Chiropractic videos for patient education were born on August 6, 1981 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I was there as the Peter Graves video from Renaissance International had its worldwide debut. Since then, patient education videos have earned an important place in the education of new patients.

Chiropractic Video Benefits

The idea of using this new fangled thing called a VCR to educate patients was a new idea. No one had ever done it before. But upon closer inspection, chiropractic patient education videos made sense:

Avoid repetitious explanations. Most chiropractic report of findings consists of an orientation and anatomical background that applies to just about every patient.

Saves time. Obviously, if you’re not giving a radiographic seminar with every patient because they already saw it on video, it can free up five- to ten-minutes that you can do something more productive.

Consistent and complete. Some chiropractors will abridge their patient explanations if the reception room is backing up. Video is consistent. Same message every time.

High impact. With graphics, sound effects, music and other video effects, the chiropractic message can have a much greater impact than a verbal description.

Patient accepted. If you follow the guidelines below, you’ll discover that patients expect to watch a video when they are having a health care procedure performed, whether vision correction, dental implants or virtually any type of elective surgery.

Like any tool, the use of chiropractic videos can be abused. A chiropractor can quickly use up his or her limited social authority by imposing patient education videos that are inappropriate. In fact, choose the wrong chiropractic video and it can create more headaches than it solves!

Chiropractic Video Guidelines

Here are the most important considerations when contemplating the purchase of chiropractic videos for educating your patients:

Short. How short is short? Short. With the reduced attention spans of today’s new patient, you want to be sure that each video is no more than 7-8 minutes. Naturally, if you can secure videos that are spellbinding and keep patients on the edge of their seat (unlikely), you can go longer.

Relevant. Remember, patients want to consult a chiropractor, not become one! The key is to walk the line between what a patient wants to know, and what a patient needs to know. It’s a fine line. Who knows for sure what’s relevant to a patient? Patients. The key thing to remember is that the videos aren’t for you, they’re for patients. Consider having some of your better patients’ critique the available choices before you purchase.

Reassuring. Besides laying a foundation for your own chiropractic explanations, the videos you use should be perceived by patients as reassuring and hopeful. Including positive comments from actual patients can be instrumental in this. Also, avoid showing actual chiropractic adjustments. It often looks more violent to an observer than a participant and could actually undermine patient compliance.

Chiropractic Video Implementation

The best chiropractic patient education videos are the ones you create yourself. This can be difficult and time consuming. The next best is to purchase videos from one of the top three or four companies that provide patient education supplies. Regardless of which videos you choose, here are some implementation suggestions:

Staff introduction. Before showing video, your paraprofessional staff should introduce the video, explaining why it is being shown and how it benefits the patient. It might sound like this, “Before you see Dr. Smith, she would like you to watch this short, five-minute video that explains what you can expect on your visit today.”

Be consistent. Staff changes or an uncooperative new patient can cause an interruption in patients seeing the videos. This can interfere with patients having a complete orientation and is often the cause of poor follow through and even referrals.

Chiropractor follow up. It’s essential that the chiropractor acknowledge that the patient has seen the video and solicit their feedback. This communicates the importance you place on the videos and paves the way for patient acceptance of future videos. “What was the greatest surprise or new piece of information that you picked up from our video?”

Chiropractic videos will never replace a personal, knee-to-knee explanation of chiropractic principles. However, if you want to help a lot of people, it’s essential that you use technology where appropriate to save time, increase the impact of your communications and set the stage for long-term patient relationships.

Lower back pain is one of the most significant health problems affecting Americans today. Look at some quotes from the National Institutes of Health (NIH):

* Seventy to 85 percent of all people have back pain at some time in their life.

* Back pain is the most frequent cause of activity limitation in people younger than 45 years old.

“Nearly everyone has low back pain sometime. Men and women are equally affected. It occurs most often between ages 30 and 50, due in part to the aging process but also as a result of sedentary life styles with too little (sometimes punctuated by too much) exercise….”

These are pretty frightening statistics. Apparently, there are few people who haven’t felt the shot of electricity running from their foot right up into their lower back. Agony. Better than a TASER any day. And you would wonder what the medical profession is up to. These numbers represent a lot of suffering for you and me. And it means a lot of money lost to us because of time off work, inconvenience and treatments. I ask myself regularly, “why isn’t the government really behind getting an effective remedy for this epidemic?” For, if practically the whole population gets it, it is an epidemic.

