Back To Basics – A Great Success
(Originally posted on August 30, 2014 by Dr. Bill)
My class at the FCA National Convention last weekend—Back to Basics: Practice from Above Down/Inside Out—was a great success!
The FCA National Convention which was held in Orlando last weekend was a class act, as usual. The folks at FCA really know how to put on a party. This one was special for me because I was honored to be on the program for the first time.
The title of my class was Back to Basics: Practice From Above Down / Inside Out.
Based on the idea of excellence in patient care with the focus on each patient’s individual needs, I called for a return to the philosophy of patient care that made our profession great in the first place.
The Patient Focused Practice
I believe in a patient focused, patient centered practice in which we slow down enough to give each patient the individualized attention and exceptional care that he deserves. This creates a real “WOW’ experience that makes people want to refer friends and family and helps you grow your practice organically, from the inside out.
A Hands-on Demonstration of Examination and Treatment Protocols and Techniques
The class was much more than a lecture on philosophy of practice, however. More than half the class was a hands-on demonstration of my unique approach to the new patient’s first visit, including the consultation, interactive examination and treatment protocols using instrument adjusting techniques.
I showed the patient exam protocol I have developed over several decades, which includes aspects of many well known and accepted technique methodologies. I have put them together in a way that gives me the best, most complete picture of what is going on with the patient, and utilize muscle testing to make the exam truly interactive so the patient can see/feel his own weak areas.
After the treatment she can see and feel the way the muscle tests strengthen to indicate improvement. Patients always love to get this kind of immediate feedback, which reassures them that something good has happened.
After doing a complete exam of a real patient and announcing and recording my findings, I continued to demonstrate my treatment protocol based on my specific findings. Again, I used a combination of techniques that I have studied and used over almost 5 decades of practice. Some of them are traditional and involve manual adjusting techniques, but these days I use more instrument adjusting.
I shared with the attendees an x-ray of my own damaged spine:
Dr. Bill’s back injury x-ray
Note collapse of the body of L3.
The instruments and adjusting technique style I use today saved my career after four years on disability. Learning to do this kind of instrument adjusting has allowed me, not only to get back into practice, but to do the best work of my career.
The icing on the cake is that the patients love it. It is comfortable, effective and eliminates most of the snap crackle and pop adjustments that can be a turn off to patients, and which sometimes prevents prospective patients from ever seeking chiropractic care. Those noisy and forceful adjustments that scare many patients are also the high impact, full contact chiropractic moves that injured me and so many others.
Did you know that the chiropractic profession has an attrition rate due to injuries that is comparable to that of professional football players?
Using the instrument adjusting techniques I teach can help you protect yourself from injuries like mine, allow you to work more comfortably and effectively with a technique that patients love and that gives consistent, superior results.
The techniques I use can help you extend your career while giving you some of the most patient friendly and effective methods you can use to help you grow your practice organically: “from above down and inside out.” They certainly have helped me to remain active and enthusiastic about practice after 47 years. I really love what I do and the results I get never cease to excite me. There is nothing routine or boring in the way I practice.
There was one other aspect to the course that I want to be sure to tell you about.
In addition to demonstrating technique, I also showed how I and my wife Kiana work together as a team. Our team approach is unique. She acts as my assistant in a very active and interactive manner. She records every detail of my examination findings and treatment procedures which I communicate to her in an ongoing dialog. This serves multiple purposes:
- The dialog between Kiana and me tells the patient that everything I do has meaning, a name and importance. It lets the patient know that what I am doing is very exacting and that we take their care very seriously. It is a different kind of patient education which I find to be very effective.
- It provides excellent documentation of each and every visit, and shows that every single treatment procedure I do is justified by an objective exam finding. This puts me in a very strong and defensible medical-legal position.
Kiana and I both enjoyed presenting this class. It was a lot of fun to do. And I got great feedback from the doctors who attended my class: “Excellent presentation, we need more classes like this!”
My goal for the remainder of my career is to share with the next generation of chiropractors, the experience and expertise that I have acquired over a half century in chiropractic.
If you are interested in attending my upcoming seminars, please contact me with your name and email address and indicate what your interest is. We will be sure to let you know when I will be teaching my next classes.
Dr. Bill
