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January 2006, Vol. 16, No. 1
Table of Contents
CBP® Non-Profit Matches Dr. Bill Harris' $25,000 Research Grant • Counter Point Round III • Dr Deed Harrison is the Most Published Chiropractor in the Index Medicus • Flawed Thinking • It's Don's Opinion • JCCA Publishes CBP® Structural Rehab Protocol • More Studies to Confirm the Validity and Reliability of PosturePrint™ • Thriving in the New Health Care Marketplace • Organic Chiropractic • Patient Education • Point Round III • The Purpose Driven Practice • Radiation Hormesis • Research Corner • Subluxation Update • System Failure • Ten New Year's Resolutions for Your Practice • Chiropractic: A Useful Component of Traumatic Brain Injury Rehabiitation • Triano is a Chiropractic Pariah •
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The Purpose Driven Practice
Part II
by Thomas O. Morgan, DC, BS, FICA, FPAC
Dr. Tom Morgan and his wife, Mary Ann, are founders of Volume Practice Seminars. Their goal is to help doctors and staff achieve volume practices, become debt free, and live spiritually disciplined lives that glorify God.
Dr. Tom Morgan graduated from the Palmer College of Chiropractic, Davenport, Iowa. He holds a B.S. degree from Upper Iowa University in practice management. Also, he holds two honorary Fellow degrees. Dr. Morgan was in active chiropractic practice for over 30 years. He retired in 1996 at the age of 54. Since that time he has been teaching the Volume Practice Seminar and doing chiropractic consulting full time. During his time in practice, he had one of the largest high volume, cash practices in the world. He has written a book about these years entitled “VOLUME PRACTICE” and three more books about chiropractic. He is famous for his “Touch and Tell” system. Dr. Morgan is a member of the continuing education faculty at Palmer, he was also an instructor in Activator technique for over ten years. He also was president of a state Association and served on the state board of examiners for twelve years.
All doctors should know that their practice momentum is directly linked to staying focused, and pinned to the idea that patients come in their offices to see how much they believe in the chiropractic adjustment. Patients are drawn to how much hope and encouragement the doctor can give them. When this is your focal point, the practice booms.
HOW YOU SEE chiropracTIC, determines this focus. Do you see your practice, the opportunity to touch lives with your adjustment, as a boundless romance of possibilities? Do you hear the siren-calling patients to your office, beckoning them to climb lofty mountaintops? Taking them away from the quagmire of fear of disease and the human standard in medicine? When you teach your new patient class, do you well up inside with a great dynamic — one that polishes your TIC spirit and propels you onward in this work? Or, do you picture yourself laboring in the heat of the desert, with the mountaintops obscuring the road ahead? Are you dried up in practice because of a poor attitude, one that blames insurance or other outside influences for your slow days? Are you resisting your life’s work thinking of the long miles ahead, telling yourself that your shoulders and hands are weak and the effort is exhausting?
If you are not on the positive side of your mission, you will want to get out of this profession. You will start focusing on “your” health, your needs, and invent ways to get out of practice. I see it all too often. One of the reasons is because our work is narrow in public/patient understanding. You have stopped celebrating the results patients get with your adjustments. Never take this for granted. If you don’t think about the good you are doing everyday, soon you will see only the “goatfeathers” of being a chiropractor. You must want by intent — to change your patients’ lives.
It should be your goal to make them chiropracTIC-minded like we are. To do this, you must begin looking at “causes” instead of symptoms. Every doctor must be a leader. We tilt on that edge of reasoning to the world looking on. We disagree with medical protocol in most instances. We want less drugs, and we want to celebrate innate and our great TIC principles. We have to do it, doctor, for no one else will do it for us.
PRINCIPLE: The greatest duty of a chiropractor is to practice and believe with all his or her being in the innate principle of life and healing. The most difficult is to persevere, and the greatest price you can pay is to give back to your profession your time, talent and resources. A great part of your work is to pass it on to family members and/or students who come behind you in your professional life.
A PERSONAL COACH CAN HELP KEEP YOU ON TRACT
When I talk to doctors about their practices, I can tell if the “TIC” is really their main focus. They often say something like “Oh, it used to be... BUT”. It’s the “but” that reveals their attitude. No longer is their mission to get their patients well as fast as possible; to “WOW” them with the greatness of chiropractic; or to encourage lifetime utilization and to see that their family factors TIC into their lives. When the focus changes to anything else, i.e., money, hobbies, insurance, or personal needs, you stand a chance to lose your enthusiasm and burn out in practice long before you need to.
When I talk to Dr. Bill Harris, before he hangs up, he always leaves me with his daily “epigram for the TIC soul.” My favorite is: “Your attitude determines your altitude.” The doctors I talk to usually have plenty of good excuses. Here are a few: “But” since 9-11, or since the war; “But” since the neighborhood has changed; “But” since I lost my help; or “But,” since I quit doing my health classes.” Since I took those three weeks off. Keeping your “focus” is one reason to hire a coach.
A coach can keep you pinned down to one central focus. That focus should be the good you can do for people, coupled to sound business principles. It involves the skills and knowledge you have that are vital in people’s lives. It is about strengthening your resolve and knowledge in chiropractic principles and practice. It is your determination to change people’s lives — to make them better, and to get them off the drug lifestyle. It is, in fact, up to you to get the TRUTH out there. You have all this knowledge to give. You know better than any patient what it takes to be healthy — what is involved and how to rely on health disciplines instead of rebounding from medical fear. I want you committed to “teach” patients about what you are doing each visit. This is how to keep your momentum going forward. Remember the watchwords of our “Touch & Tell System” TEACH — DON’T TALK with patients! Doing this day after day, patient after patient — this is what it means to persevere.
