Celebrating a 25th anniversary is a cause for celebration in any area, but it’s made even more special when the original plan only accounted for three years.
Such is the case for Dr. Jeremy McGuire. The local chiropractor is celebrating his 25th anniversary working here in town on April 15, marking a quarter-century of helping his chosen community with their aches, pains and other health and wellness related issues.
“It’s a fairly significant milestone after you’ve been in practice this amount of time,” McGuire said.
“We have enjoyed being a big part of this community this last number of years.”
McGuire said he and his wife Catherine, both of whom hail from southern Ontario, made the move up to this neck of the woods as a “lifestyle choice,” hoping to capitalize on the natural landscape and outdoors opportunities that can be had in northwestern Ontario.
“I was always a bit of an outdoors enthusiast from a young age,” he explained.
“That was the big drawing card, the outdoor lifestyle, all the lakes, cottage life that’s affordable and access to incredible fishing resources. I’m also a moose and deer hunter as well. To have all that mother nature right at hand so I wasn’t having to drive hundreds of miles out of the Toronto area to enjoy some of those things.”
Of course, with any move there are tradeoffs, and McGuire noted one such downside to moving up to a more remote area, especially for a medical professional, was the lack of resources for continuing education, as well as other colleagues to collaborate with and learn from. The College of Chiropractors of Ontario (CCO) is the governing body for the province and requires each practitioner do a certain number of hours of continuing education each year, which for those in more remote areas could mean lengthy and costly trips and stays away from home. McGuire explained that as time went on, however, advances in the online world, and some cross-border opportunities in Minnesota, helped make those issues less of an obstacle. The pandemic, he said, has been surprisingly helpful in that regard.
“COVID has helped that a considerable amount,” McGuire said.
“There are so many online virtual meetings and seminars which I never had foreshadowed. COVID has made some changes for the better for some of us who are a little bit more remote.”
Even before COVID, more and more seminars and educational opportunities were being brought online and to cities like Thunder Bay, which allowed northern practitioners many more affordable and accessible ways to keep up with their training.
But that’s all part of the job, and you don’t make 25 years in the same career without wholeheartedly embracing it. McGuire said that it’s that drive to keep learning that has always appealed to him and kept him going through the years.
“Every person that comes through the door brings a unique set of challenges with them,” he said.
“Lots of times if you don’t have the answer right that second, the engaging part is the challenge of their ‘Pandora’s box.’ We want to try and find the pieces that are missing to make them whole again, and it’s so varied. That’s the part that keeps you passionate.”
The challenges themselves are as different as the people experiencing them. McGuire said he deals with issues large and small that run from the young to the elderly, and the reward is seeing and helping people improve their overall quality of life and health. Of course, over the years you might think a chiropractor could have exhausted the problems he would encounter, especially in a smaller community like Fort Frances. Not so, says McGuire.
“That’s the years of experience, when you’ve seen this over and over again and then a person comes in with something I hadn’t seen before.”
This drive to keep learning and facing new challenges, along with seeing the improvements that chiropractic procedures can have on patients is part of what brought McGuire into the field in the first place. He shared that even in grade school he had an idea he would eventually wind up in healthcare, but it was an experience close to home that pushed him towards where he is now.
“I had a father raise me that had a terrible back,” McGuire said.
“He wouldn’t go see a chiropractor because he didn’t have any faith, confidence or belief in a chiropractor. In his late 30’s, he eventually said ‘I can’t live like this.’ He’d been on the floor for two and a half weeks and he decided to go see the chiropractor. It changed his world, and when it changed his world, it changed our family’s world.”
Chiropractic medicine is an active and often physically demanding practice. Doctors have to be able to physically affect the body and getting older means that some of them won’t be able to do things they once did as part of their job. However, even though McGuire is marking off 25 years this week, he doesn’t see himself slowing down in the future, even as he might have to make moves to other areas of the field. That just means more and different things to learn, which is a challenge he won’t pass up. It also helps that he’s grown his team in recent years.
“I was very, very fortunate, we had a local boy [Dr. Cody Caul] join me three years ago,” McGuire said.
“What that did was give me the chance to have a little more time, so I went and did a dry needling, trigger point needling course that I had always wanted to do. I’ve had my acupuncturist license as long as I’ve been a chiropractor, but I wanted to take the next step and I didn’t have anybody filling my shoes. It’s hard to get away when you don’t have any help. When he came three years ago I started to get that further education that I had wanted for a long time.”
The clinic has most recently expanded their space on Kings Hwy, adding a large room that houses weights and other exercise equipment that will allow McGuire, Caul and newest hire Dr. Krisanne Mascarenhas to work more physically with their patients and offer more services. There’s still plenty of mileage left in both McGuire and his practice, but he’s not above stopping and taking a look back to see just how far he’s come.
“As for twenty-five years, oh my goodness,” he said.
“In a lot of ways I didn’t know I was going to enjoy this career to the extent I’ve enjoyed it here in Fort Frances.”
