What is The Rooted Practice?

The Rooted Practice helps chiropractors face burnout, take a quiz, write journal posts, and shape a practice that fits across 23 pages.

Chiropractor burnout

Chiropractor burnout: why it happens, and how it heals

By Dr. Alex Swenson-Ridley, DC, MSPP, NBC-HWC · Last reviewed October 2026

The quick answer

For chiropractic practice owners, burnout is the exhaustion that comes from running the practice, not from adjusting. It grows out of reactive decisions, inherited business blueprints, an industry that resists change, and years of carrying roles chiropractic school never trained you for. If we’re really being honest, it also comes from the unhealed wounds of the profession in general as we’ve tried to navigate being taken seriously by the rest of the world. It heals when the practice is rebuilt around who the owner is, not only through better systems.

What is chiropractic practice owner burnout?

Researchers measure burnout with the Maslach Burnout Inventory, across three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. By the strictest definition, all three need to be present. Studies of chiropractors (Williams & Innes, 2012; Williams et al., 2013; Williams & Zipp, 2014; Alcantara et al., 2021) find emotional exhaustion most often and depersonalization sometimes, while chiropractors' sense of personal accomplishment usually stays high. A 2024 review in Chiropractic & Manual Therapies found the same pattern, and newer studies have focused mostly on chiropractic students rather than practice owners. So what many chiropractic practice owners feel doesn't always count as burnout on paper. That doesn't make it any less real. What's different is where it comes from.

The three dimensions, in studies of chiropractors

Emotional exhaustion

Found most often

Depersonalization

Found sometimes

Reduced personal accomplishment

Usually stays high, so rarely reduced

Illustrative, not measured values. Sources: Maslach Burnout Inventory; Williams & Innes (2012); Williams et al. (2013); Williams & Zipp (2014); Alcantara et al. (2021); 2024 review in Chiropractic & Manual Therapies (Partridge et al., 2024).

Most of the chiropractors I talk to still love their patients. They still feel competent at the table. What wears them down is owning the practice: the insurance battles, the staffing decisions, the payroll, the marketing, the newest red tape, not knowing where their next new patient is coming from, and the systems no one handed them a map for. More than one has told me, “Owning a practice is not what I thought it would be.”

You're not burned out from working hard. You're burned out from working reactively, inside an industry that we were never really designed for, and which resists innovation and change.

Why do chiropractors burn out?

Research on chiropractic burnout is still thin, but what exists points in a consistent direction. A 2011 review in the Journal of Chiropractic Humanities (Williams, 2011) identified stressors specific to chiropractors: physical workload, role stress, and mental and emotional demands.

Role stress is the one I recognize most. A chiropractor is expected to be a clinician, a business manager, an employer, a marketer, and a leader, often in the same hour. Chiropractic school prepares you for one of those.

Signs of chiropractor burnout

Tick the ones that sound like you.

You still love adjusting, and you dread almost everything else.
Most of your decisions are made in response to whatever is on fire.
You're running a model you never chose: taking insurance because you feel like you have to, a schedule designed to please everyone else, a fee structure you inherited with no way to really identify your value.
You feel alone on an island, like everyone else has this figured out.
You keep picturing a hybrid practice or looked for a way out, while simultaneously feeling crushed by the ever-growing balance of your student loans.
You've thought about selling, closing, or “retiring” early, and you're not sure whether that's a decision or an escape clouded in defeat.
Your body is keeping score: sleep, tension, getting sick every time you finally stop.
You catch yourself saying some version of “I feel dead inside.”

Not sure which of these is yours? The free Burnout Blind Spot Quiz names your archetype in about three minutes.

Take the burnout quiz

Why the usual burnout advice doesn't help

Most advice for burned-out chiropractors is about the surface: set boundaries, cap your patient load, streamline your workflows, get better software, delegate more. Those things help. They also tend to fade within a few months, because they trim the branches without touching the roots.

If the decisions underneath your practice are still reactive, the blueprint is still someone else's, and your identity as a practice owner is still that you don’t know what the heck you’re doing, the same exhaustion grows back.

How chiropractor burnout heals

Burnout heals from the roots up. In the method I teach that happens in five phases:

Reveal: getting honest about your current reality without the emotional charge, and connecting to the vision underneath it.
Unhook: clearing the reactive patterns, limiting beliefs and inherited blueprints that keep growing back.
Nourish: reconnecting to your passion, purpose, values, and worth.
Root: building leadership, worth, well-being, identity, business, and relationships that hold steady.
Transform: letting the visible practice, your team, your money, your schedule, finally reflect the strong foundation grounded in who you have become.

