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Kids Clinic Spotlight: 
Practitioner Dr. TREEKA SULLIVAN
by Michele Aitken
 

The Healing Toby Network, Kids Clinic, would like to thank all practitioners and volunteers who contribute their time, money, skills and energy to offer holistic healthcare to the children of Alaska. Each issue, Alaska Wellness will be featuring one practitioner who volunteers at the Clinic. This issue, the Kids Clinic would especially like to thank Dr. Treeka Sullivan, D.C., for her loyal work with children at the Clinic. All the practitioners who work with children at Kids Clinic do so in a volunteer capacity, often giving up time and/or income from their own clinics to work on children for free. Because Dr. Treeka (as she is fondly known at Kids Clinic) volunteers at nearly every clinic, many children have experienced firsthand the gentle and wonderfully effective benefits of her chiropractic care.  

Dr. Treeka has been practicing chiropractic for 10 years and has always worked on children in her practice. She is also a certified Pediatric Chiropractor, though she started her holistic training as a massage therapist at age 14. She became a licensed massage therapist at 17 years old and has been practicing massage therapy for the last 33 years.

Dr. Treeka is passionate about her work and cites Ida Rolf (the creator of Rolfing) as her inspiration for studying massage and entering the world of holistic care so young. Since her background is in muscle work, Dr. Treeka knows that muscle work as well as structural work is needed to bring a body into balance. She incorporates many techniques in work, including body balancing, adjustments, structural integration, cranio-sacral modalities and rehabilitation.

Kids, however, are Dr. Treeka’s core passion. She works on children even in utero, and believes that the first five years are crucial to good spinal care. Dr. Treeka feels that we should look at our spine the way we look at our teeth. Just as it is important to brush and floss and get bi-yearly check-ups, so is it necessary to do the same for our spine. In other words, chiropractic is a preventive tool. If children receive good spinal care, they will grow up to have healthy spines and be pain-free adults.

Believing that education is key to overall health, Dr. Treeka devotes a portion of her practice to helping child clients learn that chiropractic is not scary, and that good adjusting does not have to hurt. Besides this, she is calm and down to earth. It is not uncommon to walk by her room at Kids Clinic and hear children giggling and having a good time during their treatments.

Dr. Treeka encourages pre-natal chiropractic care and has had great results turning breech babies by balancing the pelvis and broad ligaments that suspend the uterus. Given this adjustment, breech babies will most often turn on their own, usually within 3 to 5 treatments. Dr. Treeka also enjoys working on babies for birth trauma and colic. Other common ailments of children that can be addressed with chiropractic are ear infections, sports injuries and growth spurts. For teenage girls, low back pain and menstrual cycle issues (including hormone imbalances such as PMS) can be addressed. And, for teenage boys, sport injuries and rapid growth issues, are often focused upon.

We are blessed to have such a wonderful doctor on our volunteer staff for Kids Clinic and greatly appreciate Dr. Sullivan’s devotion and time. She is a great asset to our work!

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Michele Aitken works holistically with children of special needs. She is a therapist at Total Health, Vice President of the Healing Toby Network and Practitioner Director at Kids Clinic. Call 529-6921 or 563-2929.

Dr. Treeka Sullivan can be reached at 561-4325 or via email at docobak@aol.com

 

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Kids Clinic Spotlight: 
Practitioner Mack Rogers
by Michele Aitken
 

The Healing Toby Network is always appreciative for all the hard work and personal sacrifice of the wonderful practitioners who offer so much time and energy to the Kid’s Clinic. This issue, we highlight a newcomer to the Kids Clinic as well as to Alaska: acupuncturist, Mack Rogers.

Mack Rogers

Mack received his training at Houston American College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, and has been practicing professionally for the last 9 months. He and his wife Samm have a beautiful son, Mason. Mack is currently working at Total Health and in such a short time has gained a special place in our hearts and clinic.

When I asked Mack what motivated him to become an acupuncturist, he told me he was a chef looking for a new career. He liked the idea of holistic medicine and felt that it would still allow him a hands-on approach as well as a way to be creative in his life, for Chinese medicine is an art as well as a science. Mack went to massage school first and there met an interesting elderly Chinese man who introduced him to Chinese herbs. This man still works with cancer patients with great success and has been an inspiration to Mack through the years.

In working with the Kids Clinic, Mack said he found “an atmosphere of holistic medicine and education… It is a heart-based practice of medicine. Parents are searching for something else and are frustrated at times with Western medicine techniques of treating parts of a child instead of the whole person. I love not only the idea of the practitioners teaching and sharing their modalities, but the camaraderie of families, such as parents talking to other parents and sharing their challenges and successes with this kind of care. It is inspiring! The thing I love most about the Clinic is the expectation that we are all in this together. The families at Kids Clinic have a responsibility to give back to the community and share what they have learned with others.”

When I asked Mack about his perspective of holistic healthcare and how he wants to help it to evolve, he replied, “I feel at times we are caught in a cookie cutter system with Western medicine – it is generic to think that we are all the same. I have the opportunity to work with my clients and each one teaches me about their body. Each person is unique and shares with you their body genius – that innate gift of becoming whole and healthy.”

Mack has some friends who are medical doctors just starting their practices. He said that they, too, are realizing that they don’t have all the answers, that there is a new wave of realization of the value of holistic modalities. As Mack said, “I wish language would evolve between the two worlds so that we could work together as a community of healing. We need not be the Jack of all Trades, but rather respect the Masters of their own trades.”

Mack loves working on kids. “Children are very receptive. They are extremely in tune with their innate abilities for healing and move through their challenges much easier than adults.” Mack also noted that the children do better with the needles than the parents do watching! Mack feels this is because their systems are so sensitive and (depending on the maturity of the child) needles are usually a last resort.

On young children needles are only used in acute emergency situations. Mack explained that when his son was 10 months old, he had an extremely high fever. Instead of taking him to the emergency room, Mack was able to use acupuncture to bring the fever down in about ten minutes! He also uses acupressure, Tuina, and herbal formulas to work with children’s systems. ”A child’s innocence is their strongest tool! They don’t care how it works; only that it does. They don’t have a need to figure it out!”

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Michele Aitken works holistically with children of special needs. She is a therapist at Total Health, Vice President of the Healing Toby Network and Practitioner Director at Kids Clinic. Call 529-6921 or 563-2929.

Mack Rogers practices Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine at Total Health Inc.   Call 563-2929 for an appointment.