TAHOE CITY, Calif. — Integrate Tahoe is a new health center in Tahoe City that focuses on full-body, as well as giving clients the tools they need to stay healthy. 

After years of working with student athletes, Dr. Abbe Gage realized she needed a life-change. In 2012, she worked with student athletes in North Tahoe, Truckee and Incline Village in injury prevention and management, as well as working in strength and condition programming for higher performance athletes at ski resorts. In partnership with Tahoe Forest Health System, she helped develop the sports medicine program that is used in local high schools. 

“In the midst of all that I went to massage therapy school in Reno and started cultivating my own approach to health and wellness and injury management by utilizing the specific training I had with the experience that I had with biomechanics, how the body moves and the efficiency of the body and really focusing on preventing injuries,” Gage said. 

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As she developed her own techniques, she left the hospital and opened her own space. 

“I just started renting my own space and having this space for people to come and really have these beautiful healing experiences outside of the medical paradigm and politics of the hospital,” Gage said. 

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At the same time, she was working at Patagonia in Reno. Although she wasn’t working in athletics specifically anymore, skiing, mountain biking and doing all things athletic and adventurous were still important parts of Gage’s life.

“I was experiencing a lot of physical pain in my body, I was having trouble actually getting through a full ski season … feeling my body almost deteriorating in 2016 when I was 27, 28 years old,” Gage said. “I was really questioning where that was coming from and so I started questioning what my direction was in life.”

Several of her coworkers suggested she visit a chiropractor in Reno, Dr. Nicole Hickok at Evolve Chiropractic. While she was nervous to try visiting a new doctor, one appointment with Dr. Hickok changed Gage’s trajectory in life. 

“The first moment I walked into Nicole’s office, I felt an incredible sense of ease in my whole body,” Gage said. 

“I started physically moving my body in different ways that I hadn’t been moving into or stretching into or accessing in a long time, really connecting deeply with my respiration and then on top of all that body expression had just met with such a beautiful soul who really took the time to see me and hear me and give me an incredible insurmountable amount of hope in this journey and just provided enough access to energy and information in order for my body and my system to start like reactivating and returning that desire for more,” Gage added. 

While the appointment was magical because it helped heal her own pain, it also led her to decide to go to chiropractic school. She graduated in 2022, and began working at Evolve in Reno, while also opening her own practice, Integrate Tahoe in Tahoe City. 

What does Gage offer? 

While Gage is technically a chiropractor, she doesn’t do the traditional cracking and popping, like most people think. 

She specializes in a unique branch of chiropractic called network spinal analysis.

“Every chiropractor is evaluating the nervous system, the nervous system through the brain and the spine, and where the spinal cord lives in the spine, and how the spine is moving, how the spinal cord is moving in that spinal canal, and how that connection of the spine is communicating to the brain, and how the brain is communicating to the spine, through the nerves,” Gage said. “Most of the world of chiropractic is evaluating the nervous system from a joint mechanic basis of how the body, how the joints are moving, and what is the biomechanical approach to this person’s body? Where can we find more efficiency in their body for movement? And what the hope is is that the movement of the joint is going to create ease in the system.”

Gage, on the other hand, isn’t looking at one specific joint, rather how the whole body works together and how the spinal cord is sitting within the body. For example, a person may complain of hip pain and a traditional chiropractor may look at adjusting the hip joint. Gage is looking at the alignment of the neck, the start of the spinal cord and how addressing stuckness in the neck can have dominoing impacts down the back into the hip. 

Those adjustments aren’t done by physically manipulating the joint but through pressure, breathwork and subtle movements that force the brain to acknowledge and reconnect with nerve endings in the body. In that way, it’s teaching a body to fix itself. 

Gage is also considering outside factors, like stresses and emotions, and how her patients hold their bodies during those feelings. 

There is a resistance from people because this isn’t traditional medicine and it can’t be studied using a scientific method, like using a double blind study. A person is either adjusted or they aren’t, so a placebo effect doesn’t really come into play. 

“It depends on what science you’re going to accept because maybe we are unable to perform a placebo effect and evaluate how this really is experienced in someone’s life, but you have an incredible amount of clinical trials, real people coming in who have tried everything, physical therapy, surgery, pain medication, and they’re still not happy, they’re still not functioning well and they’re still in a tremendous amount of pain and dysfunction and they have had beautiful openings and beautiful experiences and come to a state of ease and balance in their nervous system,” Gage said. 

Gage is accepting new clients. Her office is located at 2690 Lake Forest Road, Tahoe City. To learn more, visit https://integratetahoe.com/.

She is also accepting clients at Evolve Chiropractic in Reno. To learn more, visit https://www.renoevolve.com/.