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
Meet the New WFC Secretary General Dr. Brad Beira
What does the future of global chiropractic look like? Meet Dr. Brad Beira, the incoming Secretary General of the World Federation of Chiropractic, whose remarkable journey from South African chiropractor to international leader offers invaluable insights for practitioners everywhere.
With disarming honesty, Dr. Beira reveals how his early fascination with the nervous system and diagnostics led him to become South Africa's first registered chiropractic student in 1989—coincidentally the same year the WFC was formed. His career evolution from private practice to corporate stress management speaker, then to business executive and legal expert, has uniquely prepared him for guiding chiropractic's global future.
Dr. Beira's vision centers on expanding access—both for patients to chiropractors and for chiropractors to safe markets. "We're our own best kept secret," he admits, emphasizing how research and clear communication are essential for demonstrating chiropractic's effectiveness. He speaks passionately about physical literacy and maintaining mobility across all life stages, positioning chiropractors as vital healthcare partners in an increasingly sedentary world.
For practitioners feeling isolated in their clinics, Dr. Beira offers practical wisdom: find mentors, seek business management support, and never stop learning. His candid assessment that "practice is hard" and "practice is lonely" resonates with clinicians everywhere, while his call for greater community engagement addresses the concerning trend of younger chiropractors disconnecting from professional associations.
Whether you're a seasoned practitioner, new graduate, or chiropractic student, Dr. Beira's passionate call to action will inspire you to connect more deeply with colleagues and communicate your value more effectively to patients and other healthcare professionals. His leadership promises a new chapter for chiropractic that honors its roots while embracing innovative approaches to global healthcare challenges.
Subscribe now to hear more conversations with chiropractic thought leaders who are shaping the future of our profession.
Hi, this is Dr Arlen Foer. I'm the chairman and founder of Activator Methods International. Welcome to Activate, your Practice podcast, and today we're really happy to have a guest that we want to introduce to the chiropractic world. So good morning, dr Byron. Glad to have you.
Speaker 2:And good morning and thank you so much for having me. I do need to confess that I am really nervous. These podcasts like Radio in the Past, back in the Day podcasts are really hard for me and I get quite nervous with them. So it's very nice to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, and don't be nervous because we're just going to talk. And I sat down with Dr Burnett just a few minutes ago and said tell. I sat down with Dr Burnett just a few minutes ago and said tell me a little bit about yourself, because I'm sure all of you out in podcast land here want to know who's the new Secretary General and what kind of background does he have. Tell us a little bit about your first of all, how you started in your professional career.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Well, let me start by introducing myself by saying hi, my name is Brad and I'm a chiropractor, and everything in my whole career that's brought me to here is because I'm a chiropractor and because of the fundamental beliefs that helped me become a chiropractor in the first place. So I started always as a young kid. I was hands-on with people, I would massage them and I was looking for physical medicine as a way to take that forward. Looking for physical medicine as a way to take that forward.
Speaker 2:When I was 14, 15, 16 years old and we did biology at school, I remember seeing a picture of the brain and thinking that's what I want to do. I want to do the brain, but I also want to do things with the nerves, muscles, bones and joints. But also I really wanted to know why people got sick and what was wrong with them. So I wanted to be a primary diagnostician. So back in the 80s in South Africa where I studied, the only two professions where you could be a primary diagnostician was the general practitioner and the chiropractor. But with the chiropractor I could also do diagnostics, and then nerves, muscles, bones and joints. So fast forward that a little bit. 1988, the year that the World Federation of Chiropractic was formed, I was the first applicant as a chiropractic student in South Africa and in 1989, I was the first registered by alphabet chiropractic student in the country, in South Africa, in South Africa.
Speaker 1:My goodness, now continue on. So what happened after you practiced? How long did you practice then?
