About us
Centre Chiropractic was established in May of 2006 to serve the health care needs of our community members in Boalsburg, State College and surrounding areas in central Pennsylvania. Our general office hours are Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 9 a.m.–6 p.m., Thursdays from noon–8p.m., and every other Saturday from 10 a.m.–2 p.m. We will schedule additional times as needed to fit your schedule.
At this time, our office accepts cash patients, and we encourage all cash patients to join PCD, a national discount plan that involves a low annual membership fee for significant discounts on every service our office offers. In addition, our office is being credentialed with the most popular insurance plans in the area:
- Aetna
- Amerihealth
- BC/BS Highmark
- Capital Blue Cross
- Devon
- Federal Blue Cross
- Health America/Health Assurance
- Medical Assistance (Access Plus)
- Medicare (HGS/Medicare)
- PEBTF
- UPMC
If your insurance is not listed above, please contact our office for more information.
Dr. Matthew
After moving from New England to the West Coast to go to a performing arts high school, Dr. Matthew attended UCLA in 1988 to study physics. In his freshman year, he spent so much time working on projects in the film department that his core classes were suffering, and he decided to follow his passion and transfer. While he continued his studies in quantum physics and plasma dynamics, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in design in 1992, with an emphasis in theater, film and television. In his junior year he formed a band with other students and spent the next five years touring the Americas as a professional musician. He left the band to settle with family and expand his design business and his studies in world religion. Over the next seven years he ran a $7 million a year design and production company, developing shows and events for some of the largest companies in the world while creating a private design and fine art business.
Although he had already started a life coaching practice and become a reverend, by 2000 Dr. Matthew began to weigh his professional and financial success against his deep desire to commit his life to service. When he looked to his own frustrating lifelong experience with health care, his positive experience with chiropractic, and his deep love of working with people, and after much meditation and prayer for guidance, chiropractic was the clear choice.
He began attending Cleveland Chiropractic College Los Angeles in 2002 and started studying Gonstead Chiropractic in his first trimester. In his first year, he joined four campus clubs, became an officer of two, won the Alumni Association’s Student of the Year Award and Scholarship, produced a Children’s Health and Wellness Expo on campus, attended the International Chiropractic Pediatrics Association (ICPA) seminar series and four Gonstead seminars, and visited over one hundred D.C.s in their practices to help him in designing his own practice. In his second year, he continued his involvement on campus and also began a two-year Master’s Degree in Spiritual Psychology with emphasis in Consciousness, Health and Healing at the University of Santa Monica, which he completed in August 2005. In his third year he was elected to student council, where he worked to better the school—the place where the health of a profession truly originates—continued his club involvement, began his internship, and traveled to Washington D.C. to lobby for pro-chiropractic legislation.
Dr. Matthew was chosen from over eighty interns to participate in the highly competitive “intern exchange program” with USC medical school, where he saw patients while interacting with USC staff and medical interns, who are now required to do a chiropractic rotation prior to graduation. He graduated as the class salutatorian, cum laude, in December 2005.
He has attended over 25 seminars, primarily ICPA and Gonstead oriented, in order to better serve his patients. While he has incorporated elements of symptom-based doctoring, rehab, exercise, nutrition, extremities adjusting, and addressing the mind-body connection in his internship, his philosophy is primarily a straight one—he looks for nerve interference and removes it by hand, while encouraging his clients to success and happiness in every area of their lives.
Dr. Matthew is stepping into a long and productive chiropractic career, filled with the blessings of serving people and their health by adjusting, educating, and facilitating them in managing their own physical and emotional health. It is also his intention to affect chiropractic’s place in the media, to facilitate a modernization of our schools’ curriculum, and to work vigorously to unite and inspire chiropractors by focusing on similarities and strengths and bringing them together in service to the awesome power of the adjustment.
“Please know one thing: while being a Doctor of Chiropractic can be a very lucrative career, and while I am very open to accepting of God’s abundance in this way, I came to chiropractic to be of service, and to empower and inspire people. I love being of service, and I hope I have the chance to be of service to you.”
Speaking and community service
Dr. Matthew Hertert is also a speaker, available to speak on any topic which he has personal experience with. There are a number of talks prepared, and he also designs custom presentations on specific topics. Dr. Matthew was a Safety Officer and OSHA Compliance Specialist for GGDA for four years, and will come to your place of business, for no charge, to address groups of ten or more employees on matters of workplace safety, ergonomics, preventative health and wellness.
About Gonstead Chiropractic
The Gonstead technique of adjusting the spine and extremities was originated by Clarence Gonstead in the middle of the twentieth century. Dr. Gonstead was a young man suffering from rheumatoid arthritis when he encountered his first chiropractor, as a part of his search for relief after medicine proved useless to him. He was greatly helped and inspired by the results, and went to the Palmer School of Chiropractic on the G.I. Bill.
Dr. Gonstead fully dedicated himself to the art and science of chiropractic, and in addition to his studies at Palmer, he gained rights to dissect many hundreds of cadavers at local medical schools in his dedication to understand anatomy and biomechanics as fully as possible. His practice grew quickly, and within a few years D.C.s in neighboring states noticed that some of their patients were disappearing and traveling long distances to see Dr. Gonstead. As time went on, Clarence’s reputation and practice grew so fast that he had to build an airplane landing strip and a hotel in order to house those people coming from overseas and the west coast to get his help. Dr. Gonstead saw over a million patients in his lifetime and profoundly changed not just their lives, but the the chiropractic profession and anatomists’ understanding of the spine and biomechanics; Dr. Gonstead was responsible for Gray’s Anatomy reclassifying the sacroiliac joints as movable joints, among other contributions.
There are a few foci of Gonstead chiropractic that distinguish it from other applications of the adjustment. One is a focus on the balance of sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous systems in pathology and visceral complaints; and although this is a concern, ultimately a Gonstead chiropractor will accept a subluxation where he or she finds it instead of trying to outsmart or outthink the nervous system. A second difference is the emphasis on patient management in the application of few adjustments: many chiropractors will adjust a half dozen spinal segments or even mobilize the entire spine. A Gonstead practitioner will normally only adjust three segments during your visit. While it may seem that this would extend your recovery time, it in fact shortens it; if you come to see me and I adjust seven vertebrae, it becomes much more challenging clinically to determine which made you better, or which made you worse. Adjusting fewer places allows for greater precision and clinical management in service to your health. A third difference is the focus on biomechanics; a Gonstead doctor is trying to adjust the vertebrae back into it’s correct position on the disk, versus adjusting the two facets at the back of the bone. What this means to you as a patient is that you will not have your neck rotated or your spine rotated while getting adjusted. The single most common identifier of a Gonstead adjustment is the seated cervical (neck) adjustment. Most every other technique addresses facet problems, while Gonstead practitioners look to basic anatomy and biomechanics of the spinal unit which demonstrate the supremacy and primacy of the intervertebral disk.
Dr. Matthew pursued the study of Gonstead chiropractic in med school because in the first weeks of the curriculum it was clear that there were clinical and ethical procedures and protocols that made it a superior technique for adjusting the spine. He attended a dozen expensive seminars on Gonstead outside of and in addition to his campus education, and he practices this because he believes it to be the best thing for you—but if he ever finds something better, he will learn that too.
