What Do Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and a long list of other celebrities have in common? Harmless prescription drug and painkiller abuse in volumes and mixtures. These famous celebrities are the ones you hear about in the media.  However, the fact is, many medical errors are not reported, including death by such medicines deemed ‘normal’ to use by society.  Tylenol, Advil, Demerol, Oxycontin, Dialudid, Panadol are just a start. Throw some antidepressants, antianxieties and sedatives into the mix and voila! You have a highly addictive cocktail of deadly drugs. Do we have a global problem? I think so. We just hear about the famous ones…

From the Death by Medicine Report by Drs. Null and Dean in 2003), as few as 6% of adverse drug effects are ever reported.  Sadly, deaths estimated in 2003 due to adverse reactions to prescription drugs is 2.2 million per year. And the leading causes of adverse drug reactions were antibiotics (17%), Cardiovascular (17%), chemotherapy drugs (15%), and anti-inflammatory agents (15%).  Can you imagine what this number is now, six years later, with more and more ‘advancements’ in medicine and big pharma?

As wellness chiropractors, doctors of ’cause’, we want to be addressing the bigger picture in our offices - that health and life come from the inside-out.  If you are not teaching this principle to the people you serve, you are just another modality to them.  Health does not come from taking medicine or cutting things out of the body. It comes from the life force, carried unimpeded over the nerve system reaching to every cell, tissue and organ in the entire body. Do they know this? Do they understand the physiological implications if this nerve impulse is impeded? Do they know that it is your job to remove this interference and allow the fullest expression of life?  If they don’t, they need to.  Or they could end up like Michael Jackson, just not as famous.

How are you using this most recent, tragic death of an icon as an educational opportunity in your office?  We coach our clients to ask thoughtful questions to the people in their offices to illicit a response, rather than just lecture them about the overuse of medicine in our societies.  We need to shift their consciousness and beliefs about health and wellness.  How about the following as a start to get your mind going:

• What do you think killed Michael Jackson?
• Do you know that prescription drugs are just as dangerous as recreational drugs?
• What happens when you give a healthy person medicine they don’t need?
• If drugs can make a healthy person sick, how do they make a sick person well?
• What do you think, can medicine make someone healthier or just take their symptoms away?
• Where does health come from? What causes us to be healthy? What keeps us alive?
• What does the Nerve System control? What part of your body could live without Nerve Impulse?

May I suggest that you look at our LAASR process of communication (Listen, Acknowledge, Ask, Solution, Resolution) when educating, answering difficult questions and in all of your interactions within and outside of your practice.  It will literally transform your level of communication and results!  It is what we teach and how we coach chiropractors to great levels of success! Let’s start to manage your chiropractic practice in a true wellness model.

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Tags: Adverse Drug Reactions, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Consulting, Chiropractic Practice Management, Death by Medicine, Elvis Presley, Health, LAASR, Life Force, Medicine, Michael Jackson, Nerve System, Prescription Drug Abuse, Subluxation, Wellness Care, Wellness Chiropractors, wellness practice management

For many people, their understanding of health, where it comes from and how to stay well is as deeply ingrained as some smoker’s beliefs about smoking.

We are living and practicing chiropractic in a medical world. Although we are in a shift of a wellness revolution, the majority of people who show up in your chiropractic office are bombarded by big pharma advertising and years of thinking that health comes from drugs or surgery.  And it is your job to change their mindset and beliefs about health and healing, where it comes from and how to get it. Good luck!

Most chiropractors I coach and consult, or speak with in the field tell me that they educate the people in their office.  And the usually follow up with, “but they still don’t get IT.”  And if they did get it, our entire profession would already have thriving, true wellness chiropractic practices.  So something’s not working in our approach…

What does educate mean? To most chiropractors, they lecture and talk ‘at’ their people until they are blue in the face and the person is tuned out. There is an important distinction to make, between educating by telling or educating by asking good questions.

Try and convince a smoker that smoking is bad for him.  Tell him all the things he already knows (or doesn’t) that it is killing him. Use fear. Use threats. Use your authority as a doctor. Lecture until you’re blue in the face.  Does anything change for the smoker? Nope, he still doesn’t ‘get it’.  That’s right, his beliefs and mindset haven’t shifted one bit from all of your telling.

And this is what most chiropractors who are not having high retention, thriving wellness practices are doing.  Trying to educate by telling.  I gotta tell you, from my experience, that’s never going to work. Why? Because it’s from the outside-in, it is your idea and not theirs. Because how do human beings do react when someone tells them what to do? Resist. So you get decreased compliance, they like you less and wonder when you’ll use your authority again to get them to do what you want.

Remember a smart guy named Socrates? His philosophy was one of asking questions to have the person think. And since doctor in Latin means ‘teacher’, it’s about time our profession stopped lecturing and started asking better questions to really teach the chiropractic principle of health. Why? Because when a person thinks, processes and answers a question, it comes from the inside-out and they own it.  Since it was their idea, there is no resistance, they feel valued and given a voice. There is increased  compliance and likeability and you don’t use authority, you use leadership. How’s that for congruence with chiropractic philosophy?

