After only 20 minutes of being in Heber City, Dr. Gregory Maassen made just as many friends. 

The Dutch cyclist threw himself into endless conversations with strangers at the Wasatch County Library on the sunny afternoon in mid June. He quizzed one woman outside by asking her which famous actor from the 1960s he was named after — Gregory Peck — and joked with some senior citizens by calling them patrons of the county’s “junior center.” The smile permanently etched on Maassen’s face attracted attention as much as his orange safety vest.

But the biggest conversation starter was Maassen’s e-bike, which had yellow clogs affixed to the back — his “marketing device” — and was outfitted with everything Maassen needed to survive his cross-country trek across the United States. 

Maassen, who lives in Washington, D.C., after immigrating from the Netherlands, began his 5,800-mile journey in West Palm Beach, Florida, in March. He’s headed to Los Angeles, on track to arrive in about five weeks. He made a pit stop in Wasatch County on June 11 after pedaling from Duchesne County on Thursday morning.

“I went through Tabiona Valley, which is beautiful, but I forgot about the serious incline at the end. That is 4,000 feet,” he laughed. 

That’s where his e-bike comes in handy, reaching speeds up to 28 mph. Maassen’s still certainly getting a workout in, burning an average of 2,500 calories per day. His e-bike, meanwhile, consumes four batteries a day and gives him a boost — one comparable to half the power of a Tour de France cyclist.

“When people say that e-biking is cheating, maybe it is, but it’s very good exercise,” Maassen said.

For some, like Maassen, e-biking is an accessible gateway into exercising. It served as a way for him to treat his peripheral neuropathy, an umbrella term for conditions that affect nerves outside of the brain or spinal cord. Maassen is biking across the country to raise awareness about these conditions.

There are many types of peripheral neuropathy and about 30 million Americans live with it, explained Dr. Ahmet Hoke, director of the Merkin Peripheral Neuropathy Research Laboratory at John Hopkins Medicine. 

Some causes of peripheral neuropathy include diabetes, chemotherapy, vitamin deficiency, chronic alcohol use and some antibiotics and medications. 

In Maassen’s case, he was on a hike in South Africa in 2017 when he ran into a nest of ticks and was “inundated” with larvae.

“They were so microscopic, so small, those things that were on my skin, including my derriere,” he said. “My wife had to become a surgeon. I think we counted more than 80.”

Some time after the ticks were removed, Maassen’s body began to burn all over as if he had severe sunburns. His vocal cords began to hurt and it became difficult to speak. He was pushed from doctor to doctor who could not explain his condition. Some chalked it up to mental illness.

“Because of all the neurological stuff that was happening to me, I got those sensations for free. I became very depressed, and I became very anxious about the fact that no one could help me. There you are, this very active, healthy person, and for all I know, I could have been institutionalized,” he said.

Maassen was “bedridden” by the time he was finally referred to Dr. Hoke in 2019, who diagnosed him with peripheral neuropathy. That’s when Hoke told Maassen his condition could be treated with exercise. 

“Gregory had an unusual type of neuropathy. His was that his own immune system literally attacked his nerves after an infection. But that doesn’t continue. It’s not a progressive type of neuropathy. So, once the damage was done, the immune system resets itself, and then, it’s going to take some time for the nerves to regenerate,” Hoke said. “One thing we knew was that if the patients exercise during that time, their recovery is faster and more complete, and that’s what Gregory took to heart.”

Maassen started e-biking. His quality of life was so changed by the exercise that he later came up with the idea to partner with John Hopkins Medicine on a cross-country e-biking tour to raise awareness about peripheral neuropathy, making stops at universities, speaking to the media or simply striking up conversation with strangers.

The hope is that increased awareness leads to increased government funding for peripheral neuropathy research, which Hoke said is “extremely limited” despite the prevalence of the conditions.

Hoke said diabetic peripheral neuropathy is most common, followed by peripheral neuropathies with unknown causes. These idiopathic conditions make up 30% of all peripheral neuropathies.

