Meet Dr. Andrew Cohen · Sports Chiropractor · San Francisco
Twenty years building the diagnostic tool
the rest of the room hasn't named yet.
Circa 1984 — already adjusting.
Dr. Andrew Cohen grew up the son of a chiropractor — not in the abstract, but in the room, watching his father work. When he was in middle school, he was playing tennis with a friend whose father was also a doctor. His friend sprained his ankle. Assumed the game was over. Andrew said: "What? Dad'll fix that." And his father did. They went back to playing. His friend was stunned. Andrew had simply assumed every doctor — and every dad — could do that.
"I liked being able to fix things real time. Being a detective. Watching someone arrive cranky and leave transformed — usually with a laugh somewhere in the middle."
As he considered his career path, he was drawn to chiropractic over mainstream medicine by the immediate feedback, almost no side effects, nothing invasive. The satisfaction of working directly with the body — tinkering, testing, watching the body reorganize in real time under his hands. The ability to travel with nothing but what he knows.
His father is a chiropractor and acupuncturist. His aunt was a chiropractor with a functional medicine focus. Growing up in that household meant constant exposure to the idea that the body is a system — that symptoms have upstream causes, that multiple modalities can address what a single discipline misses. That's not a framework he developed in school. It was the water he swam in. Over twenty years and thousands of patients — Olympic athletes, firefighters, musicians, desk workers, people whose pain was dismissed as nothing — that inheritance became a system.
ProActive Systems-Based Bodywork™ isn't a technique. It's a diagnostic logic built from decades of pattern recognition across radically different bodies, demands, and environments. The framework other practitioners haven't named yet — because they haven't had to build it from scratch.
When he's not with patients, he can be found running, snowboarding, and mountain biking — his dog joins him on the runs, and together they coax his wife onto hikes though, as an aesthete not an athlete, she'll tell you she's there for the mountains, not the miles. Lately he's taken up pickleball and is learning to play the guitar. And lest you think he is always being healthy: his friends will tell you he is their reliable mezcal advisor and that he has strong opinions about chocolate chip cookies.
Dr. Cohen sustained a serious traumatic injury — a mountain biking accident involving a ravine and a close encounter with a mother bear and her cub. He did what most people do: followed the system. Filed the insurance claim, saw the providers they sent him to, took the medications they prescribed. For weeks, the answer was the same. More opioids. Higher dose, higher frequency. Nobody asked why the pain wasn't resolving. Nobody looked harder.
He knew something was wrong. He showed up at the orthopedist clinic and told them. They tried to send him home — wait, rest, give it more time. He told them he needed them to remove the cast and look at what was underneath. They refused. He told them he was going to cut it off himself. He didn't know how to do that safely, and it was a wrist, so missing wasn't an option. The tech who finally removed it delivered a lecture the entire time about the irreparable harm he was doing to himself by not letting it heal.
When the cast came off, the skin was the wrong color. Mottled. Silver and shiny. A presentation so obviously abnormal that the surgeon came out, took one look, and revised the entire treatment plan on the spot. He was referred to a pain management team and given a diagnosis: Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) — a rare, poorly understood neurological condition characterized by severe, persistent pain that conventional medicine frequently misses, dismisses, or simply doesn't know what to do with. The surgeon told him something he has never forgotten: she could only hope he would be able to work again.
That was the moment he stopped following the system.
If they couldn't help him, he would treat himself the way he would treat a patient. He did everything: chiropractic, acupuncture, physical therapy, pain psychology, laser therapy, nutrition. Chronic pain doesn't stay in the body; persistent pain reshapes mood, cognition, and identity in ways that can't be separated from the physical experience. He developed depression during the recovery. The biopsychosocial model — the recognition that biological, psychological, and social factors are all load-bearing parts of a pain pattern — isn't a framework he learned in a textbook. It's a framework he survived. He recovered. Fully. Well enough to build a twenty-year career treating the cases other practitioners send home.
What he carries into every room is this: he knows what it costs to be right when the system is telling you you're wrong. He knows what it takes to keep insisting. It is why he refuses to dismiss a patient. It's why the first-visit guarantee exists. It's why "I've tried everything" doesn't make him skeptical; it makes him more interested. And he knows that the patients who say "I've tried everything" are usually the ones who haven't yet found someone willing to actually look.
CRPS is a chronic neurological condition involving severe, disproportionate pain typically following an injury. It is frequently missed or dismissed in conventional care settings. Dr. Cohen's personal experience with CRPS informs his particular attention to pain that doesn't fit expected patterns — and his zero-tolerance policy for telling patients their pain isn't real.
Post-surgical X-ray showing plate and screws following the injury that led to Dr. Cohen's CRPS diagnosis. The surgeon's prognosis at the time: she could only hope he would be able to work again.
