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Dr. Vu Misra and Julianne Misra

The Practice That Puts People First: How Dr. Vu Misra and Julianne Misra Built the OM Center Into Loudoun County’s Most Trusted Wellness Home

One came from pharmaceuticals. One came from CNN. Together, they looked at American healthcare and decided there had to be a better way. Twenty years later, the OM Center in Loudoun County is proof that they were right.

There’s a moment Julianne Misra still thinks about when she considers why the OM Center exists. She was working in CNN’s health unit, helping write and produce segments on medicine and wellness, and she kept noticing the same thing. Show after show, the conversation orbited drugs and disease. Treatments and symptoms. She used to joke that they should rename the program entirely.

“I always said we ought to call it ‘Your Disease,'” she says, “because we spent all of our time talking about drugs and disease.”

Her husband, Dr. Vu Misra, was seeing something similar from inside the pharmaceutical industry — a field doing real good for real people, but one that was also caught in cycles of symptom management rather than root-cause healing. Drugs released, side effects discovered, drugs pulled, reformulated, and released again. The machinery kept turning, but the path toward actually correcting the problem was rarely part of the plan.

So they stepped off. They built something of their own. And twenty-some years later, the OM Center — a chiropractic, physical therapy, and wellbeing practice with locations in Ashburn and historic downtown Leesburg — has become exactly what they always envisioned: a natural path to healing, built around listening, education, and the belief that the body knows how to get well when given the right support.

Two Paths, One Purpose

Dr. Vu Misra and Julianne arrived at the OM Center from genuinely different worlds, which may be part of why it works so well. He brought clinical rigor and a deep understanding of the healthcare landscape from the inside. She brought communication, storytelling instincts, and the ability to translate complex information into something a patient could actually understand and act on.

“We were brought together for a special reason,” Julianne says, her voice softening. “Two completely different cultures and religions and all of that — although we’re both very spiritual. But I really believe the OM Center is the reason we were brought together.”

Neither of them planned for it to become what it has. Julianne thought she’d help out for a while and then return to news. Then they had children. The practice kept growing. The news business changed. And somewhere along the way, the plan became the life.

“Series of choices becomes you,” Dr. Misra says simply.

Today the OM Center serves patients from newborns to elderly, athletes to the decidedly un-athletic. People drive in from other states. Babies who were in breech position and were turned with chiropractic pressure points in the early days of the practice are now in their twenties, brought back to the center by mothers who never forgot. Families have grown up inside those walls. A patient once recognized his prom date’s voice through the open-top treatment bays — and left clutching duplicate photos of their senior prom night, hoping she’d take one.

The OM Center is, in other words, deeply woven into the fabric of the community it serves. And that didn’t happen by accident.

The Problem With Just Getting Out of Pain

Walk into the OM Center in pain and you’ll get help with the pain. But Dr. Misra will be the first to tell you that pain relief was never really the point.

“We’re really working on their function,” he says. “Not just getting them out of pain.”

It’s a distinction that matters enormously, and one the practice spends a lot of time helping patients understand. An athlete who wants to be out of pain but plans to go back on the field the next day needs a different conversation than someone recovering from a spinal injury who’s ready to commit to a full care plan. Managing expectations — honestly, clearly, and early — is part of the treatment.

“When do you wanna be out of pain?” Dr. Misra asks a typical athlete patient. “Today. Are you going back on the field? Yes. You’re not gonna be out of pain. You’re gonna get banged up. So let’s manage your condition and get you feeling better — but until you’re done with your season, let’s understand what we’re working with.”

Julianne describes it through a comparison patients rarely forget: the teeth analogy.

“When people see their dentist, they don’t say I have to come back. They brush their teeth every day — that’s dental hygiene. People don’t think about spinal hygiene until they’re in pain. If we treated our teeth the way we treat our spines, we’d all lose our teeth.”

Care plans exist not because the OM Center wants to keep patients coming in indefinitely, but because restoration of function takes time, and because without changing the behaviors that caused the problem, the problem reliably returns. And on the flip side — for those who do the work and maintain — the math is surprisingly simple. A monthly or quarterly maintenance adjustment runs $45 to $55. A few minutes on the table. And patients who come in for maintenance care almost never need the intensive intervention again.

“We were doing our patients a disservice by not pushing maintenance,” Julianne admits. “We never wanted to be salespeople. But the patients who stay consistent feel great, spend very little, and tell everyone they know.”

The Story Is Everything

Ask Dr. Misra what the most important clinical tool he has is, and don’t be surprised when the answer has nothing to do with equipment.

“Two ears, one mouth,” he says. “We should be listening twice as much as we speak.”

The OM Center is built around listening — not as a soft skill or a nice-to-have, but as a clinical necessity. Every provider documents every session. The chiropractor, the massage therapist, the yoga therapist, the reiki practitioner — everyone contributes to a patient’s story, and the full picture only emerges when all those pieces are assembled.

“Sometimes they’ll have failed to share something really important across all the times they’ve seen the doctors,” Julianne says. “As the yoga therapist, I might be working on someone’s upper body and I notice something with the leg — and it comes out that they had polio as a child and never mentioned it.”

What makes this system work is the breadth of care the OM Center offers. Where a single-discipline practice might hit a wall, the OM Center can pivot. A patient who comes in for chiropractic care and happens to mention they’re stressed out might get referred to the reiki therapist. Someone who came in for reiki might end up on the adjustment table for the first time in their life. Full circles happen regularly.

“There is no push,” Dr. Misra is clear. “We give our recommendations and then it’s up to you. If you don’t want to take care of yourself, what are we going to do for you?”

