Bringing Chiropractic Care to American Schools Can Profoundly Change Students’ Lives

Through the Cook Chiropractic Center, Drs. Lona Cook and Amanda Blonigen are on a mission to change America’s health outcomes, one student at a time

The MAHA Center Chiropractic Hub is committed to advancing the objective of improved healthcare for all Americans.

The benefits of chiropractic care have long been established. The mission of the Chiropractic Hub is not limited to what is stated on its website. Case in point – the inspiring story of Drs. Lona Cook and Amanda Blonigen.

Dr. Lona Cook began her journey in chiropractic services in northwestern Wisconsin in 2010, where she founded Cook Chiropractic Center in Chippewa Falls. The facility blossomed, challenging Dr. Cook to expand her team and capacity to serve the community’s demand for chiropractic services.

After attending a conference that challenged her to reach more of her community, Lona was inspired to extend health-enhancing chiropractic care to more families by making it more convenient to access.

In 2016, Cook Chiropractic developed a relationship with the Chippewa Falls Area School District. This began with on-site staff care but quickly evolved into providing optional, parent-approved chiropractic care for students while at school. The program grew quickly and proved the concept that many people were interested in the care and benefits if access was made easier. Dr. Amanda Blonigen joined Dr. Cook and the mission expanded.

Anecdotally, staff reported not only feeling better and more relaxed in the classroom, but they also saw the same improvements in many of their students. Some children were less disruptive and more attentive. Given these positive changes, the program expanded. For several years, the team added locations and chiropractors. As the team grew and more children had access to chiropractic care, Dr. Amanda and Dr. Cook saw an opportunity to share their findings about the benefits of chiropractic to school-aged kids. They reached out to two prominent chiropractic research teams – Life University and Haavik Research – and began a collaboration to design a program that would measure outcomes beyond anecdotal reports from parents, teachers, and children.

Later, they helped form Well Adjusted Students, Inc., a nonprofit, to expand access and research. In 2025, the teams collaborated to publish their first retrospective study, and also do a small EEG trial looking at how chiropractic care influences the central nervous system. While more research is needed in this field, initial results are hopeful.

Studying Chiropractic Care in Schools

The resulting study, published in June 2025, surveyed what Dr. Cook and her team had observed. Titled “Retrospective review of case records of school-aged children receiving chiropractic care” and published in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, the study analyzed 180 records of children ages 5-18 spanning a 12-week period of care; it included questionnaires for participants as well as neurophysiological exams. Results indicated that many children experienced significant improvements in physical health and well-being, especially those with hyperactivity. In other words, the results are extremely promising, leading the authors to call for further study of the potential benefits of chiropractic care in pediatric hospitals and on-site school environments.

The study did not find statistically significant improvements in spine thermography, heart rate variability, or school functioning scores in this initial data. However, other metrics indicated that the chiropractic services that the school-based chiropractic team provided school children resulted in meaningful health improvements.

Researchers found statistically significant improvements in children’s self-reported quality of life, with total PedsQL™ scores rising and the largest gains showing up in the “health and activities” subdomain. Children also showed a small but statistically important reduction in hyperactivity symptoms.

The study’s authors note these are small-to-modest effect sizes and, because this was a retrospective case series without a control group or randomization, the findings can’t establish that chiropractic care caused the improvements — the authors call for a future randomized controlled trial to test that question directly.

Currently, the research team is also looking at data on how children receiving chiropractic may also positively affect the student’s attendance and minimize Office Discipline Referrals (ODRs), which would be impactful in helping schools.

The school-based chiropractic study is not a brash effort to hype the profession: it is a sober, scientifically conservative assessment that the authors hope will inspire more comprehensive research on the benefits of chiropractic in schools.

“This retrospective review of case records from children attending an onsite school chiropractic clinic has demonstrated some changes in health-related quality of life following a period of 12 weeks of chiropractic care,” the study concludes. “Further research using a clinical trial design is needed to extrapolate the findings and to assess causation.”

Looking Ahead

Many new frontiers in preventive and non-traditional healthcare have emerged in tandem with the growing national awareness of the chronic disease scourge plaguing the nation’s children. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has led a bipartisan, grassroots charge to understand and counter this health crisis. Chiropractic care and other holistic therapies have a seat at the table to discern care options for healing and well-being – to work alongside separate initiatives to improve children’s diets, food choices, and the quality and amount of exercise they do.

Dr. Cook, Dr. Blonigen and many committed chiropractors like them are making a difference in the lives of Americans and their children.

The vision of the Cook Chiropractic Center is to meet children and families where they are, promote nervous system health, reduce stress, and improve their day-to-day quality of life. The short-term goal is “to demonstrate the benefits of having chiropractic care on-site for employers, employees, teachers, and students.”

Dr. Cook is excited about the work her team has accomplished: “We’re encouraged by the growing recognition — among parents, educators, policymakers, and others in our communities — that our children need more options that build real resiliency and adaptability,” she said. “MAHA, and the voices it’s bringing forward, are helping these ideas gain traction. A healthier neuro-spinal system, at any age, gives a person a stronger base to grow from and engage more fully in life. Our goal is simple: get more natural chiropractic care in front of more families, schools, and individuals, so it becomes not an alternative, but a main tenet of healthy living.”

The MAHA movement’s goals align with the school-based system that the non-profit, Well Adjusted Students, Inc., supports. Like them, we want students to lead happier, healthier lives and have improved learning opportunities through the demonstrated benefits of chiropractic services.

This is hardly a radical vision. America’s children desperately need all the help they can get. More research is required to better assess and measure outcomes of chiropractic care in the pediatric context.

Meanwhile, Well Adjusted Students, Inc. has expanded to sixteen schools, including multiple districts. It is also assisting other regions while attracting international interest as well. As the MAHA movement continues to spread, its embrace of chiropractic care and other preventative, integrative approaches offers rich hope to our nation’s most precious assets – our children.

Additional Resources:

Well Adjusted Students, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that expands school-based chiropractic care and funds the research needed to measure its effects. Chiropractors interested in serving students in schools, and districts curious about the model, can learn more at welladjustedstudents.org.

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