Empowering Women in Chiroprractic - Adding Functional Medicine to Your Practice?

Click here to download the transcript. Disclaimer:

The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  We suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hello everybody. Dr. Julie McLaughlin here for Empowering Women from ChiroSecure. I hope you're all doing great today, and we're gonna be talking a little bit about if you've been thinking about adding functional medicine into your chiropractic practice. So I have some slides. Let's get started.

So Vital Health Protocols is who I work with, and ChiroSecure is who I use for my malpractice. And hopefully all of you do too, because they are awesome. They're not only a awesome insurance company and help all of us with these things, but they do. All this educational stuff and so much more than just insurance.

So let's give ChiroSecure a bunch of hearts, thumbs up because you know they are really awesome and so helpful in our profession. Have you thought about adding functional medicine to your practice? Have you just thought about it? Have you heard of other doctors doing it? If you have, I have some reasons why you might wanna think about it a little bit more, because it really could be the missing piece in your practice.

So the principles in a nutshell of functional medicine, Do no harm. Improve the systems as well as all the functions in quality of life. Treat the underlying disorders, not just the symptoms, and improve long-term prognosis of your patient. Doesn't that sound like chiropractic? It does to me because it's so similar to our philosophy, which makes it a super great fit.

That's why we have puzzles on the screen. So the first thing I want you to think about by adding functional medicine to your practice, you're gonna improve your patient satisfaction and outcome. Not that you're not getting good satisfaction or outcome now. But you're gonna have things like integrating lifestyle and environmental and clinical interventions in your practice.

So when you have patients that are chronic and they're inflamed and they're just not responding to care like they used to, I know I've been pregnant a long time, and patients used to respond much faster and much better than they do now because they have all these other comorbidities and diabetes and heart disease and autoimmune and postviral syndromes and obesity.

That really improves. Another thing is it's an increased revenue stream without an overhead. We can add a lot of expanded services in our practice, but let's face it, they can be pretty costly. You get a new piece of equipment, or you build a gym in your office or whatever it is, it's expensive, and then that additional revenue stream has to generate revenue for you and cover that overhead with functional.

There's no overhead, right? And you're gonna be able to diversify your revenue stream. And God forbid, knock on wood, right? It gives you a backup plan. If you ever got injured or sick and you couldn't do the physical work of chiropractic, you still could have a income. With functional medicine, it's gonna help you better manage chronic diseases.

We are seeing so many people now with chronic disease, heart disease, diabetes. When I look at the functional medicine, my focus really is heavy in the cardiometabolic like heart disease and diabetes and obesity because those directly relate with chiropractic, right? We get patients that are obese and overweight and not healthy and have all of these things.

It impacts their joints and their spine. So why not treat the whole person, treat the spine, but also treat. On the inside by looking at the root cause of the conditions. And February is national Heart Disease month and is prevention month. So with functional medicine, it gives you more things to be able to help market in your practice.

So by marketing things like heart disease and looking at, cholesterol and blood sugar, that's a great way to help educate your community and they're gonna need chiropractic care as. So when you're expanding those services, I want you to think of this wider range, but you also have more topics to talk about and share with your community.

If you're doing YouTube videos or Facebook or even just specials in your office, it's really gonna help you get that word out and it's gonna help with collaboration with other healthcare providers. And what's really cool about this is. That creates a referral network. So if you see somebody's numbers are super crazy and they need some kind of medical intervention, you have your own little network where they're gonna refer to you and you're gonna refer to them.

So that in itself creates another stream of revenue for you. And you know they're gonna send you chiropractic patients as well. Cause why not? , you're gonna have freedom from insurance reimbursement. So functional medicine is cash based. That's a beautiful thing about it. The labs and things like that can get covered by insurance, but you don't even have to bill for it.

But the rest is cash and it's insurance for your health because, God forbid, like I said, I got long covid. It affected me for two years and I wasn't able to do the physical part of my practice, and I was very thankful to have that functional medicine to fall back on. It gives you the ability to be mobile.

