Dr. Lauren Clum, Class of 2005, is a leader, mentor, and longtime member of the Life West community, with deep roots in its history and mission. After growing up at Life West and earning her DC degree in 2005, she founded her Oakland practice, The Specific, where she spent 12 years helping patients restore brain-body connection to heal and function better. She returned to Life West in 2018 as an upper cervical faculty mentor in the Health Center and was appointed Dean of Clinical Operations in 2021. In her current role as Dean of Core Chiropractic, Dr. Clum oversees the Technique & Philosophy department, along with Local Service and Community Based Internship programs. Most importantly, she’s a devoted mama to her daughter, Kaiya, partner to her fiance, Matt, and bonus mama to his 3 daughters.
While I walked across the stage as a Life West graduate in 2005, my experience with the college both far precedes and exceeds that date. In fact, Life West has been a part of my life for my entire life!
I was just a baby when my dad moved our family of five from Marietta, Georgia to San Lorenzo, California. He’d been on the founding faculty of Life Chiropractic College in Marietta, working in all sorts of capacities with founder Dr. Sid E. Williams on the mission of Lasting Purpose, when Dr. Sid’s help was sought with a flailing school in California. Dr. Sid was happy to help, so long as he could rename the school and assign its president – he chose Life Chiropractic College West and my dad, Dr. Gerard Clum.
As a result, my brother, sister and I literally grew up at Life West – the college was our second home; our family’s life truly revolved around it. We attended every event the college hosted and traveled with my dad on behalf of the school all over the world – we grew up thinking that all family vacations revolved around chiropractic conferences! We got to visit some amazing places, swim in some pretty fancy hotel pools, and hear the message of Lasting Purpose over and over and over again.
The message of Lasting Purpose – giving, doing, loving, serving out of one’s abundance – permeated our family and life. My parents’ specially designed wedding rings even had “LP” engraved into them, intertwining the ideal into the very fabric of our family. And what I’ve come to truly appreciate over the years is that this ideal is not unique to chiropractic at all – it’s a message that has impacted my worldview; it’s the lens through which I see the world, foster connection and relationships, and conduct my life.
In high school I decided that I wanted to be a chiropractor like my dad. He’d shown me that there were lots of paths in the profession – I just knew I wanted to go to Life West. I met the most amazing people in school, including my bestie who later became my daughter’s godmother, and a friend who became a mentor, introducing me to my best service in chiropractic practice, the knee chest upper cervical technique.
I ended up opening the practice of my dreams, The Specific Chiropractic Center in Oakland, California. I absolutely loved private practice and my team at The Specific – they shaped me personally and professionally as we collaboratively served our communities and grew our individual practices over the next 12 years.
And then my world got flipped upside down. I had a baby girl in 2015, which naturally shifted my priorities. What really threw me for a loop, though, was her diagnosis of Angelman Syndrome, a genetic deletion that I’d never even heard of; one that catapulted me into the medical world in a way that I’d never wanted or expected. Over time, while the love for my precious girl skyrocketed, my marriage fell apart and my ability to focus on my practice absolutely dwindled. I knew I needed to do something different; I just didn’t know what.
That’s when Life West invited me home – a colleague shared a faculty opportunity in the Health Center, and I realized that it was the exact shift in service that I needed, both personally and professionally. I was nervous to return – my dad had retired several years previously and I hadn’t had much interaction with the college since graduation – but returning to the college was truly like coming home, as Lasting Purpose had never left me.
Being Kaiya’s mama, with my vitalistic upbringing and life experience as a chiropractor, has taught me incredible lessons in priorities, connection and service, and I’m so grateful that my journey continues here at Life West, a place that will always be my home away from home.
