Each Tuesday, The Citizen features a health professional from the Finger Lakes community in The Banks:

This week, we spotlight Auburn chiropractor Brian Landers.

Brian Landers

Age: 35

Hometown: Auburn

Occupation: Chiropractor

Q. What is the most rewarding part of your job?

A. Seeing a change in people, and helping people out.

Q. What is the most challenging?

A. The hardest part would be that healing is a process. There are many times that you do the best you can do for a person and they may still feel pain as healing can take time. Sometimes they have had an issue for too long before seeking care or the problem has progressed to the point that is beyond the body's healing ability.

Q. What is the most common reason people come to you?

A. In the end, it all comes down to the effect of stress. When there has been too much chemical, physical or emotional stress beyond the person's ability to adapt to it, they have interference. It's kind of like blowing a fuse.

Q. Describe your ideal patient/client.

A. I think someone that wants to take some personal responsibility for their health. They're looking at dealing with the wellness aspects, working on physical, emotional and chemical stresses. When they start getting into the idea of wellness and they notice more energy.

Q. You practiced in Auburn, moved out of state, and now you are back. What was the biggest factor in your relocating back to Auburn?

A. Being able to take care of patients I formerly took care of. And my family is here, that made a big difference. The model I have in health is a little bit different than a lot of the other chiropractors .

Q. How is your practice different?

A. You can kind of break up chiropractic into vitalistic and mechanistic. In mechanistic, you see everything as a product of chemical, electrical and mechanical forces. Vitalism sees those are there, but there is also a life force or intelligence working in the body. It kind of shifts the goal of care from just being pain and symptom oriented to being more wellness-based.

Q. What drove you to be a chiropractor?

A. My mother has had rheumatoid arthritis since I was 3. I grew up watching what I saw as a kind of failure of the medical establishment. Basically the only solutions they had was to put more drugs into her body or cut things out.

Q: What's the most common misconception you hear from patients/clients?

A: I think the biggest things are people don't have the full understanding of what chiropractic can actually offer them. It literally can affect every aspect of your life just by changing the way your nervous system is working. The other thing is people generally understanding of all the predisposing factors of what cause the issue in the first place. Say you have a truck driver who has had continual compression and decompression of the spine while driving. They have that, then they reach behind to pick up a pin and blow out their back. They think it is one instance which caused it, thus one adjustment will take care of it.

Q: If you weren't in the health care field, what career or field would you do?

A: I'd probably be doing something in psychology, or possibly teach philosophy. Or I would go into science.