Are you competing with medical doctors?

Many forget that the very right to exist as a separate profession was the acknowledgement that chiropractic was not medicine, was different from medicine and did not compete with medicine. All these years later this distinction has been blurred, lost or ignored.

If you use adjustments to treat headaches and back pain, you’re not only competing with medicine you’re basing your chiropractic interventions on a medical mindset.

“So?”

The result is two striking problems that uniquely plague chiropractors who have fashioned chiropractic into a treatment of spinal conditions.

#1 You’re Responsible For the Speed of Their Recovery

This is not an anti-medicine rant. Far from it. I don’t want to live in a world without the heroic, lifesaving skills of modern medicine and neither do you. However, when you use spinal adjustments to treat neck and back pain with a “dosage” of three adjustments a week, patients expect your “prescription” to produce the result they want in short order. Yet, unlike a more convenient and inexpensive opiate, predicting relief is virtually impossible when you’re relying on simply arousing their ability to self-heal—which is dependent on too many variables outside your control to even list.

The tacit agreement that you’re treating their pain, and that you’ll do so quickly, within the fewer and fewer visits approved by their insurance carrier, applies chiropractic principles in a way that its founder never intended and its developer warned against.

Solution: Explain to patients that you will not be treating their symptoms. Instead, that chiropractic care is designed to reduce nervous system interference to allow their body to function as it was designed. Write it on your walls. Speak it before every adjustment. Repeat it again and again and again. Remind them that they’re the doctor and the speed of their recovery reveals more about them and their overall health than what you’re doing on your table.

#2 You Have a Voracious Appetite For New Patients

If your practice is about being a low-tech aspirin for a patient’s spinal condition, then two things follow as predictable as night follows day. First, patients only hang around for the fewest number of visits possible to get pain relief, and second, you have an insatiable demand for new patients—without the reputation and social authority that medical doctors enjoy. Worse, if patients sense that you have more than a healthy attachment to whether they embrace chiropractic as a long term lifestyle adjunct, you make ending their episode of chiropractic care too risky to actually announce, so they repeatedly make (and break) their appointments until your front desk CA musters the courage to report the obvious.

Besides the wasted “recall” efforts, when these same patients suffer their likely relapse, they shun the imagined “I told you so” from you in favor of starting anew with the practice down the street. Bottom line? You’re not getting the reactivations you deserve and you’re probably not getting the referrals you deserve.

Solution: Present chiropractic care as a long-term lifestyle adjunct designed to reduce the effects of physical, chemical and emotional stress and optimize their health and well-being. With time, you could attract a tribe of individuals who would consult your practice once or twice a month, pay cash, and see you for the rest of their lives.

After 10-12 years of telling this simple but profound truth and attracting those who value their health and have the resources to pay for it, you could do something that terrifies pain most relief-only chiropractors: you could take a vacation. In fact, frequent vacations. Because your practice would still be there when you returned. Your health-conscious tribe would simply schedule their nonsymptomatic wellness visits around your occasional exploration of European capitals, the Australian outback, an Alaskan cruise or sun worship on a Caribbean beach.

Attracting Your Tribe

Whether you like to travel or not is not the point. Freedom is the point. Shunning the responsibility for pain relief (which you can’t control) is the point. Respecting the limitations of chiropractic and honoring a patient’s ability to self heal is the point.

As you no longer compete with the medical profession and effectively explain this distinction to every patient, you’ll enjoy a new sense of ease. You’ll stop falling for the inclination to “fix” patients. You’ll show up more curious about what patients are doing between visits to enhance their healing response. You’ll no longer take their slow (or fast) recovery personally. Even better, with time your practice eventually becomes the gathering point for like-minded individuals who “get” you and your mission. And who will pay you handsomely for the opportunity to participate.

At least, that’s what I do.