Another Philosophy Day

I have become very fond of philosophy as it's where I actually learn about what chiropractic is all about. The science classes that I am taking are great, but it's been really nice to know why chiropractic works.

Today in class we talked about momentum, pre/post tests with objective criteria, retracing back to health.

Momentum is simple. We all understand it when it comes to physics class. If a car is starting to roll, and you stand in front of it to stop it, it'll take force to slow it down, stop it, and then it'll start to roll back. It's the same with dis-ease. When you are dis-eased you start to gain momentum. When you then see the chiropractor to adjust you, then it'll take a bit to slow down that process and then stop the dis-ease. Then you'll start to go back the way you came (to health). That is called retracing. If you aren't back to 100% health, that's ok because now you have momentum going in that direction. If you stopped your visits, you'd still make it to becoming healthy.

The hard thing that I am learning is that many chiropractors will be happy to take credit when something goes right, but when something goes wrong, they call it retracing. It's only retracing if you did an adjustment correctly and they don't have their subluxation anymore.

Dr. Dill told us his story. He was helping out a patient and everything was going well. The patient was getting better, but then Dr. Dill made a mistake. He adjusted her when she didn't quite need it. In the pre and post tests that he used (thermography) he was seeing that she was digressing. It was then that his human error went to ego. He felt that he could fix it. He kept adjusting her, and she kept getting worse. Finally he took his ego out of the picture and said that he wouldn't adjust her for two weeks.

He was still taking the pre tests for the patient, but didn't take any post since he didn't adjust her during those two weeks. Well, she started to get better and at the end of the two weeks, she was great.

It concerns me that chiropractors are not using objective criteria before and after the adjustment to show the patient that they are making progress or not. Going back to the doc taking credit or just saying that you're getting better and pain is part of it, there's more to that.

If you adjust someone and they throw up or have a headache (or anything else adverse) there could be two reasons. If you adjusted them correctly, then you are retracing back to health. However, if you maladjusted them, then it was the doctors fault. The way to prove it is with the post test. This is the reason that chiropractors are scared to do the post test because they don't want to show that they maladjusted someone.

I for one don't want to be one of those doctors

The last item that we talked about was about payment and chiropractic assistants. Dr. Dill brought up a great point that he doesn't have a CA because he wants to know all the patients himself, and you keep all the profits. But the other thing is that he tells the patient up front how long it'll take to fix it, and how much it would cost. Then the patient only has to make the decision once to buy or not to.

Now that I have written that, let me explain. This is how Dr. Dill runs his practice. The first day is the examination to see if he can even except the patient for care. Then the second day they'll come in and he'll explain the findings of the exam and then propose the care plan. He'll explain that it'll take this long which equals out to be this much. We can either take it all up front or through an autopay each month.

At first I wasn't sure if I liked that, but then he explained that you don't want them to have to decide if they need care each time they come in just because of money. You want them to decide once and forget it. You want to be their doctor, not having to worry about them paying for the service. There is more that I would like to explain about this, because I believe that it's really important to figure this out.