A Conversation with Dr. Sean Woods, D.C., Author of “The Healing Vibe: Understand the Cause and Overcome Disease”

During these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic that has practically paralyzed our world, I’ve tapped into a curiosity that’s gnawed at me lately.

Let’s say, since our worlds turned upside down and we’ve all practically became prisoners in our own homes over the past 8 weeks, I’ve more than tapped into this curiosity.  I’ve dove in and inhale everything I can find to help better understand – what is happening to our healthcare system?  Why are certain people dying of COVID-19 and others aren’t?  Is it really true, that “COVID-19 has revealed the deadly realities of a racially polarized America,” according to the cover story of the New York Times Magazine (May 3, 2020).

One of the experts I’ve turned to in my quest for answers about the COVID-19 crisis and the impact on our healthcare system is Dr. Sean Woods, a gifted Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) in Alexandria, VA.  His work has taught me a heck of a lot about how to lead a healthier and happier life.  I met Dr. Sean – as he’s affectionately known to his patients – through Dr. Miranda Wall Van Blarcum, who also is a Doctor of Chiropractic, a former yoga and Pilates teacher at Mind the Mat, my local yoga and Pilates sanctuary, before she moved to Austin, Texas with her husband.  After Miranda left for Texas a few years ago, I started to see Dr. Sean every month.  He owns a holistic health and wellness practice, The Chiropractic Associates in Old Town Alexandria with his wife, Michelle, and has become one of the most important people in my life (after my husband, Andy, of course.) 

While many people think chiropractors just crack your back or adjust your spine – which they do – most people don’t know that chiropractors can also help you learn about nutrition, how to self-heal and self-regulate your body.  These might seem like weighty concepts.  But Dr. Sean breaks them down into common sense, easy-to-understand explanations about how your body works, how your organs work and are connected to the rest of your body, why going number two is one of the most important things you need to do (more than once a day), why you feel better when you eat certain foods (especially fruits and vegetables), why you feel like crap when you eat all the wrong stuff and how certain herbs and supplements can help your body eliminate parasites that could eventually kill you. 

Yes, kill you. 

In his new book which just came out in early May 2020, “The Healing Vibe: Understand the Cause and Overcome Disease,” Dr. Sean Woods has given us all a gift “to inspire hope for those who are having healing challenges and are feeling hopeless,” “to inspire courage for those who are facing a health concern that leaves them feeling fearful,” and to “provide inspiration for those who feel overwhelmed and helpless and think there is nothing they can do.”  The cover of Dr. Sean’s book is a beautiful, radiant, colorful heart which he drew himself to capture the essence of his book.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Sean outside of the adjustment room to learn about his book and have an open and frank conversation about what’s wrong with our healthcare system and why more people don’t see healthcare the same way he does. 

Eileen Rivera: What motivated you to write this book?

Dr. Sean: I had a breakthrough moment.  Frankly, I was getting frustrated hearing from patients who would tell me they had been to ten different doctors and none of those doctors could tell them what was wrong with them.  I could figure out the answer to their problems after the first ten minutes of seeing them. 

I was also getting frustrated when patients would tell me, you’re the only doctor who talks like this! You’re the only doctor who talks about the need to move beyond treatment of symptoms to what matters the most, which is being able to digest the food you eat and be able to eliminate what you don’t need.  I was having regular conversations with my patients to help them understand digestion, absorption, assimilation and elimination.  Soon I was having conversations about a concept that really got their attention – the cause of all disease.

For example, let’s take a common case of gastritis. As a chiropractor, I don’t treat these conditions, I correct spines. When stomachs dysfunction though, they pull the spine anterior (forward) in the middle of the back. (This concept is explained in my book). Unless the gastritis gets corrected, not just eradicating symptoms, the patient comes back routinely for me to adjust the area.  I adjust, they get relief, they eat poorly again, and they are soon back in my office wondering why the adjustments don’t “hold”. These kinds of scenarios are a big reason I needed to add nutrition into my practice years ago. These next ten years is where I began to figure out how the body is interconnected on more levels than I even imagined. 