But oh wait, there’s one more benefit.  Not only will they ‘get it’, understand health, healing and chiropractic at a deeper level, but do you think that it is easier for them to refer their friends and family if they can articulate their newfound understanding themselves?  And the practice itself grows from the inside out by high retention and high internal referrals.

So the trick is to find out how to ask better questions during every interaction of Visit 1, Visit 2, Daily Interactions, Re-Assessments, Re-Reports and in handling difficult questions. We coach chiropractors this day in and day out.  It will transform your practice, your relationship and your life. And you’ll help shift the consciousness of the world. Let us know if we can help.

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Tags: Asking, Authority, Beliefs, Chiropractic Coach, Chiropractic Consultant, Chiropractic Philosophy, Chiropractic Practice Management, Chiropractic Practice Success, Chiropractic Principle, communication, Convince, Educate, Fear Tactics, Health, High Retention, Inside-Out, Internal Referrals, Lecture, Medicine, Mindset, Outside-In, Questions, Results, scare tactics, Shift Consciousness, Socrates, Telling, True Wellness Practice, wellness revolution

As chiropractors, hopefully most of us are communicating with the people we care for about the concept of health as a process vs. health as an event.  The accumulation of stress over time and the removal of such stress is the creator of health or disease.  Nothing from the outside. Nothing that just ‘happens’.

After a close family member had a heart attack this weekend I am deeply thankful for event/crisis care that our social medical system provides. It saved her life with incredible speed and skill.  And what I know so conceptually, I was reminded viscerally this weekend where they fall short. Medical care is not designed nor intended to keep you healthy. They view health as an event instead of a process. “This happened, we fixed it. Now take these drugs for life as our best approach to manage it”.  

True health care is the chiropractic understanding: Health is a process. In every moment you are either moving towards health or away from it with your choices. If you accumulate too much lifestyle stress in your nerve system, you will create dis-ease and disease.  We acknowledge this as the CAUSE and make new choices to create a different state of health.  Wellness care is acknowledging what the body needs (and doesn’t need) to be well and continue to take care of yourself with the same level of care, whether you are sick or whether you are well.

But a process takes TIME you say! Ah yes, heart disease didn’t happen overnight. Nor will it disappear with a medical miracle.  They can reactively stop the acute pain of an MI and reestablish blood flow - but the proactive process is just beginning!  But we are a quick-fix society wanting results NOW!  

Even wellness chiropractors, who understand the ‘process vs. event’ concept and communicate this way to the people they serve about symptoms, healing, and chiropractic care can be impatient with their practice and their chiropractic coaching. But I want results NOW they say!  Ah yes, but changes in your practice don’t happen overnight!  Don’t fall into the quick-fix trap, it’s incongruent with our philosophy.

Know what you are trying to accomplish, have an action plan to work towards it, follow through with the actions and produce the results.  In every moment, your chiropractic practice is either moving towards success or away from it with your choices and actions.

Make sure that you are applying the same Process vs. Event principle to all aspects of your life: Your chiropractic practice, your chiropractic coaching, your nutrition, your exercise, your finances… it’s aligned with the laws of nature.  Life is a process, not an event.

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Tags: Chiropractic Care, Chiropractic Coaching, Event, Health Care, Medicine, Proactive, Process, Reactive, Wellness Care, wellness practice management

It is time for our chiropractic profession to shift.  It is time to tell the truth to the world and to ourselves.  It is time to stop fitting in to a medical infrastructure and practice model and to stop selling ourselves short by selling ‘pain relief’.  Aspirin or Tylenol is way cheaper than your services.

Here’s to the crazy ones ~ the chiropractors who want to push back against the status quo.  The ones who are standing their ground, practicing wellness chiropractic and not the treatment of symptoms, sickness and disease.  The ones who are becoming leaders in the wellness revolution, the shift that is unstoppable.

The medical system in many countries around the world is on the verge of collapse with regards to the percentage of GDP spent on health care and the increasing statistics of disease and death.  Ready to burst at the seams as soon as the baby boomers are ripe.  It’s a faulty premise to use sick care as health care and it’s not working.  

And people want something different.  They just need to know that chiropractic is a better way.  And that you are the one who will care for them with honest, loving, authentic service.  You’ve got to have enough value for your service, enough confidence in your skills and the communication level to share the truth… and the guts to do so.  

From my favorite ad campaign of all time… Apple in the late 1990’s called ‘Think Different’.  It is time to inspire yourself and the people in your community to Think Different about health.  Are you willing to be the ‘Crazy One’ in your community?

“Here’s to the crazy ones.

   The misfits.
    The rebels.
     The troublemakers. 
      The round pegs in the square holes. 
The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules.
   And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, 
  disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. 
    Because they change things.

They invent.    They imagine.     They heal.

 They explore.     They create.    They inspire.
      They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones,
    we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think
    they can change the world, are the ones who do”.

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Tags: Apple, Better, chiropractic, Choice, Crazy Ones, Different, Different Way, Disease, Health Care, Medical System, Medicine, Pain Relief, Service, Shift, Sickness, Status Quo, Symptoms, Think Different, wellness revolution