Ep.#125: Phillip Snider, DO - The Singing Doctor

We sit down with Dr. Phillip Snider, an Osteopathic Physician in Auburn, to talk about treating head and neck pain and why whole-body structure can change how you feel day to day. We also dig into his work with vocal performance and the mindset that helped him pivot from nutrition to medicine and build a life that keeps evolving. 
• his work at Auburn Pediatric and Adult Medicine and the conditions he focuses on, including headaches and TMJ.
• how he moved from dietitian and personal trainer to osteopathic medicine after discovering the DO approach 
• what Osteopathic medicine is and how it differs in training emphasis while using the same modern medical tools 
• the Tensegrity Model, fascia tension, and why posture can affect pain and vocal function 
• vocal cord nodules as “calluses,” plus hands-on techniques that can reduce strain for singers 
• his journey into the local music scene, open mics, songwriting, and the “never too late” message 
• career pivots, clinical informatics, teaching, and simplifying complex ideas for patients and students 
• dry needling, osteopathic manipulation, nerve blocks, and a lifestyle-first approach to obesity medicine 

Auburn Pediatric & Adult Medicine
www.auburndoc.com 334-887-8707

560 Devall Dr. Suite 201 Auburn, AL 

The Singing Doctor: www.phillipsnider.noiseyard.com

Transcript

Welcome To Good Neighbor Podcast

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Susan Hodges.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Welcome. And with me is a Dr. Philip Snyder. He's an osteopathic physician here in Auburn. Welcome, Dr. Snyder.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Glad to be here.

Dr. Snyder’s Practice And Focus

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Well, tell me a little bit about your practice. What do you do?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

I work at the Auburn Pediatric and Adult Medicine. We call it APAM for short. And there are a couple locations. There's the larger practice on Bent Creek Road. I'm at the smaller satellite office on campus on South of All Drive. And I see patients a couple days a week there. And I focus mostly on head and neck pain, headaches, TMJ, this condition called trigeminal neuralgia, where people have pain along their face, it hurts to chew, and can extend up to the scalp. And I'm also working with musicians, specifically singers, to help their voices and help their voice performance.

From Dietitian To Osteopathic Physician

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Well, tell me about your journey into medicine. What brought you into this field?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Well, mine's been a kind of a long path. I um was pre-med and undergrad, but the timing just was not right. And I instead went to um got a master's in nutrition and worked as a dietitian and personal trainer for eight years in in North Carolina. And I always knew I wanted to do more, and I didn't know if it was going to be a PhD in nutrition, dentist, doctor at public health. And one of my personal training clients was a retired radiologist. And he had a friend in Philadelphia who was a DO, and he knew I'd taken a massage class and did triathlons and liked to really help people with sports recovery. So he suggested I look into osteopathic medicine. I had no idea what osteopathic medicine was. And um, as I started learning more about it, I there's just no turning back. And I, you know, remember distinctly getting online, registering with Kaplan Review course for MCAT Review, and um I decided to go to uh medical school and moved up from North Carolina to Phoenix, didn't know a soul, and um went out there and it's just been a wonderful journey.

What Osteopathic Medicine Really Means

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Well, what is uh osteopathic medicine? Um, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Well, there are four main types of medicine we see here in the United States. There's um uh allopathic medicine, is what we know, what we see MDs, uh, osteopathic medicine, DO, and then you have the chiropractic medicine and naturopathic medicine. Okay, osteopathic medicine started in the 1800s, and it was started by a guy named A.T. Still, who was an MD and was unhappy with the treatments at that time. We didn't have a whole lot in 1875. And so he started a school that focused on how to tap into the body's innate healing abilities. And over the decades, we've incorporated a lot of the, well, all the tools that you see MDs use, surgery, uh, medications, different therapies. And our students at VCOM, where I work, we match into all the specialties. But in osteopathic medicine, our primary focus is how can we help the identify what's getting in the way of the patient healing themselves? That might be a physical element that's healing them. We teach our students the manipulation. So you'll sometimes see osteopathic manipulation. Some people think, oh, it's like a chiropractor and MD wrapped together. It's like, well, you could kind of look at it that way as a general public, but we're we're really focused on how somebody's changing their structure changes the form and how that can impact their physiology. And we're we'll prescribe medications when needed, but we also will look into diet, lifestyle, stress reduction, things like that. Anything any smart doctor, MD or DO, would look at, but we teach our students from day one, look to see how the body can heal itself and focus on that first.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

Okay, well, that makes a lot of sense. So you were talking about, you know, helping people with uh things like TMJ and what have you, and musicians with their with their vocal cords.