Speaker 2:So, fast forward a little bit. I did my undergrad degree. I saw my first patient as an intern in 1993. At that stage it took nearly two hours to do my case history because we had to stop and then go and see the clinician and get some feedback and come back. That was my first patient. The entire consult took nearly three hours, start to finish, graduated in 1996, went into my private practice soon after that and practiced all the way through full-time in practice until the end of 2000, at which point I sold my practice to chiropractors who were students of mine, bought my practice and took it over and I moved into the second phase of my life.
Speaker 1:What's the second?
Speaker 2:phase. So the second phase was as a chiropractor I would have these people come in and they were really tense and they were stressed and they had cervicogenic headaches. They didn't know they were cervicogenic, they just their heads were sore and they were getting headaches and migraines. And I started saying, well, how can you be so stressed? Let me come in and help you and tell you about that. And one of those people was a conference organizer and she said well, why don't you come and talk at my conference?
Speaker 2:So I arrive a couple of weeks later at the conference and I sit with this room of people and the person before me was an international speaker and he had a boom mic and as he walked on stage he says song number three. And I thought I don't have a boom mic, I don't have a song, is anyone going to like me? And so we begin talking and I had some very basic principles. The first was sit up straight. The second was move often and the third was take a minute, because the more anxious we get, the shorter a minute feels.
Speaker 2:And then we get anxious and we get stressed and we get hurried and then we lose perspective and then we get our muscles tense and our trapezius muscles and our sternocleidomastroids tighten up, then we get those headache clusters. So I started speaking on that and the more I spoke on that, the more people would come in to see me and some of them would say, well, can you come and talk about stress to my team? And so very soon, not only was I seeing patients in my rooms but I was doing lifestyle management at companies and in groups and I would be saying to them you know, sit up straight, take a break, you'll get computer neck. So now we talk about mobile phone neck and we talk about, you know, the technologies. But back in the early 90s we were saying, well, if you sit too long at your desktop, you're going to end up with sore neck.
Speaker 1:So we did stretching and preventive work, and then you kind of went into the business world. That's right.
Speaker 2:So I had a company approach me and they said well, we really like what you do in resilience and stress, can you do this with our team? I, we really like what you do in resilience and stress, can you do this with our team? I said yes, that progressed and my very first job after being a full-time chiropractor was the CEO for a mobile technology company's reverse logistics. So their head office was in Chicago, in Schoenberg, their finances were done in London, the manufacture of their handsets was done in Germany and I did everything south of Nigeria. So that was my first stint into knowing multiculturally what was going on in the world around me. And you know what? Everywhere I went, the executives had headaches and stress.
Speaker 1:Very common. I mean, you know, and the people that are running the companies are looking for a way to solve this. Am I correct, Correct?
Speaker 2:And so workforce health. When I worked in workforce health and I'm still new at it, I only started in 1998, the universal construct is how do we de-stress you, how do you get more mobile? How do you stretch more? How do you relax more during the course of your day? And that's this whole principle of physical literacy. Are you exercising enough? Are you eating enough whole foods? Is your diet balanced? Is your nutrition balanced? Is your lifestyle holistic in a way that not only promotes your health but prevents some of the things that we see as chiropractors every day?
Speaker 1:Then how did you get into studying law?
Speaker 2:Well, there's many stories, but I'll tell you the one, in hindsight, that I think is the most accurate truth. When I started studying chiropractic 1989, in South Africa, if I wanted to read something I would have to go to the library, I'd have to write out what I wanted. That would then get posted to an American university and they would send back via surface mail the journal that I wanted to read. Sometimes it would take two, three weeks, sometimes it would never come, but one of the things that always came was David Chapman Smith's chiropractic reports, and I read these in 1991, 1992, 1993. I thought I want to be like that when I'm big, and so when I started studying law, one of the drivers behind that were those chiropractic reports, and part of studying law was rights, representation, jurisdiction, regulatory support, and so it took nine years to do my undergraduate degrees. I did my master's in law through Salford University in the UK. I then did a bioethics certification through Georgetown in the United States, in Washington and I did a medical law.
