Joan Margaret, DC

I have been on an ongoing health journey (gut issues, allergies, digestion) since 2001. Dr. Margaret is the first doctor that I feel truly understands my challenges and holds my hand along the way. Dr Joan Margaret is knowledgeable, thorough, kind and super supportive! She has a lot of tools to choose from so she can check, cross reference and gain more information about what’s going on with you. She was recommended to me and I highly recommend her to you if you’re seeking a skillful alternative practicioner to guide you on your journey to health and healing.
ps. Her office manager, Kristi, adds to the experience by also being extremely kind and helpful.

I’ve been working with Dr. Joan Margaret, an alternative health care provider regarding arthritis inflammation in my hands, knees and stomach. She suggested a diet of no sugar and no wheat, which cause inflammation, and gave me herbal supplements. If I adhere to the diet I am pain free. Weight loss was and unexpected additional result. I’m thinking it is probably easier to lose weight when you’re not expecting it and you’re motivated by relieving pain. Another side effect is that the food I can eat: meat, vegetables and fruit, tastes better than ever.
Another thing I like is learning from Joan Margaret that if you reduce the inflammation in the stomach it also reduces the inflammation in the brain. I’ve noticed that I am more clear about solving problems – though short term memory is not improved, sadly.
Joan is a warm person who shares her ever accumulating skills and is glad to hear your thinking and questions.

If you have any kind of allergies… food, or environmental, please do yourself a big favor and go see Joan Margaret. Not only is she extremely knowledgeable about her practice, but she is a very nice and kind person.
I will always be very grateful that I went to her!!!
My eating life was a joke. Here are some of the foods that I could not eat: (they would cause, severe upset stomach and cramps, severe inchiness, insomnia, and alot more). Garlic, soy sauce, (any soy products, for that matter), all dairy products, hot sauce, almonds, peanuts, cashews, watermelon, cantelope, oranges, apples, pears, mangoes, and bananas.
Trying to find something in a restaurant that I could eat was almost impossible.
If a friend wanted to «go get a pizza», I couldn’t do it. If they wanted to go have Italian food, forget it. Asian food? Not with all of that garlic and soy sauce. Sure, I could ask them to «leave it out», but alot of food had been preprepared.
Well, thanks to Joan Margaret and NAET, I can go into any restaurant, and order anything that I want and enjoy the heck out of things that I never could in the past. My life is 100% better!
I have always wanted to visit Italy, and now that I can eat «garlic»,
Hey…“Ciao Italia”

I can’t believe there’s only one review of Joan Margaret here!
I’ve been going to her for several months, and she is nothing short of miraculous. Basically, she does everything that I wish regular doctors could do — while those guys sit around in their offices saying things like, «Oh, that’s normal,» and «I don’t know what it is, but call me if it gets worse and we’ll try to do something about it.»
With Western medicine, my experience has been that first you have to know what is and isn’t a «symptom» — so all the things that you’re used to and don’t realize could be problems will screw you over — and then you often have to know what they’re a symptom of and what can be done about them and «advocate» for yourself to doctors whose scope of practice is too broad and who aren’t caught up on things like celiac disease or non-​medical treatments for ADD. It’s exhausting!
Enter Joan Margaret.
I went to her because I knew someone whose life had been transformed by working with Joan Margaret to deal with all kinds of allergies. Allergies aren’t just sneezing fits or debilitating reactions; what I’ve learned through my treatments here is that it’s basically a term for anything that our bodies aren’t processing right. I also knew that I had hypothyroid symptoms and a swollen thyroid gland, and it alarmed me.
Joan Margaret does a very thorough 75-​minute intake to identify the main issues that are present. First (before the appointment) there’s paperwork to fill out, including a place to mark any important injuries and scars that have occured at any point, and to check off any one of maybe 50 different possible symptoms and their severity, and some medical history.
She talks to you for a while about the reasons you’re there, and then she gets down to brass tacks. It’s not just an intake; you get treatments too. In my case, she told me from her experience what my symptoms and history told her — maybe a thyroid problem, but maybe a liver issue — and then used applied kinesiology to test me for a wide range of allergies.
She then used an acupressure technique (NAET) to eliminate the first one, which was vitamin C. How scary is it to find out your body hasn’t been processing vitamin C right?
I immediately had more energy. Since then she’s cleared problems processing sugar, grains, and a hormone — I think it was pituitary hormones. I expected to have the same reaction to each cleared allergy — more energy, plain and simple — but it’s been more interesting than that. My energy levels have slowly and steadily increased as more of my energy can go to real things instead of fighting perceived invaders. Since she treated my reaction to sugar, instead of having sugar spikes when I eat chocolate and then crashing later, I’ve had no reaction at all. I also get less crazy around mealtimes. And now that I’m used to not having sugar spikes, I don’t crave sugar. I’m still discovering the results of more recent clearings! And yes, my thyroid seems less swollen too.
Your mileage may vary, depending on what’s going on with you. My wife started going, and reported that Joan Margaret actually treated something like three of her issues in the intake session, although I think one of them had to be re-​addressed the next time. My favorite thing is that while JM is doing my acupressure, she’ll test for other problems. Like, now I’m taking a food-​based iron supplement because she could identify not just that I was low in iron, but what sources I was low in.
Joan Margaret is expert in prescribing supplements for many different problems, and her office goddess Kristi is great at making them affordable. For example, she’ll pull a month’s or a week’s worth of pills out of a larger bottle and just charge me for the amount I need! How many places do that?!
How did I get that far into the (long) review without mentioning Kristi? Kristi is part of the reason that I started coming here; even though I was kind of nervous about calling a strange office and asking if they could help with my issues, she immediately put me at ease with her joyous, hilarious, and friendly manner. Both Joan Margaret and Kristi are a lot of fun to talk to and work with. That helps me a lot, because it’s very easy for me to let my health care slide by the wayside — «Oh, sure, that was helping, but things are BASICALLY okay…» But with these two to come back to, I always want to make time for more self-​care.
I always want to know prices before I go somewhere, so I’ll lay them out for you here. The intake is $ 225 for 75 minutes, but after that you can go for as little as a 15-​minute appointment ($ 45). I struggled with that intake price a little, but I really wanted help. Now I know that’s worth much more. And hey: if I could do it when I was making $ 14 an hour, with insurance that wouldn’t cover it, so could you. (If you have insurance that covers chiropractic, though, they’ll cover her treatments.)

I have been fighting a form of arthritis called Ankelosing Spondylitis for over 30 years. I have been a chiropractor for pretty much the same period, so I have had access to the best chiropractic and medical care. In thirty years, the most remarkable improvement I have seen has been from the care of Dr. Joan Margaret. A combination of nutritional and structural correction has allowed me to discontinue my NSAID drugs, and left me with less inflammation and pain than when I was taking them. I have much less pain on arising, I can hike for longer periods, and my blood tests show less inflammation. I travel from Redwood City to see Dr. Margaret, and there are a lot of chiropractors between here and there. I would recommend Dr. Margaret to anyone!