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
Looking Ahead To 2026 - Dr. Petrocco-Napuli Interviews Dr. Fuhr (Part 2)
Ready for a year where research, training, and access all move in the same direction? We lay out a concrete plan for 2026: bringing seminars back to college campuses, strengthening state association presence, and pairing that with virtual education proven to match hands-on outcomes. Along the way, we share how publishing in Nature turned heads across the broader medical world and opened doors to high-level collaborations, including a spine study with Ohio State that leverages precise instrumented thrusts.
We dig into mechanism-first research that answers real clinical questions, like whether adjusting around osteoporotic hips is safe. The findings go further than expected: not only safety signals, but evidence of trabecular regrowth in models—an insight that reframes fracture risk, fall narratives, and mobility trajectories for older adults. It’s the kind of data that boosts practitioner confidence and directly benefits patients who need careful, effective care.
Our podcast started during lockdowns as a way to keep teaching and quickly evolved into a hub with hundreds of thousands of downloads, attracting clinicians, patients, and other providers. Conversations with leaders like orthopedic surgeon Dr. Jimmy Chow and practice-growth experts bring both clinical depth and practical wisdom. That cross-pollination reflects how far interprofessional respect has come—and how evidence, patents, and consistent publishing helped change perceptions of chiropractic in the wider health ecosystem.
Training and reach are scaling together. With presence in dozens of colleges and a diverse speakers bureau, we’re building a pipeline of proficiency-rated practitioners ready for real-world cases: sports injuries, post-surgical care, documentation, Medicare, risk management, and even animal care. Expect regional seminars, alumni-centered campus events, and guests who share hard-earned insights you can apply the same day. If you’re aiming to sharpen your scan protocols, grow a sports practice, or align with the latest research, this is your roadmap.
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So let's talk about 2026. We've got a lot of exciting things coming forward. We talked a little bit about the in-person seminar that we're going to hold at Northwestern. We're looking at being more involved and being president at state associations, where we hope to have speakers so practitioners from around the U.S. can get reacquainted with Activator and see some of our new uh topics that we're teaching. And you and I have talked a lot about this and looking at not just women's health and pediatrics, but sports.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you know, Dr. First of all, my wife is the CEO of Activator, and she kind of runs the mechanics of things in the day-by-day operations. And um she wanted to have uh overview of things that are important to doctors that are coming up. That's how we kind of got into the going to the college campuses type uh seminar. And so that's why we think that that's really important. And uh we want to have hands-on. And it's it's in you know, everybody thinks you have to have hands-on, but you don't, because we have a study that we did in New Zealand, because they wanted me to come there and fly to New Zealand. I've been to New Zealand and it's a long flight. And I said, why don't we do it virtually and then we'll, you know, test to see if there's a difference between the actual on live hands-on and virtual. And it came out, no, the answer was they're equally the same. And even some of the online people said, well, I can see it better because I can play it over. And uh I don't have to stand there by a table and and wait for my turn. So there's but I still think it's camaraderie. I think that's the fellowship of it, that's the thing that people miss. Aaron Powell Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And it's hard, right? Because we're spread all over the world sometimes and don't get a chance to connect. And so when as practitioners, we get a chance to connect and connect around things that we were passionate about and we care about, it becomes really an exciting time for us.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Ross Powell Well, Activator is in 38 colleges now. And uh you may not know this, but Activator has a research facility in Spain. It's uh run by NICR, and it's Dr. Ricardo Fujikawa, he's an MD DC, and uh Orantia Ortega de Muse. That's a mouthful, and she's a PhD in molecular biology. And so we've done a lot of papers, and this is you'll find an interesting fact. The last four papers that we've had published were published in Nature. Now, if you know anything about the literature and journals, JMPT affects three percent of the academic world, uh medical world. The nature affects eighty-two percent. That's just eighty percent more, and uh everybody reads it. And so we were asked by Ohio State University to give them an instrument that they could use. They were doing a rat study on the spine, and they needed something that they could use to make a thrust into the rat. And somebody said, I just read Nature that Activator was involved with Heidi Helvig in a in a kind of a program where we went in and we adjusted, quote unquote, the relative vertebra, which means the subluxation, and it changed the brain. So we get a call from Ohio State and they said, Would you be willing to participate with us? They just got four million dollars, by the way. And we said, sure. And so they said, You're the only ones that we could find. You probably saved us a half million dollars. And so that program that particular project is just wrapping up now, so we'll have some future things to tell you about that. But you get invited to the big time when you're publishing in the big time, and that's because of Ricardo and Arantya. Because, you know, I have a saying, somebody asked me, how do you get successful, Arlen? And I said, uh, surround yourself with smart women. That's it.
