Dr. Lane’s Thoughts XXXIX

 safety-lane.com 07105

chiropractic-lane.com

NEWARK 
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Dr. Lane’s Thoughts XXXIX

1) We have made it absurdly hard for young people to get ahead in this country.  “Good” jobs (this used to be a joke where GOOD stood for “get out of debt) involve putting off adulthood until you finish college (because there are really no jobs for people who don’t go to college). Then, you have to start off in a low-paying job (unless you find an interest in jobs that pay well, like finance or engineering). Rents are out of range for those without a decent income and home purchasing is impossible.  We have all heard what that means – finishing college and moving back in with your parents.

Once a person finishes college, they are now saddled with student loan repayment, which further erodes the small income that they make.  So, you continue to live at home into your late 20s and early 30s.

There are jobs that don’t involve going to college, like those in manufacturing, but companies have cleverly sent them “off-shore” [jobs sent outside the USA] (no jobs = no unions), then “on-shored” them [brought them back but now there is no union to deal with]. 

Jobs that paid $35 in the 1970s and 1980s (an unbelievable amount for that time and the reason that many people could afford a middle-class lifestyle of starting a family with a home and cars) now pay $17 to start (which is not enough to live on your own).  In addition, companies routinely offer work on an “on-call” scheduling [the company will call the employee when they need the employee to come in, usually a call made only a few hours before the hours will be offered] leaving employees with inadequate hours and no chance to take another job for fear that they will miss a call to come to work (and then be fired).

We have young people who find apartments squeezed by inadequate space and high rents alongside elderly people living in large homes who are unable to sell them for what they are worth (after all, who can buy a house when making rent is impossible).  In addition, the elderly people can’t afford to buy a smaller house because (once again) even the smaller houses are not affordable.


MONEY

How Much Do Millennials Make Across America?

Median incomes for young people can vary wildly depending on the state they live in—with the difference between some states peaking at more than $20,000.
Business Insider released a map that shows just how hard Millennials have been hit in the years since 2008’s Great Recession. With student debt at an all-time high and young people not making nearly as much as their parents did, here’s a visual representation of the median income of Millennials across the U.S.

2) As a chiropractor, I have worked for less-than-respectable older doctors (practicing more than 20 years).  What most of them had in common with each other was their dependence on practice-management companies.  These companies go by many names (often with the words “master”, “practice”, “builders” as part of the name) and all purport to be able to increase your patient population and, of course, make you more money.
As far as I am concerned, the only people guaranteed to make money are the practice management companies!
I was forced many times to listen to these people speak on videos and in person because the doctors I worked for had purchased lifetime memberships and felt it necessary that I learn these “truths” of chiropractic marketing and patient retention from these “masters”. 


What I found was that the speakers repeated plain truths that were just common sense (“you must practice your best work with each and every patient!”, “never make a patient wait in the waiting room, but it they do have to wait, tell them why and give them a chance to reschedule!”, “always look neat and professional!’  I need to put the (!) because these people always YELLED their platitudes in the videos. I can only guess that yelling conveyed truth and excitement.  It did not do this for me, but it did make me turn down the volume or turn it off altogether.

Have you noticed a trend here?  This advice was just common sense to chiropractors, this is “kindergarten 101”-level advice.  For some reason these doctors I worked for needed to be told these easy and simple ideas and felt that their ignorance must have been universal and that I needed to hear it as well.  


At a steep price tag!  These “systems” or “programs” cost thousands of dollars!

Still, there was more.  Their advice extended to the suggestion that a doctor should be calling a patient up months after their visit to get them to return to your office.  I have to suppose that this is to remind the patient that they have pain in their body and need to be reminded or told to return to care.  I think that the idea of this call (according to the management companies) was because the patient was completely unaware of their pain until the chiropractor’s office reminded them!  Why else would you need to call people to remind them to return to care?  Are the patients supposed to be too stupid to know that they need care?

I did not make these calls to any patients but the support staff where I worked were required to make the calls.

We do not make these calls in my office at Chiropractic Lane (we have a great deal more respect for patients and their capability to come in when they need our services), but I have to wonder what actually happened on these calls.  

Did patient come back to the office to resume care because the staff reminded them that they had pain?

Office: “Hello Mr. Smith, this is the ABC chiropractic office calling to suggest that you return for care”

Mr. Smith: “I am so glad you called, I am crippled over in back pain and have been for  the last 15 days, but I didn’t know it until you called.  Now I know what to do!”

or

Mr. Smith: “I have been suffering with neck pain for the last 3 months but couldn’t figure out what to do about it – I am so glad you called”

That never happens.  The most common response is probably, “thanks for the call, I will call you when I need you” as the line goes dead as the (now, former) patient hangs up the phone. 
This call is an insult to a thinking person and they will probably seek future care in another chiropractor’s office, if they ever do return to any chiropractor’s office in the future.  Any person would see this as a blatant attempt to get money from a patient, or maybe just an insult to the intelligence of the patient.

