E-mail message this week .. Let’s Get Off Our Butts

 

That may have gotten your attention.

 

Many years ago in 2007, check the archives, the ACA reported to its members that an insurance carrier had released new policies declaring that there was insufficient evidence to support chiropractic care for children and adolescents with headaches.

 

When I read the e-mail concerning the carrier’s decision not to pay for any pediatric or headache related services, I said Wow!! Am I dreaming or has some lame chiropractor providing opinions for the insurance provider given the most ridiculous advice possible. Now come on, how many of you reading this e-mail throughout 32 great countries spanning the entire globe have adjusted and helped greatly people with all sorts of headaches? Many of these folks have been through the wringer with medical pills, potions and salves attempting to rid or manage their migraines or general all purpose stress, sinus headaches or whatever you call it. If I could see a show of hands, I bet it would be most of you raising them right now. In fact, very few of us have failed, even with the crudest of technical prowess, to help many with headaches.

 

So how can an insurance provider decide after so many years of insurance coverage and the existence of our great profession, that either chiropractic care was useless or dangerous for their insured with cervicogenic headaches either trapping the greater or inferior occipital nerve or aggravating the cervical and sub occipital soft tissue bed after a violent whiplash, sports injury or fall or general physical stress resulting into neurological stress?  Who amongst us doing specific cervical work, analyzing biomechanically the subluxation complex how would you have  responded? Regardless if you are in or out of network or insurance coverage does not apply to your office, what have you to say? 

 

As far as children, I don’t have to go far beyond my three. They were delivered via my hands in my home and never visited a pediatrician, taken medication of any type while in my charge and that was into their twenties. They rarely were sick, their friends not lucky enough to be adjusted, were sick often. My kids felt jilted in school when medicine time came and bottle after bottle was pulled from student cubbies to be administered to their classmates in the throw of an illness. “Daddy, why can’t I have something,” I heard more than once from either of my three. It didn’t take long for me to “straighten” them out with a loving understanding of the healing of the body and how they have been lucky to been cared for chiropractically from birth. How lucky they were and how unfortunate it would be if you or any chiropractor were intimidated to back off from checking children or neglect the cervical spine to rid the plague of chronic headaches from those that pass your threshold.

 

Yes, we can treat and not mention the proper diagnosis code but it just takes us down a little further into the abyss of denial. We are a weak profession both in numbers and in agreement. This will not change in my professional lifetime but individually and collectively via state and district associations, not to mention our schools and national groups, more research or awareness articles must be sent to both the local and national media. Sharing within our professional periodicals is like preaching to the choir, but this is not enough. Assign member doctors with writer’s ability to send regular reports to the media highlighting the benefits and wonders of chiropractic. Assign research students on every campus to use their skills to tag objective findings and chiropractic adjustments as a safe alternative to lifetime medication and impaired personal performance.

 

A lot has changed since 2007, but has it. We still need to get off our duffs and kick some butt

 

Now, I feel better