For the past three decades, Dr. Tamara Blossic and her team at Hockessin Chiropractic Care have been helping generations of patients in Hockessin, Greenville and beyond achieve pain relief and better health with quality chiropractic care. Recently, Dr. Blossic sat down with Greenville & Hockessin Life to talk about what led her to chiropractic care, the “Healing from the Core” philosophy, the author she’d like to invite to her dinner party, and much more.

Greenville & Hockessin Life: You began your interest and subsequent career in chiropractic care by seeing it provide healing for you, beginning when you were a teenager. Talk about the circumstances in your life that led you to seek chiropractic care.

Dr. Tamara J. Blossic: I started as a chiropractic patient as a teenager and there were two incidents that required brief care. I had a backpacking injury where I fell and injured my lower back. A second incident occurred when I had an acute neck spasm. My mother was a chiropractic care patient, so when I was injured, she took me there.

College is often a petri dish for migraine headaches, so all through college when I would visit home, I would return to the chiropractor and found out that chiropractic care helped my migraines. After I got out college I became a high school science teacher and returned to the chiropractor again, because my immune system was really challenged at the time, given that I was just starting to teach and I was in a new school system.

It was around then that you began to pursue your education in chiropractic care.

I was working on my Masters in Earth-Space Science at the time, but I was also juggling with the idea of moving my education in another direction and attending a chiropractic school. It turned out to be a very quick decision. I went to visit a school in April of that year and was enrolled there by August.

While I found that the academic side of chiropractic did not come easily to me the clinical portion of my studies did -- when I could actually get my hands on the anatomical aspect of the science. The anatomy lab allowed me to feel and touch and look, and anatomy came alive to me. Using that knowledge when I got to actually treating patients was a straight line for me.

We often hear that an employee is the “backbone” of her organization, or that an athlete is the “backbone” of his team. It is a term that illuminates the fact that the spine is, in fact, the core component of the body, and the measure of its health is often reflective of who we are and our experiences. It’s a vessel that carries our truth. How do you find that truth, and ultimately lead that patient toward healing?

In my experience, the first piece of healing comes with listening. You really need to listen to what the person is saying. Sometimes, you have to ask for clarification because they may not know what they are trying to say. Then there is the hands-on piece of healing, when I am trying to feel for changes, for things that are not normal.

When I have my hands on a person, I learn the difference between what feels normal and what doesn’t feel normal. Those subtle clues – whether it be in the tissue or joints or in the vertebrae – that what starts to give me the idea of where the pain is located. Someone may come in and complain that their pain is on the left, but when I place my hands on their body, I find out that the restriction is on the right that causes the pain pattern to shift to the left.

The whole philosophy of chiropractic is that one’s healing ability comes from the nervous system, which is housed within the spine. Each human being has an innate ability to heal through their central nervous system.

I’m trying to get the connectivity between our experiences as humans and how it all deposits itself within the spine. It’s different for everyone, yes?

If you take those two individuals similar in shape and structure and place that same trauma into their bodies, they may have two different injuries.

As that stressor comes into the body, the body has to decide whether the pain will go to the right or the left or the top or the bottom, because all of our stressors they have experienced prior to the injury have already influenced that tissue. It’s due to the fact that the central nervous system has a memory that is stored in our brain, as does the tissue itself.

So even those two people may have similar injuries, they could have different pain presentations, because of how that stressor comes into their system.

One of the principle concepts you practice – and encourage your patients to incorporate -- is reflected in a program called “Healing from the Core.” It is described as teaching patients the “How-To” skills for listening to their body’s wisdom. Describe how the act of listening to one’s body can lead to healing, and how you incorporate “Healing from the Core” into your own practice.

The whole premise of “Healing from the Core” was developed by my dear friend Suzanne Scurlock. As a body worker, she began to hear from other body workers who were complaining about fatigue and a loss of energy that was difficult to restore. She began to explore how we can begin to be compassionate with ourselves and learn how to fill ourselves back up in order to keep doing what we do.

That’s everyone, not just people in my profession. It could be the corporate executive, or a mother, or the caretaker of an elderly parent. We all need those skills.

The concept for “Healing from the Core” is to have the individual exploring what it is that pulls their energy down, and what tools they can learn to fill their glass back up, in order to not get burned out -- and use those same tools to help heal things that may have happened in the past. That could manifest itself as a physical injury, an emotional injury, a persistent grief or even the daily stressors of a relationship or work environment.

My job is to connect to the person and say, ‘How can I empower you to do your own healing work?’”

It’s the three-legged stool: You have the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. To me, healing is not just fixing the physical. It’s recognizing that there is more to a person than just muscles and bones.

Do you ever envision the day when the heavy influence of throwing prescription medicine at our nation’s health problems will be replaced by the continuing movement of the healing arts, such as chiropractic care, acupuncture, yoga and holistic medicines?

I am seeing in medicine a return to the roots of caring for the person. I am seeing that through my functional medicine eyes. When I went through my functional medicine training, I sat mostly among medical doctors, and they were talking about the first thing they should do before they start treating patients is to gather their thoughts. There is this percentage of physicians and health care providers who are interested in getting back to that holistic approach.

I see a new drive back to the roots of listening to the patient, trying to figure out the cause of one’s pain is, in order to allow the provider to support a person in a multi-team approach.

What is your favorite place in Greenville and Hockessin?

I would have to say that I am attracted to Valley Garden Park near the Hoopes Reservoir.

You throw a dinner party. Who do you invite?

If I invited a famous person, it would be C.S. Lewis. He is one of my favorite authors and his writing is very diverse.

What food or beverage can always be found in your refrigerator?

Blueberries and sparkling water.

To learn more about Dr. Tamara J. Blossic and the Hockessin Chiropractic Centre, visit www.hockessinchiro.com.

- - Richard L. Gaw