The average chiropractic visit in the United States is somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. You describe your symptoms, someone adjusts the area that hurts, you schedule the next appointment on the way out. That's a treatment. It's not a diagnosis. And it's why so many people cycle through chiropractic care for months without the pattern actually changing.
Here's how it works at ProActive.
First visit: 60 minutes — the Body Intelligence Assessment™
The first visit has two parts: what happens before you arrive, and what happens in the room.
Before you come in: the Health Autobiography™. Most people have no real record of their body's past — just a patchwork of symptoms, quick fixes, and conflicting advice. The Health Autobiography™ is a structured process to map your body's full history: what it's carried, how it's compensated, and what it's still trying to tell you. Dr. Cohen reviews it in full before you walk in the door. You don't retell your entire history from scratch in the first five minutes of the appointment. He already knows it.
In the room: the System Reset. This is where we turn on muscle groups that have been compensating instead of cooperating. Dr. Cohen runs the ProActive Protocol™ — his structured muscle testing methodology — across your full body, not just the area that brought you in. Movement screen. Postural and foot analysis. Hands-on bodywork: adjustments, soft tissue release, muscle activation. You leave adjusted, feeling better, and with a clear picture of what's been driving the pattern and what it will take to change it. Not a theory. A protocol.
Sixty minutes is the minimum it takes to do that correctly. Most offices don't offer it because it doesn't reimburse well. Dr. Cohen opted out of insurance so the time could be used for the work rather than optimized for the billing code.
Insurance reimbursement structures reward volume and speed. A five-minute adjustment and a sixty-minute diagnostic session reimburse similarly — which means the incentive is throughput, not diagnosis. The same system that sends you home with ibuprofen and a follow-up in six weeks. We opted out of that model. The kind of work that actually resolves patterns doesn't fit in a billing code.
Second visit: 40 minutes — Deep Pattern Recognition
The second session, typically two days to a week after the first, is where the deeper pattern becomes visible.
Between visits, something important happens: incubation. Dr. Cohen is watching what your body held onto from the first session and what it reverted to. What stays? What doesn't? That information isn't background — it shapes everything about the second session. This is where we move beyond the surface and start listening for what your body isn't saying out loud: the compensations it's been making, the places you've been overriding instead of recalibrating.
The second session connects the dots between movement, history, and the compensation patterns the first session surfaced. This is the beginning of true re-patterning — addressing not just where it hurts, but why it hurts, and what will shift it for good. Forty minutes. Every minute is used.
Ongoing sessions: 20–40 minutes — System-Based Bodywork
Ongoing sessions are where change becomes permanent. Every session treats what's active and builds your ability to read what your body is communicating. The ProActive Protocol™ runs through all of it — testing at every step to confirm that what's being done is actually landing, not just quieting the symptom temporarily.
Twenty to forty minutes depending on what's being addressed. A maintenance session for a patient whose pattern is well-established and stable runs shorter. A session working a new layer of a complex presentation runs longer. Dr. Cohen doesn't pad sessions. He also doesn't rush them.
You'll begin to move more freely, breathe more fully, and develop language for what's happening in your own system — not just in isolated moments after a session, but over time. You'll leave with physical shifts and with clarity about how to support them between visits.
What to wear and how to get there
Wear clothing you can move in. The movement screen requires being able to see how you actually move — that's difficult through jeans. Nothing else to prepare; the Health Autobiography™ handles that before you arrive.
Parking downtown is a fight. BART to Embarcadero is one block. 22 Battery St., Suite 600 — the building has a lobby attendant, take the elevator to the 6th floor. Same-week appointments are usually available. Call or text (415) 762-8141.