Before I was setting goals for my patients as a Chiropractor, here’s what was happening…and how we fixed it.

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Speaker 1:
Good morning, everyone. Wanted to share something that I think is really important that a lot of us chiropractors don’t do, I didn’t do for several years, and that is having a clear way of setting goals for our patients. In the past, I wasn’t setting goals, I didn’t have enough objective markers and I saw some issues. I’m going to share that with you.

Speaker 1:
First off, before I get into it, if you haven’t checked it out already, if you don’t know what MoveNow University is all about, it’s a full portal that teaches chiropractors how to integrate their practice with corrective exercise and functional movement.

Speaker 1:
It’s a lot more than that, but we have a 30-minute demo that’s prerecorded that you can watch, it’s demo.movenowu.com. I put it in the subject above or if you’re listening to this on a podcast, it’s just demo dot move now the letter U dot com. You can watch a demo, you can get an idea of what this thing’s all about. Basically, you can integrate your practice with something that is already congruent with chiropractic, it’s allowed under your license, and it backs up what we’re doing from a segmental and a postural standpoint as far as addressing movement.

Speaker 1:
Now, I wrote some notes on a board over here. I’m going to flip it around in just a second, but I’m going to read from the board as I’m going. Basically, just to tell you the backstory and start with a quote that I talk to patients about all the time and I like because I’m a very analytical person in my exercise routine, in my eating habits and everything, it’s always measured. I like to be able to measure that. I like to be able to see before and after.

Speaker 1:
Guess what? The public, your patients, want to see that as well. They want to have tangible, measurable goals and not just, “Hey, I came in with lightning-bolt pain in my low back and my low back pain went away,” because guess what happens when their low back pain goes away? They go away, too, if you don’t have any other objective measurable goals.

Speaker 1:
The problem with that is: Did you really fix them? I would argue, no you didn’t. If you see someone and get them out of pain and see them five times and they’re out of pain, you didn’t fix them. You fix them when you teach them how to change their lifestyle. It goes back to a quote that Dr. Fred DiDomenico, a friend and mentor of mine of several years, he said, “Do you want to change someone’s life or do you want to change how they’re living?”

Speaker 1:
Really, I think our job as a leader in health for our patients in our community is to change the way that they’re living, is to actually change their lifestyle, change their life, change how they think about things. If that’s too big of a task for you, this might not be for you.

Speaker 1:
Back originally, it’s funny, my original mentor, who I learned a lot of stuff from, he was a little bit of the opposite. He liked the old Jiffy Lube quote of “We’re not trying to change the world, we’re just trying to change your oil.” I flipped that over the years. I’m not trying to change your oil. I’m trying to change the world. Okay, so be a world changer. Change your community, change your patient. How do you do that? You do that by setting goals.

Speaker 1:
In the past, we didn’t have goals. I was really excited about what I did as a chiropractor. I got into chiropractic. I graduated school back in 2003 and hardcore into Gonstead, very specific segmental analysis and adjusting. I just always wanted to learn as much as I couldn’t be as good as I could in Gonstead and I was still continuing to be as good of a chiropractor and an adjuster and finding where the problem is on the patient.

Speaker 1:
What happened, though, is I would take comparative X-rays with patients and I wouldn’t see a whole lot of change. Or if I did see change, it would be the outlier, it’d be like one of the 10 would change and the rest would kind of look the same. Or if you squinted and held your tongue in the corner, your mouth, you could kind of see those difference.

Speaker 1:
I didn’t have a very objective, tangible way to even measure the change because that was really never taught to us. We had some different ways of measuring curve that we knew that we learned in school and whatnot, but it just didn’t convince me that we were actually making real measurable change if we couldn’t measure it and back it up with research. That’s what led me into discovering chiropractic biophysics and then learning that, becoming advanced certified, and adding that into my arsenal of what I was doing now.

Speaker 1:
I was doing segment and posture, but I knew something was missing, and the third part that was missing was movement. I always knew movement was important inherently because I’ve always been someone who exercises and I’ve always gauged my own health by how well I can move, so I’m thinking, “Okay, if we fix someone’s segmental integrity, we fix their posture, it looks nice and pretty, but if they can’t even do a hip hinge or a squat or bend over and pick up their child without hurting themselves, what are we really doing for them?” Then I realized this big aha moment of addressing corrective exercise and functional movement was the big missing piece. That’s the backstory.

Speaker 1:
Now, after I had that epiphany and I knew that I needed to address segment, posture, movement, then I’m thinking, “Okay, how do I measure this in a tangible evidence-based scientific manner?” so I could also show this to a patient, but do it in such a way that it doesn’t confuse them or it’s not above their head, but something that they can actually see and feel and put it all together and then have proof when they go through care that they made actual change.