It gives you a mil, the ability to be virtual. Maybe you have young kids and you want more time at home with those kids, or maybe your spouse is retired and you're not, and you wanna move somewhere, or you just wanna travel around. You can still earn that income, provide good care to your patients. So I'm gonna show you a little case study of one of my patients.

Just so you can get an idea of what this all is about. So John, he came in with an initial complaint of lower back pain. He was obese, he had high cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome, and he was actually on medication. A statin, hypertension medication. They wanted to increase his doses for him because it wasn't correcting his problem.

So what we did is we ran comprehensive labs on him. We reviewed all his medications, a statin in the blood pressure, and this were our recomme. Obviously he did chiropractic care for his back pain, which he did awesome with. We got him to lose weight and do a lifestyle change program. We monitored hi his blood pressure daily.

He did it at home and watched as he made these changes over three months and H and saw that blood pressure coming down and then we supplemented for deficiencies. So I'm gonna show you his before and after labs who get an idea of how powerful this is. These labs are only three months apart. We're not talking years or decades, or we're talking three months, right?

So these were the before. This is just his cholesterol, some advanced cholesterol, lipid numbers. He was on a statin. And his numbers were still showing up in the red and the yellow, still on a statin. He could not give this cholesterol under control and they maxed his dose on it and he's getting side effects.

Musculoskeletal aches and pains we all know, right? And his pre-diabetic. So we know pre-diabetes has the same risk factors in people with neuropathy, heart disease, kidneys, eye problems, as if they have full-blown diabetes. But they will be in the pre-diabetes phase much longer before they hit the diabetes.

So we had to correct this really fast and. Look at his ferritin super low. That's his deep iron stores. And for a man, his iron was really low at 54. I like it above 85, so he was anemic on top of it. Now, three months later, look at the difference. Even if you don't know how to read these numbers yet, but you will if you do this, you will know it all corrected into the green and he lowered his dose of his statin and he's off his blood pressure me.

That is amazing. In three months. and his back pain's relieved. He lost 30 pounds. He reversed pre-diabetes. He lowered his hemoglobin a1c that's that three month blood sugar marker back into the normal range. He reduced his dose of his statin to, and he improved his lipids into the normal range. Now he has a genetic marker that has caused his statins to be so crazy high.

So that's one of the things that he's fighting. , but lifestyle changed it, not the medication, right? He got off the blood pressure medication and because he was logging it for me, he was able to take it to his doctor who was doing those blood pressures and prescribing that medication and he was able to get off of it.

He increased his energy, improved his sleep, and his overall health and lifestyle, and guess what? He sent the rest of his family to come in and have the same thing done. So if you have patients like John, This is an awesome service to be able to offer to them. And I gotta tell you, as a doc, it's super rewarding for me as well because to see that in such a short period of time is so fun and I just love it.

So if you are considering doing functional medicine, I have to tell you, you have nothing to lose, and you should absolutely do it. So if you wanna learn more about what I do, Dr. Julie McLaughlin, vital Health Protocols. You can see me on YouTube and Facebook, and of course here, I'm Cairo Secure. So that's it for today and thank you so much Cairo Secure for everything that you do.

You are just awesome and amazing. And we all love you. Thank you and be sure to tune in a couple weeks for our next episode of Empowering Women. Bye-bye.

Join us each week as we bring you the best in business growth, practice management, social media, marketing, networking, leadership, and lots more. If it's about women in practice, in business, you'll hear it here.

We hope you enjoyed this week's Facebook Live event. Please like us on Facebook, comment and share. We. Forward to seeing all of you next week for another episode of Empowering Women in Chiropractic. Now go ahead and hit the share button and tell your friends and colleagues about the shelf. Thank you for watching.

Have a beautiful day. This has been a ChiroSecure production.