“We suspect the majority of them have complex genetic mechanisms, either unknown new genes or perhaps subtle mutations in two or three genes that bring it out, so we’ve just started sequencing the whole genome of these patients,” Hoke said.

Sequencing the genome of one patient costs several thousand dollars, he added.

“The diseases that kill people get a lot of attention, and there’s often good advocates for these diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s,” Hoke said. “Peripheral neuropathy doesn’t kill, but it makes people’s lives miserable.”

Maassen did his first e-bike cross-country tour for peripheral neuropathy in 2022. 

He stopped in Wasatch County then, too, eating at Cafe Galleria in Midway, riding the Heber Creeper and biking on U.S. 40 all the way to Sundance and back, just for fun.

This tour, however, he spent much of his weekend biking to Salt Lake City and back to appear on a podcast.

Surprisingly, Maassen has not gotten into traffic accidents or even close calls on either tour. 

This year, his biggest fiascos were in Pueblo, Colorado, where someone tried to steal his bike, and he had a late-night campsite run-in with a skunk hungry for scraps of his chicken dinner.

“When a skunk visits you in the tent, you stay very silent. You don’t move. But it was very cold, and I urgently needed to address the pressure of my bladder,” Maassen said, gravely. “So, there I am. The skunk is chewing on my stuff. I cannot move, and I urgently need to go to the toilet. I was stuck.”

There have also been many cockroaches and “exploding toilets” on the trip. If Maassen cannot find a campground with electricity to charge his e-bike batteries, he spends the night at a motel, preferably cheap, whose owners won’t make a fuss if he brings an e-bike into his room.

He stayed at Mac’s Motel in Heber City over the weekend, a three-star motel that exceeded his low standards.

What has kept Maassen going on this trip has been the prospect of coming to Utah. He called Wasatch County “cycling paradise” on Thursday and was looking forward to taking in the views on a stretch of U.S. 50, “The Loneliest Highway,” between Delta — which he biked to on Monday — and Baker, Nevada.

Beyond the views, the most gratifying part of both tours has been meeting others with peripheral neuropathy and reassuring them that they are not alone. 

“My idea is to inject a lot of humor and hope into this program,” he said. “If you are afflicted with a condition like mine, it’s not always easy to be optimistic.”

Learn more about Maassen’s journey, follow the route and donate to peripheral neuropathy research at ebiketour.org.

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While many would shy away from grabbing a horse’s leg to extend and rotate it, Dr. Kinal Patel, a chiropractor of humans, horses, dogs and cats, was in her element as she did so to the 21-year-old steed, Mariah, at Northfield Stables in Heber City. 

For many boarders and their horses, Northfield Stables is their happy place away from the hustle and bustle of downtown. The 20 acres are surrounded on all sides with the serene emptiness of the North Fields, a freshwater wetland area, with towering Mt. Timpanogos on the horizon.

Patel has spent as much time as possible in that environment since moving to Heber City last year, not just for the views, but to help her animal friends, too.

As Patel adjusted Mariah, the horse lifted one of her right legs, not to kick her doctor, but as her way of saying, “Help me out, here!” She has an uneven trot thanks to soreness on the right side of her body.

Patel gives Mariah adjustments once a week. The horse has arthritis in her hock and stifle joints in her hind legs, in no small part because her previous owner neglected her. Mariah’s current owner, Amy Hartquist, bought her nine years ago from a boarding barn in Washington. 

“She had at least two incidents where she reared up and flipped over with a saddle on, before I found her,” Hartquist said. “And she grew a whole baby without any nutritional support. They just threw her out in the field, and they were like, ‘Have a baby!’”

Patel said that, in her experience, saddles are the number one reason horses become lame. If a saddle is too tight, pinching the scapula while a human sits directly on the horse’s spine, it can create long-term health problems that can be worsened by running and jumping in high-octane events.

“It’s like an extra small bra, when you can’t fit into it. … You need space for their vertebrae to move around,” Patel explained. “But they try their hardest to please the owner and move.”

The goal of Mariah’s treatment is to make her healthy enough to be ridden. 

