By JOHN BARTIMOLE – Special to Olean Times Herald
Oct 12, 2024
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(Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles on the members of the 2024 Laine Business Accelerator cohort).

OLEAN — Dr. Emily Gardner and her husband, Dr. Samuel Gardner, have lived the Chinese adage, “Out of chaos comes opportunity.”
The Gardners, owners of Gardner Chiropractic, saw the site of their business on West State Street virtually destroyed by a powerful storm that hit Olean in June. Besides rendering an adjacent business, The Pit Stop, obsolete, the storm wreaked enough damage on the chiropractic practice’s site that it was beyond any repair.
“That certainly caused a lot of sleepless nights,” Emily Gardner said. “Things like that (the storm) happen in Florida, but not in Olean. But it did, and we had to react quickly.”
And react quickly they did, managing to open barely a week later at their new office at 2420 Constitution Ave.
“We have a lot of good connections in the community, and people were very helpful,” she said. “It was a crazy time, but we got through it. Before our roof literally fell in, we had been in the process of expanding. Then, instead of expanding, we were relocating.”
The Gardners met while students at University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Pa. while Emily was playing softball and Sam baseball. Emily graduated and went to Palmer College of Chiropractic in Iowa and her to-be husband followed her a year later.
“I grew up in Hinsdale and went to Cuba schools, so this is really my home area,” she said. “My husband grew up a couple of hours away in Pennsylvania, but he certainly was familiar with the area.”
Emily said chiropractic practice is much more acceptable now than it was in the past. “It is so much more widely used than a generation or so ago,” she said. “More and more people are spreading the word as more and more people become increasingly open to the holistic forms of healthcare.”
The business offers a wide variety of chiropractic services in addition to standard techniques, including pediatric adjustments (they’ve worked on infants as young as two days old); myofascial release (a technique used to release muscle toxins and to relax those muscles); instrument-assisted soft tissue manipulation; compression therapy; and pelvic floor therapy (used in pregnancy).
She said that while the actual practice of chiropractic medicine is flourishing, it’s also true that no two practitioners are identical in their methods. “You’ll never find two who are just the same,” she said. “My husband and I have our differences. One of those differences is physical — I’m 5-foot tall, and he’s 10 inches taller than I am!”
The business applied for the Laine Business Accelerator a year later than they had intended.
“We were going to apply last year, but life was just too hectic,” she said. “We’re grateful to be in the program this year. We’re hoping that our involvement in the accelerator helps us to expand our services and to reach more people in our community and even farther.”
Particularly, the Gardners want to add even more therapies and more practitioners, she said. “We were looking for help and guidance as to how to do that, how to scale our business in a growth pattern.”
While Emily admits the accelerator is a “big commitment of time,” it works for her and her husband. “We’re open Monday through Thursday and much of the accelerator activities occur on Friday, so that’s perfect.”
And while the chaos has subsided, the opportunities for Gardner Chiropractic continue to flourish.
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