As the daughter of two chiropractors, Dr. Bridget Edkin initially wasn’t sold on following in her parents’ footsteps, or those of six other chiropractors in the family.
“Everyone was a chiropractor and I just like to be different,” Edkin said. “So I ran from it.”
The Sláinte Chiropractic owner had plans to become a music teacher, but when she could no longer pay for school, she took time off and became a manager of Cold Stone Creamery, running nine stores in the Northeast.
It became clear her passion was not running ice cream stores.
“Everywhere I went, I would just get people to go to a chiropractor,” she said. “I’d be like, ‘if you have that, you should go to a chiropractor.’ And people said ‘why don’t you just become a chiropractor?’”
Edkin decided to take a community college anatomy and physiology course and told herself if she did well, she would consider chiropractic school. She “aced it without even thinking about it.”
She started school at Palmer College Chiropractic in Port Orange in 2013 to study the Gonstead technique. From there, she fell in love with the profession and set a goal to open her own practice.
As she nears four years in business in March, Edkin was named the JAX Chamber Small Business Leader of the Year, an honor that requires a Chamber member to be in business for at least three years.
Edkin is a member of the chamber’s Beaches Division.
She was one of a dozen Small Business Leaders of the Year among the chamber’s 10 councils and two divisions.
The chamber named her the overall winner Feb. 2.
Edkin, 36, said she wanted to open a private practice after graduating, but her family and professors discouraged her. But she was determined to work for herself.
“The majority of people don’t have the income to open up, and I didn’t have it either,” she said.
“You go to bank after bank and you ask for loans and they tell you no. So I basically crowdsourced enough money to open my practice and opened on a shoestring.”
Her office at 2370 S. Third St. was already built-out and just needed new paint and an X-ray machine. She signed the lease March 1, 2017, and Sláinte Chiropractic opened 22 days later.
“Sláinte” is a common toast to good health in Ireland and Scotland.
Even before opening, Edkin had 10 to 15 networking meetings a week, trying to establish the business before it opened. On opening day she had 85 clients. Today, her practice treats about 200 patients a week.
Edkin said she’s been able to grow her practice through networking events, word-of-mouth and engaging with the community. Before the COVID-19 pandemic she would attend festivals and host lunch-and-learn sessions with businesses.
Jacksonville’s friendly business environment also was a factor in her company’s growth, she said.
“It’s just the easiest place to open up a business because so many people care about you,” she said. “I think that’s something that not every city has.”
Owning a chiropractic practice hasn’t come without challenges. Edkin said the profession is not as widely accepted as traditional medicine and some people have had bad experiences with chiropractors.
“Have you ever had a bad haircut? Everyone’s going to say yes, but you don’t stop getting your hair cut. You just find a new hairdresser,” she said.
“I encourage people if you’ve had a bad experience with a chiropractor, that there are other ones out there that are going to take more time and more care to be able to serve you.”
Sláinte offers Gonstead chiropractic, which is neurologically based and focuses on how the brain is communicating with the body through the spine. She focuses on adults, while her husband, Vincent Farrar, is a pediatric chiropractor.
They have two young children.
Farrar and Edkin provide adjustments to help couples conceive and to help babies who have trouble breastfeeding or have developmental delays in crawling, walking or speaking.
Edkin said she has seen children who had never spoken say their first words and couples who tried other fertility treatments become pregnant after receiving their chiropractic treatments.
There are two other Gonstead practices in the region, but Sláinte is the only one that uses Insight technology to scan and map out the nervous system. The most similar practices to Sláinte are in Atlanta and Orlando.
She hopes to open two more practices in Jacksonville to make her services more accessible to people throughout the region and state. Some patients come from as far as St. Augustine and Lake City.
She also wants to add two doctors to the Jacksonville Beach office so it can treat up to 1,000 patients a week.
On top of wanting Sláinte Chiropractic to be “the Mayo Clinic of chiropractic,” Edkin said she also hopes the practice is somewhere people want to revisit.
“I just want to help a lot of people,” she said. “When my children grow up and become fourth-generation chiropractors (I hope) that they have a place to come and practice that they love.”
