06/17/2026
When Dr. Saks moved his practice from downtown Ga***rd to a restored building on S. Otsego Avenue, he was already operating from a philosophy that mainstream medicine hadn't caught up to yet: that what you eat, how your spine moves, and how your nervous system functions are not separate problems for separate specialists. They are one system. And you cannot treat one while ignoring the others.
This idea, while novel at the time, was not necessarily new. What was new, in the 20th century, was a medical model that separated them. Hippocrates wrote about food as medicine in 400 BC. Traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda had always treated nutrition, movement, and physical structure. Indigenous traditions across North America understood the same thing long before European contact. Christian monasteries were the primary healthcare institutions in Europe for centuries, with monks growing medicinal herbs and treating body, mind, and spirit as inseparable. What connected all of them was a shared conviction that the body deserves attention, not just intervention. Saks Wellness Center would fit squarely in that tradition.
He had been telling patients this for years. He recommended whole foods, nutritional supplements, diets built around real ingredients rather than processed ones. Patients were enthusiastic and willing. Then they drove home through a town with nowhere to buy any of it. The nearest health food options were in Petoskey or Traverse City, and for a working family in Northern Michigan, that often wasn't realistic.
So Dr. Saks, never one to be deterred by an ambitious undertaking, built a store himself.
The natural foods store occupied the right half of the building. Two entrances, one address. The left door led to the clinic. The right door led to shelves stocked with things like brown rice, whole-food staples, and the nutritional supplements he was already recommending in treatment. His patients could get treatment and pick up healthy groceries in the same visit.
What he was doing had a name — integrative wellness, functional nutrition — but those terms weren't in common use in 1981. The dominant model of American healthcare that decade (and to a great extent still today) was built around acute intervention: diagnose the symptom, prescribe the drug, refer to the specialist. That model was itself only a few decades old. The idea that a chiropractor might also be stocking whole-food staples and advising on diet was, to put it plainly, a bit unusual. In a town of a few thousand people in Northern Michigan, it was almost radical.
The research, of course, eventually caught up. Decades of clinical evidence now support what Dr. Saks was practicing from the beginning. That chronic inflammation, poor nutrition due to the modern industrial diet, nervous system stress, and musculoskeletal dysfunction are deeply interconnected. That treating the spine without addressing diet, or addressing diet without treating structural imbalance, leaves results on the table. Today, "integrative," "functional," and "wellness" care are growth industries. In 1981 Ga***rd, it was just what Dr. Saks believed was right.
The natural food store outgrew its half of the building. It opened as its own operation in 2000 — JoJo's Natural Market, right next door at 1459 S. Otsego Ave, still owned by Dr. Saks. What started as a single room stocked with staples and supplements has grown into one of the best selections of vitamins and supplements in Northern Michigan, alongside organic produce, bulk foods, groceries, organic beer and wine, local Michigan products, handmade goods, and it's own dedicated, knowledgeable staff to help guide you on your journey to health. The two businesses have been neighbors for decades, separated by a parking lot and connected by the same original idea: that food is not separate from health. It is health.
This July, Saks Wellness Center turns fifty. A lot has changed in those five decades — the building, the equipment, the scope of care. The clinic now offers chiropractic, rehabilitative exercise, massage, neuropathy treatment, laser therapy, and Nutritional Response Testing, a non-invasive method for identifying nutritional deficiencies and supporting the body's ability to heal itself. Dr. Saks was among the first practitioners in Michigan to integrate soft-tissue and chiropractic care, an approach that has since become standard.
What hasn't changed is the underlying conviction: that the body is not a collection of disconnected parts, and that real healing requires attending to all of them.
Most people who walk into Saks Wellness Center today may not know about the old natural food store, or about the old rundown garage Dr. Saks transformed in 1981, or the federal redevelopment loan he had to travel to Washington D.C. three times to secure, or the fact that the health food market next door traces its roots to a wall of supplements inside the clinic forty-some years ago.
They come in because their back hurts, or they haven't slept well in months, or something their doctor told them didn't add up. And they find, often to their surprise, that the approach here is different. Slower, more connected, more interested in understanding what's happening than in managing what's visible.
If you remember the days of two doors, you've probably been a patient for quite some time, and we're so grateful for you. If you haven't been in yet, the door is still open — both of them.
We’d love to meet you.
