Speaker: 0:01

Welcome to the Heart Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism. So buckle up and let's go. Let your heart guide your business journey.

TOM: 0:36

Well, welcome back to the show. Get set, sit tight, because today we've pulled quite a delight. Welcome Dr. Sasha Blaskovich, our chiropractic champ who turned heads and necks into his blueprint to victory. With a dash of football and a half a pinch of humor, Dr. B bounces from the gridiron to the gurney. Right here on the Heart Led Business Show, we'll tap into the backbone of his thriving business. So hang on to your hats. It's about to get cracking. Dr. B, thanks for coming on to the show today. How are you doing today?

Dr. Sasha: 1:09

Great, Tom. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate this.

TOM: 1:12

Awesome.

Dr. Sasha: 1:13

Brilliant intro.

TOM: 1:14

Thanks. I have a really great AI that is able to make rhymes and alliteration very well. So which is my favorite thing. But the first question I always like to ask guests is what's your definition of a heart led business?

Dr. Sasha: 1:30

My definition of a heart led business is something that you dedicate your life to, that has meaning to you based of either an experience that you had that has changed your life. And or an experience that one of your family members or loved ones has had that has changed their life. And I've seen that happen. And so I think where you wake up in the morning and it's not a job and it's something that you don't think about retiring from that. Those are the definitions of a heart led business to me.

TOM: 2:00

Oh, very cool. So what inspired you to then start the heart led business? What's your story?

Dr. Sasha: 2:06

Well, initially, I, started the path of wanting to become a chiropractor because of a hip issue I was having when I was 10 years old at the time. I was one of the tallest and strongest kids my age, and I could dominate, but for whatever reason, at that age point 10, I started developing, after 20 minutes of running, a completely limp leg. So I could not even like bear weight on my leg, and went to see all the regular doctors and specialists, and their, solution was, hey, your muscles are not strong enough. Told my parents he needs to stop playing sports, because he's just not, built for this. And my dad was seeing a chiropractor for a herniated disc at the time, and so he asked the guy, like people ask me now about their kids, hey, do you want to check out my kid? He's got this going on, and he said, absolutely. I went with my dad, and the chiro checked me out. He did some x-rays, said, hey, you're 19 millimeters off in your pelvis, so your one leg is 19 millimeters longer than the other leg. So he proposed, eight treatments, and he gave me a lift in my shoe to wear as a heel lift temporarily. And, within, eight weeks that what I was having, problems with because I got taken there at the age of 12. So between 10 and 12, I was having these problems. And at the age of 12, I was taken there. So after two years of no answers, and basically you've got to stop playing sports, this guy fixed me in eight weeks with a heel lift and a couple adjustments. And I was just blown away, not only by the result, but by his bedside manner, by his enthusiasm for what he was doing, his stories about other patients that he was, dealing with that were very similar cases to mine. I was like, I got to do what that guy does. Cause I initially, as a kid wanted to become just a regular doctor. And that completely changed my path to, I no longer want to be a regular doctor in that, smelly, sterile, iodine, environment to doing this. And then, by the time I got into into chiropractic school, so from the age of 12, I was getting all my prerequisites to do that. By the time I got to Cairo, I had played university football which I wasn't supposed to do according to these doctors because I wasn't built for it. And I had sustained an injury concussion, they said, while I was playing university football, and then when I went into chiropractic school, this hip thing that I went into there with a passion with for became a passion for trying to figure out, what the heck happened to my head to, to cause these, symptoms that I was having after that injury. And, that led me to the path where I am now is that it was a, several decades of discovery and ongoing right now that brought me to the conclusion that, myself I did not sustain a brain injury. I sustained an upper neck injury, which affects my brain stem. And the vast majority of patients now that I deal with both locally in my US and my Canadian clinic, as well as international patients that contact me for advice and guidance as to what might be going on with them, inevitably the problem ends up being for the vast majority of us in the upper neck, thereby affecting the brainstem as opposed to in the brain or the skull, affecting the brain. And so the passion that I have for that stems from my own issues and the misdiagnosis of my issues, and then coming to, the end point where I've not only found the cause, but have been working on solutions, temporary solutions, albeit because it is a permanent injury that has no natural fix. It's not like a broken bone that mends itself and, you're good to go after, eight to ten weeks and you can, start doing whatever. These are fibrous connective tissues that I've injured and these other patients have injured that have no healing capacity. So once they've been damaged, you're left with either the muscles trying to cover up for that, Or not.

TOM: 5:28

So what's the treatment then for something like that?