Speaker 1:
The reason that I gravitate towards that is not just because of my own selfish desire of wanting to have numbers and analytics because that’s how I operate, but it’s because I had patients that were dropping out of care once they felt better, which I know every chiropractor on here has probably have that issue, right? I mean, everyone. Every single chiropractor has had that issue where patients feel better and you say, “Ah, they didn’t get it,” or “Ugh, I didn’t have a chance to educate them on the importance of chiropractic corrective care” or “wellness care,” or whatever.

Speaker 1:
Or you might be the kind of chiropractor on here who’s kind of given up and you’re like, “I just do neck pain, back pain, short-term relief,” and that’s like the physical therapy model. If you want to do that, I guess that’s all well and good. I’m trying to talk to an audience that has a bigger calling that doesn’t just want to see someone five times and get them out of symptoms, but actually transform them and change them and make an impact on them for a lifetime. If you’re in that second camp, I’m not really talking to you. If you in the first camp, keep listening.

Speaker 1:
Anyway, I’m going to flip this around because I came up with some pretty good goals. I wrote them up here as far as how we do this with the patient. I’m going to take you through this one at a time.

Speaker 1:
First off: What gets measured gets managed. I have to flip this around so I’m not in the film because as we know with Facebook Live, it’ll flip it, you won’t be able to read it.

Speaker 1:
Goals: Here’s the different measurable things that we look at in our clinic. We look at comparative digital posture, okay? Do I put a ton of weight into that? Not a ton. Some, but it’s a picture, okay? We use PostureScreen, it’s an awesome app, works great, but there’s a certain margin of error as far as with marking, so it’s helpful but that’s not my definitive.

Speaker 1:
Next is comparative X-ray. As long as the X-ray is taken in a very consistent fashion, which we do, we measure a couple things on it. We measure AP changes pre and post, head translation, thoracic translation, scoliosis severity. We compare this on every single patient. We grade it initially, we measure initially, and then we compare to this on the post-X-ray. Lateral, okay? On the sagittal film, we look at cervical curve, thoracic curve, and lumbar curve. Those are all the things that we look at with X-ray.

Speaker 1:
Then the third goal here, or the third objective measurable thing we look at with patients, is a movement assessment. How do we do that? We have a MoveWell 3, which is our movement assessment that we designed. We took some of the best stuff out there, borrowed some of the best stuff from different movement assessments and things out there and made one that works very well with chiropractic that’s done in a very quick and efficient fashion. That’s the MoveWell 3.

Speaker 1:
Then belt level. What’s the belt level? The belt level is how we gamified the process. Patients start at a white belt and when they become more functional, they ascend up through the ranks, which also helps them with the fact that they have a level of accomplishment and a culture that you create within your clinic. We have belts up on the wall in our clinic and then our patients get a belt on the wrist. I’m not wearing mine because I just got done working out. I usually am wearing it even though I’m working out, so I don’t have a good excuse for that, but those are the goals.

Speaker 1:
Then that’s not the only stuff that we measure. We actually measured a lot more stuff, but we take this and we put this into more stuff. We put this into the wellness score, so we use Cash Practice Wellness Score. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that before, but it’s pretty awesome. This is, yeah, a little bit of like a free plug for Wellness Score because we use it. The cool thing about it is you can have a before grade, okay? You can show a patient “You are a D minus, 61%.” The stuff that we measure in the wellness score, we plug all of this in. We actually created our own parameters in the wellness score and that’s going to be released pretty soon. I’ve been working with Dr. Miles Bodzin and Holly as well. They’re putting that in there for MoveNow U. Anyone that’s part of Cash Practice can actually get our wellness score parameters and use it like this.

Speaker 1:
This is the stuff we measure, but we also measure more stuff. What’s more stuff? Let me flip this around. More stuff is like we measure blood pressure, we look at body fat, which is crazy because we’ve had patients that go through a 12-week transformation with us as far as fixing their segment, posture, movement and they lose 15 pounds in 12 weeks, which is nuts because we get them exercising and they’re super excited about that. They see that on the pre and post comparative digital posture picture and on their body fat measurement.

Speaker 1:
We look at body fat, we look at palpation severity of segmental subluxation. Some of these are somewhat subjective measurements, like a zero to five scale, five is like superacute and swollen is zero is like nothing.

Speaker 1:
We look at neurological symptoms, so if a person has like numbness, tingling, that sort of thing, we grade that on a zero to 10 scale.

Speaker 1:
What else do we measure on there? There’s a handful of other things, I don’t have it in front of me, but there’s about 20 different parameters that we measure, and I’ll flip this around again. That’s the more stuff. We plug this into the wellness score.

