From Coal to Chiropractic
Growing up a rambunctious country boy in the small town of Gilbert, nestled deep in the coal fields of southern West Virginia, I’ve had my share of bumps and bruises. I was active in contact sports like football and boxing. I raced motocross, and I’ve always been an avid golfer. I’ve been involved in multiple wrecks on ATVs and dirt bikes, and I’ve even been thrown from the bed of a pickup truck after being t-boned by another vehicle. I’ve suffered multiple concussions, contusions, scrapes, and bruises, not to mention a compound fracture to my lower right leg from the accident where I was ejected from the truck bed.
I was an All-Area, All-Conference, starting Center for the 1995 WVSSAC State Football Champion Gilbert Lions (the only State Championship in any sport throughout the history of Gilbert High School until they were consolidated in the early 2000’s), and I still wear my Championship ring to this day. I won the Lowell Phipps award that year for the athlete who exhibited the most ‘heart and determination,’ and as you can see, I’m still pretty proud of those accomplishments 30 years later. I grew up with my brother Mark Chastain, who is four years older than me, so he pretty much taught me how to be tough and resilient. Our parents, Mark and Linda Cline, raised us with lots of love, and they taught us how to be happy and successful through hard work, grit, and to never quit anything that we set out to accomplish, no matter how hard or impossible that it may seem to be.
The biggest lesson that they taught us was the value of family and spending as much time with them as you possibly can. My father was a coal miner who worked all day underground to make a living, while my mom was a homemaker who stayed home and raised my brother and me. She always kept a beautiful home and always had some of the greatest home-cooked meals for us and my father to come home to after a long, hard day underground. I always believed throughout my entire childhood that I would be a Coal Miner just like my father, and his father before him. I am now the father of two wonderful children, which is the greatest accomplishment of my entire life. My daughter Jeanna is 26 years old and a graduate from Furman University, and she is currently pursuing her master’s degree. My son Jacob is 17, and once he graduates from Dillon Christian School in the spring, he will be attending North Greenville to pursue his Bachelor of Science Degree.
Now I’m going to explain the reasoning behind why I became a Doctor of Chiropractic. I was in my third year at Marshall University, working toward my Bachelor of Science Degree, and I was constantly having headaches. Nothing seemed to totally get rid of the headaches, so I just figured that it was normal since I’d had so many concussions and whiplashes over the years, and I would just have to deal with it for the rest of my life. Fast forward to Thanksgiving break 1998. My brother Mark was getting ready to graduate from Logan College of Chiropractic in the spring, and he made the long trip from St. Louis, Missouri, to moms for Thanksgiving dinner. I made the
short trip from Huntington to enjoy some turkey and dressing as well, and like always, I had a terrible headache. As we sat around the table talking about our future plans and how life was going so far, my brother noticed that I could hardly keep my eyes open and that I wasn’t feeling well. He asked, “Do you have a headache?”, so I replied, “Yeah, I have them all the time”. He then asked me to follow him into the living room and proceeded to tell me that he was going to get rid of my headache. I had no clue about Chiropractic at the time, so I thought to myself, “he’s going to be a back doctor, not a head doctor, so what in the world is he going to try to do?”
He had me lay down and started messing with my neck when I heard a loud snap when he turned my head. It scared me, and I was ready to get up and leave when he said, “Calm down, I’m not finished.” He then turned my head the other way, and it cracked again. Stunned, I immediately stood up and said, “Are you trying to kill me?” He snickered in true big brother fashion and asked, “Where’s your headache?” I gathered my thoughts and noticed that my head didn’t hurt anymore, so I muttered, “It’s gone”. After that adjustment to my upper neck, I was headache-free for a solid week. This was totally miraculous in my eyes because it had been a couple of years since I hadn’t had a headache at least every other day. I started getting adjusted regularly by a doctor that my brother knew in Huntington, and I finally started to realize that I wanted to be a doctor who could help people in the way that I was being helped.
I was totally undecided on the path that I was going to take with my education up until that point, and once the summer semester started in May of 1999, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri, and enrolled at Logan College of Chiropractic. I graduated with my Bachelor of Science in Human Biology in September 2000, and I graduated with my Doctor of Chiropractic in December 2002. I worked at Cline Chiropractic for my brother in our hometown for four years after I graduated, then I moved to Dillon, South Carolina, and ran my own clinic (Advantage Health Center of Dillon) along with a satellite clinic in Aynor, South Carolina (Advantage Health Center of Aynor) for eighteen years. I went on to help a good friend of mine in Bennettsville, South Carolina, with his practice (Palmetto Health and Wellness) for six months, and now I feel like I’m finally home at one of the best-run Chiropractic clinics that I’ve ever been blessed to be a part of in Grand Strand Health and Wellness. Dr. Garner and the rest of the team are the nicest and most well-trained colleagues that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with throughout my entire career of twenty-four years. I genuinely feel like God led me here to Murrells Inlet to fulfill my calling in life and do what I was born to do, which is to help people live happier and healthier lives through Chiropractic. That one adjustment changed my life forever, and now I am blessed with the knowledge and skills to help change other people’s lives, one spine at a time.
Yours in Health,
Matthew M. Cline, D.C.
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