Creating Lifetime Practice Members with Spinal Hygiene Education

Introduction to the Practice Upgrade Summit 0:00

Welcome, everybody. This is doctor Bob Hoffman from the mass, the Circle Global. And we are so super excited to have you join the Practice Upgrade Summit. This has just been an amazing collection of Parade of stars, thought provoking world class speakers. And our conversation and a few minutes will be no different. Please take note. Pay attention. This is going to be filled with some amazing practical information that will absolutely help you upgrade your practice. Our topic in today's conversation is the Spinal Hygiene Education System for creating lifetime practice members.

I got to tell you right up front, I love lifetime practice members. I did that in my own practice. I teach my doctors if they're interested how to do that. It's easy and it's unbelievably rewarding on every level. Our guest today is none other than Doctor Taber Smith, who's a practicing chiropractor in Houston, Texas. His practice members not only receive top shelf, top notch chiropractor care, but they also receive a unique and very valuable education in spinal health and hygiene. Doctor Taber is a trailblazer here on the subject of spinal hygiene, and holds numerous events and lectures on the subject.

Timber owns and runs two of the largest chiropractic offices throughout the state of Texas, where he has treated thousands of patients and developed some of the life changing lessons that you're going to hear on the next few minutes. Doctor Taber Smith graduated from Eastern New Mexico University in 2004 with a bachelor's degree in biology. He also graduated with his Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Parker Chiropractic College in 2007. He's a student for life and continues to study the fields of chiropractic, spinal hygiene, and overall natural health.

Welcome on to the practice upgrade. Smith, doctor. Taber Smith. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor Hoffman, thank you so much for having me. It's a it's an honor and a privilege to be here. That's awesome. And back at you, my friend. Listen, the very first time I ever heard the term spinal hygiene. God, it must be 30 years ago from Doctor Sid Williams. We were at a meeting. He was up on stage. I had never heard those two words together. And he must have gone on for 15 or 20 minutes about the significance of spinal hygiene.

And yet this is a subject or a topic that, until you came along, seems to have disappeared. And I am so grateful to you to bring it back to the forefront

What Spinal Hygiene Means 2:51

and to remind us the signal, if again so patient education, lifetime spinal neurological hygiene and why lifetime chiropractic care is so great. So here's my first question for you. What actually is spinal hygiene for those people watching and listening? And why should chiropractors implement this specific type of patient education in their office? Great question, and thank you for the opportunity to to answer that. I use a lot of dental analogies. You know, when we when we hear the word spinal hygiene, the term dental hygiene kind of pops into our head as well.

And I think that, you know, chiropractic, chiropractic in general, chiropractors have done amazing things to push forward health care in our country. But I think one of the things we've dropped the ball on, is becoming it as dentistry has the largest preventative health care profession in the world. By educating our community, how to maintain the health, of our teeth and our dental hygiene. Right. And so, yes, they help people with toothaches. They correct alignment with braces. They, they they, you know, do all of these other things, but they have an education system built in to their profession that builds an awareness that we should even take care of our teeth.

Right. And that's where I believe we need to go as chiropractors. And that's what spinal hygiene is. It's building awareness of lifetime spinal care in our office and in our community. And I have a mentor and a friend, Doctor Michael Hall, chiropractic neurologist. He's actually a researcher, and I, I was talking to him and he said, look, Taylor, you know, research is great, but we don't need more research. We need more awareness. We have to build this if we want to grow. And we, you know, you talk about practice upgrades and, you know, we need a profession upgrade as well.

And to grow the profession, we each individually have to upgrade our practice and start getting this education out to more people. You know, it's interesting, if you look at the history of dentistry back in the early 1900s, people didn't brush their teeth every day. They didn't floss. They didn't go to a dentist every six months for checkups. But that was right in the time when industrialization started coming in and processed foods became a staple, sugar became a staple in our diet. And in fact, I read an article where 200 years ago, the average American ate 2 pounds of sugar per year, and today the average American eats 152 pounds of sugar per year.

And imagine what that does to dental health. So right then, in the early 1900s, when all of this processed foods became a staple in our diet, teeth began to decay at rapid, rapid rates in younger ages. And by the time you were a teenager or 20, you were having teeth pulled. You remember, like dentures where everybody had dentures. They had to come out with, you know, some alternative to teeth because tooth decay was so terrible. And that was where dentistry had to step up. And they had to say, look, we need a grass roots effort to share the message of lifetime dental health.

