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A Champion of Chiropractic
Bu Jennifer LeClaire

Laurent Goldstein is a table tennis champion—and a champion for chiropractic. Discover his pursuit to blend his passions.

Laurent Goldstein was living the alternative health lifestyle long before he became a champion for chiropractic. He used homeopathic remedies when he caught a cold. He was a strict vegetarian before it was en vogue. And he frequented health food stores long before grocers carved out niches with organic products. His involvement in table tennis kept him physically fit and relieved stress better than any drug.

Still, the native Frenchman had a major misperception of chiropractic care: He connected it solely with back pain. While he clearly accepted alternative medicine, at age 42 he had only visited a chiropractor twice—and both times for an aching back. Both times he was admittedly anxious about the adjustment, but the pounding pain led him to seek alternative means of relief where traditional medicine had failed.

“I just wanted a quick fix. I never considered returning once the pain was gone,” says Goldstein, in his charming French accent. Little did he know his perception of chiropractic was about to change forever, and he would soon begin returning for wellness rather than for pain.

Goldstein’s enlightenment came while he was working for Brican Corp., a patient education technology company in British Columbia, Canada, about 11 years ago. As fate would have it, Brican sent him to represent the company at the Chiropractic Masters seminar in Toronto. The table tennis champ watched curiously as doctors adjusted each other, their spouses and their children and thought to himself, “What’s going on? They can’t all have acute back pain.” Goldstein decided to sit in on some of the seminars hoping to understand what chiropractic was really all about. He describes the knowledge he found as an experience that forever changed his perception of chiropractic. Indeed, chiropractic has become one of his life passions.

“That day I became a chiropractic ambassador for life,” says Goldstein, who acquired Brican seven years ago and now serves as its president. “I changed the focus of Brican from a company that provided patient education software and hardware programs to optometrists, dentists and chiropractors to work exclusively within the chiropractic profession. I want to bring the excitement of a chiropractic seminar to the chiropractor’s office with our multimedia programs.”

The fruit of Goldstein’s labors is Mediadoc, an interactive patient education system that patients can watch while waiting in the reception area, adjusting rooms or therapy rooms. Endorsed by Life University, Palmer College of Chiropractic, Life Chiropractic College West, Parker College of Chiropractic and many others, Mediadoc is essentially a scrolling slide show designed not only to educate patients, but to breed enthusiasm about the benefits of chiropractic. Mediadoc offers 150 pre-programmed slide shows with over 11,000 patient education slides.

The presentation includes powerful testimonials and special marketing features aimed at helping chiropractors grow their practices by effectively communicating the mind-body connection and benefits of chiropractic care from birth to senior life. The slides depict every day people and peaceful scenes of nature combined with facts about chiropractic. One slide, for example, states “Chiropractic helps strengthen your immune system” over an image of a healthy woman jumping high in the air with a wide smile. Other slides depict babies and children as beneficiaries of chiropractic. Brican also offers teleclasses featuring some of the industry’s leading practitioners, who educate patients and generate enthusiasm for the profession.

“Our goal is to offer an affordable program that will educate patients while they are there and inspire them to come back, and also refer other patients,” Goldstein says. “I feel like if chiropractors could take their patients to Parker’s seminars, they would be sold on chiropractic for life and they would share their enthusiasm with others around them. So Mediadoc intends to recreate the experience that made me an ambassador of the profession.”

Goldstein’s passion for chiropractic—and for educating patients about its benefits—is now spilling over into another of his life’s passions: table tennis. Goldstein has been playing table tennis since he was 10 years old. Also known as Ping Pong, table tennis is like traditional tennis, except it’s played on a table divided by a net. The players volley a light, hollow ball back and forth with small paddles. Goldstein’s dad was a professional table tennis player in France’s national league. As he grew older, Goldstein’s slim figure disqualified him from sports like rugby, so he fell in love with table tennis, which requires speed and agility rather than brute strength.

“Table tennis is a fascinating sport. It’s very demanding physically because you are always moving your legs. It’s also extremely demanding from a brain level because it’s so fast. The ball comes at you at 180 to 190 miles an hour. The ball spins at speeds as fast as a race car engine. You only have a fraction of a second to react to the ball,” Goldstein says. From a chiropractic perspective, table tennis is equivalent to dancing. The player has to rotate his spine, while also moving his knees, legs and pelvis. Rotating the pelvis and the shoulder gives the player power and exerting force with the forearm, while the elbow and wrist puts the spin on the ball. Rotator cuff injuries are among the most common in this lightning-fast sport.

“It’s obvious that getting adjusted before and after a game is going to help you perform at your highest potential,” Goldstein says. He would know. He plays table tennis three to four times a week. Even when he travels he finds a club where he can smack a few Ping Pong balls with some newfound friends. Goldstein even has a coach, Chris Xu, a Canadian national team player who appeared in the Olympics. For his part, Goldstein doesn’t have much time to compete in tournaments anymore. Brican’s weekend seminars keep him from the professional circuit, but the humble Frenchman says he has won tournaments in the past.

“My desire is to bring chiropractic to this virtually untapped market. I’d like to see a chiropractor present at major table tennis events,” says Goldstein, who recently contacted Life Chiropractic College West and Life University about hosting a table tennis tournament, with chiropractors on site to adjust the players. The tournament would serve as a fundraising event for the schools, but also bring awareness of chiropractic to tournament players. “There are about 225,000 registered players in Canada and the United States and that number is growing rapidly,” Goldstein says. “Table tennis is some of the best exercise you can do—and you can keep playing into your 80s. But chiropractic is an important part of staying on top of your game. My passion and my goal is to see chiropractors reach this audience.”