140:Chiropractic Authority Complex Pt 1

Chiropractic Authority Complex Part 1 Chiropractors. Have you cubby-holing yourself? Welcome everybody to the KC CHIROpulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants, helping you doctors keep your pulse on success. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich. I'm joined with my co host, Dr. Troy Fox. Troy, are doctors cubby-holing themselves? Oh, every day, all the time, and it goes from bad to worse in most cases. So we're going to talk about a couple of big issues with that. But speaking of cubby holes, I need a bookcase behind me. I don't, I don't look nearly as cool as you do. I'm like a cubby-hole-less. That means I don't cubby-hole myself, right? That that's right. That's right. There you go. So how do you start with cubby-holing? I mean, that's an interesting term. What does it mean? And how do we end up cubby-holing ourselves? So far as practice goes, because I know we talked about this before, but I'm going to throw it on you first. So, you know, okay, so what's the meaning of cubbyhole? Well, we've shoved ourselves into a corner where we kind of can't get out. So how do we do that as chiropractors? Well, we shove ourselves into a corner where people think all we do is the chiropractic adjustment. So we've co-mingled, if you will, being a chiropractor, being a chiropractic physician with what we do with the chiropractic adjustment. And all of a sudden we just became one. And so we've cubbyholed ourselves into. Being a doctor who delivers a chiropractic adjustment, which is true, but by training, we have knowledge to do so much more. We have knowledge to diagnose more. We have, uh, probably more tools in our offices, at least for the most part. And if this isn't true in your office, that's fine. But for most of us, we have more tools in our office than just the chiropractic adjustment. And so why do we cubbyhole ourselves so much in this one direction when If we just allowed our patients to realize that we are truly doctors and they can talk to us about anything, we may not be able to treat it, but we can certainly help them know when they need to find co management somewhere else or be referred somewhere else. And I think this is just an interesting concept that you and I were just kind of batting around a little bit. Um, because I think if you. I think if you take it a step farther, we go beyond just being cubbyhole doctors. And if you break apart the two parts of what a chiropractor does, we are a doctor to begin with. We are a very great spinal and joint, you know, if we add in, you know, extra spinal joints as well. Technician. You have to be a doctor and a technician, right? It's a little different. Medical doctor sees the patient, diagnoses the patient, examines the patient, and then gives them a prescription or a recommendation for further imaging or home recommendations or whatever, right? As a chiropractor, we're expected to do all those things other than the prescription, home recommendations, further imaging, and we're expected to be a technician. And in a lot of cases, what I see with chiropractors is we dig a hole, and we're going to talk about how that hole starts, but we dig a hole so deep that we aren't doctors of chiropractic anymore. We're chiropractic technicians, we're not diagnosticians anymore. We're none of that. We're just people who adjust people's spines. Okay. So how did we get there? You just made me think of something. I'm just going to throw this out and I think we'll probably wind up coming back to this. You take a surgeon, okay, you go to a surgeon, he evaluates you, he diagnoses you, might send you for imaging, depending on what they may need surgery on. And then their technical component is the surgical procedure. And yet we still think of them as full fledged doctors. And somehow in chiropractic, we've allowed ourselves to get co mingled with our technical component and how do we unwind that? So I, I think we come back to that here in a minute, but let's talk about, let's talk about the. inadvertent method by which we get cubby hold a little bit. Yeah. You want me to say it out loud? Poverty complex. That's where it starts. It's where it starts. I totally agree with you. Yeah. Totally. In fact, I'm going to, I'm just going to lean back in my chair here a little bit and just soak that in for a minute because it truly is. And I, I think And this is your phrase, Troy. It's not just poverty complex. When we start allowing ourselves to become the patient's financial advisor, and we start dropping parts of care, we start trying to figure out ways to cheapen care, you know, one way we cheapen care, and I don't mean to be negative, but one way we cheapen care is we don't do progress exams. Or reevaluations or exam or exams at all. Exams at all. Sometimes I hear people, oh, they didn't really need an exam because they were just a simple adjustment. What, what in the world does it matter with you? Right? So you're coming. Pull yourself, doc, be be a doctor. Don't, don't be the guy that that tries to please the patient, right? You have a job to do. Exactly. So you've got to get out of that poverty complex mindset because what does that lead into? Again, this is your term, Troy. It leads to authority complex. And when you lose your authority with patients, and this is the difference between the chiropractor and the surgeon, the surgeon doesn't lose his authority. Yeah. Why are we giving up our authority? We can't. That's a really good question. We can't give up our authority with patients because why do patients come to you? Okay. They come to you. Sure. They come to you because the adjustment feels great or you get them out of pain or you get them back to function back to playing golf. You put them in maintenance care and they just, they just feel good overall and they don't have to take drugs or get surgery. But okay. All that aside, patients come to you because You're a doctor. They're asking you, they're looking for you to lead them. So to be able to lead people, we have to have authority. So the authority is that one thing that we really can't give up because the minute we give up that authority, boom, we've cubby hold ourselves. We haven't at that point, you now become an expert at nothing. All you become is a technician that plops their back, right? You know, at that point you become the guy that they'll