We have to teach people to take care of their teeth. And it took more than just going to the dentist on a regular basis. It took a knowledge of of a daily activity and importance that you had to put into your life, that if you didn't take care of your teeth, they were going to rot and they were going to decay. That had to become something that was important to you. And, you know, what I read was interesting that dentists were actually against this, in the beginning that they didn't want, you know, they were they were afraid if we teach people to take care of their teeth, they're not going to come see us anymore because we won't get the toothache.

We won't get the to pull the teeth, which they were so busy making a lot of money doing, pulling teeth right there were other. In fact, I read an article that shows the Ohio School of Dental Medicine. They started a dental hygiene class and it was shut down by the dentists in their community because they thought that it was too time consuming for a person. They would never spend the time every day to actually take care of their teeth, and that it was too costly for them to actually implement. And in practice now, thank goodness that, you know, the profession of dentistry prevailed.

They got education out there. More importantly, they got awareness out there and they created something that wasn't there before, catapulted them into a new realm, the second largest health care profession in the world because of the awareness that was created. And we want to create that awareness inside our practice, inside our community. Because if you walk down the street, there's no awareness. You can walk up to somebody and say, what do you do to take care of your spine? The average person has no clue that that should even happen, but they take their kid to a dentist, right?

I have three little boys, took them all to the dentist as soon as they got teeth in their mouth. Not because I thought they had a pain and a toothache, a cavity. I want them to grow up with great dental health. I have that awareness that was instilled in me. Now we're still instilling that into our patients and having kids brought to us, not because they have a problem or symptom or, you know, a disease, but because parent wants them to grow up with great spinal health as well. I love your answer and I love your analogies how you connected the non dentistry to the unknown.

What we do out in the marketplace. I got to tell you, this whole subject is so near and dear to my heart. In fact, I just finished reading a book called The Mouth Body Connection by Doctor Cure Tola, which is a world famous, biological dentist in New York City, about how this all connects. And one of the main points that Kurokawa talked about in his book is the mouth is the beginning of the gut of the the entire digestive system. And of course, you know that 150 pounds of sugar is not only decaying your mouth, but it's just destroying your gut health, which will then have negative impact on your brain health and everything else in your system, everything that's critical.

So I think this is really important. And Taber, just one other reference before I continue this conversation. I use similar analogies in some of my coaching with some of my doctors. For example, I often give the analogy that when you make an appointment to go see your dentist, you walk in, you check in with the receptionist and they send you to a room. Who walks in? It's the hygienist. You didn't make an appointment with the hi Janice, but the hi, Janice comes in and the hygienist does whatever he or she feels is appropriate.

And when they're finished, either the dentist comes in or they move you to a different chair or different room where the dentist is working, and then when you go out, you're going to get a bill, an invoice. It's a bill for the dentist. And a bill for the Ignaz.

Patient Education and Lifetime Care 9:39

And I often ask the question to chiropractors, who is the equivalent of the hygienist in your office who's providing services, who's part of your healing team that's generating profitability while you're taking care of patients? Because in essence, most of us, what we're doing is we're trading time for money, which is not a bad business model, but it's not an optimized business model. When other people are trading their time for your money, that's a much better model. So I love this whole subject and this whole topic.

I think you're spot on. So let let's begin. Now that we understand the concept of spinal hygiene, how does patient effective patient education consistently separate those of us in practice who are thriving and flourishing from all the rest? Sure. Great question and thank you for asking that one as well. So so to your point, which you just mentioned, you have a dentist friend who says, guess what? There's more than just preventing tooth decay to taking care of your teeth, right? That it affects your entire circulatory system, affects your gut system, affects you know, your overall health and wellness.

And we've been saying this in a in a different kind of way in chiropractic for 124 years, which was, look, your spine affects more than just the the pain that you're having. It affects everything because of your nervous system and all these things, your brain. And so with patient education, where we come from, from a spinal hygiene standpoint, is we take a step back and start at a little bit lower, simpler, easier to understand foundation, meaning that that dentist doesn't just jump in and say, here's how brushing your teeth affects your gut.

Like they. First they say you should brush your teeth because it helps with prevention of tooth decay. It helps with whitening your smile. It helps with, you know, preventing cavities, right? So that people who don't aren't ready for that next step of understanding how the gut works and how it's tight end, they can get to a to a certain, to the first step, to a certain level, and now they can start learning even more in that, in that dentist's office where in chiropractic, so many times we we're like the adjustment affects the brain, right.