This is a real puzzle for me. Especially since I managed to figure out how to get rid of mine myself. You probably don’t want a long winded story about my particular experience with back pain. My friendship with the back pain dragon would stretch over fifteen years with repeated bouts of strong pain keeping me off work and making life a misery. I was in a prison of suffering and misery. And the road to the cure started with a visit to a member of the medical profession - my dentist! But I’m getting ahead of myself here…

The pain of sciatica and lower back pain is depressing. If you are like me, you feel a great sense of fear that it will never be better again. Well you can breath a sigh of relief - it does get better. It can even disappear completely and you can be back to a normal pain free state in a short time. And what’s more you can stay in this healthy state. Instead of facing of facing a future where you are not in control and your pain is in control of you, you can find yourself back in control again. And this is the key - control.

Before I dive in, let me say I learned these techniques from my own experience with back pain. I’m aiming this at people who don’t have cancer or some other serious illness. For most of us that isn’t the reason we have chronic pain in the lower back. And now I’ll tell you about my trip to the dentist. He’s not really a butcher, but he doesn’t like giving his patients painkilling injections “unnecessarily”. His explanations about the ill effects of novocaine and the fact my wife has known him so long make me put up with it.

So, there I am sitting back in the hot seat, waiting for the drilling to commence. And an article which I’d read about research carried out at the University of Turin, Italy a couple of years ago came to mind. It was all about pain, morphine and the placebo effect. The problem of lower back pain has to be approached in two ways or on two levels. This is because there are two causes for chronic pain. They are the amount of stimulation which the nerves experience and for how long. And the responses the brain learns to the pain. The researchers discovered that the brain can manufacture its own pain killers.

So back in the dentist’s chair, I simply told my lower brain to switch off the pain signals. Simply repeating the message over and over led to my hardly feeling a thing, while my friend drilled holes in four of my front teeth! That’s how I deal with back pain. When I feel it coming on, I start instructing my brain to switch off the nerves and reject the message. Try it yourself and see!

c James Barrington 2009

http://www.thestrongbackbook.com/

Like many people, I have a bad back. I think it comes with the territory these days. We all sit hunched over desks and computers and then we come home and slump down on the couch. We don’t stretch; we don’t exercise and so we have bad backs. My sciatica used to be so bad that I’d miss a week of work a few times a year. Shooting pains down to my ankle, hurt to sit, or stand or lay down.

Two things I did have helped me and I want to share them with you. The first is so obvious I shouldn’t have to say it: I lost some weight. I shed about 25 pounds and I feel worlds better. But what really helped my sciatica is change number 2 — I got a memory foam bed.

I did not think it would be such a dramatic difference but it was. It took about a week of sleeping on the new mattress before I started waking up feeling energized and ready to meet the world. I think it is the best $1,200 I ever spent. You probably just gasped at the dollar amount I named. Yes, it was expensive, but worth it.

I like a queen mattress. I like the size; it is big but not huge. So you have to spend a bit more if you are buying a larger mattress. Of course a full or twin is loads cheaper, just like with sheets. If you need to look at a cheaper alternative, a memory foam mattress pad is the way to go. You get the benefits of sleeping on a foam pad without the hefty price tag. A queen sized pad of memory foam will set you back at least a hundred dollars and for good quality, you might want to bump that up to $200.

How does it work and why is it so great for back pain? Memory foam is also called visco elastic foam and what that means is that the foam reacts to heat and weight. It becomes supple when heat is applied. And when weight is applied, the foam cells settle down and compress, instead of trying to spring back. The reason it is a god-send to bad back sufferers is the visco part. The foam reacts to your body temperature as you sleep and where you body is in contact with the mattress, the mattress conforms to your body. This relives pressure points. So you sleep in full support. Once NASA released memory foam into the commercial market, one of the first products was a mattress designed to eliminate bedsores.

So if you are waking up every morning in pain, you probably need a new mattress. Buying a memory foam mattress or topper should give you a great night’s sleep, but don’t take my word for it.