The
Patient Choice Practice:
Teaching
with The Posture Principles
Steven
P. Weiniger, DC / Founder,
BodyZone.com
A
Patient Choice Practice cares for the patient as an educated consumer by
integrating common sense knowledge with intelligent health choices.
Managed
Care and limited insurance policies can be integrated with personal pay programs
to treat patients ethically, and provide the patient an informed choice of
AcuteCare, RehabCare or WellnessCare. Since
aging Baby Boomers do not want to stop "doing" as they age, many will
choose and pay for goods and services to help maintain an active lifestyle with
age. Empowering people to move,
feel, and be well is the key to having patients choose financial responsibility
for RehabCare and WellnessCare.
Posture
is widely acknowledged to be important for a youthful appearance and continued
good health, and keeping good posture is one reason people will pay for care.
The Posture Principles are helpful in teaching patients about posture,
and demonstrates the value of care after AcuteCare.
Patients who come to a chiropractor usually feel better in 7 visits, and
AcuteCare is most commonly covered by insurance.
Educating patients with commonsense knowledge, and teaching exercises
which "feel right" during this time of insurance covered care makes it
more likely the patient will choose to pay for continued, non-acute care. One of these concepts is that an acute injury can
create a chronic problem, and is taught in the Posture Principle, "The
Body Learns What You Teach It".
Pain
teaches the body to move differently. The
body moves in patterns of motion, which adapts to each individual's BodyType,
history of injuries & daily habits.
If it hurts to move like this, the body will not move like this,
and the body will adapt into an unbalanced pattern of motion.
The
body's motion patterns are like a folded piece of paper which folds at a crease.
The paper follows the fold because the fibers have been bent in a
pattern. Similarly, the muscles, ligaments and nerves change as they adapt to
moving the body in a pattern of motion. Strong muscles lift more. Weak ligaments
stretch more. The body’s posture adapts, creating a postural change, or
distortion. Over time, adaptive
patterns of body motion cause increased body stress and breakdown.
Teaching
patients about chiropractic and posture is one way to enhance the value of your
care. The Posture Principle
demonstrations allow people to experience kinesthetically these ideas, and also
help people to "get" the posture principles.
The BodyZone.com posture demo's were recently featured on Oprah's site, Oxygen.com.
A
demonstration for the Posture Principle, "The Body Learns What You
Teach It". is called “Don’t Be Cross” (The Reverse Arm Cross).
This demonstrates how the body moves in patterns of motion, and begins to
communicate the idea that many chronic problems begin when the body learns to
move in a distorted pattern of motion.
Don’t
Be Cross (Reverse Arm Cross)
1.
Cross your arms in front of you.
2.
Observe: Is your left forearm or
right forearm on top?
3.
Now, cross your arms with the opposite forearm on top.
(Look down and be sure you have a different arm on top this time!)
Crossing
the arms "backwards" feels awkward to most people.
An individual's pattern of motion is with either the left or the right
forearm on top. Reversing the top
forearm makes the arms, shoulder girdle, and neck move differently from the
body's trained patterns. As a very
general rule of thumb, the more stuck in a pattern of motion (and therefore out
of balance) a person is, the more imbalanced one feels on doing a Reverse Arm
Cross. Some people are so fixed in their pattern of motion they are unable to
cross their arms backwards without assistance!
Another
observation of fixed motion patterns in the Reverse Arm Cross is noting if the
hands are tucked above or under the arms, and then tucking them the opposite
way.
Teaching
patients about how their body moves is the first step to their understanding the
import role chiropractic plays in keeping their body moving.
Read Patient Choice Practice, Part III
Read Patient Choice Practice, Part IV
Click for more articles for Doctors of Chiropractic
This
article is the next in a series on integrating Managed Care, insurance, and
personal pay in a practice treating patients for AcuteCare, RehabCare and
WellnessCare. If you agree with the Patient Choice philosophy of care, and
believe this is the intelligent path for our profession, I’d like to hear from
you. Direct your email to DrWeiniger@BodyZone.com.
Email this article to a colleague. 
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