We love empowering you with knowledge to help you better understand how we can help serve you, your loved ones and others you know.

At Vital Family Chiropractic, we are a women-led team of holistic-minded people committed to helping you and your family achieve health through gentle and specific, neurologically centered chiropractic care. We are the most highly trained cranial chiropractor in Houston. 

We have a hand-selected team of like-minded partners who we refer our patients to, who host support groups and meetups and also who host classes in our office. These professionals are all professionals we completely trust. They have all been vetted through our team either through our Vital family’s experience with them, or if our team is currently under their care. These professionals help us support women just like you through their journey in womanhood, preconception, pregnancy and throughout the motherhood transition to optimal health & healing.

Dr. Whitley Jagnanan Caruso, DC, CST

Hey there, Dr. Whitley here! You’re probably wondering who I am and how I got here. I was a really sick kid. Colic, allergies, asthma… you name it, I had it. This continued from infancy to a young adult. I was a total nerd, loved science experiments, and from about the age of 4 years old, I knew I wanted to help people.

In high school, I was a competitive cheerleader (don’t hold that one against me) and injured my back during a practice. I went to a chiropractor for a few visits, but honestly I didn’t notice any difference. I was flexible, young and overall pretty healthy. I wasn’t sure what this was doing for me and I didn’t see or feel any difference in my spine. I chalked it up to the fact that “chiropractic just isn’t for me”. Boy, was I wrong!

​In college, I had awful migraine headaches. I mean AWFUL! I would have debilitating migraines 3-5 times a week. On top of that, I was taking experimental drugs to try to stop or lessen my migraines headaches. Nothing helped. Until one day, I met a chiropractor at an event I was working at. He assured me he could find the cause to my headaches and help me with my suffering. I explained to him my previous chiropractic experience and told him “chiropractic wasn’t for me” (yes, you can laugh). Somehow, this doctor convinced me to come into his office. As soon as I stepped in the door, I knew he was different. The office smelled, looked and felt different than the previous chiropractor I had seen before.

This chiropractor examined my spine in a way that had never been done before, explained to me what was going on and started adjusting me. Within weeks I started coming off of my migraine drugs and was amazed at what a difference chiropractic was making in my health. At this point, the doctor asked me what I was going to college for. I explained to him that I was pre-med (because that’s what all smart nerdy kids say they want to do in life – be a doctor). He asked me the question that changed the path of my life forever, “If you didn’t like taking drugs, why do you want to prescribe them to other people?” At that moment, I knew I had to become a chiropractor. I knew I had to be different too.

I knew my office needed to give people that gut feeling that this was different. I knew that I needed to give people explanations, give people the cause and give people hope. This was the moment I decided how I would help people.

I am a proud mom to a little boy named Warrick and wife to a chiropractor who used to practice with me before opening his own super amazing office.

In my “spare time as a mom” (which we really know doesn’t exist), I love traveling, snorkeling and learning new things.

I am undeniably the most highly cranial specific trained chiropractor in Houston. I have taken over 1000 hours of cranial training and I add more every year.

I also teach other chiropractors specific cranial work so they can serve their patients at a higher level too. I’m committed to raising the bar and creating a standard of care for chiropractic cranial work.

As a mom, if you’ve read this far, thank you. I know your time is sparse and valuable. I can’t wait to meet you soon!

Dr. Teri Phillips

I was born into a military family and spent the first 13 years of my life living on military bases and experiencing a bit of a nomadic life on the east coast.

I was an active kid that would prefer to be outside riding my bike and playing with friends than being inside doing homework or watching tv. I was an average student, but struggled with paying attention in class because my imagination was so vivid and I could easily get swept away to another place and time. Looking back, I know that they would have diagnosed me with ADHD if the current standards were used back then.

The summer between 7th and 8th grade, my Dad retired from the Marine Corps and we moved to Arlington, Texas. Along with the stress of moving to a new town in a new state, starting at a new school, and making new friends, I experienced the challenges of the physical changes of the teen years. Needless to say, middle school was stressful in many ways, but it was made even more stressful by unbalanced hormones causing emotional stress and mood swings, which was discovered much later in life.

I went to my first chiropractor at 25 years old when I got a pinched nerve in my shoulder after having 3 fender-benders within 7 months. My first doctor did a thorough neurological exam with x-rays, and we discovered that I had a drastic curve in my thoracic spine that was the result of injuries from a car accident when I was 7 years old, before seatbelt laws existed. The doctors at the emergency room took care of my broken collar bone, but they didn’t look much further to see what other injuries or issues were present from the severity of my grandfather’s pick-up being t-boned by a dump truck.

As my chiropractor started to correct my spinal misalignment, I began to experience amazing changes in my body. My hormones balanced, I stopped having digestive issues and heart burn, I had better sleep and my overall stress level at work decreased as my increased focus improved my job performance. I was genuinely a happier person and even my mom commented that she saw me “coming into my own” as I became more whole as a person.

Since that time, chiropractic care has been a regular part of my life and a key factor in staying balanced physically, mentally, and emotionally. It has become even more important as I’ve gotten older to help lessen the aging of my joint and prevent issue with arthritis.

Looking back on my life with the knowledge that I have now, I can see that I was one of those kids that had a stressed nervous system with too much on the “gas pedal” and not enough on the “brake pedal” to keep me balanced. I regularly got in trouble for not paying attention and was told by almost every teacher that I had an overactive imagination and inability to control my talking in class. When I hear about kids that are struggling in school, I can totally relate because I was like that, and I now wish that my parents had the information that we have now so that I could have gotten the chiropractic care that my body so desperately needed.

I gained a passion for serving moms and kids when I worked as a clinical nutritionist and breastfeeding educator with the Tarrant County WIC Program in Fort Worth. During 2 years of my time with WIC, I served in a clinic that had a high percentage of children with chronic health concerns that required surgical interventions and feeding tubes. I was saddened by the amount of stress that those little ones carried and wished that I had a way to reduce some of their stress so they could live happier and healthier lives. The more I learned about chiropractic and its ability to lessen the stress on the nervous system, the more I longed to help kids that may need more specialized care to reach their goals.

I feel blessed to get the opportunity to serve the families here at Vital Family Chiropractic and consider it an honor that you would choose to trust me with the health and wellness of your family.