Which I'm so totally for and about and I educate my patients all around that. But the first step was, look, do you do anything at all to take care of your spine and help it in the three areas of the principles of spinal health, which we say in spinal hygiene are alignment and motion and strength. And if you have any lack of those three, that's part of a vertebral subluxation complex. And that should be corrected in our office. That's why you need a chiropractor on your team. Right. And so it's almost exactly the same over here.

They're saying, you know, are you brushing and flossing every day? Do you have a cavity. You can't brush out a cavity, right. You need a dentist on your team. And we're saying the exact same thing. Are you doing your spinal hygiene exercises on a daily basis? Do you have a subluxation? You can't exercise out a subluxation. You need a chiropractor on your team. The analogy is almost go hand in hand, and when you really start to see that picture and build it for your patient, it's like a light bulb goes off inside their head and they're going, wow, you have it figured out.

I can't believe we didn't know this. This is exactly what my family needs. And we start talking about lifetime care. And we educate around hygiene because that literally is lifetime care. I do spinal correction in my office. And so when I say you know, we're going to do a corrective care plan, the term correction, even though I love that term, means there's an end. You know, I don't care if it takes you ten years to correct something. Right. But to correct it means there has to be an end. Right?

And so that person is just waiting for that three month react rate and say, is it corrected right, am I done? Whereas if I'm implementing hygiene, the I they say, how long do you need to do this for the rest of your life? Because this is not just correction. That's what we're doing very intently and focused in my office. And I do want to educate you on that, but we're doing hygiene for the rest of your life. And so as long as you brush your teeth, that's how long you need to do your spinal hygiene exercises.

As long as you go to your dentist for checkups, that's how long you need to be coming in our office for checkups. And we build and you know, particularly to your question, to answer your question about education, we use what I call, shotgun education, meaning there's no one way that my patient learns, right? It's not just the weekly workshop that we do in the office, or now we're actually doing virtually, although that's one way that they learn. The other way is we have an email drip system that we've built up.

And so I put together 12 emails that educate the patient about spinal hygiene, how to take care of your spine for the rest of your life. There already in an email software. So every time a new patient comes into our office and starts care, we just simply take their email, put it in that email system. And now every week for 12 weeks, they're getting education. That's teaching them about life transform care. I didn't even have to touch that. We have, the, spinal hygiene videos and a better way, film videos playing all the time in our office.

So every time someone comes in for a visit, there's a little bit of education that's going on, that's teaching them about lifetime care. My table talk. You know, it's always spinal hygiene. It's always life time span. Okay. There's a little bit more education that's getting on the books that we might give them. The fliers that we put out the Facebook post. So this this what I call shotgun education means everybody. We're saying the exact same thing. My emails say the same thing is my workshop does is my face books do as my table talk does.

But somebody might get a little bit every single time they're in our office or every time they open an email. And over their lifetime, I'm in my in my office. Hopefully they understand that big picture in that education. And that's what creates the lifetime patients in the office. Wow. Terrific. You know, coming from Texas I can get the term shotgun. I can I mean that's I refer to it as a multifaceted patient education overall. So so that might be a negative connotation in some states. But in Texas that's a positive I get that, I get that and you know listen you know we're hopefully coming towards the end, but we're still right at the moment of this conversation.

We still have a Covid pandemic going on. And to me, what I coach my members on and they're all thriving. I can honestly say with great pride, over 90% of the members of the Master's circle are at somewhere between 90% and 125% in their practice of where they were pre-COVID, and part of it was teaching them how to educate, how to communicate, and how to communicate on multiple levels. But the real most important point was this is a golden opportunity to rebrand and reinvent ourselves. I don't want to be known as a neck and back pain doctor.

I don't want to even be known as a pain doctor. I'm not against pain. Listen, if someone has pain, I'd rather than go to a pain chiropractor than take a drug any day. So I'm not anti that, but I don't want to be it. Yeah, I want to teach people on how to create optimal neurological expression. And you can't do that without spinal hygiene and spinal chiropractic care. So we're on the exact same page. So part of your education about spinal hygiene is an attempt and hopefully a very successful attempt at reinventing yourself, rebranding yourself.