At least the doctor thinks he is being smart and proactive.  This is the real job of these patient management and practice management companies – to make the doctor feel like he is doing something to help himself succeed!

My message to these doctor’s seeking the holy grail of success; how about you just treat the patients for longer at each session and use better techniques and modalities?  How about you don’t waste their time with multiple visits to resolve their problem and try to get them on their way in less than 5 visits?  How about you understand that many people have jobs and coming to your office is an inconvenience, especially when they are in pain?

At Chiropractic Lane we make it our job to resolve the musculoskeletal complaint and move the patient on to wellness and a life pain-free.  We accept insurance or a cash price of $60.00 a visit (volume discounts can be arranged).

The truth is, people call your office when they actually need your services.  Any call from a chiropractor’s office that is not initiated by the patient is disturbing their peace and insulting them by making it clear that you don’t believe that they are intelligent enough to know what to do when they are in pain, or even that they are in pain.  Plainly, it is irritating to the patient to hear from us when it is unnecessary. 

The chiropractic marketing and patient retention companies that sell their services to my colleagues are useful only to doctors who are clueless about common business practices and desperate for any patient volume no matter how ill-earned and unnecessary.

One more thing, to all those chiropractors using those practice management services and their (painfully stupid) advice: KEEP DOING IT!  Keep on listening to those companies and following their advice.

That advice is making your patient abandon you and come to my office (SMILES!)

3) I am proud thatto my many patients at Chiropractic Lane and Safety Lane, we are considered a rare find – an office with integrity and honesty.  We treat a patient in as few visits as possible to restore them to their good health and our DOT exams are done from the greeting at the door to the final stage of handing them their medical card in only 30 minutes.

We are a “no bullshit zone” office.

I can’t say that about my competitors.  Every day I hear stories from the men and women who come to my office about what they have to deal with at other places from being harassed to come to the office more often (long after they are restored to good health – see the article above) or made to wait an hour or more to be seen and then the exam takes another hour to do.

Of course the biggest insult occurs at my competitor Concentra Medical Clinics (they are nationwide, so you are probably near one).  Their exam takes 3 hours to get through!  

Yes – we do in 30 minutes what they do in 90 minutes!

To add insult to injury, if you lose your medical card or paperwork (which happens more often than you may realize), Concentra will charge you $40 to replace that paperwork and you have to return the next day to pick it up!

At Safety Lane, if you lose your paperwork just call us so we can make a copy for you and then come in and pick it up.  No charge.  We like our patients and CDL drivers and we do not consider it a burden to assist you with replacement paperwork.

And we charge the same amount for the DOT CDL Medical card as our competitors, so why go there when we are so much better, faster, and nicer?  And you get a nice t-shirt!




4) I consider it an honor to treat our DOT drivers, and that includes the people who speak mostly Spanish.  Our exams can always be done 100% in Spanish!  It is not a problem to us if you are not comfortable in English.

I have young women here who I hire based on the fact that Spanish is their first language, and English is their second language.  I want fluent language proficiency so that communication is always correct and no misunderstandings occur either during a chiropractic visit or a CDL exam.  This is more than my own version of a legal requirement (it is not required in NJ to offer services in any language other than English) but actually more of a desire to be polite.

You cannot have an office in the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ and not have Spanish speakers in the office.  If you think that you can exist as English-only you will be out of business soon – especially if some other business owner has Spanish-speakers working there!

Also, language is more than the words said.  My employees know how to speak in the manner that makes our office friendly and kind.  Simply, South American women speak to each other in a familiar way that is not found in the north and I encourage that.

More than that, healing is more than what I do in my office; it is the atmosphere in which I do it.  Spanish speakers want to be in a place where they can communicate easily.

That is what my employees do – make my office warm and friendly (there is a Yiddish word for this, “HEIMISH” which translates to “warm, homey, friendly”).

5) As a doctor with an office and a phone number, my world is constantly interrupted with people trying to sell me bullshit and lies.  From outright scam artists who mail and call me to those “chiropractic marketing gurus” I mentioned above, I have become both inured and accustomed to the crap that comes to me as a constant river.

6) The conflicts around the world, from actual wars down to fundamentalist suicide bombers who seemed to feel that they have nothing to live for are always based on the same thing: old people who would never put their own families or themselves in harm’s way telling young people who they barely know to die for a cause.  These same old men always join their people in mourning when there is retaliation for their instigations to to war and their attacks on other people.