Dr. Sasha: 5:31

Well, it varies anywhere from repeated and ongoing muscular reset for the muscles that are core muscles supporting the joint that has become unstable to certain injectables that are considered regenerative medicine, where the attempt or the intent is to somehow stimulator or promoter or initiate scarring of that tissue so that it thickens and hardens and becomes, more shortened. And in the more shortened phase of that, it stabilizes that excessive motion, thereby reducing the requirement for the muscles to repeatedly be ongoing tension and strain, and hopefully also reducing, thereby, by reducing the motion, reducing the compressive forces on the brainstem.

TOM: 6:15

Well, that's fascinating. The body.

Dr. Sasha: 6:18

The end stage of that, yeah, so in the end stage of that, the very most severe cases where the muscle work or the regenerative injection medicine has proven to not at all have any effect. And some of these patients are literally bedridden fusion surgery. So where they're literally that instability becomes immobilized by a, surgical screws, reducing the motion to zero at that spot, thereby taking away any brainstem compression that was being caused by that. And these people generally regain their life back. Basically, they go from being bedridden and not being able to do anything to, quote unquote normal people again.

TOM: 6:54

Wow. And that the brainstem is what communicates from the brain down to the rest of the body, right? So if anything is messed up there, that, that can affect many.

Dr. Sasha: 7:04

It's the junction box. Yeah, all the initiated initiated processes that start in the brain have to funnel through the brainstem to get to the body and all the sensory information coming from the body to tell the brain what's going on has to funnel through the brainstem. So that's all coordinated in the brainstem and cerebellum, which is just behind the brainstem. So that this all fires up on proper cylinders at all times, and we look like we're, creatures that are, that have it all together. And when that gets even mildly influenced by excessive bone motion you can have complete system shutdown. You can have people with heart issues or what appears to be heart issues, digestive issues, respiratory issues, visual issues, hearing issues urinary issues, coordination issues. And so these are all coming from different Body systems. And so to have all those problems occurring at the same time, so, the heart system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, it's hard to imagine that those systems can all be failing at the same time. So then, with logic and like, like I said, these decades of discovery, it comes to the point of saying, well, what centrally controls or connects to all those different systems and hey, should we look there? Yeah, we should. Because that inevitably is where the problem ends up being or getting discovered to be is at that junction point because it does connect to all those systems. And so when you have all those systems being somehow malfunctional it's not impossible, but it's almost impossible to have them as a system itself be failing. It's the control or the connection to the system neurally, which is what everything in our body functions on is a neural impulse. Without that, it doesn't do anything. And so it ends up being inevitably the brainstem in most of these people.

TOM: 8:42

Interesting. That's fascinating. And I like the connection between your passion started at 12 years old because of a hip issue. And that got you already at 12 years old studying for chiropractic. And that's amazing.

Dr. Sasha: 8:55

If that was an anomaly in and of itself, a 12 year old knowing what they want to do.

TOM: 8:59

Exactly! I think I had like five different professions, none of which panned out, of course, and now here I'm doing a podcast. So go figure. But then the head injury then got you to doing what you're doing now and being really globally recognized as a leader in finding solutions for the brainstem issue. Is that an accurate statement?

Dr. Sasha: 9:21

Yeah, I would call it more of a type of a scenario. Like I takes what takes one to no one. And it's more it's in a weird way, this I call it fortune by misfortune. And so I've had the misfortune of having this happen to me, but the fortune of being able to use the platform and the knowledge that I've obtained on my own self discovery to be able to provide and shed light on so many people's situations that are not at all being, dealt with in a global setting. So, like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to be, discussing something with somebody from Taiwan in a couple of days, as far as their imaging is concerned, that they were told was all normal and that, they're, concussive like, brain stem related symptoms are, there's no justification for it, but there is. I've looked at the guy's imaging and absolutely there's evidence there of what could be causing those symptoms. It's humbling to be able to be involved in these people's lives that are dealing with very similar scenarios to what I dealt with that was completely oblivious, an oblivious situation for the doctors that I was consulting with.

TOM: 10:24

Yeah. Well, I like what you said to a fortunate, unfortunate situation. And that's a, that's an interesting term. And I feel like a lot of passion based businesses or heartled businesses have that at the background, but we all have a choice, right? That you could have easily gone down the profit route and had just, a regular chiropractic office and just done the normal normal stuff and, or gone into medicine as well and done that. So what do you think it is that drove you to really double down on the passion and then make a business out of it?

