Dr. Dominick J. Ranieri III’s journey towards wellness, the brain and chiropractic medicine started when he was an elite teenage soccer player.
He was a goalkeeper, and they can get hit a lot. Injured. His father’s best friend was a chiropractor and recommended he go to one; it worked. Meanwhile, he saw friends and family members go a different route through more pharmaceutical-based methods, and become addicted to opioids. As an undergraduate at Syracuse, seeing that – and knowing what different outcomes he’d experienced – inspired him to go to chiropractic school.
While in chiropractic school, he had a mountain biking accident. He fell, hit his head, slid, and hit his head again, this time on a rock. Two-and-a-half weeks later, he was set to take his first licensing exam. But now, he could barely speak and was sensitive to noise and light.
“This brain injury knocked me for a loop,” he says. “I was a different person, my personality changed.” But, he says, Life University in Georgia, where he studied the science, philosophy and art of chiropractic, is a pioneering place in the functional neurology branch of chiropractic. He received cutting-edge treatment and within two weeks, he was back to himself. He passed the exam on his first try and became a believer in what he calls human optimization.
On July 3, Dr. Ranieri’s Fort Lauderdale practice celebrates its first anniversary in Fort Lauderdale. In less than a year, the practice has established itself as a place that does chiropractic a different way.
When treating patients, Dr. Ranieri thinks about the spine, and he also thinks about the brain.
“When the spine misaligns, it interrupts the flow of information between the brain and the rest of the body,” he says.
When he first sees a new patient, he uses technology to map out where there’s dysfunction in the nervous system. Next he takes x-rays of those areas to see why. “Then we work to reconnect the brain to the body so that the body can work the way it was intended to.”
“The brain controls everything down to a cellular level,” he says. “There’s not anything that happens in the body that’s not controlled by the brain. The first thing we do is work to educate people on how the brain works.”
In less than a year, he’s already begun to see the sorts of results he wants.
“We’ve been seeing some great growth,” he says. “Our patients have been getting some fantastic results. People are really happy in the practice because we practice chiropractic in a different way.”
One patient came in needing to hold their head to get out of bed because of an unstable neck. They’d been living with that for two-and-a-half years. After the first appointment, they never had to do that again. Another elderly patient had a difficult time getting around and lifting his legs enough to get, say, up a curb from the street. After several appointments, he could use stairs again.
It’s a new way of doing things, and Dr. Ranieri thinks that particularly in a post-Covid world, people are ready for that.
“We have a lot more people who are looking for a natural way to not just heal the body, but prevent us from even getting sick,” he says, calling the result a patient’s “metaphorical suit of armor.”
His practice is a family practice, a choice that was inspired by another event in his life. His nephew was born with torticollis, a condition that’s not serious in adults but that is frequently treated with invasive medicine in infants. Dr. Ranieri convinced the parents that a chiropractic route was better; and the results were life changing. So today, people of all ages are welcomed at the practice, as Dr Ranieri says, “from cradle to grave.”
On July 3, there will be a big party to celebrate the one year anniversary in Flagler Village. In the future, Dr. Ranieri hopes to invite even more people to experience chiropractic care as they hadn’t considered it before.
For more information, please visit c2cchiropractic.com.
