Chiropractor Dr. Charles Pray has a bone to pick with traditional medicine. He says the average new patient at his Ringgold, Ga., clinic has already seen two other doctors, and received two other diagnoses, to no avail. They went in with pain, and they came out with pain pills. Or worse, they went in with pain, and came out with antidepressants.
“If they weren’t in pain, maybe they wouldn’t be depressed,” Pray says. The problem, he says, is their doctors treated the symptoms, but not the causes. As a medical professional who promotes natural chiropractic healing, he goes to the source. “We do diagnostics to find the cause of the problem. If it’s something we can treat, like a vertebra that’s out of alignment and putting pressure on a nerve, then we correct it. When we correct the cause, the pain goes away.”
Pray says the goal of chiropractic care is to return the patient’s body to a state of balance. “If we can get the patient’s body close to the way it was created, then in most cases, health is a natural state.” When Pray uncovers a problem his skills can’t treat, he refers his patient to another doctor. “Someone might have cancer or a disk problem that’s beyond the scope of chiropractic. We have excellent working relationships with several doctors for people who have problems that require other kinds of treatment,” he says.
Pray must be doing something right. He’s won Best of the Best in Chattanooga every year since 2009, and this year, he won Best of the Best in North Georgia. But Pray says one colleague’s measurement of how well a chiropractor is doing is the length of the line outside his door. “If you come by here at 6:45 in the morning, you’ll see about 18 cars in the parking lot. Those are people who want their bodies operating at peak efficiency, who want to slow the decay process, and who want to feel younger as they age. They don’t want to pop pills for the rest of their lives.” Many of those patients have been with Pray since he started his North Georgia practice in Rossville 15 years ago. They moved with him in 2000 when he opened his Ft. Oglethorpe clinic, stayed through three renovations as his practice grew, and then in January of this year followed him to the corner of Battlefield Parkway and Three Notch Road, where he’s opened a new 5,000 square-foot facility.
Pray’s patients have seen the practice go through other changes as well. For example, in 1995, he developed his X-rays using a dip tank designed in the 1930s. The process was laborious, and it took him about 30 minutes to produce one x-ray. Today, he uses equipment that produces an X-ray in six seconds and then displays it on a high definition television, allowing him to snap an X-ray, diagnose the issue, and then sit down with his patient in a quiet room and explain what’s going on. “I can change the resolution and the contrast, and zoom in and out, so it has better diagnostic and educational value. And since it’s digital, it’s twice as fast as a normal X-ray, so the patient has less exposure,” Pray says.
Pray grew up in Epsom, N.H., received his undergraduate degree from the University of South Florida in 1988, and then worked in outside sales for about a year. He didn’t like it. He’d always been interested in health care, so after talking with a friend who was studying to become a chiropractor, he decided to pursue the same line of work. He enrolled at Life University in Marietta, Ga., in 1989, graduated in 1993, and then practiced as associate for six months in Indiana. Pray then opened his own clinic in Brentwood, Tenn., across the street from Waylon Jennings’ house. While there, Rosa Wilson asked him to take over her practice in Rossville, which she’d started in 1952. Pray moved to Rossville in September 1995, when his oldest child, Carson, was two months old.
Today, Carson is 16 and has three younger siblings: Spencer, 14; Cole; 12; and Ruthie, 7. Dad adjusts all of them. Carson and Spencer have expressed a desire to follow in his footsteps and become chiropractors. Pictures of Pray’s children line the back halls of his clinic. Especially impressive are the large, framed shots of him and his boys whitewater rafting the Nantahala River. When Pray isn’t spending time with his wife, Sabra, and their kids, or attending services at Oakwood Baptist Church, he’s tending to his patients. Although he’s lectured on chiropractic care and written a book on the subject, he has no time for such pursuits, as he sees close to 100 patients a day. Beginning early in the morning, he spends his hours at the clinic moving back and forth between two connected rooms, adjusting his techniques to give each person optimum care.
Pray is also overseeing the expansion of his practice to include new treatment options. His clinic already offers ultrasound, intersegmental traction and muscle stim, and will soon provide rib rotation, physical therapy, massage therapy and possibly “innovative injectables” to improve scar tissue reduction. He will be bringing on additional staff to offer these services. “We want to treat a wider range of conditions, including many of the ones we have to refer out,” he says.
Pray is glad he had the courage to leave outside sales to practice chiropractic medicine, as his career has brought him tremendous satisfaction. While he’s developed a name for himself, and arguably become the most successful chiropractor in the North Georgia and Chattanooga area, his measure of success differs from that of others. Instead of counting the cars parked in his parking lot at 6:45 a.m., he measures his success one patient at a time.
“It feels good to be able to look at a patient and, with 95 percent certainty, say ‘I can help you solve your problem.’ I probably see three to four times as many patients as the average chiropractor, so when you see me, you get the experience of 60 years worth of adjustments. So rest assured whatever condition you have, I’ve seen it many times before.”