Story of Hope for Caroline

Challenge: POTS

When Caroline first started care at Crossroads Chiropractic, she was struggling with POTS symptoms daily. POTS stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. It is a disorder characterized by a rapid increase in heart rate upon standing, leading to symptoms like dizziness, lightheadedness, fainting, and fatigue. It often affects young, otherwise healthy individuals and can significantly impact daily life due to its unpredictable nature.

Of the POTS symptoms, Caroline said that fatigue impacted her the most. “I would fall asleep upright in a chair waiting for my parents to drive me to school. I also struggled with dizziness, migraines, brain fog, racing heart, shortness of breath, anxiety, and more.”

It took some convincing for Caroline’s family to be comfortable with the idea of trying chiropractic. However, the western medicine route left Caroline full of medications, side effects, no relief and definitely no answers. She reflected on their first efforts to help get to the bottom of her POTS diagnosis, “At first, we took the western medicine route. It required a lot of drugs, including beta blockers and steroids. I had pretty horrific reactions to those medications but didn't know what else to do.”
After a lot of conversations outside of the office, Caroline and her family had no other options and figured chiropractic couldn’t hurt. The stigma around chiropractic made them very skeptical but the trust they had in our doctors gave them enough hope to give it a chance. Caroline said, “I really appreciated the emphasis on holistic health and getting to the root cause instead of just putting a band-aid on the symptoms.”

When we asked her to give us her thoughts on her very first assessments and she told us, “Yikes. There was so much nerve interference in my cervical area, which I knew was connected with many of my symptoms. It was obvious between the two scans that I was carrying a lot of physical and emotional stress.”

“Within the first month of chiropractic care, I was able to come off of the steroids my cardiologist had prescribed. By the third month, I was off three other medications. My migraines went away quickly after starting care, and my dizziness disappeared thereafter. Fatigue and brain fog took the longest to improve, but with those gradual improvements I was able to go to classes more often and play sports again.”

Caroline’s life has been impacted more by chiropractic than by any medication she had been prescribed. Her words of wisdom for anyone struggling like she were, “Invest the time and money, and stick with it. Any change -- small or large -- is still incredible and well worth it. I have referred so many people with POTS and other conditions to chiropractic because it was the only thing that gave me true relief”