Chiropractor finds spot to grow his clinic

MOSES LAKE — It turns out it was the perfect patch of land for Gregg Jones’ new clinic.

“Buying land in a small town is not easy today,” said Jones, a chiropractor whose new clinic is going up on Fifth Avenue across from the Moses Lake Library. “Literally, this was the one plot of land that fit all of our criteria.”

By criteria, Jones means parking, access to a main road and a central location in the city’s downtown area.

“We needed space for quite some time. We’ve been bursting at the seams in our old building for probably 10 years now,” Jones said of his soon-to-be former clinic, which is near the intersection of West Third Avenue and Dogwood Street. “There’s no parking; we deal with people who have trouble walking; it’s not a good set up.”

But he’s hardly down on Moses Lake. He loves small-town life and came here specifically because he appreciates the pace and the neighborliness of Moses Lake.

“It’s much more easy to be neighborly here,” he said.

Jones has been in Moses Lake adjusting spines and helping people recover from accidents and injuries for 25 years now. For 14 of those, Jones has practiced chiropractic under the banner of HealthSource, one of the nation’s largest providers of chiropractic care.

The time has come to expand. He and his new business partner, Jeff Martin, have been working on their new clinic and should have it ready to receive patients on July 27 if all goes according to plan.

For both Jones and Martin, the goal of chiropractic care is to help someone recover as quickly and as easily as possible, and without surgery, whether they’ve been injured, suffered from trauma, or are simply “out of adjustment.”

To that, chiropractors apply “hands-on” pressure to the body, typically the spine, to relieve pain. Jones said he can successfully treat 80 percent of herniated spinal disc — a painful condition in which one or more of the discs between the spinal bones have slipped out of place — compared to only 20 percent with surgery.

“The focus was on rehabilitation, retraining the neurology that controls everything,” Jones said. “We treat disc herniations, back, and migraines are a big thing. We have a huge success with that. Ninety percent of all migraines have a muscular-skeletal trigger.”

There are different types of chiropractic care, Martin said. His clinic specializes in diversified adjusting, “your classic hands-on. We are able to branch out and meet our patients’ needs.” Diversified is a combination of different kinds of chiropractic techniques and gives a practitioner maximum flexibility in treating patients, Jones said.

The new clinic is still a cavernous hall, with a bare skeletal wooden outline of a receptionist’s desk. But it will have enough room for 12 people to do rehabilitation work at the same time, Jones said, even with social distancing requirements.

“We will be social distancing for the foreseeable future,” Jones said.

HealthSource, which is a large, nationwide chain of franchise chiropractic care clinics, handles much of the marketing and all of the billing, bookkeeping and complying with state and federal regulations, making it easier for practitioners to do the job of caring for patients, Jones said.

“They keep us in compliance,” Jones said. “Health care is a heavily regulated profession.”

A native of Sunnyside, Martin has only been a practicing chiropractor for six months or so. He and his wife, Emily, a specialist in health care communication who is also helping run the new clinic, will hopefully inherit the clinic when Jones, 51, decides to retire.

“Martin will eventually kick me out,” Jones said.

Emily said she and her husband are glad to have put down roots in Moses Lake and look forward to being able to help heal what ails the people of this community.

“We fell in love with the community and the people and really being able to provide these services to the backbone of America,” she said. “Getting people out of pain, back to what they love, that’s huge.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.