James W. Healey, DC
Many chiropractors, straights and mixers, recommend to their patients that they receive lifetime chiropractic care. They encourage parents to start children early and have them in regularly for care. This is most often referred to as maintenance care and the term seems to be very common since even most insurance companies are familiar with it.
Lifetime chiropractic care is not a difficult concept to understand. In fact, if you look at the benefits of being free of vertebral subluxation, along with the frequency and abundance of potentially subluxation-producing factors in our lives, the choice for lifetime care seems overwhelmingly obvious. Nobody who understands this would logically choose to live with subluxation. Yet millions -- no, billions -- of people do just that. Why? Are they stupid or unable to comprehend the principles involved? No, I don't think so. I have some preschoolers in my practice who almost explain and figure out for themselves that subluxation is detrimental, with just a little anatomy and physiology lesson. The concepts are simple enough, to be sure. Are they reasoning, illogical people? It may seem so, but, again, I doubt it. It would be very difficult, indeed, to survive without some base of logic.
I believe it is almost entirely due to an improper expectation. People historically expect to go to a doctor only when they're sick. When they are no longer sick, they expect to stop. That's what their concept of health care is. It's actually sickness care misnamed. Lifetime care, to the majority of the population thinking this way, is only for the incurable of those on life support systems.
You might say, "Yes, but chiropractic is different! It's truly health care." But is that the message you always give? I also believe that the improper expectation with regards to lifetime chiropractic care is largely due to chiropractors themselves. We have to be careful not to fall into the sickness care model. Because people relate to it so easily as the familiar, we sometimes try to communicate our concept through the sickness language. The result is that they are trying to understand chiropractic care from the wrong frame of reference and billions remain subluxated.
This doesn't apply to all chiropractors. Some are purposely styling their practices to be sickness care offices. Some others are quite effective in avoiding or defusing the sickness care mentality with their patients. These patients, then, enthusiastically flood the office with other lifetime patient referrals. But we don't all fit into the extremes. The fact is that many of us are giving mixed messages to patients and the public.
If you want your practice to grow with lifetime patients be careful of the message you project and how it affects what the patients will expect of you. Do you look like a sickness doctor? Do you have sickness pamphlets in your office? Do you provide "safe and natural relief for common danger signals?" Do you tell your patients that it's going to take them some number of months to correct their problem? Do you tell them you don't treat the symptoms, you treat the cause? Do you ask them how they're feeling today? What do the insurance companies learn from your bills? True, with few exceptions, they don't pay for "maintenance care," but they don't understand it either. If they did, according to Reggie Gold, D.C., they still might not pay for it, but they would reduce the premiums of those who have made the commitment to stay subluxation free. What a great idea! Even your methods of analysis and adjusting can be a determinant of your message. A patient won't learn to relate to subluxation or lifetime care unless you teach them through your words and actions to appreciate their significance.
Your answers to questions and concerns like these will help you decide if you're creating the proper expectation in your patients and whether you can reasonably expect them to become lifetime patients. Remember, though, for all you do to promote chiropractic thinking, society does at least as much to promote sickness thinking. You have to recharge yourself and your message constantly.
Surround yourself with other chiropractors who think the same way, and who can energize you as you energize them. Since the principles underlying the rationale behind lifetime care derive primarily from straight chiropractic, seek out other straight chiropractors. Attend straight organization meetings, conventions, and seminars. They're not hard to find. They tell you up front that they're straight chiropractic. And if you can't find a program or group, start one! Lifetime care is too valuable to our patients for us not to make sure they understand it!
