Chiropractic Coaching: The Best Advice You Can Give Your Patient

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. This episode is called The Best Advice You Can Give Your Patient. One of your most valuable concepts in practice is the lifetime patient formula, which tells us that when you combine the optimal program of chiropractic care with optimal lifestyle habits and optimal health and wellness modalities and technology, it leads patients toward making a lifetime commitment to wellness and to ongoing wellness care.

These three components are essential for the patient to receive the greatest benefit from your services. In this Thriving Five, we’ll be examining the second piece of this lifetime patient puzzle, developing optimal lifestyle habits. What is lifestyle anyway? It refers to the patterns of living we either choose or have chosen for us.

Lifestyle, a term coined by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler almost 100 years ago, refers to the typical way of life of an individual, group, society, or culture. It includes intangible factors such as interests, opinions, values, beliefs, and preferences, and tangible factors like habits, activities, behaviors, and possessions.

Thanks. Simply put, it’s the way a person or group lives. In the context of the Lifetime Patient Formula, lifestyle plays a major role. As you can imagine, if you as the doctor do a wonderful job clinically, but then the patient eats donuts and coffee for breakfast, pizza and a Coke for lunch, and McDonald’s for dinner, it’ll surely interfere with the patient’s ability to respond and get well.

In addition, your average patient doesn’t get enough sleep or water, exercises occasionally or not at all, and suffers high levels of unresolved stress every day. This is not a favorable environment for recovery and healing, and that’s why it’s so important for you to step up to the role of Most Trusted Health and Wellness Advisor and become a source of information and advice to guide them toward better lifestyle decision making.

Lifestyle has a profound influence on brain health, and a healthy brain is necessary for overall good health. In a 2023 study, six key lifestyle factors were identified as prime movers of brain health, physical activity, restorative sleep, avoidance of risky substances, plant based nutrition, social connection, and stress management.

Let’s dig into these six pillars of brain health and see what kinds of problems patients will report and what kind of guidance you can offer them. Often, patients will confess that they don’t exercise, or if they do, it’s in fits and starts that don’t yield much long term benefit. These patients may be weak or injury prone, may report endurance or stamina issues, and may suffer postural imbalances.

Others may exercise regularly, and some of them have even learned the best ways to do so. If not, you may need to add your input and recommend choosing or avoiding certain exercises, depending on the patient’s condition and desired outcomes. For example, a patient who wants to use exercise to reduce stress may need a different routine from one who wants to lose weight or build muscle.

Custom tailor your exercise recommendations to the patient’s age, general condition, health targets, and how much time, energy, and resources the patient can invest. The bottom line is, patients usually get great results when they add physical activity into their health and wellness regimen. Ideally, it should be a personalized blend of strength and resistance training, running or walking, flow exercises like martial arts or yoga, and breathing.

The second pillar is restorative sleep. When you sleep, that’s when your brain gets a chance to clean and maintain itself. Special brain cells act like a sanitation crew, but only while you’re asleep, and the process takes about 7 hours. Do you see why it’s recommended that you get 7 or 8 hours of sleep?

If your brain can’t maintain itself, it gets less efficient, which can compromise every aspect of your health. Get enough sleep. Your brain thinks it’s non negotiable. To sleep better, avoid caffeine, alcohol, or a large meal before bed. Develop consistent patterns of sleeping and waking. Limit screen time and electronic devices in the few hours before turning in.

Exercise daily. Keep your sleeping space cool, dark, and quiet. And arrange your schedule so you can actually get 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night. The third pillar is avoidance of risky substances, like alcohol, nicotine, and drugs. We all know this, but many don’t do it. Sometimes patients can tough it out and quit smoking or drinking on their own, but more usually that transition requires some facilitation by professionals.

For patients who can’t seem to handle their addictions, develop a relationship with a local mental health counselor or a therapist as a resource to help you address such behaviors. Patients often take medications prescribed by previous doctors, and while we cannot prescribe or take our patients off their medications, we can create strategic alliances with medical practitioners who will objectively analyze the patient’s true needs.

Too often, the patient was given Xanax, or Valium, to provide some relief physically and emotionally, but that doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Also, they may be on drugs that regulate their heart function, breathing, digestion, sugar metabolism, and so on. Carefully monitor the patient’s response, as their medications may need to be adjusted or even eliminated when they start getting well under your care.

These toxins are obviously contrary to optimal brain health and function, and the objective is to limit, if not totally purge, unnecessary substances from your patient’s lifestyle. The fourth pillar is whole food, plant based nutrition, and there’s considerable evidence demonstrating that eating well is critical to overall good health.

There’s a wide range of acceptability in diet, proven by the diversity of healthy populations all over the world. Some cultures include meat, some do not. Some allow or even encourage alcohol in moderation, while others don’t. But most healthy diets include an abundance of plant based foods. Some raw, some cooked, but all with the intention of preserving a natural presentation.

A well known example is the Mediterranean diet, focused on fruits and vegetables, nuts, cereals, and olive oil, with less alcohol and dairy, and little or no red meat, processed foods, saturated fats, and sweets. Besides being a well rounded and satisfying way to feed yourself, it also provides essential micronutrients and fiber, believed to decrease the risk of neurodegenerative disease since it leads to better neurovascular health, decreased inflammation, and reduced oxidative stress levels.

The fifth pillar is social connection. Our cognitive and emotional health are deeply affected by the quality of our relationships. Family and friends act as sounding boards, support mechanisms, challengers, and cheerleaders throughout our lives. And those of us who have a more highly developed social network benefit greatly from the interaction and the sense of security.

You’ve heard it said that you’re a reflection of the people you spend most of your time with. Sometimes, this means that you’re similar to them. Or, it can mean that you use those around you as examples of what not to do, like deciding never to smoke because your parents did. But either way, your social environment will contribute to your lifestyle.

The final lifestyle factor is stress management. And this is where most, if not all, of your patients can benefit from your expertise. Without realizing it, patients are dealing with at least four types of stress at any given time. Physical stress, like the constant wear and tear of gravity, as well as injuries and accidents, Chemical stress, like poor diet and exposure to toxicity, like food additives or pollution.

Mental emotional stress, like ineffective coping with challenges and issues, and energy stress, like staring into a computer screen all day or constant use of your cell phone. Analyze your patient’s stress to see how it can be reduced or eliminated. For example, physical stress can be addressed with adjustments in exercise, chemical stress with allergy testing and nutritional counseling, Um, emotional stress with yoga, martial arts, and life coaching, and energy stress by avoiding potentially harmful devices and applying constructive energy like laser, red light, heat, cold, vibration, electrical stim, and many other modalities.

Some patients may come to you as blank slates, few to etch optimal lifestyle habits into their consciousness, but more often patients show up in varying stages of lifestyle development Through lifestyle design, you can further enrich your relationship with your patients as their most trusted health and wellness advisor.

If you want to know more about this cutting edge material, go to the Six Essentials landing page by scanning the QR code you see on the screen. Or if you like, you can leave your questions below and I’ll gladly respond. Thanks for watching. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman from The Masters Circle Global, where legends are made and legendary practices are built through chiropractic coaching.

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