Dr. Matt Westheimer spent months getting adjusted for a back injury that would not resolve.
The adjustments were real. The relief lasted a day, maybe two. Then he was back where he started: barely able to get out of bed, unable to put his own socks on. Every step was painful.
As a practicing chiropractor at the time, he started to lose faith in his own profession.
What got Dr. Matt back on track? A mentor who flew in, pulled a fresh set of X-rays, and asked which segment had been getting adjusted. Matt told him.
The mentor disagreed. He pointed to a different segment of Matt’s spine, only a couple of centimetres away, and adjusted that one instead. Matt started to recover.
That experience is the whole basis of how Matt practices now.
Rather than chasing symptoms and trying to put out the smoke, he looks for the root cause and puts out the fire.
That’s why specificity matters more to him than almost anything else, and it’s the difference between structural correction and traditional chiropractic care.
Why Dr. Matt became a chiropractor
He grew up in it. His father is in his 47th year of practice and still works full time. His uncle practiced until he retired.
Matt spent his childhood in his dad’s office, watching a man who genuinely never complained about going to work. A man who didn’t like vacations much because he wanted to get back to seeing patients.
He still weighed medicine and law before committing. What settled it was a question he couldn’t get past: if he spent his career as a cardiothoracic surgeon, saving people in the operating room after their heart attacks, what might have happened if he’d seen those same people twenty years earlier?
The philosophy pulled him in first. The evidence took longer, and he’s open about that gap — he believed what chiropractors said from stage, but the claims didn’t have data behind them, and it bothered him.
Hearing James Chestnut lay out the physiology is what closed it. Matt still holds his own explanations to that standard, and he took the entire Precision team to hear Chestnut speak in late 2025.
Chiropractic education and credentials
Matt earned his Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Life University in Marietta, Georgia, graduating Magna Cum Laude. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Central Florida, Summa Cum Laude.
He also has advanced training in pediatric chiropractic and family care.
He is currently licensed to practice chiropractic in North Carolina.
From Florida to Singapore to Matthews, NC
After graduating, Matt spent two years in a high-volume Florida practice, then six years practicing in Singapore where he met his wife Jen, who runs Precision Chiropractic with him, including shockwave therapy treatments.
Over 10+ years, Matt has worked with thousands of patients.
How Matt practices structural correction
Nobody gets adjusted at Precision on the first visit.
The first visit is a consultation, examination, and X-rays. Matt runs a seven-part structural evaluation: Structural Radiographs, Spinal Motion Analysis, NeuroBalance Analysis, NeuroStrength Analysis, Digital Structural Imaging, the Structural Distribution Test, and an Autonomic Operating System assessment.
Matt studies your films himself before your second visit, then walks you through everything he found: what it means, what a plan would involve, and what it costs.
He opens that first visit with a question he calls the champagne moment: Imagine it’s three months from now and you’re celebrating the experience you’ve had here. What would have needed to happen?
The adjustments themselves take four or five minutes, and that’s deliberate. The analysis is already done. The adjustment is fast because it’s specific.
What surrounds it takes longer: corrective exercises, guidance on sleep and nutrition, and workshops on movement and stress that patients attend at no cost.
He’s also straightforward about who he can help. If someone wants a quick adjustment and temporary relief, he says so and points them somewhere better suited. If there’s nothing worth correcting, he says that too.
A complimentary chiropractic consultation is how to get started.
Why shoulder pain became a focus
The back injury was his second injury. The first was his shoulder.
Chronic shoulder pain that started in college got worse as his Singapore practice grew and his adjusting volume climbed.
It reached the point where he was sitting in his office with the owner of the company, in tears, convinced he’d have to give up adjusting entirely.
That the career he’d built his life around was ending at the exact moment it was working.
He got out of it through chiropractic care, soft tissue work, corrective exercise, and a stretch of studying shoulder biomechanics obsessively on his own.
Shoulder pain treatment has been a particular focus of his ever since, while treating many other chronic conditions with chiropractic care.
His view: if you look only at the shoulder, and do nothing about the cervical spine, the upper thoracic spine, and how the scapula sits against the rib cage, you’re missing the boat.
So he works the whole chain: the neck and upper back first, then the SC joint where the clavicle forms the only bony connection between the spine and the arm, the AC joint, the scapula, how the humerus seats in the socket, and the musculature around all of it.
Matt writes the clinical content on this site and reviews the rest of it.
Awards and recognition
Precision Chiropractic was voted Best Chiropractor in Matthews by the CMG Weeklies in 2022 and 2024, and received Charlotte’s Best awards in 2024 and 2025.
Matt received the Distinguished Rotarian Award for 2020–2021.
