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July 2005, Vol. 15, Iss. 3
Table of Contents
A Great Opportunity • Age of Confusion •
APMR Accepts CBP® Research • CBP® has 13 Published Clinical Trials • Chronic Back Pain, Your Brain, & Chiropractic •
Creating a Great First Impression • Evidence Based Exams •
Had Enough? • Lateral Head Flexion from Vestibular Dysfunction •
Letters to the Editor • Life's Rise from the Ashes •
PosturePrint™ is now a Validated Posture Analysis •
The Disease of Unrealistic Expectation • Thousands of Heroes •
When You Can't Critique CBP® in the Peer-reviewed Literature
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Thousands of Heroes
by Thomas O. Morgan, D.C., B.S., 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.
Talking to chiropractors everyday keeps me right back in practice, like my 30 years as a clinician. Now, I get to say I’m their “coach.” Also, I broker practices and become involved with doctors’ “plans” to move, sell, buy and/or start over. I moved three times in my three decades of practice. Every move was more successful, and different in its own way.
I remember one of my mentors telling me that your practice will completely change every 10 years. I have since found that this is true! What’s important is to identify what you really want to do in your profession and practice every decade. This is like “seed money.” You keep dropping “seeds” (cash) everywhere you go. In chiropractic, it means believing in the future of our profession by giving back, by supporting our colleges, research and serving in our associations.
I was explaining this to a patient when I filled in for one of my clients. She looked at me funny, as I remarked, “Yes, soon we’re going to figure this subluxation thing out. We’ve been working on it 110 years; but don’t forget, the medics and chemists haven’t figured out how aspirin works yet. If they can’t figure out aspirin, think about the ‘unknowns’ in millions of pounds of synthetic chemicals they are dumping down people’s throats!”
I remember four decades ago, an old Dr. King in Covington, KY telling his waiting room crowd (I was one of them that day) that the pharmacies and drug companies are poisoning almost every patient who came in his office, and that he had a better way. I didn’t know how to take his brashness at the time, but now I know that he gained strength by speaking statements that he knew were truth. His extreme faith in chiropractic made him a magnet for sick people. We must all do the same, but sometimes there are discretionary situations. The key here is that we learn by teaching, so “teach” your patients about all the facets of their subluxation, the technique, our principles. Tell your patients how seriously we take chiropractic, and how we want them to understand what we have for them.
When coaching doctors, I feel it is their “human spirit” that always needs help. This is the spirit that lives in the surface world of the 6 o’clock news. You show me a doctor who has let fear, worry, and doubt creep into his or her chiropractic life, and I will show you a person and a practice on the way down. Never take positive thinking for granted. I like to take it even one step further — FAITH. Since the PhD’s in quantum physics and quantum mechanics tell us that health and real healing are all about mind, body and spirit, we can now feel free to discuss such things as “faith,” in a professional way.
In my mind, I have much “faith” when I give the adjustment that innate will change the patient for the better. NEVER LOSE THIS DOCTORS! The deeper this faith and belief is in your work, the greater your service as a doctor and healer will be. Keep attending seminars and gathering with like minds to keep this “faith” moving to the extreme. Can you remember the first time you really had extreme faith? For me it was driving my car back from college. Dr. Marshall Himes was just teaching us positive thinking and about “concepting” parking spaces right in front of our destination. This day I was to drive back to Kentucky but the engine in my car was completely shot. Later I found out it was impossible for it to even be running, but it did run and I drove it 500 miles (sometimes barely pulling a hill) home. It just had to run, because I just had to make it home. It was more than being completely out of gas and somehow the car ran further and further, to the next gas station. Everyone’s attitude and faith is tested in their own way.
You have to choose how you will deal with negative situations and emotions. THE ONLY WAY IS TO CHOOSE TO APPROACH THESE AS AN OPPORTUNITY. You can sometimes “wish” for supernatural events to keep you going when you can’t go yourself, BUT the key is positioning yourself so you feel the power available in faith, and things will happen that have no real logic or reason. Watching innate heal a patient after the adjustment is a miracle in faith. Adjusting cadavers elicits no response. So, it must be innate we believe in to create this constructive physiology after our adjustment. Many times the most unexplained healings took place when I had no rational explanation except that I took the initiative to adjust when others would hesitate.
What you have to do each waking day is to have a plan for your practice. As you lean over that adjusting table, you make choices to clear out the subluxation, or for those trained differently, you decide to “mobilize” a fixed joint. You have to look past what the medical world around you is doing to people. You have to concentrate on how you can change the patient’s life. You need to think about how that person in front of you needs to replace the drug society he or she lives in with natural concepts, natural ideas and plans for helping the body change for the better over time. You have to teach patients our better idea — Our BIG IDEA! Patients don’t come into you office because they believe in chiropractic. Rather, they come in because you believe in chiropractic. They want an “intuitive” response; a quantum physics response. The “wow” signal has to come up on in their cortical screens, so they can walk away excited that they have found something that can substitute for drugs - something that makes more sense and that “WORKS” for them.
This ability to change their “neural nets” makes changes for life. Even patients who think they know more than you do (the ones who think they know when they need a little drugs, a little adjustment, etc.), can become immersed in your thinking and perceptions of their needs on another level. That is where your “faith” comes in. When you have such solid, positive belief in yourself, your skills and the chiropractic principles, you are a reflection of that faith. Patients pick it up and believe! You can’t be one of these doctors who always thinks of that one patient that did not respond exactly like you wanted them to; that leaves a residue of doubt, fear and worry that holds you back. This type of negative, will reflect in your life backwards.
Here is what to do. Keep working on your capacity and technique because the better you can “clear” out the subluxations and the harder you work at knowing your adjustment is the best you can give patients, the more your extreme faith comes into play in patient care. Carry this thinking into all of your life relationships and activities. I believe that every delayed result needs more “opportunity thinking” in my life. Start today by defining your chiropractic health system. Begin to KNOW how it is better than more drugs and surgery. You don’t have to discount the medical system, just teach (don’t talk) a better way — the chiropractic way. This is a way that you have proven to yourself from your training, your family, and your patients.
My heroes are doctors who want to achieve benefits for patients over and above what is expected or possible. I met one of my old patients the other day. He kept reminding me of all the good I did for him. He also told me about his neighbor who he brought in to see me. This man had to sell off all his farmland to pay for his surgeries and drugs so my patient brought me his “failed surgery” friend for care. He told me how thankful this person was that I got him out of bed and back to working in his garden. It was this thankfulness for my adjustments that made me offer a silent prayer of thanks (again) for God making me a chiropractor.
You have to have extreme faith even over patients’ expectations and your own self limits. If you are a praying man or woman, pray to be more than you can be; to have hopeless cases to help; to adjust more patients than you think you can; to be more committed and positive about what you have to offer. I have three children who give adjustments everyday. Mary Ann and I beam when we talk about them. They have no idea how I feel and think about their healing work everyday. It is more than pride. Rather, it speaks to their “opportunity” to change a life for the better, thereby changing the world around them — one spine at a time. You are couched into that prayer doctor. Only believe, find out how to increase your extreme “faith”. You are my hero! Make me proud!
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