Now, gastritis is one of the most common human ailments that exist on the planet, and it’s hard to believe that with all the medical science that exists out there, and the billions placed on research, the only good advice from your doctor for gastritis is to take a prescription to block stomach acid. A dysfunctional stomach left uncorrected is, in my opinion, one of the most dangerous conditions that can exist within a body that is need of proper digestion to exist. Once the body loses its ability to properly digest proteins, which is the major role of hydrochloric acid, we set ourselves up for a multitude of major problems. The problems that can occur are much more far reaching from the stomach and which we don’t have time to talk about here. 

What became frustrating for me is that I routinely fix both acute and chronic stomach conditions in my office everyday. Correction doesn’t have to be hard, but it takes time. I need to stay on top of my patients dietary changes and ultimately knowing how to use the correct supplementation at the right time. At the end of the day with the billions of dollars spent on stomach conditions, the medical community has no clue how to actually fix and heal gastritis. I stopped taking a stance against medicine years ago. I just want help those I can. I don’t know, call me crazy, but this is not fair to the patient who comes to a doctor looking for answers to their symptoms. I think it demonstrates that something is inherently wrong with the medical health care system today. I don’t know, some days, it gets to me.

So, I decided to write a book that puts my 20 years of knowledge, and the very things I do in my office everyday, into an all encompassing “thesis,” you might say, on how all disease manifests in the human body. No small task!

Eileen Rivera:  So, what is the cause of disease? 

Dr. Sean: The cause of all disease leads back to a lack of love for yourself, or self-love. The concept that feeling bad can cause disease is tough for most people to grasp, and it’s a concept I write a lot about in my book. For those people who roll their eyes at this and say, “This has nothing to do with real science.”  I believe they need to re-evaluate their understanding of the human being and ways it expresses health.

An excerpt I particularly like from Dr. Sean’s book drives home this point: “I have found through years of practice that the patients who truly do the best are the ones who begin the task of self-love and extreme self-care to improve blockages and make their bodies strong again.”

Eileen Rivera:  Why did you decide to publish your book in the middle of a global pandemic?

Dr. Sean:  The timing was really a decision made by the universe! 

Eileen Rivera:  How do we improve our healthcare system?  How can people improve their own health?

Dr. Sean:  Well, without people taking greater responsibility for their individual health then improving the healthcare system will not take place. To use the COVID-19 virus as an example, unless there is a fundamental shift in understanding of why a virus would take over a planet, now or in 1918 [when the Spanish flu pandemic struck], we’ll be faced with another virus [like COVID-19].  The reason a virus like the Coronavirus or even the flu virus will sweep across the planet is because there are plenty of sick people for the virus to clean up. It is not the intent of a virus to enter healthy human cells and begin destroying them. 

When viruses enter unhealthy human cells, they begin the process of removing the toxicity from them. Although viruses can make you sick, and if they do, they end up showing you how sick you were. In most cases, the virus will leave you healthier than when it started with you. That can be a hard concept to comprehend. People can improve their own health quickly by caring more about the things they are putting in their body and begin the process of cleaning up their bodies.  Otherwise, with the levels of toxicity that exist on this planet and within people’s bodies, the next virus will create another fearful event with more death and suffering than what we’re experiencing now.

Eileen Rivera: Whoa. That’s heavy stuff. What needs to shift?

Dr. Sean:  Humans need to take their presence on this earth 10 times more seriously than they do now.  What I mean by that is, humans need to care about themselves a lot more than they do now, they need to know that viruses take advantage of their toxic cells, and if they are serious about their healthy existence on this planet they would begin cleaning themselves up!  If you have a clean body, a virus like COVID-19 will have no interest in you.

Eileen Rivera:  What do you mean by cleaning up your body? You can’t mean, injecting Clorox or a disinfectant. 

