Dr. Joel Kerr, associate chiropractor, acupuncturist, personal trainer, and nutritionist

Dr. Joel Kerr takes a new approach to get patients into ‘Shape’

BY: Andrew Chin

As healthcare costs increase, there is a growing movement toward preventative care and treatment. Dr. Joel Kerr, an associate chiropractor, acupuncturist, personal trainer, and nutritionist at Shape Health and Wellness Centre in Toronto (shapetoronto.com), sat down with Sway to discuss holistic health care.

Why did you decide to attain such a diverse medical background?
“Treating patients should be done in the most natural, safest and integrated way possible. I wanted to bridge the gap between physical activity with a holistic form of healthcare that didn’t just approach the body as a unit of pain, but also looked at the physical and nutritional aspects. So I became a chiropractor. I studied acupuncture under medical doctors at McMaster and then combined the two.”

The Shape Centre offers unique health assistance — can you describe how Shape differs from other wellness centres?
“The beauty of Shape is that we have combined all of these therapies. All the practitioners perform Integrative Treatment Therapy, which combines the chiropractic Active Release Techniques (ART), primarily used in the sports community, with acupuncture and exercise. We do everything in-house and, in some cases, the chiropractor and acupuncturist facilitates care for our patients. Previously, some of our patients had to travel all over the city to see different specialists. We also have a nutritionist on staff who does assessments. We emphasize that what you eat is part of your health.”

Can you give us an example of a typical session?
“Well, let’s say a patient had a back problem. We would perform some manual therapy with the ART and use acupuncture to initiate the nervous system to basically wake up. When your body is in a state of pain, there’s a point where things are not functioning the way they need to so you need to wake it up. We combine that with some exercise to get the body moving again because when you’re injured, the last thing you want to do is move.”

Your treatments seem very individualistic, and move away from the one-size-fits-all approach. Is this an intentional focus?
“It definitely is. We like to advertise that it is individualized therapy. Each person comes to us with different ailments and we have to address them as individual cases. You can’t look at just a person’s knee for knee pain; you have to look at their hip, lower back and what they are doing for most of the day. You have to look at the individual as a whole and I try to educate my patients on this. We try to emphasize that you have to change your lifestyle, be a little bit more active and do things on a day-to-day basis that will make you happy because that’s what life should be all about.”