My Chiropractor is out of town, do you mind if I book an appointment?

If you’re brand new in practice, this seems like an opportunity; if you’ve been around awhile, you know better. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t change DCs like the Kardashians change outfits. Any patient that wants you to modify their entrance procedures just to get them in is asking for extremely short-term care and is risky business.

As a DC, you get asked to do some pretty crazy things like comment on prescriptions (which you can’t legally prescribe or take a person off of) or other doctors' opinions and recommendations, or read MRIs, etc.

When you allow a patient to dictate the terms of the doctor-patient relationship, you are placed into a pile of ‘regular’ DCs. If you need to have a thorough exam, a report of findings, etc to have an adjustment, it signals loud and clear that you don’t take people in from off the street.

Stand tall, don’t cave!

The quality of patients in your office will reflect this.

People in your community know what they can get away with from some DCs: let’s make a deal, negotiations, decreased fees, make their own recommendations, etc.

What if there was a better way?

Don’t accept other DCs' retreads. There’s a reason the patient ‘says’ their DC is out of town. The patient that makes deals, negotiates, and doesn’t follow recommendations wears out their welcome very quickly with most DCs.

It sometimes can feel like you’re getting squeezed from every direction. Insurance restrictions, deductibles, co-pays, non-Chiropractic activities paying more than the actual adjustment…where does it all end?

Get back to sanity and tell people not what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. In every circumstance of importance in life, people must slow down and reassess the situation.

If it’s important enough to them, they will abide with your recommendations, your fees, etc.

Wouldn't you rather be rejected telling the truth than be accepted for watering down the truth?

There’s an old fashioned statement that most people don’t use anymore that speaks of bottom of the barrel type of people. They are not good or bad, they just aren’t in the position to commit to most things in life.

If you are certain enough in your belief in Chiropractic and yourself, you can let the ‘bottom of the barrel’ people go by only to be replaced by a high quality person who loves your office and sends in people just like themselves.