The body will heal, but sometimes just healing by itself will not produce the best outcome. The brain is saying, “being in pain is better than being paralyzed”. What we would say is let’s help facilitate that healing to do it with less scar tissue and more natural tissue, so that this patient can have both not being paralyzed and be out of pain.
I would like to shift the focus to talk about how do chiropractors benefit from this business model that you have?
Dr. Mike Carberry: Chiropractic has been one of those professions that have been on the outer fringes since their evolution in 1895. They have been around for 130 years, and they have not captured a good majority of the population, even when it is the most common ailment that people suffer from is what chiropractors treat. There’s a lot of different reasons for that, but what we find is that chiropractors have a tool. We are using functional adjustments where we are trying to gently break adhesions to help increase the motion of the spine to prevent degenerative changes, and, in some cases, even reverse it.
We have a great tool, but it is not getting out to the public. There are many reasons for that. There was a lawsuit against the American Medical Association by the chiropractors, and it went from, I believe, 1974 to 1987, which is when the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals ruled that, indeed, the American Medical Association did conspire against chiropractic, because it was a drugless profession and did not sell drugs. Not because it was dangerous because it is not. It is considered one of the safest modalities around. Moreover, not because it did not work. It was one of the most effective modalities around. Primarily, the court said, because we were not prescribing drugs, and the AMA did not like that.
Before the court ruling, chiropractors were on the outskirts and could not work with a medical doctor. However, after that decision, the court said you could not limit the ability of the chiropractor to refer to or receive a referral from a medical doctor. You cannot punish a medical doctor for referring somebody to a chiropractor. That changed things, and it was less than ten years after that that we started doing this integrated practice.
The idea is chiropractors are now bringing on other professionals to broaden the scope of the practice. The chiropractors, even though they might be the executive director of the clinic, and not all our clients are chiropractors. We do have nurse practitioners that brought chiropractic into their practice. We have some medical doctors who brought chiropractic into their practice, and we even have podiatrists and acupuncturists who have brought chiropractic and medical into the practice.
The idea is the owner, which most of them are chiropractors, broaden the scope, but they have to function as an executive director, not as a clinical director. The clinical director would be the senior license, and that would be the medical license. So, we teach chiropractors how to set these venues up to where they can find medical people that agree with the philosophy that we have been talking about, and the chiropractor can set up the clinic as an integrated team.
Now, what usually happens with our clients is, first they must find a medical person, and you would be amazed how many medical people are embracing this model. We have had lots of doctors tell us over the years, “Finally, I can now get people well without writing a prescription.” Or, “I am writing prescriptions to help people get off prescriptions, instead of just keeping them on them for the rest of their life.”
In this model, the chiropractors can expand the scope of the practice, which means they can reach more people, help more people, do it compliantly, and make a more significant profit. Then the medical people can work in an environment where they are not rushing through. Many family practitioners tell me they are rushing through their visits. They have to see 40 or 50 patients a day to make a profit because of the low reimbursement rate they receive. The patient expects them to heal them on the first visit, and the easiest way they say to do that is to write a prescription. There are many doctors I have worked with over the years said, “I hated doing that. I did not think it was the right thing to do,” but that is what the standard of care they are taught.
This model gives them an ability to improve patients functionally. We work on these patients for a period, like a physical therapy visit or a care plan, we treat them, and we help to reverse these functional limitations so that in the end, the patient reaches maximum medical improvement. The medical people love that, the chiropractors that we work with love that. It also improves the ability to expand the business, which means more people employed, and more profitability for the clinic, which means they can extend the model. We have had many chiropractors join our program, and they realize our systems are so good that they have gone from one practice to five practices in less than two years. They understand, “You know what, these systems work great. Once I get the first one ironed out, I can continue to open more of these clinics,” and they do.
