Why do you take so long to adjust my parents?

Yesterday I was adjusting a young patient who always asks great questions that are well beyond his years. When I answer them he always listens so thoughtfully.

He asked me, “Why do you spend so much more time adjusting my parents than you do to me?”

Did I neglect to mention that this young man has a wicked sense of humor as well? So I could not immediately figure out if this question came from that place where kids just hate waiting for their parent’s to be done, or if he really wanted a serious answer. I chose to try and use this as a teaching moment and give him a serious answer.

Unfortunately, I did not do a high quality job shining light on the matter for him. His question stimulated so many thoughts for me, that they all tried to come out at the same time. This ended up creating a rather disorganized answer

But it was such a great question though!

It really triggered me to look deeply at what the intention of chiropractic care is, what the chiropractic adjustment does, and how we can use these concepts to get the most out of our care.

A simple answer to his question (that I did not use) would have been, “Well, you are younger, so your problems have not been there as long and are easier to fix”.

While this answer is fairly accurate, I don’t like it because it presents the adjustment as a “fix” to a problem.

Picture this, the patient walks in, “Doc, I have a problem!” And the chiropractor answers “Well let’s ‘fix’ ya, hop on the table…”

This scenario plays out countless times in countless chiropractic offices throughout the country every day. The chiropractor can then proceed to give the perfect adjustment, and sometimes the patient will get the symptomatic relief they expect and leave satisfied, other times they don’t and feel dissatisfied. Often never to return.

Don’t get me wrong, chiropractic care can and often does give tremendous relief immediately. Unfortunately this effect should be considered more of a “side-benefit” to care and not really the main goal of chiropractic. Allow me to elaborate.

When it showed up in 1895, chiropractic was unique because it did not profess to make a patient healthy, but rather it removed interference and allowed the patient to create health in themselves.

This is a really big deal. (In fact such a big deal, you should read that again!)

For this reason I bristle when people want to be “fixed” or “cracked” or “popped back into place”. All these phrases imply strongly that there is this one treatment, one maneuver that stands between the patient and complete relief (and health).

However, it is much more accurate to view your current health status as a composite picture of all of the decisions you have made in your life up to this point. When you decide to take the steps instead of the elevator, when you decide to put the carrots on your lunch plate, when you decide to set your workspace up in a manner that encourages good posture, these take you closer to a picture that looks healthy. And generally speaking, good health leads to feeling good for a long time*.

So when my young patient asked why his parents take so much longer to adjust, what I should have said was:

“As a chiropractor I cannot heal your body. The best thing I can do for any patient is to remove the obstructions to healing in their body and let it do the rest. As a younger person, your obstructions are not as complicated as your parents, so it doesn’t take me as much work to remove them. When I spend more time with your parents, I am making sure I do as complete of a job as I can, so they can heal as fast as possible.”

“Plus your parents are cool and I really like talking to them!”

*I will definitely do a post on why this a general rule and not an absolute rule.