Business Interview: Alison Bennett

How long have you been practicing in Orange?

I grew up in Orange, but I’ve owned Alive Health (formally Spine Alive) since 2006 and then we built this building in 2009.

 What services do you provide at Alive Health?

 We now have a number of modalities besides Chiropractic, there’s podiatry, psychology, naturopathy, massage and cosmetic medical procedures as well. We also have whole food nutritional supplements that provide a great addition to looking after your body and trying to achieve better health overall.

 Most people associate chiropractors with treating back pain, but are there other issues you offer treatment for?

 Back and neck pain is definitely the big one and there's a lot of studies to support that it is extremely effective for those things. But we get a lot of great results also with headaches, with other joint — elbows, knees, feet —  you name it. There are so many things we address; some people have reported reflux improves or sinus, but that's not supported with science as yet.

 When would you seek out a chiropractor as opposed to another therapy?

 As a chiropractor we are dealing with the structural side of pain I suppose and the neurological side. I suppose a big difference is a lot of the time we are looking at the cause of the problem and trying to get people functioning better for the long term, looking at the bigger picture and also more holistically rather than just specifically where that pain is.

 What are the main reasons people end up with back pain?

 The underlying aggravating factors are often bad posture and injuries. So there’s what we call micro injuries from things we do every single day and the habitual movements and then there's the macro injuries, the falls and stuff like that. So they are what we focus on.

 What is your advice to people for improving posture and reducing the chance of back pain?

 We get very lazy and we allow gravity to take hold and let us slump. It is an effort to hold ourselves in a more appropriate position, but just try to be as tall as you possibly can with the back of the head, lifting up so that you are sort of defying gravity and that generally gets things more in line.