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#112  3 Million

4/30/2014

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What psychomotor skill (a learned activity that is not normal physiology) have you done 1.5 million times in your life?  A professional golfer will take 28 years to accumulate 1,500,000 swings if he does 200 per day 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year.  Ruben says that a professional batting practice pitcher might throw a baseball that many times in his career.  Allen says he has strummed/picked a guitar that many times in his 60+ years.  If you are 52 years of age you would have to have done the exact same thing 79 times every day from the day you were born to have done it 1.5 million times.  If you started it when you were 20 you would have to have done it 128 times every day.  I think we can agree that this professional golfer, pitcher, and guitarists are experts at what they do.  In fact they were experts long before they reached 1.5 million. 

I have been in clinical practice for 26 years multiplied by 51 weeks of practice per year times 230 patients minimum per week times 5 spinal adjustments per office visit per patient equals 1,524,900 spinal adjustments my hands have rendered so far in my career.  1.5 million times I have felt patients’ spines, decided where to adjust, how to adjust, and then adjusted.  There are 24 vertebrae plus the skull and sacro-iliac joints, and each joint can be adjusted a number of ways, so the decision making process for each of these 1.5 million encounters has been quite a learning process in itself, and likely much more valuable to you than the adjustment skills themselves.  In other words, while 1.5 million may qualify me many times over as an expert technician at the skill of adjusting, what is far more valuable are my learned skills as a doctor to sift through your history, examination, and imaging to know what to do.  Or, in some cases, what not to do.        

Adjusting the spine is what is referred to as a psychomotor skill.  It requires the basic knowledge of anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, and physics to perform.  To obtain a license to perform this skill requires nearly 5,000 hours of education in other areas such as biochemistry,  radiology, nutrition, physical examination, embryology, microbiology, pathology, differential diagnosis, pediatrics, psychology, and much more.  Written and oral examinations must then be passed for national and state recognition of clinical competency.  And that is when the real education begins.  With adjustment #1 I had my basic knowledge and primitive skills.  Not much really.  Be glad you were not patient #1.  When I look back to that day I realize now that although I had thousands of hours of education, I sure didn’t know much about people and how to care for them.  That knowledge would take dozens of years, hundreds of hours of additional seminars and training, and hundreds of thousands of adjustments. 

So what does this mean to you?  It means that I have probably heard your story before, probably many times, so I probably know how to take care of you.  In many cases it means that the examination is mostly a confirmation of what I already know just from taking your history.  It means I can sense or feel things by touching your spine that I could not even 10 years ago, let alone 26 years ago.  It means that I can give the right adjustment to the right vertebra in the right direction to give maximum results with minimum force.  So why write this?  If I were you I would want to know that chiropractic is safe and effective and that my chiropractor knows what he is doing.  Also, as a patient I might need ammunition to explain to family, friends, co-workers, and even my medical doctor why I am choosing to utilize chiropractic rather than drugs and surgery, folk-remedies, or doing nothing at all.      

But why 3,000,000 as the title you ask?  That is how many adjustments I hope to render before my body forces me into retirement.  Now how many people have done any one thing 3,000,000 times in a life?  I hope I can and that you will be there for my 3,000,000th adjustment party.   

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    Dr. Rick

    After writing an article per week for a year, I just kept going.  These are most of my collection.  They are written with my existing patients in mind, so some stuff may seem odd or unusual, but would make perfect sense to those who know chiropractic and who know me.  Enjoy and share!

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Yolanda wrote:
     
     I used to suffer severe headaches and migraines on a daily basis, usually all day.  I managed to work in an office because I had to.  When I went home at the end of the day I would often close the shades and go to bed.  I could not plan weekend events because I simply never knew how I was going to feel tomorrow.  If there were a special event such as a birthday or wedding, I would begin to medicate myself two weeks in advance to give myself the best chance of making the event.
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     An opportunity came up for us to adopt a newborn baby girl not long after I began chiropractic care.  This baby was particularly important to me and my husband because her mother is a relative.  Tragically, her mother was also a drug user and did drugs during her pregnancy.  If we could not adopt the baby she would have been put into the foster system since the biological mother was incapable of raising her.
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     What does this have to do with chiropractic?  The reality is that without chiropractic, I would still be nearly an invalid with headaches.  I COULD NOT HAVE TAKEN CARE OF AN INFANT OR RAISED A YOUNG CHILD.  THEREFORE, SHE WOULD NOT HAVE ANY OF THE OPPORTUNITIES IN LIFE THAT MY HUSBAND AND I WILL BE ABLE TO PROVIDE FOR HER.  MY DAUGHTER’S LIFE IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE SOMEBODY MADE ME GO TO A CHIROPRACTOR. 
     You need to tell everyone you know what you know about chiropractic.  Who knows who’s life you will change too.
Andrew's mother, Barbara, wrote:

     Hello, My name is Andrew and I am a happy, healthy one year old.  But I wasn’t so happy or healthy when I first met Dr. Rick a few months ago.  I had been having problems with my ears for four months, I couldn’t sleep at night and I was miserable.  We’d been to the doctor lots of times but nothing was helping.  In fact, all the medicines the doctor had tried seemed to make me worse instead of better!  Both the regular doctor and the Ear-Nose and Throat doctor said that if the antibiotics didn’t work, then they’d just have to put tubes in.  Now my Mom and dad weren’t about to let them do surgery on me, especially since they had been reading and learned that tubes can cause more problems than they solve.  My mom and dad did a lot of praying.  Then my mom heard that sometimes babies who have a traumatic birth like mine have ear trouble.  You see when I was born they used a vacuum extractor and forceps to pull me out.  I guess all that yanking on my head, hurt my neck.  She also heard that chiropractic care can be the answer.  Now she was skeptical because she couldn’t imagine a chiropractor helping ear infections!?!  But at that point she was willing to try anything!!  Happily, a few weeks of adjustments and my ears were all cleared up.  In addition, I no longer had a stiff neck or shoulders and my whole personality was happier.  I have to tell all babies who have ear troubles, don’t let them give you tubes until you at least try chiropractic care first.  After all, it can’t hurt and if you’re like me, you could be perfectly well with no drugs and no surgery.  In my family, we thank God for Dr. Rick, because I feel better, my mom and dad are happier and sometimes, I even sleep through the night.