The Problem With Being “Fixed”
September 8, 2026
She Walked In Wanting to Skip the Questions
A woman I’ll call Dana came into my office a few weeks ago with her whole history already in hand. She’d had digital scans and X-rays sent over from another practice, the same nervous system scans we run here, all the views, everything. She asked if she could skip our intake and just continue care with us. Pick up where she left off.
I said no. Not to be difficult. Six weeks had passed since those scans, and bodies change with time. But there was a bigger reason, and it’s the reason I want to write about. The scans are only half the picture. The other half is her story, and nobody had ever really asked for it.
What she wanted was less anxiety and more energy. That was the goal. But when I asked what hurt, the list kept going. Her back. Her shoulders. Her wrists. Her knee. She was tired all the time and her gut wasn’t right either.
What Four Months of Care Missed
She’d been seeing a practitioner three times a week for four months. When I looked at the progression of her scans, they didn’t look bad, but they didn’t look transformed either. Four months of care, three times a week, and the picture had barely moved. Then there was the list itself. In my experience, someone her age stops talking about the parts that hurt about a month into care. She was four months in and still naming every one of them. That’s not someone who’s slow to respond. That’s a plan that isn’t working, and nobody had said so out loud. So I started asking the questions the scans can’t answer.
The Questions the Scans Can’t Answer
Her home care recommendations were none. Not even the usual “here are a few stretches.” Four months, three times a week. Call it fifty visits. Not one sentence about how she lives when she leaves the room.
She was sleeping about six and a half hours a night. That doesn’t sound like a crisis, and that’s the problem. Anything under seven hours creates a slow deficit, a leaky bucket that never quite fills. Your nervous system needs that time to run its repair cycle, and when it doesn’t get it, you drift into a low-grade stress state and carry the strain into the next day. I asked her if anyone had ever told her that. She said no. Then she pulled out her phone and started taking notes. That’s the part that stuck with me. She wanted a roadmap. She was just never handed one.
Steps were the same story. She was moving about three thousand a day. For context, we’re built to move a lot more than that. Hunter-gatherer populations average well over ten thousand steps a day, and in some groups closer to sixteen thousand.
That’s the body we’re walking around in. Modern life makes those numbers hard, I get it, but even getting to seventy-five hundred changes things, because every step pushes blood to your brain and sitting still shuts that pump off. Nobody had connected any of this for her either.
She was simply supposed to come in and get adjusted, and the adjustments were supposed to fix her.
She’d outsourced her power to the people who were supposed to fix her.
What Almost Every Chiropractic Office Misses
Her wrists were only one piece of it, but they’re the clearest example, so let me start there.
She was hypermobile, and she knew it. When I asked, she said, “Yeah, I know that.” Here’s the paradox with hypermobility. When a joint moves too much, the body tightens around it to create stability it can’t find on its own. It’s a smart design. It just feels annoying, because the thing moves too much and the body keeps clamping down. She’d already had surgery on both wrists for carpal tunnel, and she was still having pain and numbness.
I told her the truth. I said I was in a tough spot, because I don’t like bashing another office, but I was protective of her and, honestly, angry on her behalf. Someone had already cut her open twice for wrist pain. Nobody had asked why a joint that loose was hurting in the first place. The cracking-style adjustments she’d been getting weren’t doing her any favors. When something is already too mobile, the last thing it needs is more mobilization. I’d argue those adjustments were feeding the hypermobility instead of calming it.
She got it immediately. She told me one of the doctors at that practice used gentle techniques and the others cracked and clicked their way through her spine, and all of them called it nervous system work. I think she felt a little duped. A little frustrated.
I brought up the surgery. She said she was still in pain after it. “Sounds like the surgery didn’t work,” I said. She pushed back a little. It did help, she said, it reduced the symptoms, but the pain and numbness kept coming back. So I changed my words. “Then it didn’t really resolve the issue.” She looked at me and said, “No. It didn’t.”
