speaker 1:I went to started in practice in Denver, colorado, in 1976, within literally a few weeks of graduating. I think I was like 20 at the time, yes, just getting ready to turn 21. And there I was in Denver. You know, I had taken the board, I passed the board and was looking for something. I was headed actually for New Mexico.
Speaker 1:I actually had an offer down in Raton, new Mexico, with a chiropractor who I was going to be his associate and run one of his offices, but I still didn't have a New Mexico license. He said come on down, I'll help you get your license. Well, on the way down there, I went to a phone booth because I already had a Colorado license, and I called into the chiropractic association and said are there any associateships available? And they go yeah, there's a chiropractor, there's an emergency, he's going into an alcohol rehab and his associate left, and so there's this office. They just want somebody to come in and take it over. It's only been, and they had one active patient in six months and I said, all right, well, what do you have? And everything was in place the tables, there was an x-ray machine back there, and so I said, all right, I'll do it. And so we signed papers and I started right there in Denver.
Speaker 2:Well, what did you do then to draw people to you?
Speaker 1:Well, I became part of the Chiropractic Association of Colorado. The president of the association, we used to have luncheons and we got together and they wanted to try to help educate the public there in Colorado. And we had heard that Dr Chester Wilk from Chicago from the famed antitrust suit, he was now starting to teach what are called Speaker's Bureau courses around the United States and so the association bought his entire cassette tape program. We received it, we started listening to it and then we invited him to come to Colorado to actually teach us up in the mountain courses where we'd go up there and we would play devil's advocate One of us would play the MD trying to defame chiropractic and the other would defend chiropractic and we went back and forth with these meetings. He kept coming back out and it really gave us a lot of confidence. And then we finally got a radio show. We purchased some time on a radio show there in Denver and we took turns becoming guests on this show and I was a guest and I mean it was really traumatic for me because I had never given a lecture, I'd never talked to groups or anything and to be on the radio was very scary. So I did. It felt good afterwards and we kept doing that and we started to notice there were patients that were coming into the office as a result of those broadcasts, which really excited me. Then ultimately I went and got my own radio show on a Christian station, bought and purchased time.
Speaker 1:Then ultimately somebody heard me on the radio and a lady that called my office one night.
Speaker 1:She was setting up a new talk station in Denver and I met her in my office at like three in the morning. She had heard her back moving down from Portland, oregon, to set this station up and she saw a sign in my waiting room that I had a radio show and she said, well, listen to your radio show, we're just setting up a radio station here. And she listened to it. And she came into the office for another visit after I treated here and she listened to it. And she came into the office for another visit after I treated her and she goes well, I listened to your show and we may be interested in having you come over to our station. I noticed you're on one hour now but we'd need a two hour show and I said, well, hold on, I can barely afford to pay for the one hour on radio and she goes no, we need you for two hours and we'll pay you to do it. And I said oh, that works for me.
Speaker 2:And so I started the start of your radio career.
Speaker 1:That's exactly how it started. It started over there with two hours, the downtown Denver, at the top of the Tabor Center, and with Sandusky newspaper, who owned this radio station. We went from two hours, we sold out advertising, expanded to three hours, expanded to four hours and they wanted to do five hours on Saturday. I was practicing the whole time through the week and then doing this on the weekends.
Speaker 2:And so is it true that the Colorado Medical Association or establishment would try to remove you from providing consumer education.
Speaker 1:Oh, big time, Big time In fact. I knew you were going to ask me that and so I still have the letters here that they wrote this campaign to the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News. They did everything they can. This is from the American Cancer Society, the Denver Medical Society, the Colorado Medical Society, the Arthritis Society. They put a campaign together to get this quack by the name of Dr Bob Martin off the air because he was telling people to go to chiropractors, he was telling people to exercise more often, he was telling his listeners to eat a better diet and try to lower their stress, and they didn't like it.
Speaker 1:These letters basically say this guy's killing people, he's a menace. You need to get him off the radio. Well, the good news is is that the general manager of this radio station that I was working for at the time and the program director had become patients of mine. They had all kinds of health problems that got cleared up. So every nasty letter that went to them, they wrote back and said hey, uh, he's not coming off the air and what you should do if you really have some kind of an argument with him is call him up, take him on uh, argue with him or go in and be a guest on his show. Of course they didn't want to do that. They wanted to do all the stuff behind the scenes to try to get me off the air, and it just, it emboldened me, arlen, to continue to do this.
