Good morning all. I hope everyone down here is staying dry.
We've been in the middle of Tropical Storm Debby all weekend. Half
of Tampa was under water all weekend and parts of Pinellas were out
of power, but here I am bright and early sitting in clinic hoping
my appointments show up.
Despite the weather, my weekend turned out pretty darn
entertaining. Saturday, my pals and I were at our local soccer bar
rooting on La Furia Roja ("The Furious Red"), the Spanish national
soccer team, against France. The match ended 2-0 in favor of Spain,
and the celebrating didn't end till early Sunday morning. The rest
of Sunday I had to suck up my mild nausea and headache and
entertain family from Tennessee that I hadn't seen in about a year
or so. The great thing about seeing family that you haven't seen in
a while is all the questions about how and what are you doing now
(can you sense my sarcasm?). Being the glass-half-full kind of
person that I am, I found the silver lining and took this as an
opportunity to hone my rant on what chiropractic is, and how I plan
on utilizing my new found skills once I graduate in another few
months.
The questions I was asked by family are questions we as
chiropractors will face all the time from other health care
professionals, prospective patients or skeptics. It is important to
have a confident and intelligent answer to offer when this
situation eventually occurs, if it hasn't happened to you already.
So what do I say when I'm asked what it is that chiropractors do? I
like to say that I'm a doctor (or will be one) who takes a look at
the patient as a whole, and treats them as such. I'm not against
the use of medications and some other allopathic treatments,
because in some instances they are warranted. I prefer to treat the
underlying source of a patient's discomfort in a non-invasive
manner. As a chiropractor, I am almost expected to concentrate on
the musculoskeletal aspect of pain, which I have no problem with
it, but as an NUHS graduate I will be trained as a primary care
physician and will practice in that manner. I always end with
asking the questioners to come and have me evaluate them to see for
themselves what it is I can do for them. I guess you could call
that my "elevator speech." Believe me, as cheesy as it sounds,
everyone should have one, and it should roll off the tongue.
Well, enough of my rant. I hope everyone has a great week and
for those of you taking midterms, best of luck. Hopefully everyone
has been keeping up with their material so the tests don't seem
that daunting. Remember you usually know more than you think you
do, so try not to let the nerves get to you too much.
Good luck on midterms,
Dex