Dr. Andy Barlow | Chiropractic Doctor in Tupelo, MS.

Her brother, Larry Hill, was quite high on the corporate ladder, and many other members of her family were successful in their careers. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by people not only talking the talk, but they were also walking the walk.

It was one of my first exposures to another way of thinking and looking at life, and it was like the scales dropped off my eyes.

I realized I wanted more for my life, and I WAS READY FOR A CHANGE.

I went back to college with the intent of earning a business degree. Inspired by Faye’s brother, I thought I would eventually climb the corporate ladder and work my way to management. It was hard work keeping a full-time job and going to school but any major change in life requires sacrifice and commitment. Around this time, Faye and I got engaged. With a new fiancé and three children soon to join my family, I was very motivated to work hard at my business degree. Then something happened that changed the course of my life entirely.

Faye had experienced migraines for most of her adult life. The headaches came and went, but she could usually find relief and manage the pain. That changed during our engagement. Her migraines became so severe that eventually one came and never went away. We went to every medical doctor that would see us, but after countless tests, we had zero answers as to what was causing her unbearable headache. We experienced what so many people with chronic pain experience—the medical merry go round. After striking out with traditional health care, a friend suggested we go see a chiropractor. With nothing to lose except a headache, we decided to give it a try.

As soon as we walked into that appointment, we knew we’d found something different. He started talking about the body and how it was designed to heal itself. He taught us truths about the way the body worked and explained what kind of dysfunction may be the root cause of Faye’s migraine. He adjusted her spine and asked that she come back weekly for additional adjustments. Within a few weeks, her migraines disappeared completely. I’d never witnessed anything like it in my life. I was already living a generally healthy lifestyle. I ran regularly and ate healthily, but I’d never been exposed to this kind of health philosophy. When I saw my fiancé get relief from a chronic problem that had debilitated her for years, I realized there was more to health and healing than prescriptions, injections, and pills.

The truth that our bodies are designed to heal themselves was mind-blowing to me.

I was used to a doctor coming into the appointment with a preconceived solution, prescribing medication, and walking out.

Yet this doctor didn’t do that. It was a fork-in-the-road moment for me.

“Wow, I want to help people the way this chiropractor helped Faye,” I thought.

To a certain extent, we’re all a product of the environment we grew up in, and my background prompted me to ask myself a lot of qualifying questions like, “Am I really smart enough to become a chiropractor? Can I really do this?

Am I worthy enough? Can I make this my profession?" With Faye’s support, I decided to re-route my under-graduate degree and take the path towards becoming a chiropractic doctor. I counted the cost and let go of short-term pleasures in order to chase after a long-term vision for our life.

I asked myself the question, “Am I willing to change my entire life to make a better future?”

The answer was a resounding, “Yes!” I knew there was a price to pay to get the result I wanted, and I was going to follow through. I worked on my undergraduate degree for seven years, from age twenty-six to thirty-three and then enrolled in chiropractic school in Atlanta, Georgia.

Around the same time, my stepson Matt Mackey chose chiropractic as his profession so we attended graduate school together. I didn’t want to uproot Faye from our home in Tupelo, so she stayed in Mississippi while Matt and I moved to Atlanta for four years. Faye and I made sure we saw each other on the weekends, and even though it was hard, we made it work to achieve the vision we had for our lives.

I won’t sugar coat it; those years were a grind.

It was hard going to school and being away from most of my family. In those tough, tough moments, all I focused on was walking across the stage on graduation day holding my diploma. When we take on hard things, we’re all going to hit that spiritual, physical, or psychological wall at some point. Just like a marathon runner in a race, the wall is real and we have to figure out how to go through it, around it, under it or over it.

When Faye was hired at Cooper Tire, she joined the company as a secretary and went to school on the side. After she earned her degree, she was promoted to a supervisor role. She eventually became the first female department manager of the Tupelo Division. She and I had the same ambitions and desire to improve our situation, and even though we got told “no” often, we never let that stop us. If you have any kind of goal, no matter what it is, personal, professional, financial, or health related, you WILL face resistance.

You will face setbacks.

How you respond to those obstacles determines if you reach your goal, or not. With our family’s support and a lot of grit and determination, Matt and I successfully made it through chiropractic school in four years. We never doubted where we would set up our practice. Mississippi was our home, and we couldn’t wait to go back to it. We started a practice in Tupelo and out grew that location in four years. Around that time, I got tired of seeing patients with acute health issues and I craved helping patients with complex, chronic health problems. I wanted to help people with rare and challenging cases who were out of options; the people traditional medicine had failed.

I heard about a school called the Carrick Institute which specialized in clinical functional neurology and functional

medicine. The study of neurology and complex, chronic health problems fascinated me so I returned to school while continuing to work full-time at our chiropractic clinic. I studied at the Carrick Institute for the next six years where I earned my diploma and completed a fellowship in functional neurology in 2009. Since then, I’ve taught seminars in four countries and taught hundreds of doctors from the United States, Canada, Europe and New Zealand the life changing material you’re about to read in this book.