Speaker 2:When did you start using Activator in your practice?
Speaker 1:I believe that was in the early 80s. I think that's when we first met at the Denver Stapleton Airport Hotel out there and that was my very first activator seminar that I took and I've been using it frankly ever since. Total miracle Completely changed my practice in so many ways that I can't even express my gratitude for that.
Speaker 2:Now you moved from Denver to Arizona. Why did you do that?
Speaker 1:Well, this radio show that I was doing was highly successful. I was working for this corporation. They had radio stations all over the country. So I went to the general manager and I said look, if this is working in a test market in Denver and we're sold out and we can't even keep up with it, why don't you roll my program out in a national way? Now, remember, this is in the 70s, you know the mid to late 70s. And so they went to this corporate person and said yeah, we'd love to do it, but a lot of our advertisers are drug companies, so that wouldn't fly on this on a national basis. And I said well, what do you mean? Well, you just don't have the credential to do that. And I said what do you suggest? I said this show is very popular and it would work in other markets. They go. Well, you know what, if you had an MD, we would do that in a heartbeat.
Speaker 1:I said, well, have an MD. I would never practice as an MD. I'm a chiropractor. So what I did, I figured out in order to advance the whole purpose of me getting out the message of what I do chiropractic lifestyle medicine, all of it. I sold my practice to my brother and I went to medical school in the Caribbean after I applied for medical schools in the United States and once they found out I was a chiropractor and I was already in practice for years, they said and had five or six children said we don't think so.
Speaker 1:So I ended up going to an English speaking foreign medical school in Grenada, west Indies to an English speaking foreign medical school in Grenada, west Indies, and I enrolled in that. And same thing happened as soon as I started in school. All the teachers were up at my house getting care, all the professors and they were from Harvard and Penn State and all these guys that were coming in just doing classes for a semester and then living on the beach and then going back to the United States and finally, you know, my children were suffering because there were no schools there that were worth anything going to, and so my child that was in second grade was in the same class as my child that was in the seventh grade and finally, after seeing that and their being damaged by that, I said you know, honey, I got to find another way to do this besides going through this. So I was in medical school for about a year, and so we decided to move away from that and go back to the United States and find another way to get a nationally syndicated show. Luckily I did.
Speaker 1:I moved to Arizona because I couldn't go back to Colorado because my brother now had that practice and I didn't want to interfere with that. And so we moved to Arizona and I met somebody that had a small syndicated program and I went and I substituted for them when they were on vacation. And then finally this person just wanted to give up and so I took over that show and that show led to another expansion and ultimately I got hired by iHeartMedia and I was an employee until about two years ago for 28 years with iHeartMedia and then my syndicated show has become really large and expanded and we're in about 200 radio stations today all over the United States for three hours a week. And then I also do a standalone show on KTAR News there where you're at in Phoenix, arizona. That's a big station too.
Speaker 1:It is Covers a lot of people, covers the whole state.
Speaker 2:Yes, covers the whole state. Well, you know you're famous in the radio talk world and it took a lot of courage to hang in there in the early beginning, to get your feet into it, to find out how it worked and so forth. And how do you think that you managed to keep the faith?
Speaker 1:Well, one, I was starving and my family depended on me, you know succeeding. And two, I have to give credit to the good Lord above and, of course, chester Wilk. I mean. After that it was like, and when I took his courses and read all his material, met with him, it was just a total turnaround for me. I said, yeah, I don't care, I'll go on any radio station, any TV station. If some MD wants to debate or call in and find a way to argue with me, I have no problem doing that.
Speaker 1:Now, however, I started to get patients into my practice from these radio shows. Arlen, I'm talking sick patients, I'm talking about cancer patients, people with autoimmune diseases, all kinds of stuff that you wouldn't typically see in a chiropractic practice. I had zero training in any other field like nutrition, lifestyle medicine. So I said, geez, I better find a way. I have to refer a lot of these patients out to the holistic DOs and MDs in town. I said, well, maybe I can help them somehow. So I went back and did a diplomate program, a DACPIN program, through the ACA, did a three-year program there. I also went and did a diplomate program with the A4M, which is the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. So I built my knowledge base on lifestyle medicine to integrate that with the chiropractic, and it was all about diet and exercise and I went through an acupuncture training as well and that's what kind of gave me the confidence to say, okay, I can do this and I can field these questions from all these different angles, and if I don't know it, I'll just make something up.