Speaker 1:So you had a varied law degree then.
Speaker 2:Correct. So it's nice and diverse, but the majority of my work in law is medical legal support specifically for practitioners, and representation at legal and national statutory levels.
Speaker 1:And I think I said to this you, when we were visiting you, didn't take this job for the money. No, I took it for the love. That's important because I think people should know you're well off before you ever came to this particular phase in your life.
Speaker 2:Well, if I may share this with you, before, I joined World Federation in this role and I'm very excited and I'm a little humbled because Richard had cast such a big shadow. He's done such amazing work over the last 10 years and David Chapman Smith did amazing work before that, so I feel quite overwhelmed by this in many ways. But before I applied, I was the risk and regulatory director at PricewaterhouseCoopers in South Africa and I loved it there. And one of the senior partners said to me one day why are you working? I said well, because where else do I get to share information with really great people? And so when the advert came out for this role, I thought this is the apex of my entire career. I get to work with chiropractors, those in practice, those in regulation, those in public policy, those partners everywhere the universities, the academic areas, who, the legislators but ultimately to promote the growth of chiropractic and its success at private practice level with you and your patient level, because without that we lose the essence of why we're here.
Speaker 1:Well said, and so how do you foresee the growth and legitimacy of chiropractic over the next five years?
Speaker 2:In my perfect world and it aligns to the purpose of WFC. One of the things that we really want to focus on is this access, and access is really important. So so when we start looking at access, we want access for people to chiropractors and chiropractors to safe markets to practice it. Now what do I see going forward? I see an improvement in access. I see an improvement in the population's understanding of what we do, and the more people understand what we do, including ourselves, the better we speak about what we do through education, through research, through uplifted standards, through communication, through interdisciplinary relationships, the more people at a private and at a public level will know what we do and we talk about that at high level. But actually that means when you're out in your community talking to your family and your friends and your community people, when we speak in a language that they understand, we'll have more access, which means there'll be higher utilization, and in some communities we've got really great utilization. Does that make sense to you?
Speaker 1:Yes, it does. You know, one of the things that I see being around for some 60 years is that by the year 2030, half the population in the United States is going to be over the age of 65. And we're going to end up, if we don't take care of these folks, with everybody in a nursing home, which is not possible. So we have to keep mobility in our mind of keeping these people mobile, where they can get together with each other and not become lonely, and you know all the other things that go with it. So I think chiropractic has a great area to practice in in a big support area for the whole world, Right.
Speaker 2:So I agree with you absolutely and fundamentally. So if we take from birth and we take pre-birth, even from conception the health of the mother and the child through those nine months, and then there's this concept of physical literacy we live in a world where if you look around at your chairs and tables, they're all the same height and relatively the same size, but we're all different. So how we learn to integrate with our environments and stay healthy and stay well in a time where we are traditionally more sedentary and not moving as much? We play such a big role in education, such a big role in enabling exercise, such a big role in nutritional education and then helping where there's dysfunction. So we know, and you know this well, and I'm sure everyone listening knows that the amount of disability life years for patients with low back pain is the highest amongst any non-communicable condition. That's manageable and one of the things that we know that works for that is chiropractic care.
Speaker 1:I think that's what I was saying is that I've seen people because I practiced enough to have generations come into my practice. And somebody asked me how did you have such a big return amount of people? And I said, well, some people knew that if they came once a week, they just felt better and they said I'm getting older and I don't want to be immobile, and that was worth that to them to stay mobile and stay moving and, you know, staying active. Right, and I think that's what you said. What should we focus on in the profession for the next five years?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, going back to your last question and your comment, now we're our own best kept secret. So I think one of the things that we should really focus on is research, because research sets us apart. It shows that what we do works, and it doesn't matter which philosophy we follow. If we can show that what we do works, we know it works. We just don't communicate it well enough. So, educating ourselves, educating our patients, educating our communities, focusing on our role in primary care and focusing on our role in public care Richard speaks very eloquently about the importance of chiropractic in the interconnectedness and our vision speaks amongst three things. It says access for all people of all ages and all nations, to evidence-based, person-centric, interprofessional and collaborative care for populations so that they can thrive. So if we think about that, we think about that vision. That's really where our opportunity is. The more we share, the more we show what we do works in case studies, in research, in conversations the more we're proud of what we do in a community-based setting.