SPEAKER_03:There you have it. Well, you know, Doc, so you bring up something really important, and that's about research. You know, one thing about Activator Methods is that you've always been research-based, you've always been very supportive about having research within the profession. And, you know, every year there has been an article or a project or another study that Activator Methods has been involved in. And you just mentioned, you know, this study with Ohio State that's in progress and we'll be wrapping up soon. But you know, there's been a couple others that that that are fairly recent. And I think one more specifically about, you know, bone growth and regenerating bone growth. So you want to talk a little bit about that as well?
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah. And let me tell you, when I started in the research world, I thought I was cool. I thought I was a researcher. My wife said, you're no more a researcher than the man in the moon. You're a clinician. Now stay there. So again, I surrounded myself with people that knew what they were doing at a high level, like I was talking about a ranch if uh one the other thing was um Marian McGregor, uh, you know, that's John Triano's wife, in case you need a reference. But John Triano became a good friend of mine, and uh Marian also, and she's a PhD in statistics. And so I was complaining to her one day about randomized controlled trials and how much they cost. And she said, Well, why don't you just research the mechanism? I said, I don't even understand it. Marion continued. Well, she says, You're a clinician. You're looking for something, aren't you? And I said, Yeah, I want to know if it's safe to adjust an osteoporidic trochanter. Because that's where hips break. Well, she said, uh, that's what I'm saying. Right. Just research the mechanism. Is it safe? Ask that question. So I said, let's see if we can find that out. And I quickly found out the only way you're gonna test that is by having osteoporidic rats. And they're only made up, they only grow them in Los Angeles, California. So here we are shipping 20 osteoporidic rats to Madrid, Spain, to our research center at$1,000 a rat.
SPEAKER_03:Was it first class?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_03:They didn't get a fenomile either on the flight over, did they?
SPEAKER_01:No, but they didn't they didn't put them in baggage. They put them inside the plane. So they had it, they had to be careful that they didn't upset that osteoporidic growth. Okay. So they got to Spain, and uh then a Rantya and uh Ricardo started on that project. Here's the fun part. You sometimes you get a real blessing in research, and this was one. We found out not only was it safe to adjust an osteoporitic hip, but it regrew the trabeculum in the hip. And so I was presenting this at a 50-year thing here eight years ago. And one of the doctors came up to me and says, now I understand. I used to have these people come in with a walker, and you and you they were hardly able to get around, and six months later they're walking around without the walker. I said, Yeah, you regrew the trabeculum in the hip. And that was a fascinating thing to a clinician because now I know it's safe. And look at the work we can do. Because many broken hips were broken from osteoporosis. They they were broken when they hit the ground, so they thought it was the fall, and actually they're broken before they hit the fall.
SPEAKER_03:So that's exciting, right? That's exciting clinically for a practitioner. It's exciting for patients.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the the safety aspect is really important. You know, that's what I I really like about it, is we know we can safely adjust it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Well, that's that's that's an exciting research topic from the past year. So I wanna I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the podcast. You know, you you've been doing this for about four years now, and the podcast has grown significantly. And, you know, one of the questions I want to ask you about the podcast is why? Why do you do it?
SPEAKER_01:Well, uh, it was during the COVID when I quit the road. You know, I was doing 34 seminars a year. So I was sitting around not doing much of anything, and my wife said, I'm gonna put you to work. She said, We're gonna have a podcast, and you aren't doing anything, so you like to talk, so you can you can run the podcast. And it was kind of started as give Arlen something to do, and it turned out to be really interesting because the last podcast that we put out was Nick Doyle, and some of you from Carol Econ know Nick Doyle, he's at been at Parker, his dad, Joe, was at Parker many years. He had 372,000 downloads, and uh that book happened to be on marketing. Then Sherry McAllister wrote, you know, uh her new book, uh, and we had 250,000 downloads. So all of a sudden, this podcast has become like an opinion maker that people want to know what's going on in the profession, just like we're talking here this morning. Um, who do I go to for health insurance? Well, NCMIC has a record for years. They're National Chiropractic Mutual Insurance Company out of Des Moines, Iowa. And I've used them myself my whole chiropractic life. And they have, you know, they have the right, they know chiropractic.
