Can a chiropractor practice through a mind-body lens?

In this episode, Dr. Scotty Butcher sits down with chiropractor and chronic pain practitioner Dr. Adam Bletsoe to explore the growing field of neuroplastic pain, nervous system rehabilitation, and mind body healing.

Adam shares how his own experiences with chronic pain, asthma, insomnia, anxiety, and other persistent symptoms ultimately led him toward a neuroplastic understanding of health and recovery. Together, Scotty and Adam discuss how fear, stress, beliefs, emotions, and life experiences can shape physical symptoms, while also emphasizing that pain and symptoms remain completely real.

The conversation explores common misconceptions surrounding pain, including structural explanations such as ribs "going out," SI joints slipping, or discs being out of place. Adam offers a balanced perspective that validates patients' experiences while helping them understand the role of the nervous system in symptom generation.

Listeners will also learn how Adam uses neural circuit assessments in clinical practice to help patients recognize the contribution of the brain and nervous system to their symptoms, often creating powerful moments of insight and hope.

Whether you are a healthcare provider, someone living with chronic pain, or simply interested in the mind-body connection, this conversation offers practical wisdom and a refreshing perspective on recovery.

Topics Discussed

• Adam's personal experience with chronic pain and chronic symptoms
• The evolution of chiropractic and mind-body care
• Neuroplastic pain and symptom generation
• Fear-based narratives in healthcare
• Why structural explanations often fall short
• Neural circuit assessments in clinical practice
• Graded exposure and rebuilding confidence
• Emotional experiences as physiological experiences
• Adverse childhood experiences and persistent symptoms
• Chronic pain, stress, and nervous system protection
• Building resilience instead of avoiding activity
• Why patients are not broken
• The importance of helping patients become their own healers

Memorable Quotes

"You are not broken. You're okay. And you can do this."

"I want people to understand that they are the healer."

"A good body working a little inefficiently right now."

"Your physiology is just the body portion of your emotion."

"Once you see the Matrix, it's hard to unsee it."

About Dr. Adam Bletsoe

What if your body wasn’t the problem? What if you weren’t broken—and you could feel strong, capable, and free to move again?

That is the question at the heart of Dr. Adam Bletsoe’s work.

Adam is a chiropractor, educator, and guide for people living with persistent pain and other symptoms that disrupt their lives. For more than twenty years, he has helped people make sense of symptoms that can feel confusing, frightening, and difficult to explain.

His work brings together gentle hands-on care, modern pain science, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and nervous system regulation to help people see pain differently. Rather than simply chasing symptoms, Adam helps people understand why the body may still be protecting them—and how that protection can begin to change.

His approach is science-backed, humane, and deeply collaborative. The goal is not just to feel less pain, but to rebuild trust, restore confidence, and help people return to fuller, more active lives.

Learn more at:

🌐 https://www.dradambletsoe.com

Six days after falling down the stairs, I have zero pain. A client with a nearly identical story is still dealing with symptoms months later. Same mechanism, same type of history, completely different outcome. That gap is what this episode is about.

What Happened

I tripped coming down the stairs and landed hard on my hip and shoulder. I have a known rotator cuff tear, a labral tear on both sides, a spondylolisthesis, and a previous L5-S1 herniation. In other words, my imaging is a mess on paper. When I hit the ground, I felt pain in my low back and my shoulder -- exactly where my history is. That is not a coincidence. That is predictive processing.

What I did in the first few minutes mattered more than anything else that followed.

What This Episode Covers

• Why pain shows up the way it does after an injury, and what your nervous system is actually doing in that moment
• The story behind the name Mind Body Strength, and what "strong in mind and body" actually means after you've had time to think about it
• A hamstring tweak in physiotherapy school that created intermittent pain for years -- and why that matters
• How a workplace fall can spiral into chronic symptoms when the injury gets framed the wrong way
• The two most common responses to a flare-up -- pushing through and fixing -- and why both of them keep the alarm going
• Howard Schubiner's seven F words: fear, focus, frustration, fighting, figuring out, fixing, and forlorn, and why these responses are the problem, not the solution
• The Inside Out analogy that actually explains what "sitting with a symptom" means in practice
• A step-by-step framework for what to do from the moment something hurts

The Core Idea

Pain does not equal damage. That is the single most important thing in this episode, and it is not something most people have been taught. The medical system is doing its best, but the story created around imaging and diagnosis often communicates danger in a way that turns a short-term flare into a long-term problem. Neuroplasticity works in both directions. The nervous system learns from what it is told.

This is not about mental toughness. It is not about pushing through. The client in this story was not weaker. They were taught to be afraid by every part of the system they moved through.

