Dr. Castellano opened this clinic in 2009 after nine years in a physical therapy practice on Northern Boulevard, in two rooms above what is now a bakery. It has grown into 3,100 square feet on one floor with four private adjusting rooms, a separate soft-tissue room, a rehabilitation floor with mats, bands and rollers, a traction table room, and a quiet recovery nook with a chair and a glass of water for anyone who wants five minutes before they go back out into the day — but the thing that has not changed is the shape of an appointment: one chiropractor, one patient, one room, and enough time to actually ask questions.
Chiropractic has a reputation problem and most of it is earned. Not by the treatment, which for ordinary back and neck pain is a reasonable and reasonably well-evidenced thing to try, but by the parts of the trade that sell thirty-visit plans at the first appointment, claim to treat asthma and ear infections, and take routine x-rays of everybody who walks in. Every one of those is a business decision rather than a clinical one.
So this clinic is organised around the opposite decisions. You pay per visit. Nobody here earns a bonus for rebooking you. We agree a date to stop and check whether it is working. We tell you the risks before you are on the table rather than after. And we refuse a category of booking that would be perfectly profitable to accept, which is set out in full on the scope of care page.
How this clinic works
Four decisions you can hold us to
A full hour for a first visit
Sixty minutes: history, examination, what we think is going on, what we propose, and what it costs. If that conversation ends with us sending you to your doctor instead, the visit still cost what we quoted.
No packages, no contracts
You pay per visit. We do not sell blocks of thirty, we do not ask for a signature on a care plan, and nobody here earns a bonus for rebooking you. If you feel better and want to stop, stop.
The risks, in writing
We tell you what adjustment can do, what it cannot, what the side effects usually are and what the rare serious ones are. If you would rather we did not manipulate your neck, say so and we will not.
One chiropractor, start to finish
You see the same person each visit, in their own room, on their own schedule. Four chiropractors work here and each keeps their own book, so you can pick the one whose approach suits you and stay with them.
We do not claim anyone else's approval. Chiropractic is a licensed health profession in New York State, and every chiropractor is registered with the State before they may practise. What we will not do is decorate this website with the name of a board, a college or an association as though somebody else vouches for us — nobody outside this clinic has reviewed it. So instead of showing you a badge, these pages tell you plainly who will see you, what they will do, what they will not do, what it costs, and what the risks are. Ask us about any of it before you book.
The neighbourhood
Woodside, and the nine languages spoken in this building
Woodside is one of the most linguistically diverse square miles in the United States, and a clinic here that operates in English alone is not really operating here. Between the four chiropractors and the front desk we work in 9 languages, and if we cannot manage yours we will find somebody who can rather than muddling through an examination that depends on you describing a sensation precisely.
Three minutes' walk from the 61st Street–Woodside station — the 7 train, the Long Island Rail Road, and the Q32, Q60, Q66 and Q70 buses all stop within a block. There is metered parking on 61st Street and a short loading bay outside the door. The entrance is step-free, the treatment rooms are on one level, and there is a bench by the door if you need a minute before you come in.
The book fills in a pattern you could set a calendar by. January brings the people who spent December lifting boxes and sleeping on somebody's couch. The first warm weekend of spring brings the gardeners and the people who took a bicycle out of a basement after five months. Late August brings the movers. And the fortnight after the first real snow brings everybody who shovelled from the waist. None of those weeks is a good week to be looking for a same-day appointment, so if you already know your back goes in the spring, book the spring.
In their words
What patients say
Invented, like everything else on this demonstration site, and deliberately not marked up as reviews. No rating is claimed anywhere on this website.
“He told me at the first appointment that he thought I needed an MRI before he touched me, and wrote to my doctor that afternoon. I did need one. I came back afterwards and he treated me for six weeks.”
“I asked whether she could crack my neck and she asked me why I wanted her to. Nobody had ever asked me that before. We did it a different way and it was fine.”
“The part I did not expect was being told to stop coming. Four visits, then a phone call three weeks later to check I was still all right. No package, no thirty-visit plan.”
“I was thirty-one weeks pregnant and terrified of being twisted. She never twisted anything. I lay on my side propped up with cushions and it was the first hour in a month that my hip did not ache.”
“I am seventy-eight and two people had already told me I was too brittle for this. He agreed about the twisting and did something else entirely with a little clicking instrument.”
“I wanted to run a half marathon in nine weeks. She said six was a fantasy and nine was possible if I did exactly what she wrote down. I ran it.”
A fee agreed before the visit, not after it
Book an appointment
Pick a chiropractor and an hour from the calendar — it shows only the times each of them genuinely has free. A first visit is a full hour and costs $95 for the examination on its own, or $145 if we treat you at the same appointment. You decide which after the examination, not before.