Drs. Lou ’94 and Max ’01 Jacobs make healthful adjustments at Jacobs Chiropractic Acupuncture

Story and photos by Marc Glass (PDF of magazine layout)

Seven years, tastes and temperament may separate brothers Lou ’94 and Max ’01 Jacobs. But when it comes to caring for their patients, the board-certified doctors of chiropractic couldn’t be more simpatico.

“We don’t push people. We give them the time they need to tell us what their needs are,” Lou says. “The biggest complaint we hear from patients about their experiences with hospitals and Western medicine is, ‘No one’s listening to me.’”

Max agrees: “This whole idea of efficiency with patients—just moving them along—is a strange concept to me. I don’t speak that language. If you miss spending time with patients, then you miss the most rewarding part of healing.”



The brothers say patients who visit their thriving St. John Street practice in Portland’s West End are of two kinds: the healthy who seek to be healthier (without pharmaceuticals and invasive procedures) and the long-suffering, for whom traditional medicine has been no balm. The latter, Lou says, are the “most fun” to treat.

“Stress is not an objective, quantifiable medical diagnosis, but some of the most common manifestations are lower-back pain in men, and headaches and shoulder and neck pain in women,” Lou explains. “Patients who have been told there’s nothing more that Western medicine can do for them come to us and say, ‘You are my last hope.’ It’s gratifying to see them get relief, sometimes after only one treatment.”

Helping others was always part of their career plans, but Lou’s stint in a psychology doctoral program at the Univ. of Chicago and Max’s senior-year internship with a local psychologist cooled their interest in counseling. Despite the paternal influence of Bert Jacobs, professor of psychology at UMF, theirs would not be a case of like father like sons. And yet fate and their father put them on the path to chiropractic medicine.

In the late ’90s, when Lou was working retail sales in Boston while plotting his next career move, his father took a fall outside UMF’s Lincoln Auditorium, striking his head on a drinking fountain. He was, Lou recalls, in a lot of pain, “very skeptical, even anti-chiropractic” and resigned to neck-vertebrae surgery. “With great reservation, he went to see a chiropractor,” says Lou. “After one appointment, he was virtually pain free.” Bert became a convert, and Lou found a new calling.

Thus, Lou, who majored in Chinese studies and political science, boned up on all the prerequisites (year-long, two-course sequences of biology, chemistry and physics as well as anatomy, physiology and organic chemistry) and entered Cleveland Chiropractic College of Kansas City. After majoring in psychology, Max spent a year at Lou’s alma mater before a longing for more rural environs resulted in a transfer to New York Chiropractic College in Seneca Falls.

“I had the same textbooks as my friends in medical school. We even studied together,” says Lou, recalling a year studying gross anatomy with cadaver dissection and courses in microbiology, spinal anatomy, embryology and pathophysiology in chiropractic school.

But it’s what they learned about the Depression-era philanthropic efforts of Dr. Leo Spears in their history of chiropractic courses that most influences their practice. Setting aside a day a week for volunteer work, they don’t see patients at their clinic on Fridays, when Lou can usually be found cooking meals for cancer survivors and their families at the Cancer Community Center in South Portland, Mercy Hospital’s Gary’s House or the Ronald McDonald House of Portland.

“I got my love of cooking from my mom,” says Lou of his mother, Patty Jacobs ’87. “I live by the idea that the more you give the more professional satisfaction you get. Helping people who don’t have the luxury of coming to the office is critical to me.”

Max, who spends several Fridays each month at the Portland YMCA, providing free chiropractic and acupuncture treatments to active-duty soldiers as well as veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, agrees.

“My work at the Y is really just the first step,” he says. “I want to open it up to the underinsured and people who don’t have insurance. I think health care should be free. Everyone should have as much as they need.”



Despite their premium on pro bono work, what they do and how they do it illuminates their differences. Lou, for instance, enjoys cooking for many: The more the merrier trumps any concerns about too many cooks in the kitchen. Max, meanwhile, prefers one-on-one work at the Y. Lou animatedly describes a recent trip to Bucharest—home to some two million and what he calls the “world’s most congested traffic.” Max languidly recounts a weekend foray into the forest, searching for chaga mushrooms, an antioxidant-rich, naturally antibacterial fungus commonly found on birch bark. (The brothers are now developing Chaga Brand, a line of what they call chaga-infused, “Eastern medicine-inspired skinceuticals” for people suffering from stress-related psoriasis, eczema and other skin conditions.)

“He’s definitely more laid back than I am,” Lou says of his brother. “I like to see things moving and growing so we can help as many people as we can. There’s no chiropractic medicine in Bucharest. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to go and do chiropractic in Bucharest for six months out of the year?”

“Hmmm,” says Max with thinly veiled suspicion.

“That’s what makes this work so well,” says his big brother with a smile. “Between his attitude and mine, we have a workable balance.”

Learn more about the brothers and their practice at www.drloujacobs.com