Speaker 1:I think it'll raise our profiles. Well, you know, I can speak to that because, as a practitioner for years I wanted to know for example, can we adjust an osteoporotic trochanter with an activator? And I think up all the things I want to know and then I send it off to our research team, and Dr Ricardo Fujikawa is in Madrid, spain, and Arantia Ortega de Muz is his partner. They did the research on this and they found not only were we able to adjust a osteoporotic bone, but it caused the trabeculum to regrow after so many treatments, and so that got published in Nature.
Speaker 2:Now.
Speaker 1:I say all that to say for years we published in JMPT and Spine and so forth, but the real, real bang for the buck is in a journal like you know Scientific Reports and Nature and I think we're getting there where because the last four papers we've had have all been in Nature and I think you'll love this I got a call from Ohio State University here about six months ago and they said we'd like to know if you'd let. We got a big R01 grant for $4 million and we'd like to know if you'd be involved putting the thrust into rats, because we know you've got experience and you're an expert. And I said, no, I'm not, but I have experts in the team and so, long story short, we were able to tag along in this big research grant at Ohio State. I think that wouldn't have even been possible years ago, but they read it in the literature, right, and I think that's what you're saying the more we can do that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Correct and the more we can share. I think language is such a big thing. We need to sometimes remember that our patients and our community thinks in a different language to how we taught. So, speaking in the language to the people that we want to hear, who we want to hear, our message is as important, so interdisciplinary. When we talk to our colleagues on a medical continuum basis, we need to speak a language that we can both listen to and hear, but it's a different language to when we're speaking to our patients. They need to hear a different message. It's the same message, just in a different way. And I think when you say, what do we think I'd like to see in the next five years that we celebrate ourselves a lot more than we have been. Sometimes we're a little timid with promoting what we do.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we promote the wrong things. And the things like. You know, when we have a big breakthrough in research, that should hit the, you know that should hit the major news sources and you know, let them know. Look what's been discovered and it's in a peer-reviewed journal, and so it's got to be something to pay attention to Absolutely. Now, what are your key messages to for the chiropractors in private practice?
Speaker 2:messages to for the chiropractors in private practice. You know I've been in practice on and off for for almost three decades and and there's a couple of lessons for me. First is practice is hard. Secondly, practice is lonely. Secondly, practice has a tremendous burden of responsibility on you as the clinician and and and as a chiroactor. These are the things that I would suggest. The first is find a friend, find a mentor. Speak early, speak often, speak loud and ask for help. Don't be shy to ask for help.
Speaker 2:Usually, by the time it comes to me as a medical legal person, it's gone too long and the person could have intervened earlier or they could have asked for help earlier. The second is ask for help on your practice management, because we're chiropractors, we're not always great business people. We think we are sometimes, but we're not always. So asking for help from business and practice management groups and technology groups who can help you optimize your practice, reduce your debt or improve your throughput. And then the continuing education piece keep learning. We never learn enough.
Speaker 2:And often I hear people say, well, you know, when are we going to have the students more competent when they come out of college? And I say, well, what are we doing as older chiropractors to mentor them as graduates, because you don't come out as a good chiropractor, you come out learning, ready to enter your chiropractic journey. Looking back, I look at what I was doing in my 20s. I think wow, but it's taken 30 years of practice to to get that reflection. So, doing more mentorship, taking more people under our wings, guiding the the the the older, guiding the younger practitioners, the more experienced guiding the less experienced those are the three things that I think are fundamental for practice growth.
