Most sports medicine is reactive. You get hurt, you get treated, you return to play. ProActive is built around a different premise: that the injury was predictable, that the pattern creating the conditions for it can be identified before it fails, and that elite-level diagnostics shouldn't be reserved for elite athletes.
What makes a sports chiropractor different
The CCSP® credential — Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician — requires post-doctoral training in sports medicine, orthopedic assessment, physical rehabilitation, and clinical examination specific to athletic populations. It's not a marketing term. It's a board certification with continuing education requirements and a clinical scope that goes well beyond standard chiropractic.
What it means in practice: Dr. Cohen is assessing the full kinetic chain on every patient — not just where it hurts. A knee problem is rarely a knee problem. A shoulder that keeps re-injuring has a mechanical driver that isn't in the shoulder. Sports medicine, done correctly, finds the mechanism rather than managing the symptom.
Where the framework was built
Three U.S. Olympic Training Centers. The environment where the ProActive diagnostic framework was developed — working with athletes for whom a missed diagnosis is a missed Olympic cycle.
Credentialed Team USA provider at the Olympic Trials — sideline sports medicine in the highest-stakes selection environment in American track and field.
Field care at mile 62 of a 100-mile ultramarathon is a different diagnostic environment than a clinical office. It teaches pattern recognition under conditions designed to break the body down.
Firefighters carry some of the most demanding structural load patterns of any working body. Supporting CalFire during active wildfires brought the ProActive framework into an entirely different context.
Field clinics in refugee camps, hospitals, and Red Cross settings. Care in environments with no imaging, no equipment, and no margin for guesswork produces a different level of clinical precision.
The UCI BMX Racing World Cup is the top tier of international BMX competition. The Sea Otter Classic is the largest cycling festival in North America. Field care at both events means working across road, mountain, BMX, and cyclocross athletes at the highest levels of the sport.
Every patient in the clinic gets the same framework that was developed on training fields and at endurance events. The context changes. The standard doesn't.
Sports we treat in San Francisco
The patients who come to ProActive aren't one demographic. They're runners, cyclists, climbers, dancers, and desk workers who train hard on weekends. Here's who we see regularly — and why the framework Dr. Cohen built in elite sports environments applies directly to each.
Road, trail, and ultramarathon. Dr. Cohen has provided field care at Western States 100 and worked with USA Track & Field at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials. Runner's knee, IT band syndrome, Achilles tendinopathy, plantar fasciitis, and hip impingement all have biomechanical drivers upstream of where they hurt — that's where we work. More on how we treat running injuries in San Francisco.
Road, gravel, mountain, and BMX. Dr. Cohen is a cyclist himself and has worked the UCI BMX Racing World Cup and the Sea Otter Classic — the largest cycling festival in North America, held annually in Monterey. Cycling produces predictable overuse patterns — hip flexor dominance, thoracic restriction, neck and shoulder loading from position — that most practitioners treat symptomatically. We address the mechanics driving them.
One of the highest-demand sports for finger, elbow, shoulder, and wrist — and almost no chiropractors speak to it directly. Pulley injuries, lateral epicondylitis, shoulder impingement, and wrist instability in climbers have specific biomechanical profiles. We see a significant number of Mission Cliffs and Dogpatch regulars.
Escape from Alcatraz, IRONMAN, open water — the overhead athlete's shoulder is one of the most mismanaged presentations in sports medicine. Cervical and thoracic mechanics drive most shoulder impingement; treating the shoulder alone is why it keeps coming back.
Serious athletes carrying serious load — shoulder, wrist, hip, and core demand that rivals gymnastics. Almost no sports medicine providers speak to this population. The structural patterns we treat in pole dancers overlap heavily with overhead athletes and gymnasts: shoulder stability, wrist mechanics, hip flexor loading.
High-repetition, low-impact — which means the injuries are accumulation injuries, not acute trauma. Hip impingement, knee tracking issues, ankle instability, and lumbar overload are common presentations in dedicated barre practitioners. The pattern is almost always upstream of where it hurts.
High-load, high-variability training surfaces compensation patterns fast. The shoulder complex, lumbar spine, and knee are the most common presentation sites — and in CrossFit athletes, the mechanism is usually a stability deficit compounded by volume. Training for Hyrox? We break the injuries down station by station on our Hyrox chiropractor page.
Rotational sports that produce predictable unilateral load asymmetries. Tennis elbow, golfer's elbow, lumbar rotation dysfunction, and shoulder impingement all have a mechanical driver in how the kinetic chain transfers force. We find where it's leaking.
Hip impingement, groin strain, ankle instability, and knee issues dominate. Soccer injuries are overwhelmingly pattern injuries — not bad luck. The hip and ankle are almost always involved even when the knee is where it hurts.
Basketball · skiing & snowboarding · yoga & Pilates · swimming · martial arts · weightlifting · rowing · volleyball · dance. The sport changes. The diagnostic framework doesn't.
You don't need to be an athlete
The diagnostic framework developed in elite athletic contexts produces better outcomes for every body — not just athletes. Athletes have faster feedback loops and higher stakes, which forced the development of more precise diagnostics. But a desk worker with recurring back pain and a marathoner with a hip that won't load right are often dealing with the same category of problem: a compensation pattern that hasn't been identified.
The sports medicine approach asks: what's the mechanism, what's driving the load pattern, and what will it take to change it? That question applies whether you're training for the Olympics or trying to get through a Tuesday without your sciatica flaring.
You will leave your first visit feeling seen, heard, and hopeful. Not a sales line. We're confident enough in our diagnostic process to back it. If that isn't your experience, we'll refund your first visit in full.
What the research says about sports chiropractic
The data on chiropractic care for athletic populations is consistent. Athletes receiving regular chiropractic care showed 23% fewer injuries and 31% faster return-to-play times compared to controls using conventional treatment alone. The preventive effect is the key point — it's not just about getting better faster. It's about not getting hurt in the first place.
Beyond injury outcomes: research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found that spinal adjustments produce measurable changes in brain activity — improving sensory processing and brain-body communication. For athletes, this means sharper proprioception, better movement coordination, and a nervous system that's fully communicating with the body it's supposed to be running.