Speaker 1:Just kidding on that.
Speaker 2:I remember, you know, several years ago, when I was on a show with you for something I don't know, we were doing something and you wanted us to talk about it. But I have known you as a nutritionist, I mean. You know, that's the way I have known you and that's what. I think you hit the right spots because the public was your way ahead of your time. You know, now RFK is coming out, you know, with all of the new things that natural health and everything for the correct food and all that kind of thing, and if you go on, I had a patient here not long ago that came in and said they were trying to get their blood sugar lowered. And so they went on the internet and they found all kinds of different things and they said is there anything better? And I said, listen to Bob Martin's show. And I don't know, have you ever found anything naturally for lowering blood sugar? Because that seems to be a big thing today because there's so many diabetics out there.
Speaker 1:It's huge. It's huge. About two thirds of the entire population in the United States, arlen, are either pre-diabetic or diabetic. Two thirds wrap your head around that one? Wow. So it's epidemic right now. It's epidemic and it's a combination of things.
Speaker 1:We're talking about type two diabetes, which, uh, you know that's what we're talking about. It used to be called adult onset. Well, we can't call that anymore because kids are getting it at an early age. So, yes, there's lots. You have to get back into an exercise pattern, because without exercise, nothing else is going to work, because it's all about your metabolism slowing down the receptor sites, becoming insulin resistant, having disinsulinism or metabolic syndrome. And once you start exercising, along with proper diet and avoiding the simple carbohydrates, the fast acting carbohydrates, and then you integrate with that the right nutrients, which includes chromium and zinc, and B-complex vitamins and botanicals that can absolutely solve the problem, like bitter melon and alpha lipoic acid. There's so much to do for diabetics. It is easy to shut down the progression of a diabetic cold and reverse it. We know how to do it today. There's no question about it.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a big thing, I mean when two-thirds of the country is suffering from it. Think of the metformin they're taking.
Speaker 1:Exactly the side effects with these drugs. And there are a lot of drugs that are certainly effective at lowering blood sugar, metformin being one of them, and, by the way, that particular drug was originally found in a plant, in a botanical. About 40% of the drugs on the market today come from the botanical kingdom, and then eventually they're synthesized, metformin being one of them, called goat rue, which has been used historically for a long time, and they studied that. And then they of course, synthesize and they pull it through like that.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot you can do, and I think the chiropractor can absolutely be at the forefront of this. I mean, if two thirds of the population is pre-diabetic or diabetic, that's our population, that's our demographic, and why shouldn't we be able to counsel them about exercise as part of our training and counsel them about nutrition? I had some nutrition in chiropractic college way back in the 70s. It's expanded now and you can get these three-year diplomate programs if you choose to expand your practice. So why shouldn't we do that for our patients, so that they may not have to go on drugs and can avert the possibility of all the harsh side effects associated with, you know, pharmacologic agents?
Speaker 2:I'd like to know how my listeners here today can you know, get you on syndicated radio and you know people watching the podcast if they want to contact you, because I'm sure there are people out there saying, wow, I'm looking for somebody to lower my glucose, and so what's the contact?
Speaker 1:Well, they can go to my website. A lot of content there at drbobcom spelling out the word doctor, drbobcom. And if a colleague wants to send me an email, happy to respond. My email address is I would use the R for Robert R Martin, m-a-r-t-i-n. The number two at Outlookcom. R Martin, two at Outlookcom. They can send an email.
Speaker 2:Well, what we'll do is we'll put that on the screen. I'll have my producers here put that on the screen when we hang up and then that will be coming out so people can find out how to get a hold of you and, you know, find some of that wisdom out. So I can't thank you. I know you're a busy, busy guy and to be on the podcast I really appreciate it, and so thank you very much, my friend, and we'll look forward to talking to you.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for the opportunity. It's been an honor to be on your show.
Speaker 2:And please feel free to share this podcast with your people because, you know, sometimes they want to know about what chiropractors do and this is a good chance for them to learn. Perfect, Thank you. I will Thank you.