Dr. Sasha: 11:01

Looking for my own answers and finding my own answers, like I said, being able to be involved in the lives of these patients that are having similar issues has given me a sense of energy or a level of energy that I don't think that I would have if I was just in a routine of doing what I was taught to do as a job. So this is literally a lifestyle. Like my whole day and night revolves around living with this thing. And I had, a small setback or a setback, I would say it was a small event, but it was a major setback a couple of years ago that I'm still dealing with and so just even seeing that and experiencing that, I knew what I had. I had a subsequent trauma and then how that subsequent trauma can affect me for, now at this point, almost five years later and still affecting me that in a normal logical sense, in a previous life before I learned all these things wouldn't have made sense, but now it makes a ton of sense because you're literally throwing additional fuel on a fire that's just simmered down and now it's, burning again. And a lot of patients, do have these similar kind of scenarios where what would seem logical, it doesn't make sense as to the magnitude of the symptoms they're having, but then when you ask more questions, when you get more history, when you look at more, imaging that's recent, or even, 5, 10, 15 years old, the forensic analysis of these cases becomes very obvious that what they're complaining about makes 100 percent sense. It's not, they're not malingering, it's not, they're not making it up, but that's all they're getting from physicians and loved ones because. All of us, the vast majority of us anyways, if you look at us externally, you're like, well, there's nothing wrong with that person. There's no missing limb. There's no, they don't have a patch on their eye. Like there's, they look perfectly normal and with it. And so, when the person then continues to complain about headaches and blurry vision and balance issues and all these other things it falls on deaf ears, at least eventually it falls on deaf ears. And so, the empowerment that I get in being able to relay these experiences to patients who are either just starting to experience, the pushback from loved ones or the pushback from doctors saying, get over it already or, suck it up. You look perfectly fine, but yet they're not, and they know they're not. And then coming to see or talking to someone like me, who's basically, I don't let them get a word in edgewise initially, because I explain all these things and they're like, that's me, that's exactly what I've been experiencing. And so the validation that they get in having somebody understand what they're going through is both empowering for them, but also empowering for me because I get to share those experiences and save them the 30 years of so much so that I, I was, I'm always telling these stories to patients and to friends and to other people that I once had a patient a couple of years back who was, who reluctantly came to me because his dad forced him to come to me because he was having post concussive issues that were repeated for like 10 years. And the dad was a patient of mine and he said, well, what about my son? What do you think? I'm like, Oh, I'd love to check him out. So I checked him out, did a motion x-ray on his neck and said, Hey, you have instability in your upper neck and this is explaining your symptoms. And I treated him a few times and he had some serious benefits from the treatment that he's like, tell me more. He was curious. And so I started explaining more to him in some of the sessions and going into some detail on the answers. And he says, you should write a book. And I said, I know. He goes people need to know about this. I said, I know it's on my bucket list. He goes, well, what about if I help you write a book? I'm like, tell me more. What do you mean? He goes, well, why don't I come and interview you at six o'clock in the morning on, on every Wednesday and we'll video record it and I'll put it all, we'll compile it all together and into a book. And I'm like, yeah, that's great. Sure. Okay. Sounds good. 25 year old. That's the last thing you expect is them to hold to their word, right? Modern day, millennial, 25 year old. And sure enough, every Wednesday morning he was there and, we did our, video recordings and we compiled that together into a book. And so now all those experiences that I've had, and he's had with different things that he's tried to mitigate his symptoms are now in that book. So we, and we named it Dr. B's concussion breakthrough with, because the breakthrough is the fact that I was told I had a head injury. However, discovered that it was an upper neck injury, and so the concussion breakthrough is that you can have the diagnosis of concussion, but the likelihood that you actually injured your brain is very low, but the likelihood that you injured this upper part of your neck, which then affects your brainstem, which then also affects your brain, is extremely high. So just the notion of connecting those dots for people that read the book or listen to the audiobook so that they can at least take that to their physicians to go. Hey, we never checked on my upper neck. What do you think about that? I've been having these brain symptoms or brain like symptoms, why don't we check my upper neck so at least to get that ball rolling? And so a lot of patients people have you know contacted me and said when I read this book It's like i'm reading about myself And there, and, fast forward now, it surprises me and it shocks me every day as to how many people around the world have a varying degree problem that is this problem to varying degrees. Like it's so prevalent that I would say it's infinitely more prevalent than I would have ever imagined.

TOM: 15:49

I bet that book is, just affecting people so, so positively as well, like you said, so, shifting kind of gears to the business side. So, yeah, you're running a business out of your passion, but at the end of the day it's a business, right? So there needs, you need to get paid, you got bills to pay, lights to turn on and all that. How do you balance the profit side of the business with the heart side of the business?

