Special to The Observer

“Why did you take so long?” the young boy jumps up as his mother enters the waiting area.

“Because she wants to be as healthy as she can,” Brad Fackrell replies without missing a beat, “so you can be healthy too,” he tells the boy now hugging his mother’s leg. “Health” and “healthy” are words heard often at the chiropractic office on Southern Boulevard — often enough to draw attention to the fact that they are so seldom heard in most medical offices, except as something lacking.

Fackrell does consider himself a healer with a difference, not only from conventional Western medicine, but also in an approach that differs from most other chiropractors.

“A lot of people who come to see me have health ailments,” he says, “but a percentage come because people tell them we are going to help them get healthy. Those are our favorite patients, because they take charge of their own health. They believe their bodies can heal themselves.”

Fackrell doesn’t treat symptoms, as so many people expect from their chiropractors — “popping” spines to ease back or neck pain. Instead, he enlists new patients in a total commitment to unleash the body’s natural ability to heal itself.

Health is, in many respects, Fackrell’s religious mission. New patients are not only diagnosed, but invited to contemplate the promised land of improved physical, emotional, and spiritual functioning, beginning with a tour of the sunny environment of Straight Chiropractic that includes a recitation of the mission statement, followed by an educational orientation to Fackrell’s concept of health.

In its traditional or “straight” form, the healing practice of chiropractic traces physical ailments to misalignment of the spine. Vertebrae that are misaligned — known as subluxations — pinch nerves and disrupt the brain’s communication with the organs, bones and muscles, leading to multiple health problems. Misalignment can eventually cause degeneration in the vertebrae themselves.

Chiropractors use their hands to realign patients’ spines in the “popping” technique so popular for its immediate relief from pain. But Fackrell takes the concept of chiropractic considerably further.

Not only are his patients given adjustments in the office, they are put on a schedule of lifestyle changes, stretches, traction exercises to do at home — a whole program of restored health that treats the spine as a conduit for the spirit, which is Fackrell’s ultimate concern.

He insists that he does not heal. “If someone comes in with asthma, I don’t heal the asthma. If someone comes in with a pain in the neck, I don’t remove the symptom; I remove the interference.

“My goal as a chiropractor is not to help people live a pain-free life,” he says frankly. “My goal is to help them fulfill their purpose as God intends.”

It is this passion for treating the whole person — body, mind, and soul — that distinguishes Fackrell from most doctors. Though he is careful to speak objectively about conventional medicine, he grows emotional when describing patients who have had surgical correction for scoliosis, a twist in the back that is sometimes treated with rods and bolts — often with disastrous results.

It was Fackrell’s own childhood struggle with asthma, and all the drugs and treatments it required, that originally led him to chiropractic. The chiropractor who treated him used the corrective approach that eventually set him on his path in life.

“I had been praying my whole life that I could find something that would help with the asthma I suffered from,” says Fackrell, who had been studying to be a physical therapist. “That’s also why I’m on a mission to get the message out of what I do. It’s not just a business to me — chiropractic is a mission.”

His goal, he says, is to have everyone in Rio Rancho checked for subluxation. “Not to get treatment,” he adds, “because not everyone is going to want the kind of care that I offer. But simply to get checked.”

Fackrell believes the people of New Mexico are ready to hear his message of health. It is why he moved his family here from Kansas City, Mo., in 2004 — simply out of a sense of being led.

A family photo that hangs in the Straight Chiropractic office testifies to the look of beaming good health: All eight of the Fackrell children and his wife of 17 years are treated regularly with chiropractic, and exude a boundless energy. Fackrell himself, at 41, could easily be mistaken for a college student, with nary a gray hair.

“Our practice has grown to be very successful,” he says, “because God is a part of my life every day. I am seeking every day in prayer and meditation to fulfill his purpose, not mine.”