I bet that you have patients who actually come in and talk to you about their spinal hygiene, about the the position, the movement, the strength of their spine. They're not necessarily coming in anymore and saying, it hurts here, doc. You know, that's so that's so 1940. We need to grow past that. We need to evolve to that next level. So on that topic, more, in your opinion, I'm just curious, why has the traditional model of patient education that has been around the chiropractic profession for a hundred years failed again, in your opinion, to fully engage patients, to choose lifetime care?

What was wrong with that? And why did that necessitate a new and improved model? Sure. Great question, and I'm not sure I know the exact answer, but here's what I think. I think as a profession, sometimes we are guilty of doing what our patients do. And is it thinking short term? Because, you know, we do have to pay the rent. We do have to get the new patients started. We do have to get, you know, our marketing sometimes it is is short term.

Why Traditional Chiropractic Education Falls Short 18:48

Does your neck hurt? Let me get you in here and get you signed up to a care plan. Which which. Okay, I totally think I'm. It's all right. I get it right. But if we haven't also worked a little bit harder to implement a long term education strategy for our community, for our office, we're not doing the whole profession a, you know, a very good, benefit. Right. And, and so I think over the last hour and 24 years, even if, you know, I read a lot of BJ stuff and a lot of it is about the amazing results that he got in in the clinic.

Right. But less of it was about that long term lifetime hygiene. How do we get out there in our community as dentistry that teach them how to take care of their spine and nervous system for a lifetime? One thing that was really cool about the pandemic in and in our office, when it literally shut down for weeks, was that I was I had a chance to be completely congruent. Like if you if you take chiropractic and the word chiropractic in the profession completely off the table, there's still a spine and nervous system there that needs to be taken care of.

You bet we didn't invent that, you know? And, and just because a patient couldn't or wouldn't come into my office doesn't mean I wasn't right there with them teaching them, you know, at least do your spinal molding rolls every evening. Range of motion every day. Don't lose alignment, motion and strength of your spine. Nervous system, because that is the master system of the body. And I want you to experience great health and wellness over a lifetime. Here's what you need to do. And and I my office thrived on lunch and learns in-person business lunch and learns that was the biggest driver of my clinics.

And I did 2 or 3 talks a week in my community. Guess what happened as soon as that pandemic started? Zero. Right? So but something cool happened again. We shifted to virtual because that's the the a method. I could get the same education out. And now we're having 40, 50, sometimes 60 people register for a webinar where I'm teaching the same thing. I would have gotten in front of 15 people or 20 people in person. And new people are joining our email list, which is something doctors, if you're watching and listening, you need to be growing right now is an email list of people in your community so that you can continually give them great information and value.

You have so much value in your in your head and knowledge, not just in your hands. Being able to deliver a chiropractic adjustment. We we have, you know, arguably even more value in the philosophy and in the mindset and in the in the strategies that we can teach people. And, and whether they come into my office or not, they got to take care of that spine, a nervous system. They need to know that if you don't take care of your spine, a nervous system, it will decay and regenerate, and you will not live the life that you could possibly live.

If you do, just spend a little bit of time. And I'm a big fan of, Darren Hardy, who wrote the book The Compound Effect, and I and I tell people, it's the small thing that you do every day. It's the adjustment that you come in and you get every week that is going to make the huge difference in your life. If you just brush your teeth once in your life, you might as well not have done that. It would have been a total waste of your time. Nobody would even know ten years from now that you did brush your teeth once.

It doesn't make a difference. But if you brush your teeth every day and somebody else that is your friend doesn't, by the end of ten years, I guarantee you I can tell a huge difference. Right? And I tell them if you do just one spinal hygiene exercise every day, if you come in for that, just that adjustment every week and just do that, I guarantee you in five years, in ten years you're going to be able to tell a big difference, from the person who doesn't do that. You're absolutely right. You know, one of the things that we teach, part of our core ideology in our company is we teach that there's a universal formula to retrain the body or retrain the brain to do almost anything.

And it's really simple. It's frequency over time. Yes. You know, I can learn a foreign language if I practice frequently over a year or two. Yeah, I could learn to play a new sport as long as I practice regularly over time. And this works either negatively or positively, because the language of the brain and the language of the body is repetition. Yes. So if I have bad lifestyle habits, if I have poor posture, if I repetitively do that for posture over time, I'm going to develop a more permanent, more serious problem.

