Resource Centers:(News, information, and tools to support your practice)
April 2009
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Mastering the 5 factors of a wellness practice
By Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN
Each year we see the term “wellness” becoming more and more of a buzzword in chiropractic.
Practitioners everywhere are renaming themselves “wellness experts,” and are attempting to reinvent their practices as “wellness centers” to stay ahead of the curve.
All the buzz aside, questions remain: What exactly is a wellness practice, what does it do, and how does one specialize in it?
Modern, pharmaceutical medicine attempts to define wellness as an absence of symptoms. However, the problem with this definition is that the absence of symptoms can also be equated with death — not exactly an optimum state of health!
Chiropractors who have bought into the contemporary medical model of wellness are missing the boat in a big way. While they are delivering an invaluable service directed at symptom reduction without drugs and surgery, they have not yet discovered the most rewarding aspect of practice — which is what actually occurs after the patient has already attained the first stage: “relief.”
Essential factors of a true wellness practice
As a chiropractor, whole-body wellness can be viewed as a dynamic concept. If a patient is truly well, they have freedom of motion, boundless energy, and sleep well. Contagious illnesses leave them markedly unaffected and the day-to-day stresses of living don’t wear them down; and most importantly, this is all attained without reliance on pharmaceuticals, which stimulate energy or suppress symptoms.
When new patients come in with their list of chronic and more acute symptoms, it is easy to become sympathetic to their current state of duress and lose sight of the bigger picture. It is a challenging task to break clients out of their miseducation when they come in demanding a quick fix.
Your job then becomes determining how to routinely convert each patient from a “get me out of pain now” viewpoint to a true “wellness patient” perspective for life.
The ability to cause this shift is what makes the difference between practitioners who will succeed abundantly in the 21st century, and those who will continue their endless battle for survival against insurance companies, government-funded “healthcare” programs, and socialized medicine.
5 key factors
A practice based on the principle of wellness has unlimited potential for growth, just as the patient has virtually unlimited capacity for wellness.
The five key factors modern chiropractic wellness specialists must implement into their practice in order to fulfill their role in the new healthcare paradigm are:
• A method for rapidly and precisely analyzing a patient’s current situation and what is causing it.
• A system for correcting the underlying cause of the subluxation complex as connected to the patient’s immediate stress and the accurate chiropractic technique to correct it.
• A method for measuring the length of time the body holds the adjustment after each adjustment.
• A system for monitoring progress being made in extending correction viability and stability as a
• A technique that allows you to gradually increase the amount of time needed between each adjustment through fine-tuning of the patient program and gradual sustainable lifestyle corrections — fine-tuning that supports health improvement and brings the patient into a condition of greater responsibility for their own health.
Physiological versus chronological
Educating patients in wellness, and not just “immediate pain reduction,” is vital to determining the patients’ approximate physiological (or functional) age versus their chronological age.
True wellness programs have the ability to reverse the advancement of physiological age that has progressed well beyond an individual’s chronological age.
This concept translates to “age reversal” and is totally within the patient’s capabilities — under your trained supervision and guidance.
You can stop the onslaught of highly preventable diseases in children which rob them of their youth and narrow their window of opportunity for future happiness. You can reverse the physiological decline of people in general, and reverse the steadily declining national health.
To do this, you need to restore your expectation for results to the standards established by D.D. Palmer and the earliest chiropractic pioneers.
By doing this, you will fulfill your legacy as the provider of health and wellness, and establish yourself as the messenger of the new health paradigm — one that is not measured by lack of symptoms, but measured by how much vitality each individual has.
Facing today’s challenges
In the face of today’s practice challenges, getting your patients well according to these high standards can seem like a daunting, if not impossible, task. It isn’t. Master the five factors of restoring wellness and they become second nature.
Those who “master” these all-important dynamics through careful training and practice may no longer experience problems with profitability, patient generation, or patient retention.
As the public are looking for alternatives to the continually worsening conventional medical scene, wellness practitioners have the competitive edge.
Harmful drugs, potential lawsuits, and costly insurance are no longer considered the acceptable healthcare “norm” they once were.
A program that enables you to institute a nutritional wellness component into your practice — or improve an already-existing nutritional component — gives you the potential for automatic and unlimited referral generation.
If you give people a viable alternative to something that never really seemed like much of an option in the first place, you can become the agent of a new mainstream for quality healthcare; thus fulfilling your joyful obligation as a health practitioner to improve the quality of life of your patients, family, community, children, and ultimately, yourself.
Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN, is the founder of Ulan Nutritional Systems Inc. — a company dedicated to introducing and expanding the nutritional component of chiropractic practices. He can be reached at 866-418-4801 or through www.unsinc.info.com.
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