Dr. Sean:  Besides eating cleaner with more fruits and vegetables, the first step to cleaning up your body is to remove excess protein.  Most people eat too much protein because they believe that protein is a good fuel source for your body.  Excess and improperly digested protein in a body is a fantastic catalyst for the replication of any virus and for the development of many of the autoimmune diseases that have people on edge these days.

Eileen Rivera:  If not protein, what are the best fuel sources for your body?

Dr. Sean:  The best fuel sources for the body are without a doubt fruits and vegetables. If you were to compare fuel to that of a car.  Think of fruit as putting 93 Octane into your body, very clean with very healthy fiber left over. Vegetables are a close second at about 87 Octane. Using fat for fuel can work but it is more relative to using diesel, not as clean.  The body can use protein for fuel, but at the expense of water and with the dirtiest residue left over. Protein is more like coal, burns longer but the hardest on the body.

Eileen Rivera:  What if you don’t have access to fresh fruit and vegetables, what do you eat? 

Dr. Sean:  You must always think when you’re about to put something in your mouth, what is the objective of the food I’m about to eat?  What is it going to do for my body?  I believe that if you were interested enough you could find fresh fruits and vegetables to eat. If you only have access to a 7-11, for example, there’s fresh fruit in there, like bananas, apples, oranges, and salads. Eating a bag of Cheetos and drinking a bottle of diet soda, what will that do for your body?  That’s literally putting poison in your body. I’m not saying that you should never eat or drink these things, but you need to understand them. This is what I mean about taking care of yourself so that a virus doesn’t have to take care of you.

Eileen Rivera: Wow, poison. You talk a lot about gut health and the importance of having healthy gut bacteria. You’re fond of saying that when you have good gut bacteria, it will tell your brain, “the world is good, I’ll be fine.”  You’re also famous for knowing when your patients have a parasite in their gut, and what that tells their brain, which is not so good.  How do you know when your patients have a parasite inside their bodies?

Dr. Sean:  I can tell right away when someone has a parasite in their body.  These are some of the common signs I notice quickly:  bloating, gas, migraine headaches, itchy skin, random pimples, skin blotches, asthma and allergies, obesity, feelings of hate and suicide, anorexia, excessive hunger with no weight gain, moodiness or depression.

The lower microbial world, which includes parasites, viruses, yeast, and even bad bacteria will cause low emotional states when overgrown in the gut and throughout the body and brain! It is important to understand that these bad bugs can only grow in an environment that you are creating mostly by poor food choices. The new science that has emerged in the last two decades proves that health can only be obtained by creating it for yourself. My book demonstrates on many levels why this science is true.

Eileen Rivera:  How can your book help people get healthier and survive COVID-19?

Dr. Sean:  I hope my book will help more people gain greater insight into how the body words, learn the most important factors that affect healing and ultimately how to restore long lasting health.  As I stated in the opening of my book, “when you get your body to function more effectively, you help yourself achieve a better level of health, both physically and emotionally.”  My hope is that my book will show more people that they have more power than they realize in reversing any unwanted health condition. The formula is rather simple, applying the new healthy habits is the hard part.

My vision for the book is to shift this country’s understanding of what it takes to be truly healthy, to reduce the fears associated with a virus coming to attack them, and ultimately improve the health care system by helping people get so healthy they remove themselves from it.

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To order a copy of Dr. Sean Woods’ book, The Healing Vibe: Understand the Cause and Overcome Disease, please visit:  https://www.panaceanutritionals.com/

For more information about Dr. Sean Woods and The Chiropractic Associates, 1240 N. Pitt Street, Alexandria, VA 22314, please visit: https://www.chiroassoc.net/

Eileen Cassidy Rivera is an award-winning healthcare technology executive and strategic communications and marketing professional. At present, Eileen is director of government services and industry positioning at one of the world’s largest healthcare technology companies.  She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband, three children and sweet dog, Lucky, and may be contacted at eileencrivera1@gmail.com or LinkedIn.