Have you lost your passion for chiropractic?

Today, did you break the first cardinal rule of your practice?

For many DCs with a passion for chiropractic, that rules is to leave all personal crises and problems outside the treatment room door so that you can enter, look your patient in the eye and give them your undivided attention, skill and best application of the clinical art of chiropractic.

Be honest: How many times do you find yourself thinking about personal problems while in a treatment room with a patient?

Do a reality check on your passion

Ask yourself these questions:

• Have you drifted to the point where you are seeing how much you can do to patients instead of for patients?
• How much effort are you expending educating patients about their problems and treatment?
• Have you fallen into the routine of just following your professional training in the clinic?
• Do you still have the same passion for your career that you started with?

Regardless of your present state of mind, challenge yourself to regain and renew your passion. It will give you a new love for your occupation and bring you renewed joy and satisfaction. Here are a few strategies to try:

1. Remember your role as their doctor

Our patients need assurance they are being treated by the DC best suited to handle their healthcare issues. They all need to find someone who will not give slick answers, either in the form of advice or by quoting some article of faith, but someone who will listen to them carefully, understand them and identify with them. This is precisely the role of the doctor. As “hands-on” DCs, we participate in the treatment of our patients and bond with them in their journey toward a healthier lifestyle.

2. Always help

The most ordinary, everyday patient consultation should do something to alleviate symptoms that create obstacles to having a healthy life. Every piece of advice you give, in the patient’s eyes, is a potential means of restoring their chances of success.

3. Alleviate a patient’s fear

Project mutual acceptance and validation in the same way the patient accepts you as their DC. When you validate the patient’s suffering and frame their condition as a diagnostic illness, one you can successfully handle, you reduce your patient’s fear.

4. Give special attention

It is a basic human need not only to be loved, but to be the object of attentive love. People sometimes show infantile characteristics when they have an illness,  like children whose need for security is overwhelming. We must understand and accept this need.

I really appreciated the exceptional, attentive care I received when I had my heart transplant in 2011. The treatment made me especially aware of my vulnerability. Through the act of responding to a patient’s need, we help them evolve and overcome their infantile reactions. Doctors cannot help patients develop unless they first accept the patients as they are.

We, as DCs, decide if chiropractic can help our patients. We can build trust with our patients only through genuine concern, not while hiding behind a role or façade. Genuineness reflects our trust and confidence in what chiropractic can offer our patients. Honest concerns, plus attentiveness, nourish the patient’s desire to become well and move them toward accepting the responsibility and process of healing.

5. Show interest and energy

The biggest difference among doctors is between those who live their calling with conviction and those who just want a paycheck. We DCs reveal our feelings as soon as we touch a patient’s spine. The sick are extraordinarily quick at spotting our true feelings and level of interest. They know quite well whether our displays of confidence are only recitations or stem from heartfelt personal conviction. They can see we enjoy our work by the energy we share with them and the constant smile on our face.

6. Enjoy taking clinical action

We DCs do not write prescriptions.  We attend to our patients’ bodily discomfort by handling and touching approvingly, and that opens a channel of communication often neglected by other types of healthcare providers, which is why this practice is a passion to many DCs. Patient commitment and cooperation may include a program of exercise, nutritional counseling, stress management techniques and behavioral change.

Final thoughts: We win when patients take responsibility

As our patients respond to chiropractic care, some choose to take responsibility for their own health. We must encourage and train them for this task. Patients’ improvement, psychologically and functionally as well as subjectively, depends on the DC’s clinical skills: attentiveness, listening, relieving fear by interpreting symptoms to lessen psychological stress, enlisting the patient’s peace of mind, satisfaction, trust, hope, cooperation in treatment and desire for recovery. Once they accept their responsibility, you and the patient are a team, and cooperation in their search for optimal health is assured.

Gary A. Boring, DC, BCAO (Board Certified Atlas Orthogonal), LCP(Hon), FICA, practiced for 53 years with a strong passion for chiropractic. His Missouri practice, Boring Chiropractic, at which his father and brother also worked as DCs, has served patients for nearly 90 years.