Empowering Women in Chiropractic - Why Patient Expectations May Stop Them From Getting Your Help

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Hello, and welcome to today's episode of Empowering Women in Chiropractic. I'm your host, Dr. Cathy, and listen, today we're going to talk about expectations, but not your expectations, your patient's expectations, and. the problem with accepting other people's expectations and trying to meet them. So what are we talking about today?

Listen, when patients come in, oftentimes in a chiropractic office, they have one expectation and that is get me out of pain, right? And if we go down that rabbit hole, we basically have two outcomes, right? If you're chasing the pain, if you're chasing the symptoms, you've got two outcomes. One, the pain goes away and the patient goes away.

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Two, the pain doesn't go away and the patient goes away anyway. See, when we try to meet their expectations, what we're failing to do is set up accurate expectations of what we have to offer and why it matters to them, right? That's a conversation that takes time and it takes effort and it takes experience and it takes the desire and the ability to educate your community about what We actually do.

So when we think about that, let me give you a quick example of where trying to meet people's expectations has gone horribly wrong in healthcare. Now most of you are aware that your infections in most cases are viral. However, your patients may not know that. Your community may not know that.

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The moms and the dads that are dealing with a child who was crying all night last night may not know that. So when they take that crying baby or crying child to the pediatrician, they are expecting something, and what they're expecting is a prescription. That's why they took them to the pediatrician.

And because they're expecting a prescription for an antibiotic, guess what the medical professions They do. They actually write the prescription for antibiotics. Now, this is not just hearsay. I'm not just making this up. This was a study that they did when they went to medical doctors and pediatricians and said, if the majority of ear infections, and it's been estimated it's about 96 percent of ear infections, are viral, why are antibiotics the most prescribed drug for children for ear infections.

Why are we seeing such a high number of antibiotics being prescribed for ear infections when we know that they're viral? And overwhelmingly in this survey, what they found is that the doctors all responded because we think that the mother expects it. We think That the parent expects it, and if we don't meet their expectations, we're worried that patient will leave our office, the parent will take them to a different doctor, and we'll lose them as a patient.

So in our health care system, this has been an ongoing problem. They have discovered this, they have studied this, they have done surveys on this, and they have said, we're trying to meet people's expectations with the wrong thing. We're not educating them, they're not educating the parents that, hey, wait a minute, you know what, your child has a Let's do a culture before we put them on anything.

Let's see if it could possibly be bacterial, and if so, then we'll give you an antibiotic. No, they're jumping to conclusions, they're giving them an antibiotic, and they know that most ear infections are going to clear up in 7 10 days anyway. In their mind, they're just meeting the patient's expectation to maintain them as a patient.

It's just business. And that's not where we need to go. As chiropractors, we stand in a very unique position. We stand in a position of being the only provider that can help man the physical connect with man, the spiritual. Nobody else does that. We allow the nervous system to function freely without interference.

And when we take the time to educate patients as to what we do and why we do it, It is so much more effective and so much more beneficial for them when we help them understand more realistic expectations. Will your pain go away? Most likely when the body starts to function better, the body has no need to give you pain, which is a signal or a warning or a symptom, letting you know something is wrong.

But if we don't take the time to educate them, then we spend our day chasing their symptoms, chasing their problem, and chasing their expectations, which we can't always meet. So we're hurting ourselves, we're hurting our community, and we're hurting chiropractic. Because what do you think happens when a patient goes to a chiropractic office with a specific set of expectations and they're not met?

They don't leave and say, oh gee, it just didn't work for me because my expectations were wrong. No, they leave and say, I tried it, it didn't work. And then They have bad things to say, or they don't have something positive to say, or they're not a raving fan. They don't refer people to you because they didn't get their expectations met.

I believe that our job is to help create more realistic expectations. My job, I believe, is to help educate people and empower them with the tools that they need so that they can make better health care decisions. And I believe that is all of our jobs, so that when people come into your office, my office, or the person down the street, we are all helping them to understand.

The function of the nervous system. How the body works. Understanding that the brain is the very first structure to develop, followed by the spinal cord, followed by the nerves. And if those structures do not form properly, then a baby doesn't form. Hang on, the rain's got me choked up here. We're in hurricane season and I don't know where you are, but I'm in Atlanta.

I'm nowhere near the ocean and we're talking about hurricanes. I grew up on the ocean in Long Island. We had hurricanes. It was normal. But to be talking about hurricanes in Atlanta when, I can't even get to the beach for Five hours. This is crazy weather. So it's raining, it's pouring, and then it stops.

Then it's raining, it's pouring, and then pine cones are dropping on the roof of my building, and then it stops. So there's, it's craziness going on. But let's really talk about this because how do you help your patients understand? You have to change your language and you have to help change their language.

