Dr. Tanase's Thoughts on Year-Long Chiropractic Care Plans

(Editor's Note:  Today's post comes to us from Dr. Adam Tanase and I think he brings up a very good point.  Enjoy!)

By Dr. Adam Tanase

Suppose you visit a chiropractor who recommends a year long course of treatment. It’s reasonable and prudent to ask if this is a necessary and truly beneficial treatment plan. So you might be wondering if this is common in the chiropractic profession. Let’s discuss it.

To clarify, it’s not my purpose or place to tell you what you need or don’t need. By all means, listen to your doctor’s recommendations and then do whatever you feel is best for your situation. I’m simply an advocate for making well-informed decisions, especially when it comes to health matters.

Now, let’s investigate where the concept of year-long care plans originated.

You might be tempted to think it begins in chiropractic school… but it doesn't. In fact, not once during my chiropractic training can I recall any of my instructors encouraging this protocol. If anything, it was quite the opposite.

In a nutshell, chiropractic students learn to assess a patient’s chief complaint, perform diagnostic procedures, determine the most likely cause of the problem, provide short-term treatment, and then re-evaluate the patient to determine if what they did worked. They also learn to spot red flags and identify conditions that need immediate medical referral.

The most important part of this process was re-evaluation. Is the patient responding to care as expected? If not, change treatment or refer out.

So if chiropractors didn't learn about this practice in school, where does it come from…

The answer, sadly, is that the business side of chiropractic is learned from “practice management” companies. Self-proclaimed “coaches” impart anecdotal business advice upon impressionable chiropractors. Anyone, proven or unproven, can be a coach. Some of these individuals have only been in practice themselves for a few years and are up to their eyeballs in debt. Others are veterans who drive Bentleys and own private jets… some have gone to jail.

This murky advice comes at a hefty price, costing anywhere from a few hundreds dollars per month to upwards of $60,000 per year. I personally know doctors who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout their career on coaching.

While not all coaching programs teach the same procedures, a pervasive theme among many of them involves year-long care plans.

But why? What is it about 12-month commitments that makes this concept so ubiquitous within the chiropractic profession?

I wish I could tell you that the person who benefited from this the most was you – the patient. Unfortunately, this approach caters more to the doctor.

See, running a chiropractic office isn't much different than operating any other kind of business. Rent, utilities, insurance, inventory, employees, etc… all need to be paid before profits are generated. There’s a certain dollar amount that needs to be collected each month just to keep the doors open.

Having a predictable or pre-determined patient load makes the chiropractic business owner’s job considerably easier. If a chiropractor has to see 200 patient visits per month to break even, the first way to insure that happens is to get new patients to “sign up” or commit to long-term care plans.

From there, it helps to devise a cookie-cutter schedule of treatments for all new patients to follow. Why see patients “as needed” when you can instruct them to come in one, two, or even three times per week… for a year! Cha-ching!

Instead of growing the business by creating value for the patient, doctors are trained by practice management companies to place a value on the patient.

This business model infected the profession more than 35 years ago. It has become so common that new graduates who have never even spoken to a practice management company often think that scheduling patients “three times per week for 12 weeks” is the standard of care (monkey see, monkey do).

To this day, I cannot logically wrap my head around such an intense frequency of care. Maybe that’s just me… I’m sure there are thousands of patients out there who've happily paid for and completed year long care plans with much success. I’m not disparaging their decision, their doctor, or their results.

But I’ll leave you with this… If you find yourself having to decide whether or not you should sign on the dotted line, I want you to know that patients can get outstanding results without ever committing to 12-months of care.

Frequently Asked Questions About Upper Cervical Care: Part II

“Does it have to be corrected often?”

That depends on your own body. After the initial period of correction some people can hold their correction for several months at a time. Others have to be corrected every other week. Everyone is different. The Upper Cervical doctor’s objective is to make as precise an Upper Cervical correction as possible. Then he/she must help you maintain the correction with as few corrections as possible so that you can enjoy a better quality of life. Periodic Upper Cervical checkups, just like dental checkups and physicals, should be part of your personal preventive health care program. If you are maintaining your correction and body balance then your Upper Cervical chiropractor will not adjust you.

How soon should I get my children under this care?

As soon after birth as possible, and then have them checked regularly as they grow up. You could not possibly give your child a better gift than to make certain that the one organ of the body that controls all the other organs and body functions, the brainstem, is doing its job without interference from the tiny bone just below it.

How much does it cost?

A fraction of what you have probably already spent in your quest to get well. There will be some expense at the beginning because of the x-rays that are so necessary. But our organization has asked that each doctor provide some type of payment plan that enables you and your family to get under care as soon as possible. Because insurance does not pay for corrective care they may only cover a portion of what is needed. In addition, some HMO’s and PPO’s only have certain chiropractors on their list of providers and you have to go to them. Most of these, though equally well trained in other chiropractic procedures, may not be trained in precision Upper Cervical chiropractic. On a personal note, Richard and I had no insurance when we started Upper Cervical care, but the concept made enough sense to risk it. Plus, it cost no more than other forms of chiropractic care. It turned out to be the best investment of our lives.

If the Upper Cervical procedure is so good, why haven’t I heard about it before?

There are specific reasons why you have never heard about this before, and unfortunately, they are political. First, most people are aware of the tension between the medical profession and the chiropractic profession over the last 100 years. Whenever there is a problem, there is always a black out of information to the public at large. For example, several years ago when we tried to discuss Upper Cervical care with any medical doctor or nurse, the moment we mentioned the word “chiropractor”, a thick wall went up. We never were given the chance to describe how advanced chiropractic at large has become and there are phenomenal procedures like this one available to people today. The medical prejudice we encountered prevented us from being able to share this information with doctors and nurses who work with people who desperately needed this information, the very information that would have helped their patients avoid surgery in many cases and avoid the consumption of drugs with dangerous side effects. Because the doctors and nurses themselves did not know about this type of healthcare, and in some cases, they chose not to know, their patients have paid the price.

Fortunately, now, more and more medical doctors are discovering how beneficial Upper Cervical health care is and are referring more and more of their patients to Upper Cervical doctors. These medical doctors acknowledge that constantly prescribing medication is, at times, ineffective and can actually create additional problems. They realize they have found a safe, scientific type of care that is of extreme benefit to their patients. Some of these progressive medical doctors are now becoming some of our greatest allies. One day we sincerely hope that the medical and chiropractic professions will work side-by-side for the benefit of public health. We need them both.