Meet Alistair
The Chiropractor
I love my job!
I love being able to help people; to be with people and to share their joys and sorrows; to constantly push my mind and heart into expansion. I especially enjoy being slightly weird, being misunderstood… perhaps this is an endemic Scottish thing (always the underdog), perhaps moving to Scotland from Africa at a young age and being “different” throughout my childhood. Either way it fits well with my profession.
Chiropractic is a much misunderstood approach to health which aims to restore optimal function to the person rather than ‘fix’ a specific issue. People often think I am a back doctor but I am not. If I am anything I suppose I am a doctor of the nervous system. The only reason I touch anyone’s back is to affect the nervous system through the super highway which is their spine. And if the spine ran down the front of the body people might still come with back problems and i would touch only the front of the body and still their ‘back problem’ would go away!
The nervous system (the brain, spinal cord and nerves) is the master control system. When it is functioning correctly, problems tend to disappear as the body is a self healing system which needs only to be free of interference in order to work properly. My job is to identify the compensations and adaptations that your body has gone into which are reducing its function. Chiropractors recognize the person as a whole, not a collection of parts, and understand that pain is not the problem, but the alarm which your body uses to alert you of a problem. The body is a self regulating organism which will heal itself under the right conditions. So creating the right conditions for healing and optimisation to occur is my primary goal.
If you are curious as to whether chiropractic might be beneficial for you I would be happy to help if I can.
Husband. Father. Son. Friend
I live in Clovenfords with my wife and two boys (and our cat, Starlord). We are all nomads and misfits but having grown up in the Borders it feels like home to me.
We enjoy pretty much everything outdoorsy but are also suckers for cards or board games by the fire, music on the porch, or family films on a Friday evening.
I have been actively pursuing "health" since my late teens and decided faily early on that whatever I did in this life it would be something that contributed to the good of this world. It took me a while but after wandering the world and working in many varied places, I finally found chiropractic in my eary 30s and pretty much instantly decided this is what I was going to do with my life.
After doing a year of preparatory study in the Borders, we moved down to Wales where I studied at the Welsh Institute of Chiropractic for 4 years.
I graduated with Honours and moved back to the Scottish Borders where I worked for 6 years at the busiest Chiropractic Clininc in the Borders. In late 2022 I decided to move on to begin something exciting and more congruent with my values.
Facilitator
I have been passionately invested in the pursuit of physical and mental health for as long as I can remember. Having studied psychology, exercise, nutrition, yoga, breathwork, embodiment, mens-work, and of course chiropractic, I am able to approach various issues from several perspectives.
I am driven by the pursuit of excellence and personal evolution which is why I have invested so much in these different approaches to physical and mental health. These days I am particularly interested in the practices which our "deep time" ancestors used to remain whole, and healthy. These include gathering and sharing in circle, drumming, dancing, time in nature, breathwork, movement, and many others.
I am currently offering workshops and retreats both individually and alongside my wife, Pollyana. You can find out more about these by following the link below.
“Best money I've spent in my life!
I could hardly walk with sciatica, now I'm totally pain free.”
- Liz S
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