In 2001, when Dr. Spencer Dupre was only three or four, his mother was ejected through the windshield during a horrific car accident. She suffered a debilitating spinal cord injury, and the prognosis was grim.
“Nobody ever told her she was going to walk again,” remembers Dupre, founder of Empower Chiropractic and resident of Livano Canyon Falls in Northlake. “She went from doctor to doctor to doctor, and everybody told her, ‘There’s no hope. You should get used to using the wheelchair.’”
Dupre says that even as a young child, it was difficult to watch what his mother was going through and feel helpless to offer comfort.
His mother, though, didn’t take “no” for an answer. “When my mom first woke up in the post-op room after her accident, she heard God’s voice say, ‘I have a greater purpose for you in this world.’”
When doctors couldn’t help, she tried physical therapy until she finally found a therapist with a different message. “He said, ‘If no one else will take a chance on you, then I will. It’s worth a shot.’ If somebody hadn’t said that to my mom, who knows where my mother would be? Probably still in a wheelchair.”
Instead, she got herself to therapy every single day for months and relearned, slowly and persistently, to walk. “She learned to take every day step by step, with the faith that God had put the ability to heal in her body.” A couple of years later, she realized her dream of walking down the aisle on her own two feet to marry Dupre’s stepfather.
His mother’s traumatic injury and hard-won recovery became such a defining experience in Dupre’s life that he decided to pursue a career in health care. He wanted to dedicate his work to supporting people like his mom in their efforts to recover from physical obstacles.
He wanted to be the one willing to try when patients appeared to have hit a dead end.
Dupre decided on chiropractic care as his area of practice, and he never looked back.
“My mother’s experience was the thing that really made me choose to become a chiropractor,” he says. “There’s never been a situation where I didn’t feel healing was possible for somebody.”
Dupre obtained his doctor of chiropractic degree while also completing a bachelor of science in anatomy and another in health and wellness. He is Webster certified through the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association and is actively training as a member of The Pediatric Experience, a group dedicated to helping chiropractic practitioners continue to expand their ability to provide the best possible outcomes for their pediatric patients.
Dupre founded his practice on the principles and practices of what’s considered neurological chiropractic care, which represents a different kind of treatment with a greater range of applications. “There are really two types of chiropractic,” Dupre explains. “There is structural chiropractic, which looks at the body kind of like Legos, saying, ‘This is in place, this is out of place, we’re going to put everything back together. Neurologic chiropractic looks at the body like a supercomputer. The way you type on your computer — you press a button and it does something on the screen — is the same way that your nervous system works. The brain asks the body to do something, and it should perform a normal action. If it doesn’t, there’s something wrong.
“It would be like if you went to press W on your keyboard and got a K. So we treat the body like it’s a supercomputer rather than just a bunch of parts.”
Though Dupre cautions that not every patient or circumstance is a fit for his practice, his approach has allowed him to help a wide range of patients and conditions. Along the way, he’s seen lives transformed.
“It’s really rewarding to be able to help people get back to doing what they want to do,” he says. “The reason my practice is called Empower Chiropractic is that the definition of ‘empower’ is to make someone stronger and more confident in claiming their own natural abilities. We’re giving your body the best chance for it to heal so you can live with normal function.”
To this day, Dupre says that the experience of his mother healing against the odds is his motivation to serve. “My mom needed somebody who believed in her,” he says, “and I get to be that person for families every single day. It’s an opportunity to take care of people — it’s not an obligation. And that’s the difference.”