Yes, if I get adjusted regularly, if I practice spinal hygiene regularly, if I eat a clean diet, take my supplements, work on my gut microbiome, improve my cognitive function regularly over time, I'm going to retrain. All right. Part of this paper is another really subtle but significant piece. And it's this we've discovered that doing less, more often always produces a better outcome than trying to do more, less often. And now I share with patients about that is I ask a simple question what do you think would be better going to the gym three hours a month once or going to the gym three times a week for 20 minutes?

And everybody says going to the gym three times a week for 20 minutes because doing less, more often always creates that frequency over time. Phenomenon to retrain the body or retrain the brain. The only difference between exercise and chiropractic, they're both based on natural law is exercise is retraining the body, and chiropractic is retraining the brain. But it's the same exact thing, and it's the same thing with dental hygiene or spinal hygiene, posture, mobility, movement. It's all the same.

And we have to get patients to really understand that. Yeah, I use that strategy actually in my table talk and that, you know, when I give them their home care, their spinal hygiene, home care, there's several different exercises that go in that. And we teach them how to do each one, but not everybody does. Every one, every day. So when they come back for their adjustment, I'm like, how's that spinal hygiene going? Well, doc, honestly, I didn't I didn't get it done. Well, you know what? I want to cut two of those exercises out.

Now I just want you to do these two every day. Can you do those two for me? Yeah. Well, then I check them the next time when they come in my table talk is. How's that spinal hygiene exercise going home? Well, doc, I didn't do it. Now we're cutting it down to one. Just this one little thing. All I want you to do are every day. Can you do that for me? Sure, doc, but if we just get that person doing one thing, we explode. They're, well, awareness and build their value for lifetime care. Because they couldn't do ten every day, but they could do one.

And it makes a much bigger difference than them forgetting to do all ten right and right. And also here's how that helps the entire chiropractic profession grow it. I read a Gallup poll and, it asks Americans, do you brush your teeth on a regular basis? 97% of Americans said they brush their teeth on a regular basis. Now, extrapolate that what that means is 97% of Americans are aware that they should do something for their teeth every day, right? And that awareness translates to 50% of Americans visiting a dentist on a regular basis.

And you might think just 50%, but that's 150 million people. That's half of everyone in America. They go to a dentist on a regular basis, and then that makes the second largest health care profession in the world. Now let's look at our numbers. How many people do you think do a spinal hygiene exercise every day? So you mean zero other than your patients and the right 1%. And they might be all of us, right? All of us. And that it lack of awareness translates to maybe 5% of Americans visiting a chiropractor and imagine if we had their numbers and awareness that imagine if 97% of people on a daily basis did something to take care of their spine.

We couldn't handle it at our current IT would drive so many people to the chiropractor just because they would be aware that spinal health mattered. You're right. You're absolutely right. Now, by the way, my opinion I asked yours, but my opinion is the traditional model of patient education has failed to commit people to lifetime care, choose life and care, because one of the things I've discovered in my 42 years in our profession is that chiropractors are extraordinarily honest, but they're honest to a degree.

They tell the patient at the report of findings enough of the truth not to get rejected, but they don't tell them the whole truth. And this to me is a huge issue. You know, again, we're all different. There isn't one model that works for everybody. I respect all the different forms of chiropractic. As long as you're ethical and honest and doing your best and showing up as your best, I don't care what your model is. I want to help you just get better at it. But when I was in private practice for over two decades, I used to start off my report of findings with this statement table more based on my detailed cases, free consultation and my thorough exam filtered into all my years of experience of working with thousands of patients like you.

Here's what I need you to know. You will flourish and thrive with chiropractic care for the rest of your life. But today, I don't want to talk about the rest of your life. I want to talk about the first year of care, which is the foundational year

The Biggest Health Problem Today 28:30

where we pour the cement foundation to rebuild your health on top of. And I got 99% conversion. Nice. And and did everybody follow through for lifetime? No. But when I sold my practice, I had close to 100 patients who had been with me for a minimum of 15 consecutive years. And and that's what's possible. And that is more of our profession then what you do and what I did and many other successful chiropractors did. Man, it would be a huge game changer. We would quickly go from that 5 or 6 or 8% to 15, 20, 30, 40 or 50%.

You're 100% right? Yeah. Well, I got to say, I love how you just frame that. I'm actually going to use that now. Like like when you start talking about their the rest of their life and then you say just one year. That sounds like an no time at all. Yeah. That sounds I mean, most chiropractors, if they framed it a different way and say, I want you, I want to give you a one year care plan where you are going to be here all this time and, and in this here's the whole year upfront. But know like that sounds like so much.