Dr. Sasha: 16:18

Well, maybe it's kind of cliche, but I don't really pay attention to the profit side as much. It doesn't interest me at all. Like I, I thought about that when I was, first getting into my career that you have your student, your loans, you have all these other things that you're like, well, you go to the end of the day and you're like, well, how much did I make today? And how am I going to be able to, or am I going to be able to, pay down the loan and pay for the rent and all these other things to pay for my staff? And you get fast forward to a point where I am now and that happened a long time ago where just by being passionate about what I'm doing and just going that extra mile results in me not having to think about marketing or advertising or like the bottom end of things because just the passion for the work and the effort that you put in, and it doesn't always render results because, there's so many factors that affect The result the patient gets, but just the time and the effort and the dedication that I put in, like I said, it's become a way of life as opposed to a job. So I'll be looking at imaging and doing research at, 11, 12 o'clock at night that I'm not getting paid for, but it's just interesting to me to try to learn this stuff, both for the patient, but also then obviously for me. So there's a, pseudo selfish nature in what I'm doing because it's giving me more information on me, but at the same time for the individual I'm trying to help. And so, getting up in the morning and not seeing it as a job and going to bed at night after having just, closed my laptop after doing research, which again, didn't seem like a job. It seemed like just something I was interested in looking up and repeating that day after day again, it's cliche, but the other stuff falls into place.

TOM: 17:49

Yeah.

Dr. Sasha: 17:49

The notion that, I don't ever see myself retiring from this, I see myself, modifying what I'm doing and, focusing on certain things that are, most effective, both for myself and for, other individuals that I'm trying to help.

TOM: 18:00

And do you see yourself passing down that knowledge to another group of younger

Dr. Sasha: 18:06

Yeah. And again, it's not something that I'm proactively doing or trying to do, but I do get approached on a regular basis to, one on one and teach or help learn or answer questions and and even just here in my Canada, US location here, I was blessed to have a young gentleman who graduated about four years ago shadow and intern with me for three years, and he's, I would say about as close to a clone of me as you can get, He literally absorbed everything that I've been doing and not so that I, not so much that I sat him down and taught him, but he observed and took on and attempted and tried and did. And so I would say he's absolutely as close to you as close to a clone that you can get of me. And there are other people, other physicians and practitioners that have inquired as well, and, constantly harping on me to start teaching this stuff and providing lectures and things. And so that is one of the things that's on my, on my list of things to do in the upcoming year and a half is to actually start, presenting lectures from the basic anatomy of this thing to the more complex, neurophysiology and neuroradiology of this phenomenon and helping more practitioners out there get proficient at this. And some of them, albeit have very similar problems too. There's a couple of practitioners that I've already, encountered and dealt with, and I regularly answer their questions and feel their calls because they're also dealing with the same problem themselves. And they're also then trying to help their own patients with that knowledge. And so it's empowering for them. It's and it's empowering for me as well.

TOM: 19:31

And so the old adage of do what you love and you never work a day of your life or, throw yourself into the passion and the profits will come. Sounds like it's worked out very well for you.

Dr. Sasha: 19:43

Well, it's comfortable. It can definitely never, not at all say that, I could, quit right now and go live on a beach somewhere. That's not even anywhere close to that, nor would I want want

TOM: 19:51

to. No, or would you want to, I think that's part of the key, right?

Dr. Sasha: 19:54

And in all reality, like this level of controlled dysfunction that I'm in is giving me energy. And so I think whenever I have a break or take a, a long weekend or whatever else, I feel miserable. And it's not because I feel miserable because of the people I'm around. It's because this tunnel that I'm in of doing this work and dealing with these people provides me energy because I'm dealing with me basically. Day in and day out.

TOM: 20:17

That's fascinating. I had another interview earlier today, the same, it's like, you put the people first. And then everything else just falls into place. And it might not be a direct correlation one to one. It might not happen immediately, but for the long term, it happens. And I think a lot of love, like for profit businesses that only think about the profit, it's very short sighted. It's like, what's our quarter going to look like? What's the month or what's the day looking? And you can see that in the long term profits versus, it's like the tortoise and the hare, right? And the heartled is the hare. And the, the profit is the tortoise. But I'm sorry, the other way. So you have the slower grind to it, but it's much more fulfilling than if you were just chasing after the dollars.

Dr. Sasha: 21:08

Yeah, absolutely. And it's hard in this day and age where, a quick fix and should happen yesterday is the mentality. It's really hard to to buckle down and say, okay, I'm going to do what's right. I'm going to do what feels right because you can sleep better at night and you can, enjoy what you're doing. And then fast forward five years from now, fast forward seven years from now, all the stuff that I thought I wanted five or seven years ago is actually happening as a byproduct of having been passionate and going the extra mile and having dealt with people to the extent of how, what I wanted to have been dealt with if I was in their shoes. And then getting to the point of where that all blends out and then you just go forward and grow as much as you can on a daily basis from there, but comfortably grow.

