‘Instead of going to medical school, I studied chiropractic, a natural healing art.’

Syosset

“When I was an undergraduate biology major, I met a chiropractor, a doctor who believes that the body can cure itself if you release its own healing ability. What he said made sense and seemed rational. So instead of going to medical school, I studied chiropractic, a natural healing art that has been helping people since 1885. It’s drugless, doesn’t use surgery and is based on taking care of the structure of the human frame, freeing up the nervous system so it can function at a high level, and maintaining health without having to take a pharmaceutical drug every time you have a pain or an ache.

In my garage … I built the first prototype of the Extentrac.

“I graduated from New York Chiropractic College in 1980. While there, I referred my mother to a chiropractor who alleviated the chronic back pain she had suffered for years. I opened my practice in Syosset 40 years ago. I was working with a nurse who had a severe herniated disc that wasn’t helped by medications, traditional chiropractic manipulation, conventional medical traction or physical therapy. She was bent at a 30-degree angle. In a last effort to help the patient, I dynamically lifted her in a backward bending position with vertical gravity. I observed an immediate reduction in pain. The patient was standing straight, and a new therapeutic technique was born. After achieving good results treating patients manually for two years, I realized I could develop a machine to treat a wider range of conditions and patients.

“In my garage, using pipes from a Long Island fence company and a bending device lent by a patient who was a union electrician who’d avoided surgery from this procedure, I built the first prototype of the Extentrac. The original led to more prototypes and more advanced models with more features. The product has been further developed by Spine Care Technologies Inc., with new designs focusing on sports injury prevention and enhanced athletic performance. Spine Care Technologies is marketing the fifth-generation therapeutic device, Extentrac Elite, to the health care and sports industries.