But if you say, here's the rest of your life, here's the first year. Yeah, we want to start with one year. That sounds that sounds really good. Yeah. Like I've been getting adjusted approximately once a week for 47 years. So so just think about that 50 times a year. Times almost 50 years is I'm closing in on 2500 visits right? Yeah. Awesome. I am not recommending to anybody at the report of findings to say this is John's. You're going to need about 2500 visits, each one for me. Again, you're right.

Start with what's reasonable and bite size. Plus there's a whole science of something called expectation management. What the experts tell us, what the scientists tell us is about 80% of everything we get in life is directly related to what we expect to get in life. So I'm trying to create that expectation, and we're going to see each other for the rest of our lives. But let's zero in let's laser focus on that first year so we can help you feel. But even more important is function. Well, love that. Love it.

Hey, what do you think is the biggest health problem facing society today? So here's I'm so glad you asked me this question. Like I tell docs, like we have an epidemic of sick and suffering people. I mean, we we could jump into the numbers of heart disease, diabetes, cancers. I mean, it's worse than it's ever been before. And I ask docs, what do you think each one of those people have most in common? Right. Because, I mean, if you were looking at our ecosystem and let's say dolphins had all of this chronic diseases and we wouldn't go and take each individual dolphin individually and say, you need this supplement, this thing, this thing.

We would look generally, what do all of those dolphins have in common? And then we'd say it might be this toxin or it might be this in their diet or something like that. If you look at people and you say, what do all the sick and suffering people in our country, in our world have in common? It's not a poor diet, even though there are a lot of poor diets out there. But that's not I would argue that is not the number one thing that people have in common. It is not a lack of exercise because we have much worse, health here in America than, in Europe.

And we exercise more than they do. Right? Even though I get it, people shouldn't move more. They should eat better. But the single number one biggest thing that they have in common, all the sick and suffering people in our world is damage to their spine. And nervous system. And you can look at it, you can see it documented through a lot of these different studies, where we show that 96% of 80 year olds have severe spinal degeneration and decay. When you look back, 85% of 50 year olds by the age of 50, 85% significant decay, damage and breakdown of their spine.

And then you keep rewinding it. Now, when dentistry was back in that industrial age, when sugar became now look where we're at in the technology age, where technology is coming in, and we have kindergartners who are having to sit in front of a screen for eight hours a day. And we're wondering why all chiropractors out there who take X-rays are saying we're seeing spinal, the candy generation in teenagers now, right at younger and younger ages. In fact, there was one study that showed, it was 37% of 20 year olds had significant spinal degeneration, 20 year olds.

And then there was a study published, in the back letter that showed that 9% of ten year olds had the beginning stages of spinal decay, and they were asymptomatic. They were 154 of them. They put them through an MRI machine, but they could see spinal breakdown already starting at the age of ten. All right. And so the number one thing that most sick and suffering people have in common is damage to the spinal nervous system. And this just hammers home the fact that chiropractors have been saying this for 120 years, that your nervous system is your master system of the body, and if the spine is decaying at faster rates than ever before, guess what?

That's going to affect the nervous system and your body won't be able to function. Your body won't be able to heal. So now is the time I get goosebumps saying this. Like now is the time for us to step up and start teaching people this and showing people this and saying, if you do know, do not start taking better care of your spine or nervous system because of the stress that it's under today. More than ever before in the history of the human race, it will decay and regenerate. You need to learn this, right?

This this education needs to be in your practice, no doubt about it. And I love how you just stated all of that. You know, for me, I think it's really pivotal to recognize that people are far sicker today than they've ever been. There is such an over abundance of constant, chronic, low levels of physical, chemical, emotional, electromagnetic stress that we're eating worse. We're not exercising properly. You know, ten years ago, you know, there was a new term called Tex neck. The researchers don't refer to it as pecs neck anymore.

It's now called digital dementia because we're starting to develop also dementia. Early, early indicators and signs of dementia in young kids because they're like this looking at a screen nonstop all day. Yeah. It's unbelievable. And you know, when when there's some controversy which always just makes me want to put a stick in my eye, you know, is chiropractic care okay for kids? Oh my God, there's no better time on earth to get adjusted when than when you're a newborn. And and if you can't start, then to start immediately.