TOM: 21:52

Yeah, I love that. That's really good advice for other heart led businesses that might be struggling with just like, maybe having a bad month or two, two bad months, three bad months that, just stay the course, keep the people first and it will work out as long as your passion is there and your heart's in it as well.

Dr. Sasha: 22:11

Yep. And there's been enough enough books written out there that people can gravitate to and get an idea of that. Like, there's one that a lot of people talk about called Think and Grow Rich. I'm sure you've heard of it. Napoleon Hill. And there's a more modern day version of that called Three Feet from Gold. And both of those basically ultimately what the gist of the books is basically is don't give up because usually at the point where you're wanting to give up the most is the point where you're actually about to have your breakthrough. So with the three feet from gold notion is it's the main story is this guy who bought this massive piece of land in California and was mining it for gold and bought all this expensive equipment and all this investment into it and his family was telling him, you're an idiot. You got to, you're not going to do this and blah, blah, blah. And he kept mining. And then he got to the point where he's like, okay, they're obviously right. And then he sold everything for cents on the dollar to a local guy who literally just went three feet to the side of where this path was going and started, trenching further and found the largest vein of gold ever found in California and became a multi whatever at that time. And it was literally like, yeah, it was like you're at that point. And you don't know that you're at that point. Because you'll give up and start something else and you would have missed out on, you'd end up missing out on something that was right around the bend there, had you just stayed the course. And that's the gist of all these stories in these books is that, all these uber successful people like Henry Ford and whoever else, the reason that they got to that point is because they actually never gave up. And it's just a matter of time. And if you don't limit your time to, okay, well, this doesn't work out in three years. I'm giving up and I'm doing something else. That's the general mentality of the world right now is that, you give a fixed time as opposed to, give a fixed time. And if it doesn't work out, extend it a little bit more and just keep going and dealing with the adversities and fighting through all the battles that you got to do to get to the end of that finish line that you will reach that finish line.

TOM: 24:00

Yeah. As long as your passion is still in it and you haven't given up internally. Yeah. That's, powerful. Yeah. Three feet from gold.

Dr. Sasha: 24:08

And again, if that passion from the onset is not driven by profit, but drip, so this three feet of gold might not be a good example, because I think the passion for that was finding the gold.

TOM: 24:17

Of course.

Dr. Sasha: 24:17

Not digging. Right. So, and so with, other careers, like my passion is the career itself or doing what I'm doing and it's not gold

TOM: 24:25

Yeah. But it can be at some point you keep doing it potentially. Yeah.

Dr. Sasha: 24:30

As a byproduct.

TOM: 24:31

And not the initial just focus. Yeah. Love it. Thanks this great conversation. I really appreciate your story and what you're doing for people. That seemed like there's no hope. Right? And now you're giving them hope and giving them solutions as well, which is really great. It's no wonder you're globally recognized for the work that you do. Congrats on that. How can people find more about you and, if they're having these issues, like what can they do to find you and get support perhaps?

Dr. Sasha: 25:01

I've got a lot of videos posted on my YouTube channel that a lot of them, if they're not for comical relief of, some kind of fail or injury video that is just for comic relief, like I said, a lot of the rest of it is educational and deals with this sort of general region. And so that YouTube channel is is Dr. B's injury resources. So DR, and then B's injury resources. And like I said, most of the content on there somehow relates to this region or at least the serious content that's not intended for laughs. The other way, so that's for general information and learning about a lot of these things. Because there's a lot of podcasts that I've been on that sort of touch on this. On this basis, and then the other place is my clinics. The name of the clinics is the Whiplash Clinics. So the website for that is whiplashclinic.com. So people can contact me through. There's a contact form and then the international patients that want to bypass actually a clinical setting and just have either a virtual assessment of their imaging and a zoom explanation of the findings of that imaging, they would go to drblaskovich.com. So Dr, then my last name. And that's a website that I had created so that it would help the international patients have easier access that doesn't have to run through a receptionist.

TOM: 26:17

Cool. We'll link all that into the show notes as well. So if you're interested in learning more about Dr. B and the work that he's doing, then definitely click on those links and get over to his website. So just Reminder to our lovely listeners and guests, thank you so much for tuning in for today's show. We really appreciate that. If you found this advice helpful, find the show helpful. Please share it with a friend or colleague that could use the advice that we share on the show. And if you could give us a rating and review, we'd certainly appreciate that as it does help get the word out about the show. So until next time, lead with your heart.

Speaker 2: 26:59

You've been listening to the Heart Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.