Sold Healing, Handed Maintenance
Here’s what actually pisses me off about all of it. If the chiropractic office she went to was a pain-based clinic and the goal was short-term relief, fine. Pain relief doesn’t take very long. But dress it up as a full transformation of the nervous system, put someone on a long-term plan, and then that transformation never really happens, and you’re just leading people on. She was sold healing and handed maintenance.
I recognized it fast because I’d bought the same thing.
The Day I Stopped Waiting to Be Fixed
Ten years ago I was struggling with my own health crisis. Graves’ disease, an autoimmune thyroid condition. And I did exactly what Dana did. I went looking for the person who could fix me.
I quit my job to reduce my stress and moved to the desert of southern New Mexico, where I tried everything. Protocols, supplements, the whole functional medicine spread. I spent thousands on it, and every bit of it sounded logical. Each protocol had a mechanism and a story about healing that made sense while I was reading it. It didn’t work. My bottles were her fifty visits. Same purchase, different packaging. And here’s what I learned the hard way.
It’s often the same story whether it’s conventional medicine, functional medicine, chiropractic, or therapy. Everybody claims they treat the root cause. Everybody has the buzzword. And I kept handing myself over to one more person who was going to solve me.
None of it helped me turn the corner. What turned the corner was embarrassingly simple. I stopped fighting my body and started treating it more like a plant than a car. I put myself in the right conditions long enough for my body to heal. I ate whole foods. I went for walks. I slept a lot. I watched comedy movies and I laughed. I leaned on my community. I didn’t touch alcohol for a year. I simplified my life until there was almost nothing left to fight.
I got worn out from being fixed. I stopped waiting for the cure to arrive in a pill or a bottle. That’s when I actually started healing.
What I got back in that desert wasn’t a protocol. It was my agency.
Four Conditions, One System
This happens in offices every day. A practitioner takes the credit for fixing someone, the person keeps coming back, the symptoms come and go, and nothing really changes underneath. Coming and going isn’t the same as resolving.
You don’t fix a plant. You find the window and you find the water, and it does the rest. For us, that’s the Core Four — the four conditions that feed the nervous system:
- Sleep — the repair cycle your nervous system runs while you’re out
- Stress — the load your nervous system is carrying day to day
- Movement — the pump that keeps blood, and everything it carries, circulating
- What you take in — food, and everything else your body has to process
Those are levers no adjustment can pull for you. They’re yours. Go back to Dana with her phone out, writing down sleep and steps. That’s two of the four. Four months of care, and nobody had ever pointed her at them.
I tell people on the very first visit, before anything else, that my job is to teach them how to see me less. If they can’t get to seven hours of sleep, I’m not going to make them feel silly about it. When they push back, I just tell them the truth. They’ll probably spend three times as much money in my office, because it’s like trying to grow a plant back to life in a closet. You can do it. It’s a lot of work, and the plant never really stops needing you. Once they understand that, they stop fighting me on it, and they understand it’s their choice. It always has to be their choice. That’s the point.
The part that hurts is rarely where the problem lives. And the part that heals you was never something someone did to you.
You Were Always the One Doing the Healing
Dana’s wrists were never really about her wrists. Neither was her back, or her knee, or her gut. Her scans were never the whole story. The care she’d been getting taught her, week after week, that healing was something that happened to her, on a table, three times a week, forever.
It isn’t. The magic was always in you. You were always the one doing the healing.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you’re on someone’s table three times a week and still carrying the same list, and you want your power back, I wrote a book about how I got mine. It’s called Stepping Out of the Grave: How to Heal When You’re Tired of Trying. Join the waitlist for early access.
I’m Dr. Matt Delgado, a nervous system-focused chiropractor and author in Austin, Texas. I reversed my own Graves’ disease, and I write about how the body actually heals. Read my story.
Tired of trying? I wrote a book about that.
Stepping Out of the Grave: How to Heal When You’re Tired of Trying comes out January 2027. Join the waitlist today and I’ll send you the bonus guide right now: How to Throw Away Half Your Supplements, a 30-day experiment where you watch your body stop needing them. It’s a $50 guide, free, delivered the moment you sign up.