EMPOWERING THROUGH ALTERNATIVE HEALTH

Dr. Christopher Motley isn’t your average doctor. Specializing in Functional Wellness, Frequency Medicine, Clinical Kinesiology, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, Dr. Motley has a unique gift for looking beyond the symptoms to identify the source of the problem. His approach empowers patients with personalized tools and practical strategies designed to help the body restore balance, optimize wellness, and support lasting health.

Could you tell us about yourself and what you specialize in?

I’ve been in clinical practice for over twenty years in Franklin, Tennessee—a small town just south of Nashville. I specialize in a few different holistic alternative health modalities, such as acupuncture, herbal remedies, homeopathy, body work—such as kinesiology and chiropractic, cold laser therapy, and bio energetic medicine. My primary focus for treating patients is based on traditional Chinese medicine philosophy, which states that the body is electrical and full of biological energy, known as ‘Chi’. The energy carries information—it’s a communication system. It’s a silent language that communicates with us through physical patterns on the outside of the body. Whether it’s the creases on the face, the shape of your face, the color of your tongue, the texture of your skin, or even your weight gain or weight loss patterns, you can see it. This is the energy making itself known or expressing itself on the outside surface of the body. You can find out so much about a person’s internal environment and their internal health just by knowing certain patterns, traits, or habits. By studying their symptomatology from a Chinese medicine perspective, you can find out so much about their internal health environment. When someone wakes up in the middle of the night, if they can’t fall asleep, that tells you something about their gallbladder or liver. Emotional outbursts, like laughing when you want to cry, could tell you about their heart. The sound of the voice can tell you which organ is imbalanced or sick. Restroom or bowel movement frequencies can tell you which microbe could  affecting  their digestive track. And of course, chronic coughing or mucous in the throat,  can tell me they have kidney problems. Even teeth grinding would tell me that a person could have parasites in their gallbladder. 
All of these are subtle signals, and signs of what could be underneath the surface. 

How did you get started in this specific wellness space?

I’ve always appreciated alternative health and learning about the nervous system, even at a young age. My dad was a military man and had a bad back, thinning discs, and was always wearing a back brace when he was working. 
He visited one of his friends, who was a chiropractor, and then one day, stopped wearing his back brace. I asked him why he stopped doing that, and he said he went to a doctor who worked on his muscles and bones, and he didn’t have to get back surgery. 
His pain went away. My brother had chronic allergies to dust mites—the same chiropractor said, ‘please bring him to me, we can work on his nervous system.’ My brother got his cervical spine adjusted and balanced and did not have to get allergy medicine and shots anymore, which was amazing to me. It stuck with me because my brother always breathed through his mouth, and would keep me up at night. Almost the same day of therapy, he started breathing through his nose, which really intrigued me even at a young age. Also my mother told me that I have distant cousins in the hills of Korea—my mom is Korean—and said they used to do herbal remedies for the villages in the mountains. I’ve never met them, but I believe that maybe it’s in my blood. Before I went to chiropractic school, I was in a rear-end accident, which gave me whiplash, and my neck was out of alignment severely—it kept giving me chronic headaches and migraine symptoms. Even after receiving treatments, my neck would stay steady for a little bit, but would fall back out of alignment. There was another student who was about to graduate who practices the same type of techniques that I use now and he said, ‘let me check you out and see what’s going on’—he worked on me told me that while my neck was injured, the instability and weakness was really coming from my digestive system. The muscles in your neck and shoulders are connected to the strength of your gallbladder and liver, which really dumbfounded me because I was not planning on getting into acupuncture or kinesiology or frequency based medicine. He used acupressure, muscle balancing, and manipulations to help relieve the pressure off my gallbladder… and I slept for fourteen hours the first night and after a few days, stopped having migraines and headaches just from helping my digestive system. And that stuck with me. I started to study acupuncture and the energetic connections of the organs to the body and that’s what made me stick in this type of space.

Why do you think this wellness space has become so popular compared to traditional medicine?

I think this type of wellness space has made leaps and bounds in the last few years, because we have a medical system that is based more on getting rid of a problem after it’s occurred rather than being preventative. Prevention should be a focus in healthcare. I think our culture is a culture that is living longer because of modern medicine. At the end of the day, people just want to live a more fulfilling, vital life. They don’t want to live to survive, and now in our culture, people want to live life to the fullest and have a vibrant life. We’re normally taught that as we get older, we’re going to get stiff, have achy joints, get bad vision, have incontinence. People don’t want to accept that way of thinking, because now, we are seeing that the research and technology is so much better. More research is showing that you can use minerals, vitamins, herbs, and alternative therapies to actually strengthen your body so that it ages gracefully. I think that’s why we’re seeing more people move towards this wellness area, because they don’t want to accept the status quo. They know that even at an old age, we should be able to continue  feeding and energizing the body.  Alternative and mainstream health information has become so vast and getting bigger and bigger.

You talk about a lot of deep emotions being tied to health issues. What are some simple tips people can use to release some of these emotions?

Breathe through your stomach, don’t breathe through your chest. Don’t breathe upwards, breathe downwards and push out your belly and stretch your diaphragm as you breathe. As you breathe through your stomach, you’re going to naturally stretch your Vagus nerve, which increases your relaxation through parasympathetic strengthening. The next thing is, while you do that, try to also incorporate grounding. By putting your feet in the grass or dirt or on some stone, you can transfer toxic ions out while pulling healing ions in from the Earth. 
It’s been shown that grounding changes the ionic charge within your fascia, the highway for emotional signals. This allows a lot of the emotional energy to flow out of the body. Next is massaging the ends of the fingers and toes. All the acupuncture meridians will have one of their beginning or ending points on the fingers or the toes. When you massage all those fingers and toes, you are basically connecting all the organs of the body. 
When the organs of the body can communicate with each other, they will all help each other out to help process the emotions. Another tip is to use a fascia bar or a fascia ball to work your fascia out. 
That’s where the emotional energy travels. The looser your fascia, the easier emotional energy will flow through you. Lastly, sun on the eyelids in the morning balances your cortisol levels, regulates your adrenaline output, and helps you handle your stress. Getting plenty of sun on the eyelids and face is vital along with movement and being outside. 

