Clinic Ideology

As we enter our 5th week of patient care we are getting more efficient in the clinic.  Our SOAP notes are improving, our palpation skills are getting quicker and our communication skills are improving with our patients.  The daunting task of going to school and treating patients is enormous.  It becomes a sink or swim mentality and when you look back at all the swimming that has been done, it is a confidence booster.

The challenge is to keep your ideology present during every patient visit.  Meaning, what do you want to achieve with the patients you treat as a whole.  It is hard to keep this mindset when you are trying to meet the patients immediate needs of both pain reduction and improved function.  The task requires a solid grasp on why we are marching through this doctorate program to begin with.  To this point, I have been meeting my patients immediate needs but I haven't been able to apply my ideological values to my care.  This is mainly because I am just now getting used to the flow of the clinic.

It is interesting to look at things critically and find ways to add tidbits of information to the patient visit and still get the job done.  My ideology stems from physical fitness and nutrition which in my mind are most important to achieve health.  Are the patients I oversee participating in consistent physical fitness and are they eating well?  Those two things are huge to me because they effect all aspects of health.  This is the time to develop our own approach to patient care.  Remembering that there are rules to follow but add our own personal spice to the mixture.

For the next 5 weeks I am going to try hard to keep my values for health present at every patient visit and push forward a wellness model.  I will be doing this in practice next year, so it is time to start focusing more energy into this department.  Now that we've had a few weeks to adapt to the rigor of this new world inside the clinic, it is time to make some changes.  This will be a challenge because we are already lacking time during every visit.  It can be done and should be done.  Some of us have similar ideologies of wellness and some of us view the role of chiropractic quite differently.  For instance, some believe the role of a DC is to relieve pain and release the patient from care once they are out of pain.  Some believe care should extend beyond pain and be applied prophylactically and some take it one step beyond that to fitness, in which, could extend patient care well into the future.  It all comes down to your vision of the role of a DC.

All for now