Chiropractic Patient Education...

Your ability to influence others is proportional to how intimately you know yourself. If you aren't comfortable in your own skin, leading patients (or others) is impossible.

How do you get to know yourself?

Journal. Spend private time with yourself describing the events of the day. Put your feelings into words. Use words to explore your perceptions, worries, reactions and judgments. Only as you are able to assign language to what is so, will you be sufficiently present to inspire those around you.

De-mediate your life. Many of us use media as an avoidance strategy, especially television, a drug administered through the eyes that distracts and pacifies. Plop down in front of the boob tube and we can avoid confronting our shortcomings, disappointments and the dreams we aren't pursuing.

Want to be a change agent? Start with yourself. Like the safety demo. "Put on your mask first before assisting others."

Subscribe to Monday Morning Motivation.

Sell everything you have and give it to the poor.

Sound like a good idea? Great. Then clearly you aren't attached to your things. Good for you. Yet, many people are. In fact, many define who they are by what they own. Car. House. Children's achievements. Education. Trophy spouse. Etc.

It may be convenient, but it's almost always inaccurate. You are not your stuff.

Instead, you are all the decision you've made up until now. You made them. Not your car. Not your spouse. You. The good decisions and not so good decisions.

And while we don't get a do-over, we can almost always choose to make better choices in the future. In fact, as we age, almost all of us do.

Next time you have to decide, do so by holding it up to the yardstick of eternity. You know, infinite. Then decide. Bet you find it much easier.

Subscribe to Monday Morning Motivation.

Happiness is choice. Since you know the truth about health, you should be the happiest person patient's encounter.

It's risky surrendering your happiness to circumstances. Yet, many of us do. Which can reduce happiness to one of those exceedingly-rare-winning-the-lottery-predicting-the-future kinds of experiences. In other words we don't enjoy the frequency of happy episodes we deserve.

Want more happiness? Begin by identifying the circumstances that make you happy. Write it down. Simple, yet few attend to this important matter.

It may surprise you to learn that there are many people who have tried to make you happy. But through the difficult process of reverse engineering, they have been less than successful in finding the winning combination. They would appreciate a couple of clues. Share them.

Then, be prepared for unexpected joy and some occasional bliss. Which start by first choosing to be happy. Oh, and be sure to tell your face!

Subscribe to Monday Morning Motivation.

Now that the dust has settled from the New Mexico attempt that would have allowed chiropractors to prescribe drugs and possibly perform surgery, it might be helpful to remind ourselves as to why this was, and is, such a bad idea. An idea that some, emboldened by last year’s close call in the Land of Enchantment, seem inclined to bring to other legislatures near you.

I’m guessing that when you see Minute Maid juice, you don’t think of apple juice. And when you think of BIC Pens you probably don’t imagine BIC pantyhose. (Yes, they tried that!) Or how about a Harley Davidson cake decorating kit? Or Lifesaver gum? Or Coca-Cola chap stick?

In marketing parlance these unsuccessful (and expensive) hallucinations are called line extensions. They rarely work. Yet a handful of chiropractors are trying to pull off something similar with the addition of drugs to the chiropractic scope of practice!

Continue reading "Five Arguments Against Adding Drugs to Chiropractic " »

Someday you'll feel alone and discouraged. Or depressed and hopeless. What will make matters worse is that those around you won't share these feelings. In fact, their apparent happiness will make your feelings of separation worse.

This is a common human condition and there are several strategies for escaping it. I have used all of them to ameliorate my own episodes:

Vigorous exercise. I used jogging (because it was inexpensive) and found that the endorphin high lasted long enough to move beyond my personal pity party.

Serve others. The surest way to escape is to serve. And it may not be through chiropractic. Volunteer your time. Community service. Soup kitchen. The possibilities are endless.

Pray. Feelings of separation, depression and the like are often signs of spiritual oppression. It's a common scheme of the enemy. Rebuke the spirits of darkness and create a clearing by inviting in the Holy Spirit.

Subscribe to Monday Morning Motivation.

This is an all too common belief held by many chiropractors who are naive, lazy or inclined to steal. Naturally, this lack of integrity creates far more problems in the long run than it solves in the short term.

Chiropractors who see a patient’s insurance policy as some sort of entitlement are probably the worse abusers. Either they don’t know how insurance policies work, or do, and choose to blur the boundaries for their personal gain.

In case you didn’t know, the purpose of a health insurance policy is NOT to insure the patient’s health!

Continue reading "“I can always find something to bill an insurance company for…” " »