Speaker 1:Go through them again.
Speaker 2:Okay. So number one ask, ask early, ask often, ask loud, find a mentor or more so that you can speak to them, because practice is lonely. The second piece which I think is really important is and I learned this over my years of not being a chiropractor, being in business is we're not business-minded traditionally. We're practitioners. We care about the outcomes of our patient. We're not always good at tax, we're not always good at financial planning or financial management or optimizing the debt ratio of the equipment we'd like to buy. So get somebody to help you with that. And the third is keep learning Because, as we were discussing earlier, as research comes out with fundamental reinforcement of what we already know, the more we learn, the better we speak. The better we speak, the more confident we become, the safer our practices are.
Speaker 1:I'm writing this down because I'm giving a graduation speech at Northeast next weekend and so I wanted to write that down because I'm making my graduation speeches 10 things that I think that they should know, and one of them will be that because I had a start on that anyway, and it's so true because students come out and they just don't know these things and finding a mentor is absolutely necessary, and I can remember back having mentors in the chiropractic world and how much they helped me and I can think of different ideas they gave me. What do you tell chiropractors that want to do a leadership role? Because I think my wife says that we have been a failure in the chiropractic profession by not getting training to new people. We haven't trained new leaders.
Speaker 1:We had a group of old, tough leaders that were really good but there's been a dearth of lack of leadership training, and I think this is something that could be talked about.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great point because continuity and succession is so important. And I think about my leaders, who my mentors, and one of my mentors was a chap, adrian Bosman. So Adrian was the president of AECC and he then went and he started wine farming in Arizona and after he'd finished wine farming he went back to becoming a chiropractor in Johannesburg, moved down to a beautiful area called Plettenberg Bay, but Adrian was chairperson of the regional branch. This was 1998.
Speaker 2:I was the first student graduate elected now onto the National Council for the Chiropractic Association of South Africa, of course at 28, I knew everything about everything, as one does, and I went to sit with Adrian and we had coffee, pretty much like I said, find a mentor. And Adrian said it's never too far for too short for something important. And so I often say now and you'll catch me saying it I'm free that day, but the time between me having that conversation with Adrian and now is 28 years and it feels like it was yesterday. So that journey of starting into leadership begins early. So if you're interested in getting involved, my second mentor, also a chiropractor, was a gentleman called Mario Malani. He says you can't make a difference if you're not at the table. So come to the table, and it doesn't have to be the big table, it can be the kiddies' table, if you prefer. Start with your local branch, get involved with your local association, get involved at a state level, get involved in your community.
Speaker 1:It seems today, though, that the younger doctors don't want to join the state associations. They don't want to be uh you know involved in it. Do you have a remedy for that?
Speaker 2:yeah, I, I see that and and and I. I appreciate that. But one of the big things is, when you're not in the community, with, with your professional colleagues, it's lonely, and then you, you miss the fundamental changes that are going on in the world. So I found in marketing, I was told if you're over 35 and you don't have a mentor not a mentee, a mentor who's under 25, you're missing fundamental shifts in communication. And that's the same with our chiropractic communities. If you're not part of the community and you're not going to regular meetings, you're missing fundamental shifts.
Speaker 2:You tend to become more isolated, and so my suggestion to people is you should really be joining, being part of your chiropractic community. And some of that is I don't need anyone to tell me what to do and you don't, but sometimes you might need to ask somebody what to do, and so an association of like-minded people is priceless. So my suggestion to all the chiropractors in practice listening is connect with each other, form an association. If you don't like how it's being run, step up and volunteer to change it. And then the question is how do I change it? And that goes back to the continuing education we're taught to be chiropractors. If you want to learn how to run business, start taking some business courses finance for non-financial managers general management marketing.
Speaker 1:Do you have a call to action for chiropractors? Listening to this podcast.