Patel’s treatment began with rubbing essential oils onto Mariah’s body to soothe her. Then, she performed a series of adjustments across Mariah’s body, extending her legs, pushing down on the spine and massaging the temporomandibular joint in the jaw.

As Patel performed the latter adjustment, Mariah involuntarily stuck her tongue out and flatulated. While stinky, that indicates the horse is relaxed and signals the treatment is working, Patel explained. Yawning and nuzzling up are also positive indicators.

By the time Patel wrapped up the treatment by enveloping Mariah in a pulsed electromagnetic field blanket, which massages the horse with vibrations and uses magnetic fields to stimulate cellular repair, the horse was falling asleep on her hooves. Hartquist’s anxious girl was completely relaxed.

Usually, it’s the horses that are in the most pain that have negative reactions, nipping, kicking or bucking if Patel tries to touch them. 

“You just have to keep calm and give the horse some space, and go back to see why it bucked back or reared up. It’s obviously pain or discomfort,” Patel said. “You don’t come in like you own them. It’s a kind of respect.”

Dogs can also be dangerous, but they’re typically easier to handle. 

For example, 13-year-old border collie poodle mix Beau didn’t resist when Patel picked him up and adjusted his legs. 

Beau suffered a neck injury last year. His owner, Ashley Peatross, didn’t see it happen, but he assumes Beau tripped on the stairs.

“I was upstairs, and he came up, and he was pretty much crawling,” Peatross said. 

After a month of trying to manage the injury, administering anti-inflammatory medications and carrying Beau outside for every bathroom trip, Peatross scheduled an appointment with Patel.

“She came over and did one adjustment, and after that, he went from barely being able to move to being able to move around and take care of himself,” Peatross said. “After two or three treatments, his quality of life was way better.” 

Patel entered chiropractic medicine because of the positive effects it had on her own life.

Patel was born prematurely, which resulted in lifelong health issues, particularly asthma and constipation. She didn’t discover chiropractic care until she was a pharmacy student at Western Illinois University. A friend recommended it to Patel, who had injured her knee while playing soccer. Patel was surprised to find that adjustments lessened the severity of her other health conditions. 

“I was literally hospitalized all the time for those two things. So, I was like, ‘If medicine didn’t help, and this is helping?’ So, I switched careers,” Patel said.

She earned her doctorate at the Logan University College of Chiropractic in Missouri in 2012, later opening a practice in Illinois with her former husband, where, among their many patients, the pair treated professional athletes from the National Football League and Major League Baseball.

Patel became interested in animal chiropractic after an experience she’d had with her dog. Then, Patel acquired a certification in animal chiropractic at the Options For Animals College of Animal Chiropractic in Kansas in 2018. 

“He got a nerve nicked by a veterinary procedure,” she explained. “When he came back, his right hind (leg) wasn’t working, and he was peeing himself. Gabapentin would make him absolutely neurotic and crazy, like, teeth out at patients, because he’d come to work with me. My girlfriend, who does show dogs and show horses in Florida and Pennsylvania … came and adjusted him, and it was magic.” 

She moved to Heber City last year after her divorce and soon found a family of sorts at Northfield Stables, where she spends her Sundays providing adjustments to animals. 

While treating human patients is fulfilling, treating horses, cats and dogs provides Patel with her sense of purpose.

“My goal is to give back to the ones that can’t speak,” she said.

Patel’s practice, Heber Valley Chiropractic, is located at 2 S. Main St. She also expanded to Park City last month and is located within Park City Fit at 4108 N. Forestdale Dr. 

Appointments can be booked at hebervalleychiropractic.com.

The post Meet chiropractor Kinal Patel, the Wasatch Back’s doctor in the (barn)house appeared first on Park Record.

Children and their parents convened at the PC MARC Friday morning, May 19, 2017, for a bike-to-school event. Attendees were treated to free bike helmets, bike bells and stickers. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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Linda Elbert of Mindful Cuisine hosted five people at her home in Park City for an “Early Spring Dinner” cooking class Saturday evening, April 8, 2017. The group prepared a myriad of dishes, ranging from appetizers to desserts. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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