But if we can start to work with kids from an early age on, we would reverse prevent all of this damage. And the generation after. So. So is neo, in your opinion, is this what I we're seeing such amazing progressive degeneration in so many people today? Because I remember even when I was in practice, I've been out of practice over 20 years. When I was in practice, I would take a lateral cervical X rate of a 21 year old, and it was already authority sparring and DJ d and it was like, what did you do, bang your head against the wall for eight years, right?

I just, I couldn't contemplate how did that happen? Right. Yeah. No, exactly what it is and I there needs to be more long term research on adjustments and hygiene exercises and taking care of this by showing that we decrease the amount of degeneration. I totally agree with that. In fact, I've been talking with some of the, Australian Research Foundation's Life Universities Research Foundation, and it's amazing to me that's never been done yet. Right. And so we absolutely need to be able to show we can prevent that.

But if you just look at deductive reasoning, this is where this is what dentistry did. Like I've never read a, you know, randomized controlled trial

Practice Results and Patient Commitment 36:48

that shows brushing your teeth was safe and effective. I've never read that, but I still brush my teeth every day. Right. Because of deductive reasoning. So back in the early 1900s, Doctor Alfred phones, who's now the father of dental hygiene. He they they discovered that bacteria build up in the teeth. Bacteria secretes an acid, which is a byproduct of digestion. And that acid causes, breakdown in the enamel of the teeth or dental caries. Cavities. Right. So once they knew how tooth decay happened, they worked backwards.

And they said, guess what? If we brush every day and we clean the bacteria off, they won't be able to secrete an acid that won't break down your enamel. That could help prevent tooth decay. Now, we never say that it was perfect and would. And you'd never get a cavity if you did it, but they said it could reduce your risk factors for tooth decay based on what we know. Right? And if you look at the spine, we know that poor posture. We know that loss of curve speeds up. Osteo fights, especially around that mid cervical spine.

We know that, lack of motion, in fact, Tapio Varthaman did a study on rabbits where it wasn't very nice to rabbits, but he, he cast their joints, and then at different intervals of time, one week, one month, one year, he would cut into the joint and then record what happened. And he showed that lack of motion in a joint causes arthritis, causes, degeneration. Right. So we know alignment abnormal biomechanics. We know lack of motion causes the speed up of degeneration. Therefore, through deductive reasoning, we can say, look, if we can improve alignment, motion, strength, basically, if we can remove subluxation, we can improve the health of the spine. And nervous system.

And we can limit or reduce risk factors for spinal degeneration. Yes, we need to be looking into those things long term research wise so that we can back those up with studies. But it's common sense. And just unfortunately, we don't practice common sense. It's more than common sense. Again, I totally agree with you. But, you know, when we were in chiropractic school, we were taught something called Wolff's Law boom. And by the way, it wasn't called Wolfe's theory or Wolfe's postulate. It was Wolfe's law, which means it always happens.

And if I can paraphrase Wolff's law, here's what it said. Any bone under stress over time attracts calcium salts, which is the beginning of our arthritic degeneration. Absolute doesn't matter if it's a finger that hits the keyboard all the time, but it's out of alignment, or it's a cervical vertebrae or a lumbar where it doesn't matter. Any bone under stress over time will become arthritic. The arthritis is, if you stop and think about this from a chiropractic philosophical perspective, is an innate mechanism to try to stabilize a weakened joint.

You know, innate just wants to try to handle what's wrong. It's looking for our survival value. It doesn't contemplate that it's going to cause secondary or tertiary problems. Like, I can't bend my finger anymore or I can't move my neck anymore. But it's soldering together the weakened joint so it's not weak anymore. That's what the question is, is. And that's what we're seeing in degeneration and spines all over the place before our time runs out. Table. And this has just been awesome. You've been amazing.

Thank you. Please share with our audience some of the results you've experienced in your practice, the growth of your practice, the engagement and commitment of your patients. How compliant they are, the amount of referrals you get. You know you you have two very successful practices. What have you seen firsthand? What have you experienced first hand? Sure. Well, and and just from a new patient standpoint, we usually average 10 to 20 new patients a week. You know, per practice. So we and right now we're starting to get back up to that.

But during that pandemic the new patients really slowed down. Right. We I mean, every once in a while we'd get someone that was brave and wanted to come in or something during a, during a complete shutdown. But the what I call in our office, lifetime patients, we have hundreds of families that are what I call lifetime patients. Now, when we put things on, you know, fliers and marketing, we call them VIPs. Okay. But they're that's what they are is lifetime patients. They said, here's our credit card.