SPEAKER_03:You know, you and I have talked a lot about the podcast, and some of the things that you've said to me before are you do this to bring cutting-edge information back to the practitioners that are out there. And, you know, you bring on speakers or individuals to talk to that, you know, have business sense or have business minds, they have clinical minds, they've been successful in their ventures and in what they do. Um, you had Dr. Chow that came in and talked clinically about, you know, the care post-surgically with you and and and different perspectives. So I'm gonna ask you a really tough question. Who was your favorite podcast of 2025?
SPEAKER_01:That's really hard because they uh varied in subject. The subject matter was really hard. Now, of course, uh Jimmy Chow is the orthopedic surgeon that is my friend, um, he was probably one of my favorites just because he said I went to him when my wife went for her final exam and said, uh, you know, I just enjoyed much being with you. And uh he said, um, I really enjoyed getting to know about chiropractic. And I said, I have a question for you. Uh, you know, you talked about that lateral trochanter pain and how many times people get a shot of cortisone. And I said, the chiropractors need to be educated to this. Would you come on my podcast? He said, sure. Now you have to be old like me to go back and think, you know, when I first started a practice, a medical doctor wouldn't talk to us. Literally. I walked right in the country club one night in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, and there was the medical doctor, and he turned his back on me. And uh then he made a statement. He said, Now you look smart, darling. How come you became a chiropractor? Why'd you become a medical doctor? And I said, Well, because chiropractic works. That was, but I mean, this is how far we've come. And I think where I saw it was that he saw that we were really into this and we were researching things and publishing papers and getting patents and that we were somebody to pay attention to. So that was that was one of my, you know, that was one of my favorites. Um then you have people like Cindy Howard that has fought and battled cancer and won. And like I said, I think earlier, there's patients out there listening today. And so if you want to find a proficiency-rated doctor, you go to doc.activator.com. And excuse me. And you can find a proficiency-rated doctor. That's why it's so important to keep your ratings up because you learn new things.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you just hit the hammer on the on the nail there. You know, the podcast has spread in a way that it's not just practitioners.
SPEAKER_02:Oh no.
SPEAKER_03:It's it's gone way beyond the chiropractic practic practitioner. Um, we've got patients that listen. Uh, we have individuals that are that are other types of providers and other types of individuals. So you've you've really made a huge stretch and outreach into the general population.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think that's why we're seeing you know, over a quarter of a million downloads. There's there's not 40,000 chiropractors. So we know that we're affecting other people. And uh I was doing a podcast for a friend of mine one day at Lightspeed in Vegas, and he said, You know you're a disruptor, Arlen. And I said, What do you mean? He said, Well, you changed how people practice chiropractic going to instrument adjusting. And I said, But look, uh surgeons are using robots. So didn't they change? We need to change. Chiropractic is a little behind in that area. So being a disruptor doesn't bother me at all. And he said, You know, you're a disruptor in postgraduate, too. And I said, What do you mean? He said, Well, you used to teach it, you know, every day and in a weekend in a class. Now you're doing it virtually. We're helping people around the world. And if we can do that, then all this is worth it.
SPEAKER_03:So you just said something else super important. Um, you know, Dr. Four, you talk about activator, and a lot of times we forget. Activator is worldwide. There are activator practitioners that are treating worldwide. There are patients that are receiving care worldwide. Talk a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_01:I got to tell you a story. I'm with uh Stephen Sa, he's an MD that we went to Taiwan with. And he said, uh, we got the afternoon off. Do you want to go with me to the Valley of the T? And I go, What is that? And he said, That's where they raise tea. And so I said, sure. So we go up the mountain and uh we come up to this clearing, and he said, Well, this is where the you know the workers, all the tea people work and everything like that. And we'll have lunch up here. And so we walked into this big, like a, you know, was like a shed. And here in the corner was a guy with on a little raised platform do an activator. And I just about fell over, and he had a picture of me on the wall, and he looked up and saw me, and he screamed in something in Chinese, and I said, What did he say? And he says, The activator God has come from the heavens. We're cracked up, laughing, but it wasn't funny because this little old Chinese lady came up and she threw her arms around me in Chinese, and he interpreted. She said, I was bent over and couldn't stand up until I got activator, and she was crying. And I mean, now you you know you really know that you've influenced the people in the world when you see that kind of a thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And practitioners too, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And here was this Chinese chiropractor. He was as good an activator as he was just, I was so excited, and I went out and complimented him and everything. He was thrilled, you know, that he all the other people are like, oh man, he must be good if Dr. Ford comes up and congratulates him.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So let's let's talk a little bit about 2026. You know, we're gonna have new podcast episodes. You've got a whole line of of new individuals that are gonna be joining you, and and that's exciting. We've got some face-to-face courses that we're gonna be introducing. And like we said earlier, we're gonna be involved at some state associations and and we'll be able to reach out to practitioners, not just stateside, but but worldwide.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And you know, um, somebody asked me, how did you get so many people on a podcast? And I said, I know a lot of people. And uh, I'm trying to pick people that have a specific thing to give to the practitioners and to the patients. And uh so I can just think of a couple of them that I've I've got in mind to come on. And uh I I want to have them share years of experience that they have. And we'll do all different types of problems that people have. And I like I said, I think that's why we're over the quarter of a million markup in 350,000, is because the people out there are learning. And that's why I can't say it enough. You know, you want to get activator methods proficiency rated because they'll come to you then, you know. Because again, like I said, we had uh 17,000 patients last month that went to our activator proficiency rated doctors, and that's a couple thousand. So, you know, they can't handle everything. We're short of doctors, actually.
