Chiropractic Practice: The Good, Bad and Ugly of Getting Your Patients Out of Pain

Welcome to this week’s Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Bob Hoffman for The Masters Circle Global, where legends are made and legendary practices are built through chiropractic coaching. Today, I want to discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of getting your patients out of pain. All doctors want to help patients get out of pain.

In fact, the primary reason any patient goes to any doctor is because they have a problem, and that problem is most frequently pain. We doctors of chiropractic are no different. Yes, I get that some of our colleagues believe that they attract patients who are well and who want to stay that way, but I’m sure you will agree with me that the overwhelming majority of our patients Become patients because they’re in pain.

New patients come to see you because they believe that they have to. Of course, they hope that their pain would subside and go away on its own. And yes, they hope that whatever self care that they applied would have helped. But the pain persisted and they surrendered and made an appointment because they felt that they had to.

Patients are trained to not go to doctors when they have minimal or no pain and to go to doctors when they do in fact have pain, but then they’re also trained to stop going to doctors when the pain goes away. When I was still in chiropractic school in the 1970s, I was fortunate to get to talk to a chiropractic icon.

Who is long gone, but he shared a concept and a belief that changed my life and changed the chiropractic course most of us should be following. He said that when you accept a patient based on the hope to eliminate their pain, and worse when the patient accepts you as their doctor, based on the hope that you will infect, eliminate that pain, it automatically creates a huge problem in the doctor patient relationship.

Because you see, if the pain goes away, the patient also happily goes away. And if the pain doesn’t go away quickly enough in the patient’s mind, they still go away, but this time unhappily. The patient never gets what they deserve, which is ongoing, individualized, optimal neurological function and improved health and well being.

The doctor never gets what he or she wants and deserves, which is a happy, healthy, lifetime patient and the chiropractic profession loses because this transaction failed to produce another miracle and another raving fan. We have to remember that pain is not the problem. It’s just an indicator that there is a problem.

Please recognize that pain is the last. thing that shows up in the disease process and the very first thing that goes away in the healing process. It is both misleading and dangerous to determine your health based just on how you feel. Why is it dangerous you ask? Well, we all know someone who felt well and died of a heart attack, or felt well and had a stroke, or discovered after feeling well that they had cancer, even though they were asymptomatic.

When a patient enters your office in pain, the only visible thing is their pain. And if and when you help them become pain free, You unfortunately also make what was visible their pain invisible, which is why they quit care. I can assure you, in this circumstance, that if you had performed a full body MRI on that exact same patient and also did a full range of lab work, more likely than not, you would find numerous Subclinical problems that are both concerning and also not bad enough to make the patient even aware of it.

Chiropractic philosophy teaches us to be proactive and not reactive, which is one of the many key differences between chiropractic and medicine. You all know all of this, but unfortunately your patient does not know this unless you effectively educate them. It’s your job to give the patient what they want.

But it’s your obligation to give the patient what they need. When you fail to stand up for the truth, for succumbing to the patient’s ignorance and just treating their pain, you and our profession get pigeonholed into being a crisis care practice and probably even more limiting into becoming a low back and neck.

Crisis care practice. Oh my God. When what you have in your hands and what you have in your heart and what you have in your head is so much bigger and so much more. If you would just stand and deliver the truth, people are willing to purchase the truth. People in your community are literally dying because you haven’t told them the truth loud enough, often enough or convincing enough.

And this ladies and gentlemen produces the ongoing frustration from making chiropractic a job for you instead of it being your calling and making it outrageously challenging for you to even succeed. Many of our clients are crushing it, having their best year ever, year after year, because they’ve decided to stand up and tell the truth.

Because they recognize that treating the patient’s pain is the first step. And it must be followed up with the same patient to function better, to live better, and to be better. When you succeed at getting a patient to feel better, that just gets your patient back to neutral. They’re no longer in pain, but that doesn’t mean that they’re healthy.

In addition, there’s a whole world of possibility past neutral, like better energy and endurance, improved mobility and flexibility, deeper restorative sleep, stronger immunity, better posture, better digestion, managing stress more effectively, being less anxious, less mood swings, less emotional eating, and aging gracefully instead of just growing old.

This is not only good doctoring, but it’s a powerful way to recession proof and to future proof your practice. This is a significant shift from treating problems to treating people, a shift from crisis care to health and wellness care that everyone, including all of your patients deserve. This is a shift in your thinking so your patients can get what they want and what they deserve, which is to be fully alive and in peak health.

It’s also good doctoring because all patients should be monitored and managed on a regular basis to either confirm that they’re making the progress that you and they expected, or to show you exactly what minor course corrections might be necessary in your care plan, your recommendations, the type of adjusting you’re delivering.

They allow you to customize your care to customize your recommendation and to get even better results than you’ve ever gotten in the past. This allows you to take the patient way past less or no pain to ongoing care to achieve optimal neurological expression so that they can live their best life and it creates lifetime patients for you, which should be all of our overarching goal and objective.

Remember to have what only 5 percent of what the best in class in our profession has, you must be willing to do what the other 95 percent are unwilling to do. And if you’re not familiar with the six essentials, then start scanning the QR, QR code on your screen right now. Go ahead. Take out your camera and scan that QR code and learn much more about this and about the six essentials.

When you do that, you will learn to do what no one else is doing and show you how to become even more successful. The six essentials are a critical piece of the future of your practice, especially if you aspire to grow and expand your impact and your income. So we invite Go ahead and scan that QR code and learn so much more about this essential information to help you refine, modify and improve your thinking and your actions every day in practice to have the practice that you deserve.

I hope you enjoyed this Thrive in Five and we’ll be back next week with another great version.

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