Dr. Cohen's father is a chiropractor and acupuncturist. His aunt was a chiropractor with a functional medicine focus. Growing up between them meant absorbing a systems-level view of the body before it could be formally articulated — the understanding that symptoms have upstream causes and that no single modality has all the answers. The intuition most clinicians spend years trying to develop was, for him, an inheritance.
Inside Olympic Training Centers, the margin between performing and broken is measured in fractions. There's no room for approximation. This is where Dr. Cohen's diagnostic precision sharpened — where pattern recognition had to be fast, accurate, and accountable to the result.
The Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician credential is one of the highest post-doctoral sports medicine qualifications available to a chiropractor — awarded by the American Chiropractic Board of Sports Physicians to clinicians who demonstrate advanced competency in sports injury diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. It requires substantial clinical hours and rigorous examination. It's the credential that formalizes what the field work was building.
On-site care at Team USA Track & Field — including the Olympic Trials — means diagnosing dysfunction in bodies operating at the highest level of human performance. Nothing gets to hide. The work either holds or it doesn't.
Firefighters carry some of the most demanding structural load patterns of any working body — sustained exertion, asymmetric weight, extreme stress. Supporting CalFire during active wildfires brought the ProActive framework into a completely different context: not peak performance, but structural resilience under conditions designed to break you down.
Endurance athletes break down slowly and invisibly over months. The patterns that cause failure are already running long before anything hurts. Identifying the mechanism before the injury — not after — is the skill that transfers directly to every patient who walks in with a recurring problem they've been told is just bad luck. Dr. Cohen has provided on-site support at the Western States Endurance Run and the North Face Endurance Challenge — two of the most demanding events in the sport. The field work extends beyond elite ultra-running: cyclists at the Sea Otter Classic, charity event participants at the Susan G. Komen Walk, runners and riders across the full spectrum of who shows up to do something hard with their body. The diagnostic approach doesn't change. The body is the body.
Everything built across those environments — every athlete, every firefighter, every pattern that didn't fit the textbook — is available to every patient who walks through the door on Battery Street. You don't need to be performing at any particular level to deserve this quality of diagnostic care. You just need a body.
ProActive Systems-Based Bodywork™ isn't a technique. It's a diagnostic logic: a way of asking the right questions, in the right sequence, to find what's actually driving the problem.
These are the principles it's built on. Applied in every session, with every patient, regardless of what they came in for. Dr. Cohen holds the CCSP® — Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician — one of the highest post-doctoral sports medicine credentials in chiropractic, and the framework reflects the diagnostic standard that credential demands.
Where it hurts is almost never where the problem lives. Pain is a signal. The job is to find what's generating it — not quiet it.
Every ankle sprain, every surgery, every period of compensating for something that "went away on its own" — all of it is still in the system. The Health Autobiography™ exists because this history matters more than most practitioners realize.
It wasn't wasted time. A prior label helps Dr. Cohen skip wrong paths. The underlying pattern usually predates the diagnosis — knowing what's been ruled out is still part of the map.
What happens between sessions tells Dr. Cohen as much as what happens in the room. What the system holds — and what it reverts to — is information. Watched deliberately.
Passive care creates dependency. The goal is that you leave knowing more about your body — not just feeling better in the moment. That literacy is part of the treatment.
A body under sustained stress carries it structurally. Dr. Cohen notices it. Works with it — not because he's a therapist, but because a chiropractor who ignores it is working with incomplete data.
Including — and especially — the cases other providers sent home. Dr. Cohen, DC, CCSP® (Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician) can also order labs and imaging directly — no referral lag, no insurance markup.
Don't see your condition? Call or text (415) 762-8141 — if it's not something Dr. Cohen can help with, he'll tell you and point you somewhere better. Zero-judgment practice. Labs & imaging ordered directly. FSA/HSA accepted. Superbills provided for out-of-network reimbursement.
"He understands human bodies unlike any medical professional I've seen — knowing within minutes if the challenges are musculoskeletal and/or emotional/psychological. He comes from several generations of family practitioners and has been practicing bodywork since he was essentially a kid."
"He doesn't do a cookie-cutter treatment plan. He listens, understands, asks the right questions, then explains what he thinks is happening. I had severe tendonitis for 6+ months with no help from Kaiser. He introduced me to Shockwave Therapy he'd been working with at the Olympic Training Center. Life changing."
"PT didn't help. Steroid injections didn't help. Surgery didn't help. Then I found Dr. Cohen. He completely changed my life. I just finished 10 months of travel — running through rice terraces, climbing volcanoes. It may not have been possible without him."
"His ability to figure out what is wrong is pretty remarkable — he finds connections between things you would probably never expect. I have been going to Dr. Cohen for over 10 years now and am really grateful I found him."
More questions? Call or text.
(415) 762-8141
He'll probably answer himself.
When Dr. Cohen was in middle school, he was playing tennis with a friend whose father was also a doctor. His friend sprained his ankle and assumed the game was over. Andrew said: "What? Dad'll fix that." And his father — a chiropractor — did. They went back to playing. His friend was stunned. Andrew had simply assumed every doctor and every dad could do that.