If there is advice you can give to men and women to help de-stress, what would your top three tips be?

Number one is to make sure you have at least one bowel movement a day. It may sound funny, but when a person holds on to waste within the colon, they are holding on to toxins as well. It may make you more prone to hold onto toxic things in your life. You need to have a bowel movement, because if you can do it physically, it can help you emotionally and mentally. If you’re holding on to toxins in your gut, that will allow toxic waste to pour back out into your bloodstream and go right up to your brain, and affect the way you think. A toxic gut means a toxic brain. Practicing relaxation to have a bowel movement, taking magnesium, good herbals, using a great fiber, and stomach massages are all ways to help with that bowel movement. Secondly, drinking plenty of water with electrolytes. Basically, you need water with minerals or electrolytes because it helps strengthen your kidneys and your urinary tract system. Furthermore, the stronger your kidneys, the stronger your adrenal glands. Number three is stretching. A limber body and limber facial system will allow emotional and mental Chi electricity to flow through the body, so that the body can process all your emotions, whether good or bad, without any hindrances. 
If you stretch, it allows the body to process your emotions quickly to process those stress points out fast. Number four, laugh. 
It may sound cheesy, but laughing helps turn off many of the anxiety centers in your brain. When you laugh, it has been proven that certain hormones and brain chemicals are released to actually help you experience joy and build happiness. So laughter is truly a great medicine—some say it’s the best medicine! 

We know you have a large client roster, including some celebrities. How do people usually go about finding you?

You can find me on most all social media outlets—Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X, and my website. We have a membership available on my website that you can sign up for on my website or underneath my link tree on Instagram where I usually go on almost every week with a live Q+A. I’m so thankful that I’ve been able to help patients of all ages… from one day old up to patients over one-hundred years old. 
I’ve worked on patients of many different realms and cultures—whether it’s athletes, actors, musicians, electricians, teachers, accountants, or so on, I’m just thankful to be able to work on people of all different realms. It’s really been an honor that people have given me the privilege to help them walk alongside them in their journey of health.

If someone wants to get involved in the same space you are in, what are some of the first steps they should take?

First would be to find a program or school that has training that heavily emphasizes the philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine—the reason being is that TCM allows you to look at the body in a holistic manner. It helps you to understand the physical structural aspect of an individual, the body, and the mental and emotional aspect of a person. It doesn’t mean that you can solve every problem, but it at least allows you to investigate a patient or a person’s condition. 
And if you can have a well-rounded viewpoint of the patient or client, you can either help them heal or you may have to refer out. It makes you a better practitioner to understand what’s best for that patient and the more knowledge and understanding you have for the body as a whole, the more you can help them. I would also recommend kinesiology. Particularly, applied kinesiology—essentially, this allows the muscles to find out what’s going on within the internal nervous system. It is one of the best techniques out there. I would highly recommend somebody getting trained in this particular type of technique or something similar.  
Number three, using biofeedback, techniques, or instruments, such as what I use—EAV, electro acupuncture, VOLL meters. This is a machine that allows you to scan and measure the electrical activity, or power within the meridian system. These are all three different types of biofeedback/frequency techniques that can give you very good information about a person and can make you a very well-rounded practitioner.

We know you have a popular podcast. Could you tell us about it and what listeners can expect?

I have a podcast called the Ancient Help Podcast Where East Meets West. It’s how ancient medicine and ancient philosophy is mixed with modern technology and modern science. They both benefit each other—they have similarities and they have differences—but we try to come from different angles in an objective way so that you can see how you can use both to help you in your healing journey. I wanted to make this podcast where nobody feels judged—nobody feels guilty or bad about any health choices they have made in the past or are making right now, but just giving information to help them where they are. I try to take really complicated health jargon and make it very simple and easy to understand and digest. I have guests that talk about physical health—like weight training, diets, exercise—and I have guests that talk about spiritual health—spiritual practices, energetic healing, hormone experts, thyroid experts, and acupuncturists. I also have doctors and teachers on— just try to have a well-rounded view of how a person can help every aspect of their healing.

If you could give advice to readers who are worried about their health issues, what would be your best advice? For example, are there signs to look for or signs to ignore?

I always tell people, give yourself grace and don’t fear. That’s what my podcast is about… 
the more information you understand about health and about yourself, you realize that many complicated, scary facts and figures can be understood in a simplistic way. If you understand these processes, and if you understand health in a very simplistic way, you can make very simple decisions that can have profound effects. We have been taught that medicine, cellular health, cellular processes, and biological processes are so complicated that we can’t know anything about it, and we can’t make informed decisions. 
But when you break it down and get down to the basics, you understand that you can make many decisions to help you in your health. Knowing what labs you could get run or what tests could be done and then possibly reading them or taking them to the expert that does, takes the fear out of it. It makes you proactive. 
It allows you to take your health into your own hands. I always say, study, get educated, and look for ways to simplify the complicated information. Don’t ignore those signs, but also don’t be afraid of them. 
Investigate it. I always say, ‘don’t worry, but don’t ignore.’