TSC seems to present itself as an alternative to medical/therapeutic care but somehow if after it succeeds, the PM is expected to understand/realize and desire the need regular chiropractic care for the rest of their life. OSC just starts with explaining that concept before beginning care and giving them the option.
The premise is you need to keep coming or your “condition will return”, thus, when it does return the patient leaves. This is why I;ve never met a TSC (God I hate that term, Joe) who isn’t looking for new patients.
Joe,
It is basically, how good a chiropractor you are and patient education.
You seem to think that you actually know how a lifetime corrective care chiropractor works. But you don’t. I know that with the rotten training modern chiropractors get from the chiropractic failures who are teaching in the schools may end up working as you describe, but I and my people never did. We used nothing but straight Chiropractic and got people healthier, stronger, working better so they could get themselves well, in most cases when they couldn’t without chiropractic corrective care. They “had tried everything else, including chiropractic.”
Yes, most new patients when we started, came in for symptom treatment. But they also got intensive chiropractic education in our offices. They also received very gentle, pleasant adjustments, involving no shocking scary thrusts.
First, no patient is accepted for care beyond the initial symptom reduction period unless they prove that they understand how the body works, what the chiropractor is doing and why, and why they need regular lifetime care. They receive a chiropractic education and constant demonstration of the efficacy of chiropractic care, by being shown how chiropractic is beneficial for them each visit using before and after adjustment tests. Later they will also see the changes, not only in their body functions but also see full spine x-rays in which they can compare and see the distorted, unstable spine actually correcting. (This last was demonstrated to insurance people and in court many times and resulted in bigger settlements of cases so that the patient could have long term/lifetime care. I have written on your forum about one of these cases where a $9,000 settlement was raised to $120,000 after a Workman’s Comp deposition.) Only then will they be placed on the spinal correction program. In other words we weed out the unsuitable patients early on.
Doing the above education and demonstration work right results in a full practice that does not need constant new patients. For example my son’s practice is made up to a large degree with patients who first came to me for care as long as 40 years ago. Most of them have been on a maintenance program of at least one visit per week for all that time.
Of course you must have knowledge of why people gradually weaken as they go through life, until they eventually sicken and die and how chiropractic mitigates that. That is what the patient must understand.
Read and understand the following, if you will…
In 1973 the May Clinic produced a research paper that spoke of the fact that the nerve and brain cells you were born with are the only cells in your body that can not replace, once a nerve cell is gone it is gone forever. The nerve cells running your body today are the same ones that were there when you were born. The average person will lose about 300,000 nerve and brain cells every day.
Now you reading this, should be able to understand the resultant gradual, steady descent which finally results in some organ or part of the body no longer having enough nerves to carry on life. Prober Chiropractic mitigates that. Use your imagination.
Now, put that together with what you observed during dissection class, where you surely saw evidence of spinal nerve damage. In fact Pennsylvania University did a 30 year study demonstrating the gradual, inevitable destruction of spinal nerve roots resulting from Lumbar injuries to athletes. This study lead Pete Fernandez D.C. to develop a wall chart you probably have on you adjustment room wall, demonstrating the degeneration over time, later called the 4 phases of spinal structure and nerve degeneration caused by Vertebral Subluxation that was later also used by Clarence Gonstead, D.C. the Renaissance Seminar people and Dr. Chung Ha Su, Phd. and thousands of chiropractors.
Why this model of chiropractic care was not used by all chiropractors I can not understand, other than to point out that few chiropractors were smart enough and willing to work enough to use it.. Logan basic, for example did most of what I described above. I do remember when I was in school, ready to graduate, that five of us, who always sat in the back of the room during lectures, were discussing (during a break), who among the approximately 450 people we knew in that school, (including instructors) we personally would allow to adjust us, and came to the conclusion that only 2 others in the school, besides ourselves, would we allow to touch us..
By the way, the reason that subluxations return is very simple.
A subluxation could not exist without damage to the support structures, particularly the associated check ligaments. (Picture the athlete who injures the ligaments of some part of his body, say the knee, what does that do to his career? Why? Because ligament damage does not heal properly no matter what is done. The same with nerve damage.) The nerve root is also damaged. (Chung Ha Sue…”the weight of a quarter on the back of your hand (5 mm. hg.) maintained for 3 minutes will cause up to 60% of the involved nerves to malfunction…3 hours of that pressure and you will have some degree of permanent nerve damage.”