Short bio
Dr. Alex Swenson-Ridley is the founder of The Rooted Practice, a consulting practice for chiropractic practice owners who've built something that looks successful from the outside and feels reactive and disconnected from the inside, what she calls being the business healer for chiropractors. She built a seven-figure chiropractic practice from nothing, lost it to bankruptcy, and spent years learning the difference between building from someone else's blueprint and building from her own identity. She now guides practice owners through the deeper work, reveal, unhook, nourish, root, and transform, so the practice they run finally reflects who they actually are.
Long bio
Dr. Alex Swenson-Ridley knows what it looks like to build everything you were supposed to want and still feel disconnected from it.
She opened her first chiropractic practice with no financial backing, no business plan, and no map—just a borrowed portable table and a six-week-old son strapped to her chest. Within five years, it had become a seven-figure practice with a team of twelve. From the outside, it looked like she'd made it. On the inside, she was following a blueprint she'd never chosen, showing up everywhere except in her own decisions.
Then it collapsed: an insurance audit that recouped hundreds of thousands of dollars with no recourse, a wrist injury that had gone unaddressed for years, and finally, bankruptcy. She stepped away from the profession entirely for three years—not by choice, but because she had nothing left to build with.
On the other side of that collapse, she found what she now teaches: the difference between decisions made reactively and decisions made from a clear, rooted sense of who you actually are. That question became the center of everything—her consulting work, her podcast, and her PhD research in organizational development and change at Fielding Graduate University.
She's built her practice again—this time with real boundaries, a business designed around what she actually needs, and a wrist that no longer defines the shape of her career. As a mentor and guide—the business healer for chiropractors, not a business coach in the way the chiropractic profession typically understands the term—she now helps other chiropractic practice owners do the same work she had to do: get honest about where they actually stand, unhook from the patterns and blueprints keeping them stuck, and build a practice—and an identity—that's actually theirs.
Talk topics
Chiropractor burnout: it isn't the adjusting
Why capable chiropractic practice owners burn out despite outward success, and why the usual advice doesn't hold.
Reactive decisions and borrowed blueprints
How practices get built one reaction at a time, and what changes when owners start showing up in their own decisions.
Calling or escape: the hybrid practice question
Functional medicine, virtual care, and how to tell a real calling from a reactive attempt to fix surface-level problems.
Leaving, staying, and rebuilding
An insurance audit, a bankruptcy, “retiring” at 36, and a return to practice with intention and a new identity.
