QUESTION:  Are there strategies that can help in communications with new patients?

ANSWER:  Communications skills and the substance and integrity of your messages are key elements in your practice success.  Your serious consideration, planning and thought are needed to make sure that you utilize your communications skills as an effective part of the care and healing process.  Here is Part 4:

Interference with normal health is caused by vertebral subluxations in the spine interfering with the normal transmission of vital, health sustaining information from the brain to the body and from the body back to the brain.  As chiropractic professionals, we know that the spinal column is the crucial place with movable parts that could become subluxated and cause nerve interference between the power source (the brain) and the body!  Effectively communicating the vital relationships between spine, subluxation, health and the chiropractic adjustment is the essence of patient education. Developing a comprehensive, well-stated and yet concise patient education program is vital to your clinical connection and to the patient's recovery.  To this end, please consider the following:

A.                    Practice-wise, clear verbal communication about health and life through subluxation correction is equally as important as a precise x-ray analysis and a precise subluxation correcting adjustment. 

B.                     The patient must hear from you, what you are doing and why you are doing it!  As you palpate down the spine, especially in the thoracic and lumbar areas, and you locate an interference, which could be a compensation and/or a subluxation (your x-ray and other findings will help tell you which), at least tell the patient what organ systems that level of the spine helps control and what problems it could create and/or contribute to in their body. 

C.                    Work on your patient education statements.  Write them down, talk about them with your colleagues, get comfortable with every element in your presentation and then work to learn them so that they become second-nature and a natural component of every conversation with your patients.

D.                    Do not hesitate to send home printed information about chiropractic with the patient to supplement and compliment what you tell them during their visit.  This will also help patients more effectively explain to family members and friends about their chiropractic experience.

E.                     When they patients come back and say, "Check my stomach and gall bladder places" or "Check my lung place I'm having a little shortness of breath lately" or better yet, "Check everything Doctor and I know you will because you always do.  I'm doing fantastic lately and I want to stay that way!" you will know that you have connected on the basic premise of chiropractic.  When this type of verbal communication takes place between you and the patients, you will know that you are doing your job and you are doing it magnificently!

F.                     Make sure that you tell the full story.  Don't get bogged down mid-way.  It is vital that the patient hear the beginning, middle and end of your explanation of chiropractic to insure their complete understanding of what you are doing and why.  This is why it is important to have a concise message, applicable to the time you have with each patient, and that your education efforts be ongoing.

G.                    Communication about improving the patients' present and future health should be done with every patient on every visit, with a few exceptions for very valid reasons. 

H.                    An exception might be a workers' compensation patient, whose reason for being in your office and whose coverage is usually limited to the short-term correction of their immediate, work-related problem.  Be conscious of the need to care for their immediate concerns, and develop a longer-term understanding that will allow that patient to return to your care, after and apart from their workers' compensation situation.  Their needs are just as great as any other patient and you should work to address their special situation.  Short-term correction of workers' compensation patients will bring you many more workers' compensation cases. Long-term correction, beyond the immediate work-related need, can jeopardize or possible even eliminate you from further consideration of workers' compensation patients by the regulating agencies and get you drawn into disputes over when the work-related care ended and other care began.  These are the types of situations when you concentrate on a patient's presenting problem(s) as separate from their overall health.  Chiropractors who only treat isolated problems of patients have small practices.  Big practices come from addressing the patient's health, not just the patient's immediate problem. 

I.                      Once a patient fully understands the facts that vertebral subluxations, chiropractic adjustments and health go hand-in-hand, they will no longer relate symptoms to you, but instead will say, "I need an adjustment. My power's turned off."  From that point on in your care of those patients, any time these patients sense a problem; the first thought in their mind is that they are out of adjustment.  Then, you will know that you are doing your job of effectively communicating with the patient. 

J.                      Always tell it like it is.  Honesty is not only the best policy; it is the only acceptable basis for the doctor-patient relationship.  Never make promises, never guess, and listen to your own best professional judgment at all times.  Honesty also means being honest with yourself, so look for help when you need it, do research on those tough cases, ask questions of your peers and professional organizations and strive at all times to give the very best chiropractic has to offer to every patient.