It was a Friday morning, early because I couldn’t sleep well that night. I got to the office by 6:20, a full hour and change before my CA would arrive. I was at my desk intending to prepare for the day ahead. Instead, I just sat there staring vacantly at the wall. I felt…
numb.
Another day of the fun fun fun ahead.
Practice was not going well. I was trying to meet Overhead month in, month out. Struggling to get New Patients in the doors. Few of my patients referred others. The patients I did have, if they followed my recommendations at all, often went MIA. I was wearing too many hats in my practice and, frankly, running myself thin… My staff did not perform in the way I “wanted” her to. She didn’t seem as focused or as productive as I thought she should be to help the practice grow.
I was needing to jump through more and more hoops to appease the managed care networks. And they reciprocated by eating my lunch with shrinking reimbursements and increasing fees. To say I was at a point of utter frustration would have been a gross understatement.
I was disheartened.
And as my circumstances continued to drum away at me, I was actually beginning to question why I ever went into this profession in the first place…
That’s when things turned upside down.
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“It ain’t what a man knows that hurts him. It’s what he knows that ain’t true.”
~Josh Billings
–Some people ask, “why we even bother to try and teach and mentor chiropractic students on what ‘real world’ practice is all about”? The reason behind their wonder? ”Students already know everything”, they say.
Admittedly, the sarcasm is often times well-placed… The fact is you can read all you want about how to fly a plane, but until you go out and do it for real, learning directly from a pilot whose actually done it thousands of times before, you have no clue as to what it really takes to fly. As Dr. Tom Owen puts it, “knowing is not going”.
While at Logan, my classmates and I would discuss what our future practices were going to look like someday… and what our lifestyle would be like as doctors and no longer as starving students. But none of us knew. The things we did “know”, and just accepted as undeniable truths, turn out to be the same myths that students still accept as undeniable truths even today.
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Hmm. Where’s that question coming from? I’m going a little deep today. Better than off the deep-end. Some observations I felt led to share… my hope is it touches even just one reader…
In coaching many DCs in practice, and directing hundreds prior to opening their own practice, I’ve identified a “theme” that recurs, not often thankfully, but recurs nonetheless.
It has to do with a person, we’ll call him “Ralph”, who is faced with some problem that has yet to be overcome. He has already figured out the reason for his failure, or so he is convinced… at least at first.
What I mean is I believe Ralph truly is convinced about “why” something is as it is, why something won’t work, or why he hasn’t been able to overcome… but there comes a time in coaching that it becomes obvious, maybe to everyone but Ralph, that he is so hellbent on defending his “reasons”, he would rather be “right” than embrace a solution and move forward.
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It’s very interesting to hear what students are thinking regarding opening their own practice. Kindof. I mean, I do remember what it was like as a student, even though it’s been nearly eighteen years since I last ate Ramen Noodles… not so delicious, but boy were they economical! A steady diet of those, and one can eat for a week on about ten bucks. A little tuna and Cream of Mushroom soup mixed in, and there’s your protein as well.
I was clueless back then. Not just in a culinary sense, but in my concepts of what things were really worth my time and attention. I was so focused on getting through all the requirements, while maintaining my 3.something GPA. Then came state Boards. Being from a suburb of Buffalo, many people have asked me how I settled on North Carolina as the state I would live and practice? My honest answer? I placed my finger over Buffalo on a map, and traced an imaginary line due south!
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What is the likelihood that Chiropractic will ever become the #1 healthcare choice in America? At the outset of this blog, this was one of my stated passions. To see our profession and our individual doctors elevated to the status we should hold.
If I get hit by a truck, take me to the ER. If I have a heart attack, call 911. If I have a genetic anomaly or inexplicably develop a disease such as diabetes or a cardiomyopathy requiring life-sustaining medication, then give me that medication.
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Do you remember the movie, “Cast Away”? Tom Hanks played a FedEx worker whose company plane goes down, stranding him on a desert island for years. As he recovers remnants of the wreckage, he opens some of the packages.
He finds his buddy, “Wilson”, and the ice skate that helps him with that toothache problem (Ptoooooie).
But there was that one package that he refused to open.
About a year ago, FedEx ran a commercial that spoofed the movie.
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It’s a cold, rainy day today. I just left a grocery store and saw an elderly
man with a limp checking out about the same time I was. Think of the classic, Norman Rockwell grandfather… now picture that gentleman leaving the store, donning a crash helmet, and straddling a kickin’ yellow scooter like one of these to make his getaway:
Cold. Rainy. Grandpa. This fella’s choice of transportation was either due to a late-life crisis, or my guess is “the economy” had something to do with it.
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Hello and welcome back. I’m going to dive right back into my train of thought from my last post. There were two key points I’d like to repeat here to bring us back on point:
A chiropractor in private practice is really an educated entrepreneur.
And
…the skills and information needed to be successful are over and above what you’ve been trained for in school!
If you’re reading this and you are still a student, you have learned some concepts that place you light years ahead of your colleagues, and yes, ahead of many a practicing DC trying to build a practice and earn a living.
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If you’ve checked in on this Blog from the beginning, you’ve noticed I’ve shared a lot about some of the problems that exist in the chiropractic profession.
If you’re a newer visitor here and you have a few minutes, go ahead and review some or all of my prior posts. No really, go ahead… I’ll wait…
I’ve focused on why so many DCs struggle in practice. Really and truly, with what we have to offer a suffering humanity, we should be the #1 Healthcare choice in America and throughout the world.
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The Doctor from Illinois continued… “I didn’t need anybody to tell me how to do it”. But as a business owner, she started to lose her passion. Feeling overwhelmed with the business side of things, she wasn’t exactly enjoying life anymore.
Stories such as these are heard over and over in our profession. Remember the “myths” we discussed in my last post. Hers was a common one… “I was on fire for chiropractic… I didn’t need anybody to tell me how to do it”.
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