call you when they need you. And we talked about that a little while ago too. Here's my cord. Yeah. Here's a gosh, that's a whole different topic. But when you lose your authority, you now lose the ability. The talk to the patient about the difference between symptom and condition, what causes the condition and you, you put yourself in this position because you no longer are talking about the, the, the, the detrimental effects of what happens to a disc when you lose mechanical motion in a joint. You are no longer talking about the bony structural deficits deficits that occur when you have damage and loss of range of motion to a spinal segment. You no longer talk about Wolff's law of plastic deformation. How long has it been since some of you, have you ever talked to a patient about that? I have three times this morning already. I did all the time. I use Wolff's law all the time. Yeah, and you know why? Because I have authority as a doctor to explain to my patient what kind of nasty things are going to happen to you if you don't take care of yourself, if you don't treat the condition and you only treat the symptoms. Okay, so. I want to stop right there because we, we got to squeeze in a word from our sponsor here, but I'm gonna stop right there because this, this is deep. So everybody, what we're talking about is giving up your doctor authority and getting. Wait… Troy has coined as Authority Complex, which is akin to poverty complex. I think authority complex leads into poverty complex probably and how we cubbyhole ourselves to become technicians instead of Maintaining our authority as doctors. So hold that thought. We're going to have a word from our sponsor. We'll come right back. SPONSOR MESSAGE All right, everybody. Welcome back to the KC CHIROpulse podcast. We're talking about something pretty deep today. We're talking about maintaining your authority, authority complex. So you don't lead into poverty complex and worship so that you don't wind up cubby hole your cubby-holing hard to say so that you don't cubby-hole yourself into becoming a chiropractic technician. You're a chiropractic physician. Not a technician. Yes, we deliver the chiropractic adjustment. That's not all we do. We diagnose patients. We're supposed to lead patients to good health. We're supposed to lead them down the path that makes the best sense for them for their long term health. And so we're talking about how doctors sometimes get themselves cubbyholed. I know you've got a thought because I can see it on your face. I know you well enough, but you had an experience recently with a patient where you talked to the patient about something that wasn't chiropractic related. And what was the response you got? Tell that story. Yeah. So I was, I was looking at a patient. I was actually looking down the table, you know, this time of the year, it's summertime and people have less clothing on. And I happened to look down at this patient's thigh and I saw an interesting dermatological condition that looked. Like there's a possibility it could be cancerous. So I looked at the patient, I said, Hey, how long has that been there? And they said, well, I don't know, you know, three or four months probably. And I'm like, interesting. I go, have you had anybody look at it? No. And I said, well, you know, there's a chance that that should be cancerous. I think it'd be really smart at this point for you to make an appointment with your dermatologist and get in there. Now that all sounds pretty normal. That sounds like stuff that we should be saying. And we do say, I made a referral. Basically at that point, the patient says, Oh my gosh. You're like a real doctor. I kind of smiled. I was, I thought it was funny. I was like, well, yeah. And you have to realize these patients that I'm seeing right now are, are, are, uh, patients that, that are fairly new to me that I'm talking to. And they said, you're like a real doctor. And I said, yeah, I said, um, we as chiropractors are trained in everything that your medical doctors trained in. The only thing that we don't train in is the pharmacopoeia, you know, the drugs that are being prescribed. But we do look at, you know, everything from Pregnancy to dermatology while we're in school, viral, bacterial, we look at all that stuff. And we don't use it every day. Our expertise is really in spinal and extra spinal problems and joint problems, but we use it a lot. And he goes, wow, that's really cool. He goes, I guess that would make sense because if you're looking at me as a whole, and I said, exactly. So I gained credibility with him. I also didn't give up my authority. And when you are doing exams and you see things that are not spinal in nature, it is still important that we address those because those are, those are things that the patient expects. You don't go to your medical doctor and say, doc, I'm having headaches. And the medical doctor says, great, let's do an exam on you. And you have a hematoma, the size of a softball on the side, side of your neck. And he goes, well, I don't see anything up around your head or your temple sore. No, you know, I don't know what's wrong with you. Go ahead and go on home. He would not ignore, you know, this thing, this growth on the side of your neck. Right. But yet as chiropractors, sometimes we do, because we go, whoa. I'm just a chiropractic physician working on the spine and I don't want to overstep my bounds. I don't think you're overstepping your bounds. I think you're, you're creating authority with that patient. Number one. And number two, you're doing your job. You're doing your job. It's your responsibility. Your job is to diagnose that patient as a whole. It may not be to determine whether that person needs a specific type of heart surgery. That's out of my scope, right? But I can sure while I'm doing exam, here's some abnormalities with the heart and say, you know what, I think you need to make an appointment, uh, back with either your general practitioner or with, with the heart doctor, with the cardiologist and have them take a look at you because I, I'm, I think that maybe, uh, you've got some issues going on with your heart. So, yeah, but you know, that goes a long ways from what we're talking about with the cultural authority. My thing is what the authority is, is not so much. That we're sticking our head in the sand, but we're just giving it away. We're