Dr. Lacey Mays never planned on becoming a chiropractor because of a business degree — she got there because of migraines. A neurologist referred her to a chiropractor, the headaches eased, and the holistic approach to care stuck with her. From there she earned an MBA so she'd know how to run a business, went through chiropractic school, and eventually opened her own practice. Today, as Brood Balance Wellness, she sees families broadly, but mothers and babies make up the bulk of her caseload — and this conversation with Mark Anthony covers why.
What sets her practice apart isn't just who she sees, but how she sees them: entirely mobile, in patients' homes, and filtered through a functional-medicine lens that looks for root causes rather than just adjusting and moving on.
Key Takeaways
- After working as an associate at a brick-and-mortar practice, Dr. Lacey Mays of Brood Balance Wellness went fully mobile in April, bringing chiropractic care directly into patients' homes.
- Her practice centers on mothers and babies, built almost entirely through word-of-mouth referrals from patients, midwives, doulas, and a local pediatrician.
- She blends chiropractic adjustment with functional medicine — including DUTCH hormone testing and additional nutrient panels — to look for the root cause behind symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, hair loss, and poor temperature regulation.
- Baby adjustments are very gentle — she compares the pressure to testing a piece of produce at the grocery store — and she screens every baby she sees for tongue and lip ties, referring out to pediatric dentists when needed.
- Dr. Mays doesn't expect mobile chiropractic to replace brick-and-mortar care, but sees it growing alongside it, especially for parents of young children and homebound patients.
From Migraines to a Mobile Practice
After leaving an associate role at another practice, Dr. Mays struck out on her own — and chose to go fully mobile rather than open a traditional office. She'd only been doing it since April, just a few months before this conversation was recorded, but the transition has gone smoothly: patients from her old practice sought her out, and new ones have come almost entirely through word of mouth, including referrals from midwives, doulas, and a local pediatrician. The model also builds in flexibility that a fixed office can't. As she put it, a sick child no longer has to mean a canceled appointment: "I'll come to you. Well, I'm sick. That's fine. This is a perfect time for you to be adjusted."
Intentional Healing: Functional Medicine and Women's Hormone Health
The episode's theme, intentional healing, comes from a personal place. Dr. Mays is a mother of two who has been open about her own struggles with fertility and miscarriage, and it shapes how she works with other women who feel dismissed after a doctor's visit ends with "your labs are normal." Functional medicine, she explained, means looking past whether a result falls inside a normal range and asking whether a patient is actually at an optimal level — because, in her view, many women are running on stress hormones, cortisol, and coffee just to get through the day. In her own practice she layers lab and hormone testing, including DUTCH testing, on top of chiropractic adjustment, aiming at root causes rather than symptom management alone.
She described the everyday warning signs of hormonal or nervous-system imbalance that patients don't always connect to one another: disrupted sleep, fatigue, brain fog, anxiety-type symptoms, hair loss, brittle nails, poor temperature regulation, dizziness, and restless legs. Her intake process leans heavily on listening before adjusting — she noted that roughly 90 percent of a diagnosis comes from a patient's history, including past trauma, which she believes the body's fascia holds onto.
"The most important thing to me is that people just want to be heard. Sit down — let's listen to what's truly going on. What's happening in your day-to-day life? How stressful is it, and how are you managing that stress?"
— Dr. Lacey MaysChiropractic Care for Babies: Gentle Adjustments and Oral Ties
Babies make up a significant share of Dr. Mays' practice, and she was direct that infant adjustments look nothing like the viral cracking-and-popping videos people picture. A baby's nervous system develops in relationship with the mother's during pregnancy, she explained — if the mother is carrying a lot of stress or tension, the baby is very likely, in her estimate "easily 90 percent" of the time, to come out tense as well. The technique itself is intentionally light: "It's like the pressure that you would use to test a tomato or a grape at the grocery store. It's very gentle — there's no twisting, no loud pops."
She also checks every baby she sees for oral ties — tongue and lip ties — which she connects to the same fascia network running through the body. Left unaddressed, oral ties can make it hard for a baby to latch well, leading to mouth blisters, cracked and bleeding nipples for the mother, difficulty gaining weight, and more gas and spit-up from swallowing air during a poor latch. When she suspects a tie, she refers the family to a pediatric dentist for evaluation and a possible frenulum release, sometimes alongside a myofunctional therapist, since treating the tie itself sits outside a chiropractor's scope. Parents dealing with latch or feeding struggles may need to bring their baby in weekly rather than monthly, especially while a referral is in progress. After a session, she said, parents often notice a baby is hungrier, sleeps better, or has an easier bowel movement — signs, in her view, that the adjustment supported the parasympathetic "rest and digest" side of the nervous system.
The Future of Mobile Care, and Who This Conversation Is For
Asked whether mobile chiropractic is the future of the field, Dr. Mays was measured rather than evangelical. She doesn't expect it to overtake brick-and-mortar practices — transporting a table and equipment to every visit gets harder as a practice adds more modalities — but she does expect more mobile practitioners working alongside traditional offices. From her base in Jefferson City, Missouri, she currently covers roughly a 40-mile radius, including the Lake of the Ozarks, Columbia, and the smaller towns in between, with a travel fee built in for the distance.
This conversation is a good fit for expecting or new parents curious about in-home care, anyone wondering whether a fussy, gassy, or hard-to-latch baby could be dealing with tension or an oral tie, and women who've been told their labs are "normal" but still don't feel like themselves.
