Ask most people what "recovery" means and they'll say sleep, or maybe a stretch here and there. Dr. Jasmine Bonner, DC spent this conversation with Mark Anthony making the case that recovery is really a whole system — sleep, water, food, and muscle care working together — and that the body most people are trying to "fix" with a single appointment usually needs to be prepped, not just cracked.
Bonner's path into chiropractic started in a pre-med track aimed at orthopedic surgery, until she sat in on a knee surgery in undergrad and realized, in her words, it "kind of wasn't the profession" for her. A representative from Life University visiting her class introduced her to chiropractic, and she ended up at Parker University in Dallas instead. What drew her in, she said, was the idea of holistic healing — making meaningful changes for patients without surgery or long-term medication. Today she runs a wellness-based practice, Spinal Bloom (spinalbloom.com), in the Austin, Texas area.
Key Takeaways
- Dr. Bonner runs a wellness-based chiropractic practice, Spinal Bloom, in the Austin, Texas area, blending instrument-assisted soft tissue work, massage gun therapy, cupping, and adjustments.
- She opens new-patient visits with lifestyle questions — sleep, water intake, diet, caffeine — because she sees pain as connected to those daily habits, not separate from them.
- A patient recovering from a moderate-to-severe car accident reported major shoulder pain relief after a single cupping session, and felt well enough to travel on vacation about six weeks later.
- Her adjustments come last in every visit, after massage gun, cupping, and scraping work relax the muscle — a sequence she says makes the adjustment itself gentler and lowers injury risk.
- She starts nutrition changes with whole foods, like a morning fruit-and-vegetable smoothie before coffee, and commonly discusses magnesium malate and vitamin D with patients dealing with ongoing stiffness.
The Toolkit: Massage Guns, Cupping, and Instrument-Assisted Soft Tissue Work
Bonner walked through the modalities she leans on before an adjustment ever happens, all filed under the broad umbrella of "instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilization":
- Massage gun (percussion) therapy: quick tapping that stimulates the nervous system and proprioception — Bonner said this is "really, really good" for athletes and is typically how she opens an appointment, to get the body "awake" before anything else.
- Instrument-assisted scraping: using stainless steel or plastic tools — or gua sha stones — with an oil or cream, worked directly over tight muscle knots. She described it as targeted rather than general, useful for adhesions and knots that build up in athletes or anyone doing repetitive lifting.
- Cupping therapy: suction cups lift the muscle to create a decompression effect, sometimes paired with gentle patient movement while the cups are on. Any resulting marks are from increased blood flow, not injury, and typically fade within four to five days — Bonner has patients ice the area afterward to speed that along.
Only after that soft tissue work does she move to the adjustment itself, which she described as deliberately gentle.
"It puts the responsibility of your health back on yourself. I think that's really what holistic health is."
— Dr. Jasmine Bonner, DCA Real Case: Recovering From a Car Accident
Bonner described a recent patient who came in after a car accident she characterized as moderate to severe. Before discussing the accident itself, Bonner asked her standard intake questions — sleep, water, diet — and found the patient was waking two or three times a night, wasn't drinking her recommended water intake, and was living on a granola bar and coffee until dinner at 7 or 8 p.m. "Your body's not going to be able to properly recover from that injury," Bonner said, "because it didn't even start on a good note."
She introduced cupping on the patient's traps, paired with gentle arm movement while the cups were on. The patient — sore but not in pain afterward — texted Bonner at 5:36 the next morning to say she'd been able to put on her bra and clothes without significant shoulder pain, after a single visit. Surgery had been on the table with the patient's other providers given the severity of the accident, but she continued with conservative care and felt well enough to go on vacation about a month and a half after the crash. Bonner was clear this was one patient's case, not a universal outcome, and noted the patient was still under continuing care, with the next phase focused on nutrition to support what the soft tissue work had started.
A second case Bonner mentioned involved a server whose job kept her arms raised overhead for long stretches, causing mid-back stiffness. After a course of cupping and muscle work, the patient noticed improved range of motion — able to turn and swing trays more freely instead of holding her arm in a fixed position.
Why the Adjustment Comes Last
Bonner's sequence in a typical appointment: massage gun first to stimulate the nervous system, then cupping for decompression (with movement exercises while the cups are on), then scraping if muscle knots remain, and the adjustment last. "I think that it's because I do those steps beforehand to make sure that I'm not just addressing the joints that need to work," she said — the goal is relaxed, well-circulated muscle tissue going into the adjustment, so the adjustment itself is "not painful, it's smooth." She argued that skipping the prep work raises the odds of strain, since a tight, tensed-up muscle around a joint is more prone to injury during manipulation than one that's already relaxed.
Sleep, Water, and Vitamins: Recovery Starts Before the Appointment
Water intake came up repeatedly as a foundation Bonner returns to with patients — she connected inadequate hydration to higher injury risk and to fatigue that people often misattribute to poor sleep alone. On nutrition, she starts patients with whole foods before supplementation: for one patient, that meant a morning smoothie (strawberries, kale, mango, a bit of honey) before coffee, to help regulate appetite through the day. When supplementation does come up, she said magnesium — specifically magnesium malate, which she ties to muscle recovery and stiffness — and vitamin D are the two she recommends most often, noting that patients low in vitamin D frequently test low in vitamin K as well. She was skeptical of relying on occasional vitamin infusions or injections as a substitute for consistent daily habits, saying she doesn't want patients to feel their only access to nutrients is an appointment.
Bonner's broader framing of "holistic" care: try the natural, low-risk options first — stretching, heat, ice, movement — and escalate only if those don't help. "If you try those things and they don't work," she said, "by all means go the more serious route."