The Framework

1. Ask Nicole Sachs' question: am I going to die?
2. Take inventory without catastrophizing -- what moves, what actually hurts
3. Decide whether you need medical clearance, and if so, go get it
4. When results come back, acknowledge what is there without feeding the story that it defines your outcome
5. Sit with the symptom without trying to fix it, stretch it out, or Google it away
6. Give your nervous system time to settle

Resources Mentioned

• Howard Schubiner, MD -- predictive processing, the seven F words; his book Unlearn Your Pain (released May 2026)
• Nicole Sachs, LCSW -- The Cure for Chronic Pain podcast
• Inside Out (Pixar) -- the Bing Bong scene as a practical model for how to approach symptoms with acknowledgment rather than urgency

If any of this sounds familiar -- the flare-ups, the imaging that never quite explains it, the cycle of fixing and worrying -- this is the kind of work we do at Mind Body Strength.

mindbodystrength.ca

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"Mind-body" is a phrase I've been using for years. And recently I caught myself wondering whether it's even the right term. Because when you dig into what's actually happening with chronic pain, fatigue, anxiety, or any of the conditions we talk about on this show, the "mind" part gets complicated fast.

This is a solo episode — just me, sitting with a question I've been turning over for a long time. What are we actually working with? Is it the mind? The brain? The nervous system? And does the difference matter? I think it does. Because what we call something shapes how we think about it, and how we think about it shapes what we do with it.

This episode covers the science and philosophy behind all of it — and lands somewhere genuinely hopeful.

What We Cover

• Why "mind-body" is both a useful and imperfect term — and what it is actually pointing at
• The difference between the brain and the mind, and why the distinction matters clinically
• Are emotions physiological? The honest answer — including where the purely physiological view has a gap
• William James, Damasio, Schachter and Singer, and Lisa Feldman Barrett — what the research actually says about how emotions are built
• Core affect vs. categorised emotion — a distinction that changes how you work with symptoms
• The predictive brain — how your nervous system is constantly running ahead of the moment based on past experience
• The limbic system and the amygdala — why the threat detector fires first and asks questions later
• The fear-symptom loop — how it becomes self-sustaining and how to interrupt it
• Why reframing works — and why it is not positive thinking
• What a genuinely integrated approach looks like across all three layers: body, brain, and mind
• Why none of this is fixed — and what neuroplasticity actually means for people who have been told to live with their symptoms

Work With Scotty

If something in this episode resonated with you, the best next step is a free 15-minute consultation. It's a no-pressure conversation — you share what's going on, I share how I work, and we figure out together whether it's a good fit.

👉 Book a free consult at mindbodystrength.ca

Connect

• 🌐 mindbodystrength.ca
• 📧 [email protected]

If this episode was useful, please subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who might need to hear it. It genuinely helps more people find the show.

Most people who find their way here have already tried a lot of things. Tests, specialists, treatments — and they're still not better. This first episode is about why that happens. And I know, because I've lived it.

This is my real story. The rugby injury, the marriage I almost didn't survive, the back pain, the panic attacks, the two suicide attempts, and the slow realization that my body had been trying to tell me something for most of my life. I'm sharing it because it might sound familiar — not in the details, but in the feeling.

What We Cover

• What NERDS stands for — and why WTF means more than one thing around here
• Fear as the common thread in all chronic symptoms — and why it doesn't always look like fear
• My childhood, emotional neglect, and what that does to a developing nervous system
• A rugby injury, a concussion, and the beginning of 25 years of anxiety
• A marriage where I felt unheard and alone — and two suicide attempts I've never spoken about publicly
• The back pain that consumed five years of my life and kept me off the playground with my kids
• Deadlifts, exposure therapy, and what I now believe actually healed my pain
• The seesaw between physical and emotional pain — and why tattoos were part of my story
• Finding mindfulness and the moment things genuinely started to shift
• What neuroplastic symptoms actually are — and why "it's all in your head" completely misses the point
• Real examples from my own history: anaphylaxis, IBS, knee pain, and ankle surgery with almost no post-op pain

Key Takeaways

• Fear drives chronic symptoms — but it usually looks like fixing, avoiding, or frustration, not obvious fear
• The story matters more than the symptoms
• Neuroplastic symptoms are real and physical — and they're not your fault
• Symptoms that shift and move are giving you information, not punishing you

Work With Scotty

If something in this episode resonated with you, the best next step is a free 15-minute consultation. It's a no-pressure conversation — you share what's going on, I share how I work, and we figure out together whether it's a good fit.

👉 Book a free consult at mindbodystrength.ca

Connect

• 🌐 mindbodystrength.ca
• 📧 [email protected]

If this episode was useful, please subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who might need to hear it. It genuinely helps more people find the show.

📝 A note on this episode: This episode contains an honest discussion of suicide attempts, depression, anxiety, and childhood trauma. If you're currently struggling, please reach out to a mental health professional or contact a crisis line in your area.

Mind Body Strength NERDs is a podcast for people living with chronic pain, fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, and other mind-body symptoms — and for the practitioners who support them.

Hosted by Scotty Butcher, licensed physiotherapist, PhD physiologist, and Mind Body Coach, each episode explores what neuroplasticity, nervous system responses, and emotional recovery can actually look like in real life. No hype. No quick fixes. Just honest, grounded conversations backed by evidence.

NERDS stands for Neuroplasticity and Emotional Recovery through Discussions and Stories. If you're nerdy about this stuff too, you're in the right place.