Why the Spine Can Make You or Break You: Inside the Conversation With Dr. Andrew Harris

Most people don't think about their spine until it forces them to. Dr. Andrew Harris, a chiropractor who spent this conversation with Mark Anthony walking through exactly how that breakdown happens — quietly, over years, long before a single symptom shows up — has built his entire practice around catching it earlier.

Harris's path into chiropractic wasn't the plan. He studied electrical engineering at Wilkes University, then went to work at a nuclear power facility in Georgia while playing rugby on the side — nearly ten years and, by his count, around 19 seasons of it. He'd already been accepted into the Medical College of Georgia when a severe back injury sustained on the rugby pitch sent him looking for answers. What he found instead was chiropractic care, and a philosophy, at 23, built around letting the body heal itself rather than reaching first for drugs or surgery. He put medical school aside, trained at Life Chiropractic College, and graduated in March 1999.

He spent his first 15 years in practice in Pennsylvania running a family-based clinic, Harris Family Chiropractic, where he estimates 78 to 80 percent of patients represented multiple generations of the same family, and roughly 120 children were born into those patient families over that stretch. About a decade ago he relocated to Ormond Beach, Florida, just north of Daytona. The patient population there skewed older and more transient, and within two or three years the severity of the disc problems he was seeing — some of the worst backs he says he'd encountered in his career — pushed him to retool the practice entirely around spine and disc care. That practice is now Florida Spine & Disc Institute.

Reading the Spine: Alignment, Discs, and a Simple Rule of Thumb

Harris's core argument is that spine health isn't a separate wellness category — it's the foundation underneath whatever else someone considers "healthy," whether that's diet, exercise, or anything else. Left unmanaged, he says, breakdown isn't a possibility, it's a timeline:

When a patient does come in, X-rays are the first step — used to identify degeneration, disc integrity, and alignment before anything else. Harris described a simple diagnostic rule of thumb: pain that lasts more than three or four days isn't a muscle issue, it's a nerve issue. From there it comes down to one of two causes, or both — the spine's alignment is off and pinching a nerve, or a disc is breaking down and damaging one. His office then uses specialized equipment intended to help take pressure off the disc and let inflammation around the disc and nerve settle on its own, with the stated goal of resolving pain without relying on medication or surgery.

By his account, the low back trouble spots he sees most often are the L4-L5 and L5-S1 discs, while in the neck it's the C4-5, C5-6, and C6-7 discs. Beyond localized pain, he pointed to sciatica — nerve irritation radiating down the leg — and radiculopathy in the hands, where patients lose sensation and motor function, as the other conditions he treats regularly.

The Kinetic Chain: How Feet, Knees, and Hips Connect to the Back

Harris doesn't treat the spine in isolation. In 2024 his practice added equipment intended to help create space in a breaking-down knee joint and support regeneration of the meniscus — the cartilage pad between the femur and tibia that thins with age and is a common driver of knee replacements in patients now in their 40s and 50s. The goal, he said, is to help patients avoid or delay that surgery, since a knee replacement done at 45 or 50 often means a second one — sometimes on both knees — fifteen to twenty years later.

An avid runner of some 30 years himself, Harris described the knee as "a conduit" between the hip and ankle. He estimated roughly 80 percent of people pronate — meaning flatter arches that, over hundreds of thousands of cumulative steps, wear unevenly on the knee — and pointed to supportive footwear and orthotics as a way to help stabilize the ankle and reduce that downstream strain on the knee, hip, and low back. In his framing, the foot, knee, hip, and spine form one kinetic chain, and when one link breaks down, "it's a domino effect" that tends to pull the others down with it.

That same whole-body view shapes how he approaches neuropathy. When a patient presents with numbness or pain that could be nerve-related, his office works to determine whether it's coming from the spine itself or from a metabolic cause — poor circulation associated with type 2 diabetes, for instance, which over years can cause patients to lose feeling in their hands and feet. The treatment approach differs depending on which it is, since working on the disc alone won't resolve a circulation-driven problem.

Everyday Habits Dr. Harris Says Matter Most

Asked what people can do before a problem ever lands them in a chiropractor's office, Harris kept coming back to sitting. He cited an estimate that the average American spends 37 years of their life in a seated position — a compressive load on the low back that he says is compounded by looking down at a phone. His advice for anyone at a desk job: get up, move, and consider a standing desk, even if it only cuts sitting time by three or four hours a day, which he estimated as a 25 to 30 percent reduction in load on the spine.

Footwear came up repeatedly. Harris said he's a proponent of replacing athletic shoes roughly every six months, noting that a sneaker's cushioning tends to lose its integrity somewhere around 300 to 400 miles of use even if the shoe still looks fine. During the conversation he ballparked an entry-level over-the-counter orthotic in the neighborhood of $45 to $50, and a solid pair of running shoes somewhere around $150 to $180, and recommended a proper fitting and gait assessment at a specialty running retailer — he mentioned Fleet Feet by name — over guessing at a brand.

His broader philosophy traces back to the same "spinal hygiene" idea:

His conclusion: don't wait for pain to be the signal. He recommends getting the spine X-rayed once a year, the same way someone would get an annual dental checkup, so degeneration can be caught and addressed before it becomes a bigger problem.

Who This Conversation Is For

If you sit for most of your day, have been told your back or knee pain is "just part of getting older," or simply haven't thought about your spine since the last time it hurt, this episode is a plain-language look at how a chiropractor who specializes in spine and disc care actually thinks about prevention, diagnosis, and when non-surgical treatment can help.