So it's not about how you feel, It's about how you function. It's not about how you feel. It's about how your body is able to heal. When you start having better conversations and using better words and directing the conversations and leading your patients to better quality patients better quality questions, then you're having people who are engaged in your care, who are releasing some of the false expectations they may have had and who are accepting better, more realistic expectations of what It means to be under chiropractic care.

So talk to your patients about what it is that we do, how we detect and correct vertebral subluxations, how adjustments help to remove the interference to the nervous system to allow the body to restore its normal function. How everybody has an internal or inherit recuperative ability. Their body has an innate intelligence and when we allow that innate intelligence or that internal wisdom to flow freely without interference from subluxations, misalignments, spasms, inflammation, right?

All of the problems that we're dealing with when you have a bone out of place or you have pressure on a nerve or you have a subluxation or interference. When we allow the body to function normally. Health can be restored. And when health is restored, pain is one of the first symptoms to go away. Now, one of the things I always have used is a drawing or a map of what a nerve looks like and how the external portion of the nerve picks up the sensation, but the internal portion picks up all of the actions that we're going to do, right?

So you have the afferent one of the things I explain to patients is When you have pressure on a nerve and you're crushing down on a nerve, let's just say it's a water bottle because I don't have my little drawing here, when you're crushing down on a nerve, the first thing to show up is pain, right? I'm sorry, the first thing that happens is you're affecting the body and then eventually when you crush it enough, you may have some pain, but as you take that pressure off, the first thing to go away is that pain.

That doesn't mean that the nerve is functioning freely. It means that we've removed some of that pain Some of that pressure, some of the ability for the body to begin functioning, we have to continue until we get the body to its normal state, till we get it to a point where there is no longer pressure on the nerves and therefore interference with the nervous system.

The conversations that you have with your patients are going to dictate the level of care that they receive in your office. So if you have very surface level conversations, you're going to get surface level care and surface level results. You're going to get people who come in with a headache, leave feeling better.

But if you have deeper conversations and you get to the root cause of health, the root cause of function, and you have patients who understand that or are willing to learn more or who are asking you better questions about their health, then what ends up happening is you end up having people who are benefiting truly from chiropractic care, who are not just here like it's a band aid or not just here like it's an aspirin, but they're here because they value The relationship between chiropractic care and their family's ability to perform and function to their optimum level.

So shifting your conversations away from pain and toward function, away from how they feel to how they heal is going to help your patients understand why they need to follow their care plans. And it helps you to lay out a better, more appropriate care plan for them when you're able to say, This is not just about the pain that you've been experiencing for the last six weeks.

This is about the malfunction, the dis ease that's been going on, the subluxations, the misalignments that have been there for months or years that have now led to the situation where now you're experiencing or expressing a symptom. But let's look at the underlying causes and let's show whether there's degeneration on an x ray, whether there's misalignment, whether there's a problem.

Inflammation going on, whether this is affecting their body's overall function, whether you're looking at heart rate variability, or whether you're looking at leg length variability, or whether you're looking at, different structures, the organ systems, whatever you're using as your criteria in your office, relate it back to the level of degeneration they may be experiencing, based on how long this has been going on.

Therefore, This is going to take time for your body to heal. Rather than meeting other people's expectations for care in your office, be the one who helps them and says, look, I understand where you're coming from. Let me explain to you what a more realistic expectation is and how we're going to not only achieve your goal, but achieve goals you haven't even thought about, which is how do I not only get out of pain?

How do I make sure that I don't experience this again? How do I make sure that I remove the interference that was causing the pain? How do I make sure that my organs and my muscles are able to function properly? And how do I make sure that my body is able to continue to heal and grow and function normally as I mature and age so that I'm not wearing my body out, so that I'm not degenerating, so that I'm not developing arthritic conditions, right?

When you shift your conversations, You shift the feel in your office and you shift the energy that the patients come in with, and you shift the expectation that they have. Therefore the results that they're seeking and getting and sharing with the community. And that is going to help you reach more people to really, truly help experience the big idea in your community.

So I want to thank you so much for joining me here. Hopefully in the next few weeks, I know I'll be at a couple of different events. Hopefully I'll run into you and see you somewhere, but if I don't hesitate to come up to me. Gimme a hug. Let's talk. Let's see how you're doing it in your practice. And listen ladies, I appreciate what you're doing in your corner of the world.

Keep doing it. Keep doing a great job. Keep empowering your patients so that collectively our patients will help raise the vibration of our communities and we'll see a healthier, more prosperous world. Have a great day. I'll see everybody next time. Bye-Bye.

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