Speaker 2:That's a great one. I have so many calls to action, we probably need about eight hours to do it. But I think the first one would be get involved. And it's not only get involved with WFC, but I'd love everyone to get involved with WFC. I'd love everyone to be involved in their associations. But get involved with your profession. Be closer to each other.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes we're not as close to our colleagues as we could be, sometimes maybe because we think, well, they're going to steal our patients, so we're going to steal theirs, and we forget that actually we work for the patient, not the other way around. So my first call to action and I hope we get a chance to talk about more is connect with your colleagues, connect with your professional chiropractic peers. Number two Number two is step up, and by step up, what I've learned is that we speak a language that we understand, but often other chiropractors don't understand and, more importantly, other professionals in the healthcare continuum don't understand. We, from a public health perspective, are one group of healthcare professionals within a wide community. So how do we describe what we do?
Speaker 2:So if I say you're a chiropractor, so what do you do? Do you have a one or two minute explanation that's clear, concise, precise and accurate as to what you do. So I say to people, because people often say, well, we adjust, I say well, what happens before you adjust? I say, well, before you adjust, you reach a diagnosis. Right Before you reach a diagnosis, you do an examination. Before you do an examination, before you do the examination, you're doing education and then, after you've done the adjustment, you're doing rehabilitation, you're doing prevention, and all of those pieces, those dots that you want to join or the pearls that you'd like to string, are equally important. So my second call to action would be tell your story really well. Five minute elevator story five, it's a long time in an elevator, yes, it is.
Speaker 1:But I mean, that's what people salespeople have done for years, is you know? They had that two minutes or whatever it was to sell somebody on something. And that's why I've always thought patient lectures were good. You know, we did patient lectures in our office for years where the people would come in on a Monday night and we'd have a big oh, we'd have hot coffee and whatever it was to, you know, keep them happy, but we'd have 20, 25 people for a lecture and we found, the more we lectured, the better we got at explaining what we did Correct.
Speaker 2:I used to do that for book clubs. On a Tuesday and a Thursday afternoon I used to go to the book clubs and talk about kids' health and talk about general health and the moms would ask the questions and I had to learn not to speak in school language. I had to translate what I'd learned into moms and dads and children language. And I agree with you the more you speak it, the better you get at it, but also the better your community trusts you because you've been in their homes or they've been in your practice, not as a patient but as a contemporary in some ways.
Speaker 1:Somebody asked me one time how do you get all the patients? You do, and in Minnesota where I lived, you know everybody snowed all winter so you had to shovel snows and everything. They said you must have hated it. I said I never did it and they said why? I said well, I had contracts, you know, for people to clean the clinic. You know parking lots. They did my house first so I didn't have to shovel snow when I went to the clinic but I took care of all the tradespeople and if they were hurt they came to my house and I took care of them any time of the day and night and they referred people like crazy because I took care of everybody that I didn't want to do that kind of work for or work with and that's how I ended up meeting so many people.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. For me that's be of service be available. Be kind and be gentle.
Speaker 1:Yes, now you start April 1st, is that correct?
Speaker 2:Correct, we're T-9. You start April 1st, is that correct? Correct? We're T-9. And so Richard and I joke as of today, because it's T-9 until I join formally as Secretary General Designate, and it's 103 days, so it's T-104 before Richard's formal retirement and I take over on the 1st of July.
Speaker 1:Well, I can't tell you how happy I am to have the chance to sit down like this and visit with you, because I'm much more comfortable. You know, richard was a good friend and is a good friend and I'm thinking, boy, they got to replace this guy and that's going to be a job and I think you're up to it and I'm very happy that you were able to be on the podcast so the profession could meet you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, and I'm free that day and that day is any time and anywhere to answer any questions. Support any chiropractor ever.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, dr Brad Byra. I got that right this time. You absolutely did, and so look forward to seeing him a lot in the profession.