Speaker 1:
Then when we’re initially presenting this to a patient, we’re showing them a summary of everything we found, this is all they see. They see a whole, basically, report that shows all these parameters. We run through this with them briefly and there’s a little paragraph on a handful of pages after that explains each one of the parameters and we show them “You’re a D minus and over the course of 12 weeks going through this corrective process, you can usually improve this anywhere between 15 to 20% if you follow everything that we tell you to do and you’re a good patient and you’re a good student, okay?” Then they’re like, “Yeah, I want to do that.” Then we have a comparative, 12 weeks later, and then we print out a comparative report. We run through that with them.

Speaker 1:
Now, here’s the power of that: Not only does that patient see that they made great objective, measurable changes, but what if they didn’t change in certain categories? What if some categories changed a lot, others didn’t, and then we start talking about what they did? Or maybe the special case of them being extremely rigid and osteoarthritic? Maybe there’s other complicating factors that make them slower to change. Whatever it may be, now you have something tangible and objective and you can then say, “Okay, well here’s what I recommend moving forward,” all right?

Speaker 1:
There’s systems we have behind this in detail. We spell this process out in detail inside of MoveNow University. It’s not just how to put corrective exercise in your practice. We cover the day one, day two, day three, day four, and day five. We actually have a five-day process for very specific reasons.

Speaker 1:
Then after all that stuff is done, the vast majority of the patients say, “Yeah, I want to keep going. I want to achieve these goals. I want to keep excelling through this process.” If someone has done amazingly well in the first 12 weeks, then by all means, we scale back our recommendations because that person is better off than someone who needs more care.

Speaker 1:
Now, us as the doctor, instead of having like generic recommendations that we just give to everyone, we have very specific dialed-in recommendations after that initial 12 weeks to see how the patient is going to respond to the corrective process.

Speaker 1:
Again, what gets measured gets managed. I reiterate that to patients all the time. People understand it, they get it, they appreciate it, and they say, “I’ve never had any chiropractor go through this with me before. I’ve never had a physical therapist do this. I’ve never had any doctor, I’ve never had anyone look all of these things and then remeasure where I’m at. I usually go to my doctor, they say my cholesterol, my blood pressure is within ‘normal limits,’ so I’m healthy, but I can’t bend over and touch my toes or I can’t hip hinge or I can load my body with any sort of resistance or weight. Yeah, they told me I have decreased bone density.”

Speaker 1:
It’s crazy to me how our healthcare system paints the picture for their patients that they’re “healthy” when their vitals are chemically controlled by some kind of pharmaceutical and that somehow spells out health. It doesn’t. People understand that it doesn’t. They need you to connect the dots and they need an alternative. They need a solution to this. I feel very strongly that us as chiropractors, that’s our role. That’s what we’re supposed to be is the solution. What better way to do it than address segment, posture, movement? You need systems to be able to do that.

Speaker 1:
Again, check out our demo. It’s at demo.movenowu.com. You can watch the demo, you can see all the work we’ve put into this for the past, I guess almost three years now. We just finished this whole process called the “Success Launch,” which is a 12-week training, it’s a detailed training. You print out a manual, all of your staff prints out a manual, and there’s week-by-week handhold processes, plus we’re available on a private Facebook group, plus the other a hundred plus doctors who are a part of this are on there as well who’ve already gone through a whole lot of these steps.

Speaker 1:
Basically, it makes sure that when you join this and when you plug this into your practice in 12 weeks, you’re implemented. It doesn’t sit on the shelf and collect dust. It’s not just a gym membership that you buy and you never show up to the gym. Really, what it is, on the contrary, it’s the gym membership that you buy and you have the trainer that’s there three days a week making sure that you achieve your goals and at the end of it you’re like, “I couldn’t have done this without you, but thank you so much. Now, I’ve developed a habit and I’m self-sufficient going forward.”

Speaker 1:
That’s why we built this. That’s what we built this whole Success Launch process inside of our program that is literally a university. I don’t think I could’ve named it anything more appropriately when we named it a couple of years back. It is literally a university. I think one day we’ll probably have to do something more extensive than an online process and our in-person courses that we do three, four times a year at our clinic out here in Meridian, Idaho. The next one’s going to be probably end of February, I haven’t set the date yet, called the “Impact Event.”

Speaker 1:
Anyway, with all of that said, I got to get going because I still practice full-time. I just finished working out in my home gym. I got to go into the clinic and see patients and apply all this stuff and I’m talking to you right now in practice because we practice what we preach. Comment, share. If you find this helpful, let me know. Appreciate y’all. Over and out.