SPEAKER_03:You know, that's very true. And if you look at the the trajectory of the chiropractic profession in general, you know, we're we're looking at a shortage of practitioners coming up here in the future. And so as we move to continue to train the next generation of chiropractors, you know, having having a lot of different types and opportunities for training becomes important because the population is changing as well in which we serve.
SPEAKER_01:That's why we wanted to get in the schools. And believe me, to get in a college is a tough thing because it's called getting in the curriculum.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Curriculums are always full. Everybody wants in the curriculums. So it only took 50 years, but we now have access to all these different colleges. Because remember, every quarter or every semester, there's a new group coming in. And so that's why we formed a speaker bureau. Uh we've got, oh, I can think of Stacy Neal from Northwestern. Uh she took over the class at Northwestern and it went crazy. Ron Wells is in Parker. They're full. They can't even take any more people. And Ricardo just came to Southern Cal and did uh John Skringe's uh activator class. So the colleges are really excited about this because this is something the practitioner can take out into the field, and then they can continue in the field to be able to get new patients from quote unquote from the activator methods camp. And uh once their proficiency rated, and then there's upper extremity, lower extremity. And somebody asked me one time, why does Jan Roberts have such a big practice? And I said, because he knows what he's doing. Why does Tom Davida have a big practice? Because they know what they're doing. They know when somebody comes in with a shoulder where to start. And it's not always just uh a shoulder that's out, there's uh ribs and there's all kinds of things like I found on uh this orthopedic surgery or the uh OBGYN person the other day. So knowledge, that's what that's what makes a practice. Um I have a summer house, and uh I told my wife, when we go up there, I'm just not gonna practice. I've got other things I can do, and you know, we'll just have a good time. That lasted a week. My next door neighbor said, I know you're not practicing Arwen, but he said, I hurt my back playing golf. And I said, Okay, um I'll take care of you, but don't tell anybody. That lasted a week. Then his friend hurt his back, and all of a sudden I've got a practice running. My wife said, I thought you weren't doing that. I said, Well, I'll stop it. I'll charge them each$100 apiece cash and I'll give it to the kids at the you know, scholarship fund. And uh I tried that. No, didn't they pay any attention to that? That summer I ended up giving a check to the scholarship for kids at the club for$5,000. Divide that by that's that's 500 adjustments that I gave during the summer. And I'd said if I was Going to start a practice. I started with old people at a country club. You know, they wanted to play golf. They didn't care what it cost. And so that's what I'm saying. You don't have to worry about building a practice if you know what you're doing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the world-renowned speakers that Activator has on their speakers bureau. You know that you've you've done a lot of work to identify individuals who can help train the future practitioners that that are learning Activator, but also you've worked really hard to identify practitioners that can relate to the advanced practitioner. So talk a little bit about our Speaker's Bureau and what that means.
