Brian F. Cooke, D.C. Biography

Dr. Brian Cooke was born in Greensboro, N.C. but raised in northwestern S.C. Initially he attended the College of Charleston in South Carolina immediately following high school. After two years of continuous schooling towards a career in medicine, Dr. Cooke spent a summer in Houston working at the prestigious St. Luke’s Heart Research Center.

He then transferred to the University of Florida where he decided to move away from a traditional medical career and graduated in the top 10% of his class in economics (emphasizing business management). While putting off graduate school, Dr. Cooke took a very competitively sought-after job, with what is now Bayer Crop Science, and moved to the Quad-Cities.

While in the Quad-Cities, he continued a lifelong pursuit of wellness and even discovered personal training through the IFPA. Of course, while training himself and others, injuries occurred and his exposure to chiropractic began. This exposure rekindled Dr. Cooke’s desire to learn about and practice the healing arts as he then enrolled in Palmer College of Chiropractic for his doctorate.

I worked with Dr. Croft at the Spine Research Institute of San Diego (SRISD); a research center devoted to the investigation of motor vehicle crash injury. For the past 28 years, SRISD has focused research and education on the more common injuries sustained in everyday motor vehicle crashes, such as whiplash and mild traumatic brain injuries.

I became familiar with the epidemiology of whiplash and brain injuries, the mechanical factors of motor vehicle crashes, and the wide range of physical injuries that can occur. I learned how to conduct more comprehensive physical examinations through the Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician Certification (CCSP). The CCSP is the only chiropractic certification that increases the learner’s aptitude for assessing real world trauma, like is seen in sports and motor vehicle crashes, to more specifically identify the trauma objectively, pairing the trauma with effective treatment or referrals.

I apply cutting-edge diagnostic work, like on-site Digital Motion X-Ray, to find previously missed injuries from complete video imaging through the entire range of motion, in all planes of motion, of the neck and extremities. We are taking what others would view as transient sprain/strains and finding any permanence to the injuries.

Our office incorporates a nurse practitioner, from an independent medical office, to validate my findings with a detailed musculoskeletal exam and pain evaluation. This produces a collaborative approach with a local medical office to treat often missed damage in injury cases, like ligament laxity, with cutting-edge treatments like Prolotherapy.

Dr. Croft’s program also included an intense discussion of forensic risk analysis, which considers how the various known risk factors can increase a person’s chance for injury or long-term symptoms. This approach brings together the objective findings in exams with an understanding of the mechanism of injury and ties everything together to directly pinpoint causality of injury.