What to do when your practice and patients are not developing the way you had imagined?
Though you are a skilled and passionate chiropractor, perhaps you have many patients who are not experiencing the results you expect. Instead, your patients show up with the same complaints and subluxations week after week. Patients who need to lose weight are unable to do so. Patients suffering from all types of conditions, such as fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and chronic strep throat infections, aren’t getting better.
Maybe you are having other frustrations, as well. Small checks from insurance companies as reimbursement for your services are not paying the bills, the staff you’ve hired to help is not performing, and your debt keeps mounting as you keep your practice running. Your chiropractic school might not have effectively prepared you to run a business. After years of struggling with all these issues, you may have thought about closing your doors and walking away from it all.
But before you close up shop, consider learning more about other ways to enhance your practice techniques, such as using nutrition in practice. But it is important to invest time into learning how to tie nutrition into your practice, and how to make your business run more efficiently.
While there are different muscle- testing techniques you can practice, it is important that you select a program that addresses patient needs as well as your own as a business owner. One option to consider is Nutrition Response Testing.
A better system
If you already use synthetic supplements in your practice, you might wonder why they are not working consistently. There is a difference between nutritional supplements made from foods and other natural ingredients and those made synthetically.
When it comes to nutrition, the body needs all of the components of any given nutrient to utilize it. Once you understand this concept, you begin thinking differently about nutrition and the role it plays in optimal health.
Nutrition Response Testing is a system that enables you to communicate with the innate intelligence of your patient’s body. Developed by Freddie Ulan, DC, Nutrition Response Testing addresses reoccurring and non- resolving subluxations caused by toxicity, nutritional deficiency, and stress. Built into the idea of this testing is a method of detecting biochemical, neurological, and structural barriers to healing that may be preventing a patient from responding to the correct intervention, and constitutes a way of removing those barriers naturally for optimal results.
To perform Nutrition Response Testing requires becoming fully trained in the technique and mastering it. The nutritional aspect of a patient’s case is handled differently than a straight chiropractic adjustment patient. An adjustment patient shows up in your office and gets on your table, then you do most of the work. Through Nutrition Response Testing, you determine the cause of recurring subluxations and chronic health problems, and create a personalized health improvement program the patient carries out between office visits.
Effective training in Nutrition Response Testing will provide you with the tools needed to ensure maximum patient compliance with these programs. Without proper training, the key components needed to ensure that patients remain with you long enough to get results, and who then become a constant source of referrals, won’t be fully understood.
Generally speaking, Nutrition Response Testing doesn’t diagnose or treat a disease, but a typical program will have two components: analysis and a personalized heath improvement program. The practitioner uses the patient’s muscle groups in tandem with acupressure points to locate and stimulate neurological reflexes. Depending on the patient’s response, you can ascertain which nutritional supplements and foods are needed to support their return to health.
By systematically implementing this into your standard of care, you can have an extremely successful practice with much happier patients who are now holding their adjustments longer, and routinely recovering from health challenges. This can lead to a tremendous increase in referrals because happy, satisfied patients spread the word.
Benefits for all
Naturally, an increase in patient visits can lead to lower marketing overhead and increased income, perhaps even to a cash practice and less stress.
There is nothing more satisfying than being a skilled healer, helping people restore their health, and making a comfortable living. However, as a business owner, you must also learn to increase efficiency and lower overhead. The smartest way to do this is to find a nutrition technique that includes training in practice management such as hiring and training the correct staff, effective low-cost marketing techniques that help you target your ideal patient, and the implementation of easy-to-use systems so that your practice runs smoothly and you have less stress.
Before committing to a new practice technique, such as Nutrition Response Testing, do your due diligence and research different programs. Understand what they fully entail, from the amount of training you need to the quality of the products they recommend. To successfully add a cash-based nutrition component to your existing practice, or to have a stand-alone nutrition practice, there are three specific components you need to consider:
- A time-tested, workable system for zeroing in on the patient’s needs and monitoring their progress.
- An effective, standardized system of patient management that allows you to eliminate “problem” patients before they become patients and increases compliance, retention, results, and referrals.
- An effective, standardized system of practice management that increases efficiency and lowers overhead; a system that turns patients and staff into cheerleaders who build your practice for you and enables you to hire and train the correct staff.
There are a lot of muscle testing seminars and systems to choose from. It is important to select a program that resonates with you and includes all the above components, so your skills as a healer and business owner can continuously improve.
To learn more or to find a Nutrition Response Testing workshop in your area, visit unsinc.info.
Cori Stern, DC, is a graduate of the University of Bridgeport Chiropractic College. She has been in private practice since 2001, seeing both chiropractic and nutrition patients. She lectures around the country, teaching health care practitioners about Nutrition Response Testing. She can be contacted at healthpointnutrition@gmail.com.