As he thought about a career, what drew him to chiropractic was specific: fix things in real time, with your hands, almost no side effects, immediate feedback. Be a detective. Watch someone arrive cranky and leave transformed — usually with a laugh in there somewhere. Travel with nothing but what you know.
Yes — and it changed everything about how he practices. He sustained a serious traumatic injury in a mountain biking accident involving a ravine and a close encounter with a mother bear and her cub. During his recovery, he developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) — a rare, poorly understood neurological condition that conventional medicine frequently misses or dismisses.
He knows firsthand what it's like to have tried everything, to be told the pain is normal, to find that the people who actually helped were the ones you paid out of pocket. That experience is not a footnote to how he works — it's the reason the guarantee exists and the reason "I've tried everything" makes him more interested, not less.
Shoulder problems, knee pain, jaw dysfunction (TMJ), and ankle sprains — partly because they're so commonly mismanaged, and partly because the mechanism is almost never where people think it is. He also has a particular affinity for patients who use physical activity to manage stress — runners, climbers, people whose sport is also their mental health infrastructure. When that's been taken away by injury, the loss compounds: the body hurts and the coping mechanism is gone. Getting someone back to movement in that situation isn't just physical recovery. The biological, psychological, and social gains feed each other — the body heals, the stress regulation returns, the mood follows. He finds that cascade one of the most satisfying things in clinical practice. And he knows how to give it back.
Upper cross syndrome and tech neck are the dominant presentations — the postural and muscular pattern that develops from long hours at screens, often with a monitor that isn't directly in front of you, or a phone held at the wrong angle for years. This produces neck pain, headaches, shoulder tension, and jaw problems, frequently in combination. Many patients have been medicated for years without anyone addressing the structural driver. Dr. Cohen also sees significant stress-related musculoskeletal presentations. San Francisco is not a low-stress city.
Jaw dysfunction (TMJ disorders) surprises people most — they don't expect a chiropractor to be on that menu. Tennis elbow, runner's knee, and nutrition support also catch people off guard. So does pregnancy: Dr. Cohen is Webster Technique certified, which means he's specifically trained to address the pelvic and sacral mechanics that shift during pregnancy — a population that often has nowhere good to turn for musculoskeletal pain. Dr. Cohen can also order labs and imaging directly — bypassing the referral queue and the cost inflation that comes with it. If something needs imaging, you won't wait three weeks for a referral.
It wasn't wasted time — even a wrong diagnosis gets us closer to the right one. A disc herniation label, a rotator cuff diagnosis — once someone has that diagnosis, they tend to get generic treatment for it while the underlying pattern that predates it gets overlooked. A prior diagnosis helps Dr. Cohen skip the wrong paths. He's building on an incomplete map, which is faster than starting with no map at all.
Most people assume being in-network is an advantage. Dr. Cohen doesn't think it incentivizes the best care. When a patient pays cash and doesn't get results, they don't come back — which means every visit has to earn the next one. That forces the provider to bring their A game, every time.
In-network practices don't just bill insurance — they're organized around it. A significant portion of clinical overhead goes to coding compliance, prior authorization, insurance appeals, and billing staff. That's time and attention that doesn't go to patients, to continuing education, or to staying current with the evidence. Dr. Cohen has none of that infrastructure. The time it would take to fight with an insurance company about a denied claim goes into the next patient's care instead.
There's also something worth naming about what insurance actually delivers. The coverage feels like a benefit until you look closely at what's being covered — typically the adjustment, and not much else. The diagnostic work, the soft tissue release, the time to actually listen: these don't have billing codes that insurance pays well for, so they get abbreviated or cut. You're not getting a discount on full care. You're getting full payment for partial care.
Insurance typically covers only the adjustment — the crack — while everything else that makes the work hold gets left out: the soft tissue release, the corrective movement, the diagnostic work, the patient education. ProActive is modeled on sideline sports care — where the job is to get the athlete back on the field using whatever tools it takes. For you, that means every visit is built around getting you back to what you want to be doing. What's best for your outcomes, not what's covered best.
Many patients use FSA/HSA accounts, and we provide superbills for out-of-network reimbursement if your plan supports it.
Most of his patients aren't athletes in any conventional sense. Desk workers, musicians, teachers, parents, people in recovery, people devoted to yoga, hiking, gaming, pole dancing, or simply staying functional as they age. The diagnostic framework was built on elite athletes, but it works on every body. You don't need to be performing at any particular level to deserve this quality of care.
Book a Body Intelligence Assessment™ at ProActive Chiropractic, downtown San Francisco. Dr. Cohen reviews your Health Autobiography™ before you arrive. You'll leave knowing what's actually happening — and what it will take to fix it.
ProActive Chiropractic · Cohen Corp.