“The Power That Made the Body Heals the Body”: Inside the Conversation With Dr. Travis Ring

Most conversations about chiropractic start and end with back pain. Dr. Travis Ring's conversation with Mark Anthony started somewhere else entirely — with the phrase that gives the episode its title: the power that made the body heals the body. Over the course of the conversation, Ring, who has run his own practice, Eastern Oklahoma Chiropractic, since 2010, used that phrase as a throughline connecting his clinical philosophy, his Christian faith, and his own approach to nutrition.

Ring's path into chiropractic began as a patient, not a practitioner. He grew up in a family with no history of college education, arrived at school on a baseball scholarship with pre-med ambitions, and then sustained a back injury during his college years that sent him to a local chiropractor for the first time. He described being struck by the entire process — the X-rays, the explanation, the treatment, and ultimately the results — enough that it redirected his career. Sixteen years into running his own practice, he's married with two teenage daughters and describes his role less as fixing patients and more as removing whatever is interfering with a body that already knows how to heal itself.

Chiropractic Care for Every Age — From Newborns to Nonagenarians

Ring described a fairly traditional first visit — X-ray analysis, a case history, and manual adjustments aimed at restoring normal spinal movement and taking pressure off the nervous system. Where his practice differs from the public's mental image of chiropractic, he said, is in who he sees: patients ranging from a few days old to patients in their 90s. Traditional complaints like back pain, neck pain, and headaches remain the most common reason people walk in the door, but he argued that's a narrow view of what chiropractic care is for.

Parents are often skeptical that a newborn needs chiropractic care at all, Ring said, largely because they picture the twisting and popping associated with adult adjustments and can't imagine it applied to an infant. His argument for pediatric care rests on the birth process itself: months spent cramped in the womb, followed by a delivery that — even without complications — can involve real pulling and twisting of a newborn's neck, more so when vacuum or forceps extraction is used. Because infants can't describe pain, he said, that early spinal stress tends to show up instead as colic, reflux, or recurring ear infections rather than a complaint parents would think to bring to a chiropractor. As children grow into toddlers, the repeated falls of learning to walk add their own small, cumulative stress to the spine — what Ring called "micro traumas" that rarely look serious in the moment but can add up.

The same logic applies to structural issues like scoliosis, which Ring said tends to develop and become noticeable during the early teenage years. Mark Anthony, who has lived with a mild spinal curvature since childhood, noted during the conversation that chiropractic wasn't widely known when he was young enough for it to have made a difference. Ring's point was straightforward: the earlier a structural issue is caught, the more room there is to correct it, rather than manage it once a person reaches adulthood.

The Philosophy Behind “The Power That Made the Body Heals the Body”

Ring described himself as a man of faith who sees the body's healing capacity as something built in from conception — and, in his view, a chiropractor's role is less to heal a patient than to clear whatever is interfering with a process the body is already equipped to do. Functionally, that means restoring proper movement and alignment of the spine in service of the nervous system, which he described as the system that controls and coordinates every organ, tissue, and cell in the body. When spinal dysfunction puts that system under stress, he said, the body loses some of its capacity to recover, which shows up first as pain and, left alone, can contribute to broader dysfunction.

That contrast, Ring said, is the whole argument for chiropractic's philosophical starting point: healing isn't something a doctor adds to the body from the outside, it's a capability the nervous system already has, and his job is to remove interference — primarily spinal dysfunction — that keeps it from working at full capacity.

Mindset, Stress, and the Body's Two Nervous Systems

Ring was equally direct about mindset. Patients who walk into treatment expecting it to help, he said, tend to do better than patients who arrive doubtful or discouraged — a pattern he connected to the body's two-mode nervous system. The sympathetic branch handles "fight or flight," and the parasympathetic branch handles "rest and digest," and in his description a body can't meaningfully do both at once. Someone who stays chronically stressed or quick to anger, he said, keeps their body in sympathetic overdrive, which crowds out the rest-and-digest state where most physical recovery actually happens.

The conversation also touched on faith and community as sources of that mindset. Ring described faith as something a person can "borrow" early on from the people around them — church, in his case — until they develop their own, and pointed to the familiar idea that people tend to become like the five people they spend the most time with. He was careful to frame lasting change as gradual rather than instant: real change, he said, takes time and repetition, even if a shift in direction can start immediately.

Nutrition, Food Quality, and the Supplement Dr. Ring Takes Daily

Nutrition came up as Ring's other major lever for health, driven by his view that the modern food supply has grown steadily more processed and nutrient-depleted. Since December 2024, he's taken a daily supplement made from moringa oleifera — a plant he described as native to tropical regions of Africa, South Asia, and Central and South America — sourced, he said, from shade-dried, pesticide-free plantations in India. He described it as delivering a broad spread of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and amino acids in a single daily packet, and said he recommends it to patients dealing with chronic joint pain in particular.

Ring was clear that he's personally affiliated with the company that produces the supplement, and that his own experience with it — better energy, less brain fog, milder joint pain — is anecdotal. He said he's heard similar reports from patients, friends, and family, including some who noticed changes in blood pressure, blood sugar, or prostate-related markers, but he did not present those as clinical outcomes, and none were verified during the conversation. As with any supplement, listeners should treat that as one chiropractor's personal recommendation rather than a substitute for medical evaluation.

Taken together, the episode functions less as a pitch for any single treatment and more as Ring's working theory of health — spine, nervous system, mindset, faith, and nutrition treated as parts of one system, with the body doing the actual healing once whatever is in the way gets cleared out.