giving it away because we don't want the responsibility of having to be the doctor in some cases. And in other cases, we're afraid to tell the patient it's been more than six months since I've seen you. We need to do a re exam or you have a new condition coming in today. We really need to do a re exam. Instead, what we do is we sidestep that exam and we go, I'll just go ahead and adjust you. Why? Because we have a poverty complex and at that point, we now have an authority complex because the patient believes that nothing requires an exam for you to be adjusted. Not only do you lose your authority, they start to become angry with you if you try to assert any authority. Who wants to be in that position, right? Because you gave it all away. Yeah. So I've got a practice building tip here. So everybody listened to this because I think we just, we just walked into one of the biggest ways that you can build a practice. And you and I are testament to this because this is how we built big practices. And that is using your doctor authority, using your credibility and your knowledge. To take care of the patient and watching for those opportunities, like the skin tag that comes up watching for those opportunities. So I give you a great example, uh, and this happened all the time in my practice. So I had a patient came in, he had low back pain, he'd been to another chiropractor, didn't do anything. So I took some x rays and we dug a little bit deeper and found that he had an incredibly large, um, Lumbar aortic, aortic, aortic aneurysm. Huge, huge. I mean, this, this thing was the size of a basketball. So I said, you know what? I think we have a problem here. I called the surgeon down the street. He said, send him right over. Surgeon calls me at home that night because we were friends. He calls me at home that night. And he says, wow, good catch. We're doing surgery on this guy in the morning. And so I never cared. I never treated this guy. He came back by my office several weeks later, thanked me for catching it, sending him to the surgeon. Wow. You, you probably saved my life. I'm just doing my job. Right. And this guy begins to refer, he referred like 30 patients to me because that authority that I had with that patient carried on to every conversation he had with other people about going to a doctor. Yeah. And he would, he would send me people that weren't chiropractic related. I'd do an exam on them, refer them out somewhere because I had such a high level authority. So here's the practice building point. Look for the opportunities to use your authority and I give you a little test to try I'm gonna I'm gonna give you two things here I'm gonna be a little test to try You want to see how hard it is to get your credibility and your authority back with a patient? Tell them for three or four visits come back when you need to just try that. Just pick somebody. I Don't want to say I dare you but just pick somebody and then after about the fourth time Then turn to him and say, you know what? I think I need to see you back once a week for the next four weeks. You know what? I can tell you right now that I'm not going to do that because I already know the outcome. Yeah. The outcome is going to be no doc. I'll just call you when I need to. And they'll probably walk out the door and never come back because you tried to exert authority with them after you gave it up. This is how hard authority is to get back. You cannot give it up. It's probably the hardest thing to get back with any kind of patient. So you have to stand your ground, be a doctor. It's okay to say, I need to see you this many times. I need to order an MRI. You need to do this. You need that. You need to be on this schedule. You need this adjustment and these two therapies, it's okay to tell them that. Okay. What's the litmus test? One more thing. What's the litmus test? If it's good for the patient and it's good for the clinic, then do it. I'm not telling you to do anything that's only good for the clinic. Right. It's good for both. So go ahead. I was going to say some of you are panicking right now because you've already given up your authority in the practice. Right? You also have a poverty complex. They go hand in hand. So you've done this and you're scared and you're scared. Now, what do I do? And how do I get out of this? So. We want you to listen next time, because we're actually going to give you a step by step guide, how to move out of this. Because quite frankly, in a practice, it's, it's like an ocean. It's constantly moving, right? We're, we're going to give you the answers to how to get out of this in the next podcast. So if you're listening today and you go, Oh my gosh, that's me. I've become a technician. Never fear. Hey, we still love you. Sure. We still know that you can be a great doctor, but we need to get you back to being a doctor and a technician, not just a technician. So listen in to us next time because we are going to go through the steps to get you back where you need to be in your practice and very quickly because you can't unwind it and unwind it. All right, that was a lot today. So that was cubbyhole, grab your authority back. Be sure to tune in next time. In the meantime, go to cats, consultants. com. If you haven't done it already, it's Kats with a KATS go check out all the events that we do. There's some free downloads on there. Check out the consulting and coaching that we do for people. And if you're ready to get on the path to profit, jump on one of our calendars or give us a call. Let's have a breakthrough session and just talk about your practice and where you're at and how we might be able to help you. Troy, this is an awesome podcast. It was great. Great. And I'm looking forward to next time because we're going to give you solutions. Yes, absolutely. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to the KC CHIROpulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants. We'll see you next time. See ya. The information presented in this podcast is not intended to offer any diagnosing or treatment of disease. This information is presented for education and entertainment purposes only and is not indicative of any results, or any promise thereof, that you may encounter in your business should you adopt any of the information presented. The viewpoints presented are merely the representative opinions of the speakers.