You know, let's don't talk finances anymore. Charge it every month. We're coming in every week to get checked. And that those life timers, they didn't stop coming in as long as that door was open and they came through. And what it showed me was that this type of education creates a stronger practice. And more, if you will, a more valuable practice. So if you do want to sell it some day, you say, you know, we have 5000 thousand plus a month that's coming in on auto debit for you. You know, you don't have to do a thing about.

So like imagine that to be able to sell a practice. But it's it pandemic proofs your practice having those people who understand lifetime spinal care they that was just priceless to be able to see and learn from me. If it wasn't for those lifetimes, we'd have been hurting a lot more during those months. And it was also very fulfilling for me because they understood how important it was to get adjusted during that time. Right. I again get the goosebumps talking about it, but but that made me so happy to be able to practice and adjust them and them saying I would never miss my my adjustment doc.

So even from not just a financial standpoint, from a fulfillment in your, in your, in your career, you know, I would highly recommend a doc start to implement this type of, of education. Beautiful. You know again just connecting the dots. You know in the the circle world, we talk about creating a frictionless practice that friction is anything that slows down the business, damages the flow of the business or causes a patient to reconsider. So for example, asking someone to make an appointment at the end of every visit is friction.

Asking someone to pay at the end of every visit is friction. When you have a educated, committed, engaged, compliant patient, you remove probably 40 or 50 or 60% of the friction in a business.

Getting Started with Spinal Hygiene 43:18

Yeah, and that's what you've done, right? No, they're happy. They don't even think about their monthly payment. Right. It's no longer a money decision. It's they're coming in because they just want to stay well get well. No, I'm referring in a lot of other people and telling them, oh, my dog is not only a great doc, not only will you feel and function better, but you know, we only charge is this whatever this might be? And he put you on auto debt, but you don't even have to think about it. Yeah, no. And I'm. I'm with you hundred percent.

We have these conversations in our team meetings. I'm like, how can we make it easier for patients to get in when they come by the office? Do they have to have an appointment? Can they just come in? Can they just swing by during these hours? I people's lives are getting busier. They're getting more difficult, and we don't have a drive thru window for a chiropractic adjustment. You know, you can't you can't get it over the phone. Right? And so, I want to eliminate any other friction that I could possibly eliminate for them to make their life easier, to make sure that they can get something that that's going to actually improve their life and allow them to do all the things that that they have to do in today's day and age.

Beautiful. Well, we're we're on the same page. Before our time runs out, how can the people watching and listening to this who totally resonate with you and your message, want to get into spinal hygiene? Want to get their patients to choose lifetime care, to have a practice that's more frictionless? How do they get in touch with you? How do they learn more? How do they get involved? Thank you for for asking that. The so I joined with Life University, to create the first ever certified spinal hygienist program.

So you can actually there's a 12 hour course. You can see credits in most states for it. And you can find out more about that. And there's actually a free, training that you can you can get if you go to spinal hygienist.com and you can learn more about what we've been talking about here. We also provide spinal hygiene products. And those are what we use in our office to educate. The cool thing about the products is they not only help the patients implement the spinal hygiene exercises, but they teach the patient why they should be doing it.

And I read a study, I think it was out of Canada. They took two groups and they gave them each home care. They were talking about compliance. One group, they said, you do these exercises and that's all they said to them. The other group, they gave them the exact same exercises, but they showed them what each exercise did, why they should do it. So they added a whole new realm of just putting why behind the exercise. And the group that knows why they were doing the exercises were 60, percent more compliant than the group that was just told to do the exercises.

And that's why we're in the spinal hygiene, kits and the system that we built. The why behind the exercise is very important. And it's all chiropractic and it's teaching the patient about lifetime care. And they can learn more about those products at spinal Hygiene products.com. Beautiful table. You are a dear friend. I love and appreciate you. You're changing and improving and uplifting our profession and I can't be more grateful and thankful. This was a terrific conversation. Totally practice upgrade.

People learned a lot. There's a ton that they can implement. I hope that they get in touch with you. I hope they learn more about this. I hope they get on board. I hope they help rebrand and reinvent themselves. Have a wonderful day. Thank you so much for your time and your gift to to lift our profession up and to show that there is a better way. You know, success in chiropractic is so easy. I believe you got to work overtime to screw it up. And, it should be effortless. Easy is not hard work and you've made it effortless.

Ease. And I hope the people watching this follow your lead. Have a great day and thank you so much. Thank you.