Dr. Alex Swenson-Ridley
From the other
side of the
collapse.
I didn’t build The Rooted Practice from theory. I built it from what I had to learn — the hard way — about what chiropractic costs when you build it inside a model that was never designed for you.
The Beginning
I opened my first practice six weeks after my son was born.
No financial backing. No business plan. No mentor. Just a portable table, a room in a naturopathic doctor’s office, and a calling I couldn’t argue with. My son came with me. We napped between patients.
Things grew quickly — faster than I understood at the time. Within five years it had become a seven-figure practice with a team of twelve. From the outside, it looked like success. From the inside, I was already starting to lose myself in it.
I started comparing myself to other practitioners. Doubting what came naturally. Forcing what had once felt effortless. I started building toward metrics that, looking back, had nothing to do with why I went into chiropractic in the first place.
The early years — my son grew up in that practice.
“I was building toward metrics that had nothing to do with why I went into chiropractic in the first place. I just didn’t have language for that yet.”Dr. Alex Swenson-Ridley
The Collapse
Why Chiropractic Burnout Becomes a Breaking Point
A wrist torn in six places. A sudden 50% income loss from an insurance audit. A staff of twelve I could no longer support. A bankruptcy. A marriage that didn’t survive the wreckage.
I stepped away from practice for three years. And for most of those three years, I called it retired. That word did a lot of work for me. It covered the shame. It made the leaving sound like a choice.
It wasn’t a choice. It was survival. I had left the profession in a lot of hurt, with no framework for understanding what had happened to me and no desire to go back. I tried functional medicine. Health coaching in the virtual space. I had success — and kept burning out anyway. The void didn’t close because the real problem had never been addressed.
The real problem wasn’t my business model. It wasn’t my team, or my location, or my marketing. It was that I had spent years building inside a structure that was never designed to hold what I actually valued — and I had no idea that’s what I was doing.
The Turn
Coming back wasn’t easy. It was necessary.
When I started engaging in chiropractic communities again — cautiously, sharing small pieces of my story — something unexpected happened. I realized I hadn’t left for the right reasons. I had left because I was broken and didn’t know how to go on. But underneath the hurt and the exhaustion, I actually still loved the profession. That surprised me.
Around the same time, I was accepted into my master’s program in positive psychology. For the first time, I had language for what I had experienced. Not just the burnout — but the underlying mechanics of why it had happened, why it kept happening, and why external fixes had never touched it.
Getting my license back in 2024 was its own reckoning. The red tape alone dredged up more trauma than I expected. But I came back to practice with something I didn’t have the first time: a framework. An understanding of organizational psychology, strengths-based leadership, and the structural reasons why so many chiropractors end up exactly where I had been.
I came back to practice. And I came back to build something different.
PhD Research · Fielding Graduate University
The profession doesn’t need another burnout study. It needs a new model.
My doctoral research in organizational development and change is still evolving — I’m in the early stages — but the center of it is clear. I’m working toward a model of leadership and business design that helps the chiropractic profession transcend the years of conflict that came from the quest for legitimacy.
The vitalistic versus musculoskeletal divide. The insurance dependency. The identity crisis that gets passed from graduating class to graduating class. These aren’t accidents. They’re the downstream effects of a profession that never fully resolved its foundational tension.
The ultimate goal is a path to a unified professional identity — and greater fulfilment and success for everyone who is a part of this profession. Something needs to change. My research is aimed at bringing a new model for what that looks like and how we actually get there.
An important dimension of that research is understanding how the path to fulfilment and flourishing differs for women in chiropractic — because it does, in ways the existing literature has barely touched.
Understanding how 130+ years of legitimacy-seeking shaped the collective identity of chiropractic — and what a unified foundation could look like instead.
Building a model of practice ownership rooted in individual strengths and values — rather than borrowed blueprints that were never designed to fit.
Transforming the lived experience of chiropractic practice owners through organizational psychology and positive psychology frameworks that address the inside problem, not just the external symptoms.
How the path to fulfilment and flourishing differs for women in chiropractic — shaped by different pressures, relationships to ambition, rest, and identity.
Training & Credentials
The education behind the work.
My clinical and academic training spans chiropractic, positive psychology, health coaching, HeartMath, and organizational development. Each piece is relevant — not as a credential stack, but because the work I do draws on all of it.
I am still in active chiropractic practice at Life Sprout Collective in Fairbanks, Alaska — a membership-based pediatric and family wellness practice. I teach what I live. That matters to me, and I know it matters to many of the chiropractors I work with.
Presenting — the work of translating research into practice has always been central.
The Rooted Foundation
If any part of this story sounds familiar, you’re in the right place.
The Rooted Foundation is a 3-month cohort journey for chiropractic practice owners ready to do the reckoning. Five to eight practitioners. Rooted Leadership, Rooted Worth, and Rooted Well-Being. Three cohorts per year. This is where the inside work actually happens.