Tensegrity And Treating Singer Strain

SPEAKER_02 4:45

Tell me a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

So our body is like a uh an interconnected web. There's a model that is called tensegrity, T-E-N-S-E-G-R-I-T-Y. And tensegrity model was first coined by Bugminster Fuller with the buckyball, and how you can have a structure that's very strong, but it's not built on the compression model. It's a series of cables and struts where you may have a cable pulling on tension and a strut pushing away. And our body is built that way. Our bones are like the struts, and all of our fascia and muscle is like the cables. And so when you start to learn how the body works, you can feel you train your hands to feel where there are areas where the fascia and muscles are locked up and tight. And if you can release those, it lets all the fascia and tissues move like it was designed to move. A kid would taste this. I'm like, we're gonna get you back to factory settings if we can. Yeah, and that's really important because our hyoid bone is where a lot of our muscles attach below the tongue, underneath the hyoid bone, and the neck and the shoulders and the back, and they all had this interconnected tension play. And when that gets abnormal and we get muscle tension, it makes everything that's supposed to function in there not function as easily as that was designed. And the body lays down tissue where there's extra stress. Now we see this with calluses on our hands. Lester and later get a callus. Well, vocal cord nodules are nothing more than calluses on the vocal cord.

SPEAKER_02 6:30

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

And what that does is it makes the singer not be able to hit notes because you don't have the smooth flow of air across that vocal cord. And that is usually from an abnormal tension on the whole throat structure. So if you can get somebody to um have their head over their body to have a lot of ease in the head and the neck and the whole, there's a thing called the Alexander method, which looks at whole body posture. And if you work with somebody, like I'll take a piece of gauze and take somebody's tongue and give a little gentle traction and move to the left and right, up, down, and do some unwinding, or maybe put my hand inside their mouth with the glove on and do some releasing of muscles, and immediately they're they're more free to sing and let some sing with less effort, it makes the quality of their voice better, and you don't get that strain on the voice that over time professional musicians will find as they do more and more singing, they develop the nodules or the hemorrhages or problems like that. So I do workshops at songwriters' festivals teaching singers how to prevent a lot of those issues.

Becoming The Singing Doctor

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Okay. And this is uh a topic dear to your heart because I learned that you are often called the singing doctor. So tell me about your talent in uh music.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

So I started playing guitar, gosh, when I was 15. I was always in choir in high school and college and grad school and sang at the Greensboro City choir for several years. And I kind of mixed the guitar and singing, but I would put the guitar down, pick it back up, you know, went to medical school, put the guitar down. And about I moved here four years ago, four and a half years ago now, and about five years ago, I just decided to pick up the guitar and started playing more. And I only knew about four or five songs at that time, cover songs. And when I moved here, I discovered open mics. Even though I'd sang in concerts for college and high school, I'd never done an open mic. And so the music scene around here is really robust. Not a lot of people know that, but we have a lot of good musicians, singer, songwriters. So I started doing open mics, and it's like I can't play the same three songs all the time. So I started learning more songs, and then about six months into that, somebody said, Hey, we need somebody to play at a restaurant. Can you play for three hours? And I was like, Oh, I got some more songs to learn to be able to do it. So I started doing that, and then a couple years ago, I started writing my own music. So I really blossomed my career, and that's one of the neat things is that I like to inspire people. It's like it's never too late. I hear a lot of people say, Oh, I'm too old to learn this or that. And it's like, no, it's never too late. Now I've got songs out on Spotify, writing my own music, going to songwriters' festivals, and um just hosting a lot of open mics around town. You know, we have them in downtown Opalica. Um, so you just you never know what's around the corner. That's kind of like one of my take-home messages I try to share with our students or pre-med students who are shadowing me in the office and want to see if they want to apply or not, is you know, always say yes to what's coming your way because you never know what that might turn into.