When the old pro football players show up for summer practice, the coaches look first at their basic skills. The coach always wants to know, “Are they in condition? Did they keep in shape? Did they do something to change for the better in their skill level and for the team? Can they still run as fast, block and tackle as proficiently as before? Do they still love the game with the same intensity? You see doctors; you don’t have a coach who can cut you from the team if you become a slacker. You ARE the team, the coach, and the main player, as well as the boss! You HAVE to maintain your focus and intensity. Let’s look at a simple basic strategy as a starting place. This is so simple, but only one out of ten new doctors I coach have this in place.
AIM TO WIN
You can’t know where you are going tomorrow without a plan — without learning from hindsight, and without long-range strategies. Today, go buy a couple of hard poster boards and put twelve blocks on these charts (one for each month). On one poster write your four stats in each block - 1) office visits, 2) new patients, 3) services 4) collections. At the end of the month, write the reality of your practice next to each of the four stats (in each block). You want to raise your goal at least 10% a month. Your second chart is your monthly planner. Put your special events, marketing, time off, vacations, theme for newsletter, promotions, equipment needed, etc. These two simple posters will help you and your office team focus on what you want to accomplish.
Tell your staff “it takes a team to make a dream.” Your mission keeps them on track. I also recommend that each doctor and staff write a “mission statement” and read it each week at the beginning of your staff meeting. This sets the “character” of your practice. Your character develops as you express a strong, deeply felt core value in the innate philosophy that you teach others, and a special determination to do a better job than medicine. You must express your desire to “teach” a better health discipline to your patients. You and your staff must be the prime examples of people who do not take any drugs, who rely on innate for homeostasis, who get adjusted regularly, who exercise and are in peak physical condition, who study health and eat as organically as possible.
Plus, the patients must feel intuitively that you are excited about helping them. Also, you and your staff must have deep spiritual values to deal with the stress of practice. Some offices choose biblical principles to guide their practices. Others like philosophy tenets. I like the offices where the team prays for patients with special needs. Whatever is driving your practice in a spiritual sense must be couched in your love and acceptance of each patient and the special meaning each patient brings to you and your practice. I remember one time I hired a person who was also a RN. She said that at the nurses’ station, all they ever did was gossip and joke about the negative quirks of all their patients down the hall. To me, this was the most negative thing I could think of for a so-called “healing” institution. Don’t let your staff gripe about negative, difficult, unlovable patients. There are many quirks to make fun of — but rather talk about how to love them and give them more than they ever get anywhere else. I remember an old lady I hugged once who told me with a tear in her eye, that I was the first man who had hugged her in years.
Gripes do have a place though. I recommend an organized “gripe” session at the end of each staff meeting. Each member could give one negative point about their job, or with the other staff members or patients they deal with. BUT, after the gripe, they have to give two positive points — concerning what they were going to do to serve the patients more and cause the practice to go forward. Next, is to train your staff to be the most positive and productive at peak patient load hours. If you are at 5:30 p.m. and the waiting room is full and a patient brings in a friend in pain, what system do you have to get that unexpected new patient in your system that day? If you can train for emergency new patient procedures, or higher service at peak times, then the routine, steady flow will be effortless.
Teach your staff that a little crisis in the day is a good sign of growth. It is at these stressful times that your systems and team are proven. These times reveal the “heart” of your team. One way to see if they fail this test, is to know they are turning away new patients, or late call ins. This can be compared to an athlete who has come back to prominence after an injury or a crisis. Look for pride in themselves, their team, innate, and their work. This is the heart of your office team. Train for it (have a special NP procedure for busy hours) and reward the staff for their efforts. I like the incentive plans for team members. For each of the four stats you reach — give an incentive or bonus.
HOW TO MEASURE YOUR SUCCESS
I have several gauges that I use to measure the success of a doctor. Income is certainly a positive and necessary by-product of your success but it is not the bottom line of your practice life. There is a biblical principle that God (or universal intelligence) looks inward at the inward motives and intent — who you are in the dark. The world looks at the outside evidence of who you are. I like to look at what you do with your income and your success. This speaks about your character. As I said before — I like to see if you are out of debt.
To do this though, you have to have the mindset of a person who “saves” his or her income. Do you live above your means - spending before you have saved? I see lots of “takers” in this profession. This is a profession that I feel is still new, misunderstood, and underutilized. Because of our unique stature, there is much to do in teaching the world about our science. I look for the doctor who has PAD days (Patient Appreciation Days), who supports research, who pays his or her dues to the alumni association; who takes technique courses, and attends Homecoming; takes part and attends local, and state association district meetings; those who have been on foreign mission trips, or who donate time and money to our children’s centers and look for ways to promote TIC in their community. I ask about scoliosis screenings, talks to schools and about student recruitment for your chiropractic college.
I look at the awards doctors have won from our profession, as well as the number of students referred to the DC program by the clinic. I ask about how each doctor is encouraging his or her children to become chiropractors. I know this for certain, that couples who talk negatively about other chiropractors in their area and the profession in general, usually do not have children who enter the profession. I measure a doctor’s success by his or her vision for the future — for a world impacted by the adjustment; a world that understands the subluxation, and one who wants to keep the bloodstream free of synthetic chemicals. This is a world based on respecting innate intelligence, and the body in general. Our work is a noble thing. We have the safest, most effective, most preventive healthcare system in the world. Live in this “idea”, because it reflects the truth.
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