You're not the only one

“When I started working with Dr. Alex I was so burnt out I didn't know if I wanted to keep practicing. Through our work together I realized I did want to keep practicing and found my connection to why again.”

— Dr. Kasey P., DC

My own burnout, twice

I built a seven-figure chiropractic practice with a borrowed portable table and a six-week-old son strapped to my chest. Five years later, I sat down in the middle of my brand new remodeled office in a 6,000 square foot building I’d bought and ugly cried. Not because I was happy, but because I felt trapped inside the thing I built and couldn’t see a way out. A few months later an insurance audit recouped hundreds of thousands of dollars. My wrist that was torn in six places finally gave out. After another year of fighting to find the will power to keep going and dig out of the hole I found myself in, I filed for bankruptcy. I left the profession for three years. I told people I'd retired. I was 36. Truthfully, I was too broken, physically and emotionally, to keep going, and I didn't know how to fix myself.

I became a health and wellness coach and learned everything I could about building a virtual practice. I convinced myself it was the answer I’d been looking for–the location freedom. The ability to see fewer people and make more money. Then I burned out a second time, in a virtual coaching model I belatedly realized I still built with the same reactive patterns and choices I’d made the first time around. That's when I finally understood that the problem was never how hard I worked. It was that every decision I made was a reaction and tended to be made for the benefit of everyone but me.

Feeling a little bit defeated, and recognizing that I needed to do something more than just change the clothes of the service I delivered, I stepped back from practice entirely. I enrolled in a trauma healing program. Then a masters in positive psychology. Somewhere in there I decided to jump into the abyss and ask the question of who I was without the title “chiropractor” or “practice owner” or anything of the accolades I hid my insecurities behind. It wasn’t easy work. But on the other side, I came out knowing two things for sure–I still loved the chiropractic profession and hadn’t left for any of the right reasons. I also knew that I wasn’t alone in my journey and experience of practice, and that the profession needed something different to be able to change that experience for ourselves. This led me to a PhD in Organizational Development and Change with a second masters along the way, and the creation of The Rooted Practice, where I marry both the theory of how organizations grow and change with the realities of chiropractic practice ownership.

Questions chiropractors ask about burnout

Is chiropractic practice owner burnout different from clinician burnout?

Yes. Clinician burnout comes mostly from patient care and system pressures. Practice owner burnout includes all of that plus adds the weight of running the business: leading a team, carrying overhead, and making decisions no one trained you for.

Can you recover from burnout without leaving your practice?

Often, yes. Many practice owners recover by rebuilding how the practice runs, not by leaving it. Sometimes the honest answer is to leave, and that's allowed too.

Should I quit chiropractic?

Before you decide, separate what you're moving toward from what you're trying to escape. If the choice is truly made from strength and certainty in who you are and why you’re leaving, it might truly be the right next choice. If you’re leaving feeling defeated and like a victim of a profession that let you down, there’s healing to do before you make the choice to leave.

Why doesn't fixing my systems fix my burnout?

Because systems sit on top of decisions and your identity. If the decisions are still reactive, new systems carry the same exhaustion patterns into them.

Where do I start?

With three minutes. The free Burnout Blind Spot Quiz names the archetype draining you most, and gives you one thing to do about it today.

Take the burnout quiz

Sources

Alcantara, J., Whetten, A., & Alcantara, J. (2021). Towards a safety culture in chiropractic: The use of the Safety, Communication, Operational Reliability, and Engagement (SCORE) questionnaire. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 42, 101266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctcp.2020.101266
Maslach, C., Jackson, S. E., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). Maslach Burnout Inventory (3rd ed.). Consulting Psychologists Press.
Partridge, B. L., Scott, Z. E., Roecker, C. B., Walters, S. A., & Daniels, C. J. (2024). Burnout amongst chiropractic faculty, practitioners, and trainees: A scoping review. Chiropractic & Manual Therapies, 32, 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12998-024-00550-3
Williams, S. (2011). Potential unique causes of burnout for chiropractic professionals. Journal of Chiropractic Humanities, 18(1), 86–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.echu.2011.09.003
Williams, S., & Innes, S. (2012). Burnout among chiropractic practitioners: Real or imagined? An exploratory study protocol. Chiropractic & Manual Therapies, 20(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/2045-709X-20-4
Williams, S., Zipp, G. P., Cahill, T., & Parasher, R. K. (2013). Prevalence of burnout among doctors of chiropractic in the northeastern United States. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 36(6), 376–384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmpt.2013.05.025
Williams, S. P., & Zipp, G. P. (2014). Prevalence and associated risk factors of burnout among US doctors of chiropractic. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 37(3), 180–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmpt.2013.12.008