Award-winning sports personality and host, Kelsey Nicole Nelson, started the new year welcoming Dr. Haley Parker as the first guest of the year for “Listen In With KNN” to discuss the importance of treatment of young athletes’ bodies.
Dr. Parker is an acupuncturist and Director of Community Outreach & Partnerships in the Virginia University of Integrative Medicine which focuses on acupuncture and whole health. She is a former Division I athlete who today works with student-athletes on sports-related psychologically and performance for training.
Nelson opened the conversation on the factors that lead to Parker’s work.
“My experience as an athlete really helped me to find answers in holistic medicine, traditional East Asian medicine, including acupuncture and herbs because of some of the injuries that I would continue to get during my training,” Parker said.
She believes that these types of medicine helped her maintain her training and her mental wellness and performance as a student-athlete.
Parker would later on join the Virginia University of Integrative Medicine in 2021 to teach practice management while overseeing clinics in the Georgia and New Jersey areas.
“Ultimately, it helped open a door to me to where I wanted to teach people what I found out for myself and ultimately help to teach teachers of the future,” Parker said.
Parker later mentioned how athletes do not have enough time for rest between practices or competitions and they forget that rest and recovery is a key component to performance.
She recalled the time when she pushed her body through the pain by staying competitive as an athlete, but began seeing it as a repercussion.
“So either it would create more of a window for injury or it would take a lot longer to recover rather than listening to your body, working with your body and potentially having more longevity in the performance that you have,” Parker said.
The graduate from Southwest Acupuncture College said it is common to put extra stress on our bodies and needs an extra boost from time to time.
The acupuncture procedure requires a sterile needle that is placed in specific parts of an individual’s body for rebalancing with Parker calling it “almost like a coding system to the brain in the body.”
“We’re helping the body to drop into an alpha state of relaxation, where the body really does know how to go into that hyperbaric healing response,” Parker said.
At the VUIM, Parker would address the acute stage in acupuncture. It is the first stage that occurs immediately after injury within a day that reduces swelling and promotes Qi and blood circulation.
She added that her typical patients come in every other week to help rehabilitate and support their bodies. This also contributes to the maintenance phase.
“The phase is out once a month for what we call a tune up, and we are helping to support the areas that are our main concern and preventing those pains from coming back,” Parker said when explaining the phase.
Parker sees appointments for acupuncture beneficial to helping support the body and their healing response.
“My athletes can have a much smoother recovery, knowing that they’re doing everything that they need and working on that internal aspect of health and wellness and performance of giving their body that time to really repair from the inside out,” Parker said.
Parker praises her patients for managing the conditions they faced during their injury while emphasizing on the importance of East Asian medicine.
The medicine uses practices of tai chi and chi in acupuncture is the energy that changes and runs through an individual’s body, flowing in certain areas of the body.
“If we can identify that deeper pattern, we’re able to help support that underlying baseline to where we can help their bodies stay well and then repair those little injuries and breakdowns along the way,” Parker said.
Listen to the full show below.
