Lubbock Artist Lives a Healthy Life in Active Retirement. Consistency and Upper Cervical Chiroppractic Benefits Long Term Health.

What Pain in the Neck? Resolving Suffering

Valerie Kumkov Hill

• Valerie has lived in Lubbock since 1969. Her father came here initially to teach mathematics at Texas Tech. She ended up going to Texas Tech University and has been there ever since. She majored in Art and had a second degree in Dance. She taught in the public school system for 24 years. She has always been mindful of health and nutrition. Currently, in retirement, Valerie teaches yoga to seniors.

• Valerie’s husband was the first one to come to the Blair Chiropractic Clinic after doing some research. He'd been having some major neck problems even before they were married. It must've been sometime in the late '70s; Doctor Blair was there at the time. Her husband, as a child, had had some surgeries and physical problems that actually resulted from a childhood case of polio.

• While working at a bookstore, Valerie started noticing she was getting stiff and tense in her neck and shoulders. She then started seeing Doctor Blair herself. She started seeing results herself, and after their children were born, they became patients of the clinic as well. By then, Doctor Addington had taken over. He checked the kids out over the years, and they had minor adjustments. Then their son was involved in a car accident as a passenger in high school, and they got him in right away. No one was hurt badly, but their son seemed to recover much more quickly from that. The same happened with her daughter, as an adult, when she was t-boned by a drunk driver in her truck. They immediately brought her in again and had her checked out. She'd had some hip problems because of the way the seatbelt jerked her, and she had some adjustments done in her lower back and pelvis as well.

• Valerie has noticed as she’s gotten older that you often don't feel better right away or for a few days after getting an adjustment. When you come back a week later, things have smoothed out, and it was just her body reacting to being aligned again and the muscles having to pull slightly. The first line of care is to run a graph on the cervical vertebra and see how things are doing. Then if there's a problem, take care of it as quickly as possible so that it doesn't become a chronic problem. She has noticed that over the years, She’s had fewer and fewer adjustments. She can't even remember the last time she had her neck adjusted because it has been maintained so well.
• While teaching yoga at the community center, Valerie adjusts poses that need to be adjusted for age, and they work on things like getting down and up from a chair or the floor. Taking a long time to warm up, the first thing they do after breathing is to start gently moving their neck muscles, the very top of the spine, and then gradually warming the spine up. Her mission is to let people get over that fear of yoga and not be intimidated.

• Valerie wrote a children’s book during Covid called
• Clive the Lonely Llama.
• It was published by Wild Lark Books, a bookstore in Downtown Lubbock.

Here is Valerie’s teaching schedule:

Yoga classes: M, T, TH 9:30 at Maxey Community Center

Seated Yoga: T, TH 10:45

Fitness/light aerobics: Wed. 9:45

To see more of Valerie’s work or to purchase her art:

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To contact Ruth, go to https://www.blairclinic.com

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