SPEAKER_01:For example, my wife said, we need young people. And I said, What do you mean? And she said, you know, people are young today and they want to have they want to relate. So we picked Dr. Jamal DeVita, who's Tom DeVita's son, runs a nice practice in Acton, Massachusetts. And he's also a sports injury guy. And he knows sports injury and weightlifting. And you know, kids today they go to Parker because they have a weightlifting program. I mean, that's they want to be fit, and that's good. So Jamal took over and he he's done sports for us, and he's also doing the basic scan protocol. He'll probably do that in Northwestern. So that's one example. Then we have more experienced practitioners like Ed Galvin from Oswego and New York, who has been at it for 35 years. And uh he knows the routine, and so he's a really good instructor. And uh Zyngard from uh the other end of the country and Michael McMurray, there's these are people that we put into the Speakers Bureau because there's they're really good speakers. And what they've been doing is, for example, Maine had their big association meeting here just a couple weeks ago, and Jamal went there and taught a beginning class. And they were so excited about it they want him back in the spring because they said we learn more from that hour, two or three hours, I think he did. He said, how to handle things and what the step-by-step procedures are. So when you feed practitioners what they do and how to do it, that's what you're after.
SPEAKER_03:And you know, you've got some other really unique speakers. You've got uh Dr. Perone, you've got Dr. Neil, um, you've got uh Dr. Susan Broker who works with animals. And so you've really thought about it all. And you know, you just brought in Kathy Wiedner to do some documentation. And and so we've really been looking at you know how we can help that practitioner diversify and stay contemporary.
SPEAKER_01:We want to we want to hit them where they live. You know, what kind of a problem are you having? I'm having problems with Medicare. Well, Kathy Wiedner knows more about how to handle Medicare than anybody I know, and so that's why we brought her in. You know more about risk management. And you know, people I hate to say this, but they do dumb things like cancel their malpractice insurance when they retire, but yet they're adjusting people.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_01:That is plain stupid. And so there's different things that we can help people with at different faces in their practice. So that's that's why we've got all the different types of speakers. And uh yeah, you know, uh Stacy Neal, uh, she was she was an ICE agent and she was a former in her government career, and then she got hurt in her line of duty and got went to a chiropractor, and that's how she got well, and she loved it, and so that's how she became a chiropractor.
SPEAKER_03:Aaron Powell So you've got a power-packed punch there with all of those Speaker's Bureau. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Really you know, it's just they have different talents.
SPEAKER_03:Aaron Powell Yes, which is great.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:And it and it really applies to everybody out there in clinical practice. Aaron Powell Well, thanks for spending time with me today, Dr. Ford. This was so much fun. Um, we've had a great 2025, and we're moving into 2026 with a lot of excitement and new things.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm excited because we have come this far and we've got a lot of things that we're bringing to fruition. And one thing that I just want to say that we're really happy to have Dr. Petraco here with us as the president of Activator because she brings a new excitement and also expertise in an area that I don't have. And she has got, you know, a chiropractic degree, which is very important to us. So that part carries on, plus a doctorate in education, and now she's in the corporate world and she's enjoying that. And so I'm grateful to have somebody that we can rely on to carry this on. And I think everybody will be happy that we have a legacy and that we're being able to pass this down. I know Judy has said we don't want to let this die. We want to have this go even bigger. And so we think we're there.
SPEAKER_03:Aaron Ross Powell Well, Dr. Ford, I'm so grateful and I'm so honored. And I look forward to all the years to come with all the new things that we're we're going to bring together to the to the practitioners, to the patients that experience and get adjusted with Activator. And 2026 is going to be a great year. We've listened to the practitioners, we've heard a lot of really great comments and feedback. And together, we've come up with a great plan. So I can't wait to see all the exciting things that come forward.
SPEAKER_01:You're exactly right. In case out there that you think we weren't listening, we have been listening quite carefully. But we think we've come up with a real nice plan. And we'll probably end up with regional seminars. That may be the future, but we're testing it right now to see how it works. And Logan was really excited because they had practitioners and alumni that came that hadn't been there in 30 years. And uh so we may go to every college in the country and do an activator seminar just so uh the alumni can come back and see what's happening on the college campus.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you, Dr. Four, for spending time with me today and reversing the table and allowing me to ask you questions. Uh usually you're the question asker. So today was kind of fun for me when you turned over the microphone. And uh I really appreciate all of your time and your thoughtfulness and everything that you bring to our profession.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thank you so much. And we're just happy to have you on the team. And we really do have a good team, and I think this will benefit the field doctors out there because we're we're gonna be the conduit that brings the new stuff to them for their practices. Thanks for listening to Activate Your Practice Podcast. Remember, this is brought to you by SoftTech Table Company. You can find more information on this table at SoftechTables.com.
SPEAKER_00:Softtech manufactures specialized treatment tables designed to help chiropractors who utilize the activator method maximize their time and the success of their procedures. Upgrade to the only adjusting tables endorsed by Activator Methods at SoftechTables.com.
