Chiropractic Practice: Tools for Making the Invisible Visible

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 tools for making the invisible visible. So let me ask, since almost all new patients enter your office complaining about a pain or a problem and you succeed in eliminating their pain or problem, what motivates them to return for additional care since you succeeded in making what was visible, their pain, now invisible?.

Now, invisible. Well, for the majority of you, the answer is nothing. Nothing motivates them to continue with your care once they are feeling better, which explains why the patient visit average in our profession is embarrassingly low. There’s nothing wrong with attracting new patients with pain, and there’s nothing wrong with adjusting them to eliminate their pain.

But this cannot be what your doctor patient relationship is all about unless you want to practice with a ridiculously low PVA retention and compliance rate, or you want to constantly be stressed to attract more new patients endlessly, or you want to be a crisis doctor for just a handful of visits each day or because you want to struggle in practice barely getting by.

So get this, please. Patients only respond to what’s visible to them and allow me to give you some very important practical examples. Like exercise. Everyone knows that they should exercise. Everyone intends to exercise, but the majority stop very early in the process because they don’t see the results from exercise soon enough.

The results remain invisible. Everyone also knows that they should eat clean and eat healthy. But the majority don’t because depriving themselves doesn’t work. But even more important is the ice cream sundae is really visible and they can’t resist it while they resist the benefits of healthy, healthy eating because that is invisible.

And we all know that we need to save money for the future, to save money for retirement, but the majority cannot resist the temptation to buy things they may not even need because they’re, what they’re buying is very visible and savings is it. Many of my clients have million dollar practices that have had them for years, even during COVID and here’s a key reason.

They’re consistently extraordinary in making the invisible visible for their patients. Not just managing, reducing, or eliminating their patient’s pain, but showing the patient the subclinical findings going on below the surface and explaining what each of these findings means and it’s significant so that they can monitor and manage that patient’s health effectively now and in the future.

So your main job with patients becomes making the invisible visible regarding how they feel better and then how they function better so that they can then live better with ongoing care with you. There are endless ways to successfully do this, including x-ray, MRIs, lab work, posture photos, pulse ox, balance trackers, bilateral weight scales, and heart rate variability as just some examples.

Most of these docs select at least two or three different ways to make the invisible visible and they use them at different intervals with each patient. For example, they may do a before and after pulse ox reading each week, a heart rate variability test each month, and lab work every 90 days or every six months.

All designed to document the subclinical irregularities and abnormalities that the patient can’t see, feel, taste or touch, and to regularly show the improvements and progress the patient makes from your ongoing specific chiropractic care. This is not only good doctoring. But it’s a powerful way to recession proof and future proof your practice.

This is a shift in your thinking from treating people to treat from treating problems to treating people a shift from crisis care to health and wellness care that everyone deserves. This occurs with a shift in your thinking, so your patients can get what they want and deserve, which is to be fully alive and in optimal health.

It’s also good doctoring because all patients should be monitored and managed on a regular basis to either confirm their making progress and their healing or to show you that you need to make some minor course corrections with their care plan. your recommendations, the frequency of your adjusting or how you’re adjusting them.

This allows you to customize your care, customize your recommendations and get the results with each and every patient that you believe and they deserve. The outdated concept of one size fits all never worked and will not work going forward. You must be willing to let go of the past to embrace the present and to prepare for the future.

This allows you to take the patient way past less or no pain to ongoing care to achieve optimal neurological expression. living their best life and aging gracefully instead of just growing old. It also creates lifetime patients, which should be all of our overarching goals. How awesome would your practice be if patients wanted to be in your office, look forward to your care, totally trusted you and realize that continuing with your care way past pain was one of the smartest decisions they could ever make.

Pain isn’t a problem. It just indicates that you have a problem and eliminating pain doesn’t make you healthy. It just gives you the false impression that you may be healthy. And how amazing would it be for your practice if you were able to charge and collect a significantly higher fee for your services, and patients gladly paid you for that because you created such value.

And how would it feel if these same lifetime patients referred their friends, their family, their coworkers, their neighbors, because of the remarkable and predictable results that you achieved with them in your clinic. 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.

Quite frankly, the six essentials should always be part of your daily and weekly training. If you’re really serious about making an impact and moving in the direction of becoming best in class, and excelling at making the invisible visible is an essential part of that. If you’re not familiar with these strategies, then start scanning the QR code on your screen and learn much more about these six essentials.

Once you do that, it will show you how to make the invisible visible in your practice and show you what no one else is showing you. The six essentials are a critical piece of the future of your practice, especially if you want to have greater impact. and greater income. And this is why we invite you to scan that QR code and learn so much more about this timely and very important information to help you refine, modify and improve what you believe and what you take action on inside your practice each and every day.

So again, take out your phone, scan that QR code. Go to those six essentials, answer the questions, make the invisible visible. Remember, the fundamentals have changed, the focus has changed, the business model has changed, and the ability to influence your staff and your patients have changed. You need to know these and what you need to do to succeed.

Have a great day.

Checkout our other Thrive In Fives

Don’t forget to learn about our Practice Growth Calculator