Victoria Malchar of Warwick’s Malchar Wellness Center is a chiropractor, sure. But she does so much more than that and has for quite some time.
Basically, patients can come to Malchar with an issue and know it will be fully and carefully considered. If necessary, she will go beyond a spinal adjustment and into full-on investigative mode.
“I dig until I find the cause,” she said, crossing areas of medical focus.
Her patients, newborns to seniors, receive whole-person health care derived from nearly four decades in the field and Malchar’s willingness to ask the right questions.
Malchar is aware that it can be difficult to describe the work she does, but she takes pride in being a rebel and looking at different disciplines and getting different certifications to treat patients. “Comprehensive,” is a good way to sum it up, as she considers factors in each patient that go far beneath the surface.
“We have to know what caused [the issue],” she said, and then develop a plan to treat it in the most natural way possible, often involving changes in diet.
“Can we nourish the muscles and help them repair faster? And is there neurological damage that can be repaired as well?” she said.
Malchar has been out in front in areas of wellness considered a bit offbeat until recently.
Years ago, “I was doing things that were so foreign to everybody else,” she said. Depending on the patient’s needs, improving the whole person can involve kinesiology, muscle testing, structural and nutritional balance, energy healing and emotional health considerations.
“The [Food and Drug Administration] would have come in and closed my office,” back in the day, she said. “But now it’s all mainstream. I kind of did it and brought it to New England, but it was more recognized in places like New York and California.”
Malchar sees patients for sports and auto injuries such as concussions, which can trigger inflammation in other areas of the body, she said. She uses contact reflex analysis, homeopathy, naturopathy, the chiropractic activator methodology, nutrition, and total body modification, which aims to improve the body’s functional physiology.
It’s all connected, said Malchar.
“I’d have patients – kids who were involved in sports – who had numerous concussions,” she said. “But they had never told me during the exam. But a few concussions can upset digestion and balance. So we had work to do to help the brain avoid these permanent effects of that neurological trauma.”
‘I dig until I find the cause [of a problem].’
Victoria Malchar, Malchar Wellness Center owner
Raised in Long Island, N.Y., Malchar earned her Doctor of Chiropractic degree from New York Chiropractic College in Seneca Falls in 1981.
She worked with competitive athletes with special needs while in New York. After her move to Rhode Island, Malchar started a course of study and became certified as a chiropractic sports physician in 1990. She is board-certified in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York.
Cancer prevention and preventative care for elders became a focus for Malchar when her mother – after years of being misdiagnosed – was found to have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, colon cancer and celiac disease in 2005. She dived in and learned all she could, developing a lecture series and course work on cancer prevention as a result.
From 2005-2007, she even hosted a radio show on WPRO. “Back to Health with Dr. Victoria Malchar,” which was another way for her to educate people about wellness and health.
Her own passion for learning new things goes beyond the world of health care.
Malchar is a recent graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program at Community College of Rhode Island, for example, with leaders in various industries who are looking to expand their businesses.
She works to share her knowledge with others, as well, with lectures and speaking engagements. She is the co-creator of an education symposium for child-abuse awareness and regulations for members of the Chiropractic Society of Rhode Island. Malchar also set up an educational platform for her patients on health care topics, such as nutritional options for chronic pain and toxic effects of household chemicals, for example.
Malchar said there is advice that rings true for every patient: Stay away from sugar. Eat organic and organic meats. Stay away from gluten and GMOs. “Eat clean. You are what you eat. Eat good, whole foods, vegetables and proteins, and stay away from boxes, bags or anything processed,” she said.
Despite the honors and recognition she has received – one of America’s Best Chiropractors as chosen by the National Consumer Advisory Board in 2015 and 2016, for example – she’s most proud of her four children, her husband and her grandchild.
