Our Treatment Philosophy
If you’ve ever been to a chiropractor before, you probably have some assumptions of how your treatment will go. Maybe you’ve seen the viral TikToks of chiropractors cracking entire backs and every joint in the body. Maybe you’ve been told that you need to come in every week for the next five years. Maybe you’ve worked with a chiropractor at sporting events. While everyone practices differently, I want to distill what makes Focus On Health different, so that you know exactly what to expect from your care.
Appointment #1: The New Patient Exam
When you hear about our new patient exam it may sound daunting. 40 minutes of movement to diagnose what’s going on. The reality is, this appointment is so long for a reason. We rely on the principles of the selective functional movement assessment (SFMA) to guide our care. This exam looks deep beyond where you are having pain to uncover dysfunction. While pain is generally the guiding force for people coming to see us, it’s not always what meets the eye.
At this appointment, you will also learn a critical skill-diaphragmatic breathing. This technique helps you build a strong canister in your core. Our activities of daily living require us to have a strong core foundation; whether you are running, playing with your kids or doing chores around the house, our body is designed to be protected. When we learn how to properly access our diaphragm and utilize our core stabilizing muscles, we find that activity becomes easier and pain-free.
Appointment #2: The Report Of Findings
While you will be treated on day one, the report of findings appointment is your time to learn exactly what is going on. At this appointment, your doctor will walk you through your diagnoses and treatment plan. This plan is individualized and built to meet your specific needs. Our doctors dedicate time and energy to making this plan realistic while also ensuring you will have the most success. This means not keeping you here forever, rather, doing a few weeks of work to see if improvements are made.
You will also get some homework at this appointment. Our doctors can’t see our patients everyday, even though we would love to. So, we send you home with a list of home exercises to reinforce what happens in the treatment room. These exercises are meant to correct and strengthen any areas that need support as shown in the SFMA. It is your job to execute on these, just as it is our job to treat you.
Appointments #3-8ish: Active Care
With a plan in place, it’s time to get to work! Active care is where our patients see the most success. During these appointments, you will receive the treatment mentioned in your plan. That is often a combination of joint manipulation (adjustments), manual therapy (muscle work) and dry needling. This is time meant to reset the joint and muscle systems and give them the opportunity to change. But, without any alteration to habits aside from treatment, these resets are not as successful.
Thus, our doctors develop an in-clinic exercise program designed to strengthen AFTER treatment. As a result, you are able to retrain your body to move properly. This helps you avoid falling into old patterns that hurt you in the first place. The exercise schematic is progressive, so on week one you are often just learning the movement patterns. By week four, you are able to lift more weight, do more explosive movements or test complex movement patterns.
Appointment #9: The FMS
At this point in your journey, you are feeling more confident, stronger and pain-free. You have put in the hard work and the time to make changes. You have stuck to the plan and you are reaping the benefits. We want to see how much you improve, which is why we use an additional screening tool to see how you are doing.
This is a much shorter version of the exam that you went through on day one, but they all live in the same family. The FMS is designed to look at your movement patterns from a 30,000 foot view. It gives us good information about how you’re moving after being in care with us, and if you are ready to go back to the activities you love. If things have cleared, you are ready to start tapering. If there are still things that need work or are causing pain, this is the time to reevaluate the plan and make changes.
Follow-Up Appointments
Since the FMS is personalized and leads to different plans, everyone looks a little different at this stage. Some people begin to taper care, only seeing us once a week and then pushing further beyond then. The goal is to determine what your threshold is. Whether you need to come in every two weeks or every three months is dependent on how your body responds to care and exercise.
We do not want to keep you on a plan where you need to see us every week. We want to equip our patients with the tools that they need to be successful in their lives. We are here for support, check-ins and, just like any other doctors office, to be sure that your musculoskeletal bill of health is clean.
If you’ve been hesitant about what seeing a chiropractor means, I promise it’s worth it. We want to make you more successful in whatever you love. Our team is dedicated to helping you see real results, not just keeping you in a cycle of pain and confusion. If you’re ready to take the next steps, we are ready to help you become better than before.
Alex