Chiropractors are called upon by their patient base for care frequently throughout the day. Each time we interact with a patient, we touch them multiple times on the neck, back, and of course, when we shake their hands. Therefore, our immune system has to be in top working order all year, not just during flu season, for us to stay healthy and keep our doors open.
Chiropractors have to practice what we preach. We have to be proactive about neck pain, back pain, and overall health, including all the systems of our body.
1. Eating healthy and hydrating
The majority of chiropractors understand what eating healthy and drinking plenty of water means. It is essential to keep these principles in mind when trying to keep yourself healthy. A good rule to remember is to simply drink water instead of other beverages and remove simple carbohydrates and sugars from your diet. Maintaining a diet of natural foods and non-processed will help keep our health in check. Eating the right foods and taking adequate Vitamin D, a minimum of 10,000 IU daily, is essential for our immune system to function correctly.
Juice Plus Capsules is another supplement to consider taking. Juice Plus and Vitamin D are the ONLY supplements I take daily in addition to my post-workout shakes. I have only missed one day of work in the past five years of practice due to sickness. As the link explains further, Juice Plus is a fantastic product of dehydrated fruits and vegetables in an easy-to-swallow capsule. If you visit the following site, it will explain the vast importance of taking Juice Plus daily. When was the last time you had 30 fruits and vegetables every single day?
As stated above, drinking water is a must. Our body is 75% water. Our vertebral discs are made of water. We even tell our patients to stay hydrated to make sure our discs do not dehydrate. We need to practice what we preach. Drinking water using a Hydrojug has been proven to increase how much water we drink daily. Visiting this link allows you to learn more about the Hydrojug and how it can help you stay hydrated at your clinic. Visit Hydrojug website.
2. Exercise and Flexibility.
It is not enough to work out a few days a week and call it good anymore. We not only have to feel good and just go about our day working a desk job, but we also need to heal our patients as well. Resistance training and cardiovascular exercises are critical. Chiropractors have to stress our muscles and joints with activities with much greater demands than our job requires. This approach ensures the microtrauma of repetitive movements, “providing chiropractic adjustments” daily never causes issues. If we continually stress the body at a higher demand in the fitness center’s controlled environment, then we have a minimal risk of injury in the workplace.
Flexibility is just as important as exercise. Flexibility and dynamic stretches/yoga are crucial daily as well. Dynamic flexibility and stretching is an unsung hero and necessity that is always overlooked as unimportant. However, when we perform chiropractic care daily, we put our body into some interesting positions to get the right line of drive or line of correction to make a significant adjustment for the patient.
I overlooked regular stretching until I got a hip flexor tear while adjusting a patient. After having that intense pain linger for well over a year, I knew I had to make a lifestyle change to make sure that never happened again. So every morning, I set aside 30 minutes to make sure my joints are warmed up and ready for a full day of chiropractic adjusting.
3. Family time/Personal time
It is essential to define work and personal time and make time to be disconnected from our work. However, not fully disconnecting is incredibly exhausting on the body, physically and emotionally. Never shutting our Facebook off or forwarding calls to our cell phone keeps us engaged and geared up all hours of the day. This state of being constantly on is not a healthy situation long-term. We all know the power the central nervous system has over the whole body. We need to make sure that we take just as good care of our mental health as our physical health. They are both equally important.
4. Divide the work and focus on your patients
Running a chiropractic clinic is no simple task. First and foremost, you are treating patients all morning and afternoon. Your primary focus should be patient-centered care. We as providers need to be assessing each patient visit and figuring out what we need to do for that patient based on their complaints. We should not be concerned about minor daily issues that arise. Insurance-related problems need to be addressed by your billing staff. I do not have a full-time billing staff. My billing staff remote accesses a few hours a week and handles all my insurance-related inquiries. My reception staff is always trained to be busy, even when we are not seeing patients. During a quiet day, they clean or file paperwork. You need to be focused on healing patients and keep it simple!
5. Sleep and regular chiropractic care
How much sleep would you say you are getting every night? Chances are it is not a full eight hours. I am just as guilty as anyone else. When it is a beautiful summer evening, and the sun doesn’t set until 9:45, I have difficulty getting to bed by 9:30 to get my full eight hours of sleep. I can also say when I do not get my full eight hours of sleep. I am not as responsive and much more sluggish. Getting eight hours of sleep each night is just as important as regular exercise. Rest is when our body rebuilds damaged tissue and heals. If we do not allow our bodies to sleep, we do not heal. When we do not heal, we cannot serve our patients as well as we should be.
6. Use of chiropractic tools and instruments
Chiropractors say, “With hands only,” myself included. However, if we use this quote verbatim, we never excel in our career, and we never become progressive in the field. If farmers used the same saying, “with hands only,” we would be planting our seeds one at a time by hand.
I agree that using our hands as chiropractors is essential, and the use of our hands only is adequate for many patients. However, we need tools and instruments to adjust the spines that don’t respond to traditional techniques. Anterior Assist is a great example. Anterior Assist helps chiropractors adjust a patient’s thoracic spines with ease. It offers a comfortable thoracic adjustment while offering 100% protection of the chiropractor’s hand as well. Anterior Assist was designed by chiropractors to aid chiropractors. This tool allows chiropractors to continue with long successful practices pain-free.
In addition to all of this, we need to practice what we preach and get regular adjustments. Seeing a chiropractor regularly for spinal adjustments allows our body to heal and allows our systems to work at optimal levels, including the immune system. Getting regular spinal manipulations regularly improves our likelihood of living a more healthy life offering a quality of life that is second to none.