Mindset, Teaching, And Career Pivots

SPEAKER_02 9:50

And you know, part of the reason I do this uh podcast is I like to encourage people to kind of follow their dreams or to take that risk into uh entrepreneurship. And that's you know, you are the prime example of doing that. Um, your journey of starting out doing one thing and then pivoting to become an oste osteopathic physician. Tell me a little bit about the mindset that you developed to, you know, to grow in your business and in music the way you have.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Well, I I've always like my grandfather, um, he always pushed me to go to school, go to college, and um always pushed me to learn through education. So I taught nutrition when I was a dietitian at UNC Greensboro and always thought I wanted to go into teaching. And so eventually I did. And I've always been open to whatever is around the corner. And my career is like taking many versions. I was just straight family practice five days a week for about five years out of residency. Then I got into clinical informatics, which is how do you take the computer and the electronic medical record and all the forms and data is generated and help the end users use the system efficiently because you know, patients can't stand it when a doctor comes in and turns their back to them and starts typing on the computer. Yeah. And so I would teach them workflows, how do you interact with the patient and put the information in and use the computer to show somebody, oh, here's your cholesterol from last time, here's your you know, different readings. And so I started doing that and and I actually became a chief medical information officer at a five hospital system before I moved down south. I I was in upstate New York. Um, and that was a lot of fun because I helped to develop systems for teaching people electronic medical records, decided which functions we would accept with the upgrades. And um I just I think overall I just really enjoy helping people and helping people figure out complex things and make it simple so they can understand. And so I've been able to apply that several different ways throughout my career. And that's one of the reasons I really like teaching, is that I can share my experience, what I wish I would have known as a med student with med students, and hopefully save them from some of the same steps and you know, blunders along the way, but then also help them take complex ideas and make it easy. Like I'll do financial advice talks to some of the med students and you know, talk to them about you know how to invest and what to be thinking about when they get their first contract out of residency. And it's just it's so much fun sharing my life experience with other people. And that's what I love through music, is I can do that through the stories that I tell and the songs that I write.

SPEAKER_02 12:45

Absolutely.

Dry Needling, Headache Care, Lifestyle

SPEAKER_02 12:46

Well, tell me one thing you wish people knew about your practice that they may not realize.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

I think that um APAM has a lot, we offer a lot. We do regular primary care. Um, we have uh some sports medicine docs there, which are great. They're the same docs that treat the Auburn uh uh athletes for Auburn University. But um I think that not a lot of people know that I do dry needling, which is we use acupuncture needles to release trigger points, and I do that all over the body, and I treat with my hands osteopathic manipulation all over the body. And I think that um some word of mouth has gotten people to know about it, but um, I've I've reached out to some of the local dentists because you know they get a lot of people with head and neck pain. And I think that um just to let people know it's not that scary to get the dry needling done or if we're doing trigger point injections or occipital nerve blocks for headaches, and it can make a big impact down the road. And um, and just you know, give it give it a try. And also, I always encourage patients to take control of their own lifestyle because I'm I'm also board certified in obesity medicine, being a dietitian before uh medical school, and so I really encourage people to take control of their own destiny. Yes, I'll do some weight loss medications, but that's never the cornerstone of it. So it's really encouraging people to work with me, help you develop a plan and get to the bottom of maybe why you're not feeling good or why you can't do what you want to do.

How To Book And Follow Along

SPEAKER_02 14:26

Well, how can someone find you and get in touch with you if they uh want to uh come by and see you with a particular problem?

SPEAKER_00 14:34

One of the easiest ways is to call us at 334-887-8707 and make sure when you schedule an appointment that you don't go to the office on Bent Creek Road, you come to the one on Duvall Drive. Okay, and um you can find me on the Vom website, vcom. I think it's Vcom.edu. And we have four campuses. So we have one Virginia, South Carolina, here in Auburn, and in Louisiana. Um, also I have uh a website if you're interested in contacting me about playing music or hosting open mic somewhere. Uh you can get in touch with me through my uh uh my uh website that I have through uh the noiseyard.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I have so enjoyed learning more about you, your practice, and your musician.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Oh, you're welcome. Oh, one other way that people can follow me on Instagram, I'm the Singing Doctor325.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

That's also my I have a YouTube channel, the Singing Doctor, but at Singing Doctor325 is is what's uh is what the the handle is, is the is the kid safe or the YouTube.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

All right. Well, thanks for joining me. I've uh enjoyed talking to you.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast Auburn. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNP Auburn.com. That's GNP Auburn.com or call three three four four two nine seven four zero.