I REACH: The Values That Changed Everything

For the first stretch of the OM Center’s life, the Misras operated on good intentions, strong instincts, and the ethos of treating everyone like family. It worked beautifully with patients. With a growing team, it got complicated.

The turning point came through their mentor, Dr. Jay Greenstein, who pushed them to define not just their mission and vision, but their values. What emerged was an acronym — I REACH — that became the operating system of the entire practice.

Integrity. Respect. Empowerment. Accountability. Compassion. Honesty.

And the full phrase: I reach above and beyond. Because I REACH is the floor, not the ceiling.

“If someone on the team is calling in sick all the time,” Dr. Misra explains, “instead of getting judgmental — instead of saying what’s wrong with you — we say: do you realize that every time you call in sick, your teammates are having to jump at the last minute to fill your slot? How is that accountable to the team?”

The framework took the personal out of hard conversations and replaced it with something everyone had already agreed to. Conflict stopped being about personalities and started being about shared values. And the practice, almost immediately, started attracting the kind of team members who genuinely wanted to operate that way.

“We don’t really have problems anymore,” Dr. Misra says. “We just have to apply it.”

Growing Through COVID — and Into a Historic Building

When the pandemic hit, many practices braced for collapse. The OM Center expanded.

The foundation was an app called Embody, developed by their mentor Dr. Greenstein, which had already been connecting patients to the practice in ways nothing else had. When COVID arrived and in-person visits became complicated, the app kept communication flowing and kept patients coming in — the OM Center remained open as essential healthcare workers, helping take musculoskeletal cases off the backs of overwhelmed emergency rooms. Dr. Hery, their partner, stepped up to run the practice during the stretch when the Misras were sequestered due to health concerns. His wife, a nurse who had just been laid off, came in alongside him. Together, the two of them kept everything running.

The practice didn’t just survive. It got too busy for its existing space.

That’s when Greg Hogan, a patient who happened to be a commercial realtor, started nudging. He found a building in downtown Leesburg — the original Loudoun County hospital, a historic structure that turned out to be where the first doctor and first pharmacist in the county had worked. Where T. Colin Campbell, the scientist behind the China Study and the Forks Over Knives plant-based movement, was born. A building with three layers of brick in the walls and a weight of history that even the renovation costs couldn’t make them regret.

“It is an honor to restore a historic building,” Julianne says. “And there’s something so cool about looking back at who’s been there.”

The Leesburg location is now home to the OM Center alongside a carefully curated collection of tenants chosen with intention — a bookstore, a plant shop, a yoga studio, a hemp store, and a residential apartment. Every element chosen to contribute something positive to the people who walk through the door. An oasis, in their words, of healthcare and wellbeing.

Mentorship as Legacy

Over two decades, the OM Center has become something it perhaps didn’t set out to be: a training ground for the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Chiropractic assistants who went on to chiropractic school. Staff members who decided to pursue physical therapy, osteopathic medicine, and even veterinary medicine after working alongside Dr. Misra and his team. A high school senior at Academy of Loudoun who has already published research. A chiropractor, Dr. Monte, who was first a patient, then a CA, then studied at Life University — and is now joining the team, the first person to have completed that full circle back to the practice.

Dr. Misra is direct about why this matters.

“Without mentorship, there is little lasting purpose. To do something while you live is great. But for that to continue when you’re not there is even greater.”

Their second doctor, Dr. Maya Mann, came in fresh from school on Julianne’s instinct — she found her, knew immediately, and the practice fell in love with her collectively. Five years later, Dr. Mann has built her own following specializing in prenatal care and sports injury. She has become, in the truest sense, the next generation of what the Misras built.

Their own children have worked at the practice too — and both carry its lessons. Their son is heading toward medical school, with interests in neurology and research. Their daughter Sierra, who once watched videos in the office playroom while her parents worked long days, grew into an independent young woman who now lives alone in New York City working in public relations, communicating with confidence and ease.

“Of all the traits she’s learned there,” Julianne says, “her independence and her assuredness — that’s what tells me she really developed something.”

Five Years Best of Loudoun — and What Comes Next

The OM Center has been voted Best of Loudoun five years running. Dr. Misra has been called, by grateful patients, Dr. God — a nickname he’d prefer not to carry, but which he receives with the same quiet humor that runs through everything he does. He’s also been called The Punisher, earned through deep tissue work with a rolling pin on IT bands that left more than one large firefighter plotting (playful) revenge.

What he and Julianne are proudest of, though, isn’t an award. It’s the community. The patients who have been with them from the beginning, whose children have grown up and gone to college, who trust them enough to lie still on the table while someone moves their neck. The staff who are better professionals — and better people — for having spent time inside those walls.

The newest addition to the practice is a collaboration with partner Nanda Kumar Raju — an Ayurvedic medicine platform connecting patients via app to vetted practitioners direct from India, offering natural, dietary-based approaches to everything from diabetes management to musculoskeletal care. Thousands of years of practice, made accessible through a simple interface for two visits at less than a hundred dollars.

It’s exactly the kind of thing the OM Center has always been drawn to: ancient, natural, rooted in wisdom, and completely different from what anyone down the street is offering.

“Light therapy, sound therapy, shockwave — whatever can help people as the technology advances, that’s what we’re about,” Dr. Misra says. “You have to keep adapting.”

And underneath all of it — the awards, the locations, the app, the Ayurvedic expansion, the twenty years — there is something simpler.

“Life is a school,” Julianne says, “and love is the lesson. That’s why we’re here. To help each other.”

Dr. Vu Misra and Julianne Misra are the founders of the OM Center, a chiropractic, physical therapy, and wellbeing practice with locations in Ashburn and historic downtown Leesburg, Virginia, serving Loudoun County and beyond.

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