7) This issue of old men compelling young people to live odd lives that result in death is done on a lesser scale, even just in the strange ways that unbalanced parents can cause their children anguish because of the parents’ odd compulsions.

During my first marriage, I soon learned that my wife’s father had created an odd dialogue with my wife (his daughter) which found her revealing private issues with him for no apparent reason except his own interests.  In most households, adult children are allowed some privacy around their marriage or their bodily integrity.

I would overhear her revealing our sex life and her menstrual cycles with what I assumed was her mother (why a mother needed to know her daughter’s intimate details and why a woman would want to talk these things over with her mother was something I had simply chalked up to the lives that women lead with each other).  

When I questioned why she felt compelled to share this information with her mother she shocked me with her answer!  Imagine my surprise when she informed me that these conversations were not with her mother but with her father!  And before anyone assumes that my wife was very young, puzzled and seeking answers from a learned medical professional I need to tell you that my wife was 40 at that time and her father was a retired high school history teacher.

She told me many times (crying) that she had spent a lifetime trying to distance herself from her father’s prying questions, but always ending up telling him what he wanted to know. The question will never be answered why he felt a need to bother his daughter until she answered such personal queries!  I divorced her very soon after discovering one odd thing about her family dynamics after another.  It got to be too much!

We also need to wonder where her (very much alive and married to her father) mother was in all of this and why she felt that these questions to her perimenopausal daughter was both pertinent and legitimate of her husband, her daughter’s father.

Our marriage ended and my ex-wife moved back in with her parents. The way I say it, both the father and the daughter are my ex-wife now!  

There is nothing healthy about old people ruining the lives of young people for their own selfish needs.

8) Rapes on college campuses are a far more frequent and a far worse problem than anyone can comprehend, especially if the university or college has a vested interest in the rapist. Whether he is a college athlete, or child of an alumni with great wealth who pays the enormous tuition these places charge; in any case, the school wants to protect the rapist, not the student who was raped!

When these events occur, the women soon find themselves not only the victim of sexual assault, but also a victim of the school’s administration as it uses all resources (the campus counseling center’s private records, the school nurse’s private files – both supposedly protected by HIPAA laws but, in actuality, property of the school itself) to create a case against the raped woman!

The woman soon learns that campus employees are beholden to the school that pays their salary! This woman finds herself with no avenues of relief and all trusted people are compelled by their personal economic concerns to assist in the employer’s (the university) devaluing as a human being and the elevation and protection of the campus in which she was attacked!

Schools will never let a single woman be the basis for their problems.  Issues involving sex continue to be viewed through the lens of 1950s values which can be summed up as a “good” woman never allows herself to be placed in a position that she should have had the wisdom and guidance to have avoided.  The school acts as if the knowledge and wisdom of a 19 year old woman should be superior to that of an equally-19 year old male!

Horny star athletes and privileged boys of wealth, neither of whom have heard the word “no” fin the brief lives are now who are also considered to have no responsibility when a woman complains about their behavior.  Layers of lawyers, provided by the alumni, the school, and their parents work hard to quash any investigation, and obstruct the release of evidence, and important things that are both lost and misplaced to keep this “golden and privileged” man-child out of trouble. 

Soon, the rape case disappears and all the powers go back to “normal”.  The true power structure of male-centric universities are revealed as have never changed and not a ripple remains where a young woman once stood.

9)  Walnuts each day keep the doctor away? – Eating a handful of walnuts each day might help keep the doctor away, at least for some people who are at risk of developing diabetes, a U.S. study suggests.

10) Tumeric is great for you but it does not absorb well.  Buy Turmeric with piperine or add black pepper to your food to release  the wonderful powers of tumeric.

11) A new study reveals that when you’re older, your brain health is directly tied to your cardiorespiratory fitness. Seems having a healthy heart and lungs beefs up connections between various regions of your brain, and that’s key to thinking clearly. 

Fortunately, you don’t have to be Jack LaLanne (a chiropractor, graduated from Lincoln Chiropractic College in 1932) to reap the senior cerebral benefits of aerobic endurance. (At 70, he swam 1.5 miles wearing shackles while towing 70 rowboats holding 70 people!) Instead, try these three tips to help you achieve a younger RealAge and better brain function. 

* Practice deep breathing. Close your eyes. Breathe in slowly for a count of four; hold it for a two-count. Exhale slowly and evenly for an eight-count. Repeat 5 times, twice a day. 

* Walk, walk, walk. Aim for 10,000 steps a day; so grab a pedometer and a buddy and enjoy! 

*Maintain a healthy weight with a Mediterranean diet. Healthy weight reduces strain on heart and lungs, eases cardio-damaging inflammation and helps oxygenate your brain and body! 


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