– By Nolan Halverson –
Nolan Halverson
Tucked on the corner of Industrial Boulevard and Depot Road is where Life West Chiropractic College has its roots. When you walk through the doors at Life West, something magical happens. You get transported to a place of love and positivity. The halls are not only full of warm welcomes and smiling faces, even on stressful midterm or final weeks, they are full of incredible stories, new health knowledge and Lasting Purpose which is what makes Life West the best place on earth.
My favorite question to ask people I meet in the Life West hallways is “Why do you want to be chiropractor”. First, imagine if you asked that question to most other professions. You would probably get a blank stare or an answer that reflects income or prestige. However, in the hallways of Life West you get stories of various ailments that no other doctor could help but through chiropractic adjustments they got their life back. You also hear the stories from students whose parent(s) is/are chiropractor(s) and have been adjusted since birth and never had a shot or pill put in their body and how they went to baseball games for “sick days” because they never got sick growing up.
From someone who grew up in the traditional medical paradigm, with no adjustments and lots of shots and drugs, I grew up accustomed to getting sick a few times a year it was hard to believe the stories of “chiro kids” who never got sick until I heard it for the umpteenth time in the hallways of Life West. They seemed to have a different health knowledge than the ordinary person. Before all these hallway talks, I didn’t know that people didn’t vaccinate their kids or didn’t take drugs to reduce fevers. As crazy as that sounded at the beginning, it’s hard to argue reducing a fever with drugs when you learn that the body creates the fever to kill off bad virus or bacteria or that the unvaccinated never suffered from or transmitted the disease they weren’t “protected” from. It’s not that one view of health is superior to another, but a person should have choices on what is best for them and their families and through the Life West hallways I was exposed to different ways of viewing and maintaining healththat I never came across in my first 20 years of life.
In those first 20 years of life, I grew up in northern Minnesota in a place known for the friendly “Minnesota nice” mentality and when I traveled to places outside of my home state, I would notice people would be a little less inviting to strike up a conversation with and more likely to just be “unfriendly”, for a lack of a better term. However, the Lasting Purpose mindset that runs deep through the culture of Life West puts the “Minnesota nice” mentality to shame. To give, to do, to love, and to serve out of your own sense of abundance, expecting nothing in return, runs through everything down to the screws that hold the building together. Students staying up late helping each other get through CNS and other tough classes, to club meetings at school before classes to practice technique, to professors dedicating extra time and knowledge to students outside of class, to a different fundraiser every quarter, to chiropractic mission trips around the world, to the President and his wife, Drs Ron and Mary Oberstein, hosting service groups at their house for dinners and so much more giving, doing, loving and serving done at Life West day-in-and-day-out, quarter-after-quarter. This is what separates Life West from the average campus.
“To give, to do, to love, and to serve out of your own sense of abundance, expecting nothing in return, runs through everything, down to the screws that hold the building together.”
Life West is a special place and being in a city without much natural beauty, only adds to special culture of Life West. There are around 600 students at Life West all who choose to live in Hayward California for 3 years of their lives because what is offered at Life West cannot be found anywhere else. The incredible stories, new health knowledge and Lasting Purpose runs through the hallways of Life West and when you walk in the doors you instantly realize you are somewhere special and if you open your heart to it, you will walk away a better person. Life West is truly the best place on earth.