Handling the Resistant Patient

Hey, everyone. Chris, again, it's day three in the chiropractic nutrition series I'm doing here. So this is all about how to talk about nutrition, diet, lifestyle changes with your patients. Conversations that can be quite tricky to get them on board with. Now, we talked the other day about the abdominal palpation, like I do with every patient, to get a lot of them on board. And yesterday about how I then introduced the idea of some nutritional lifestyle changes using the EPE framework. So if you haven't checked that out, go and watch those first. Today I'm going to talk about how I handle patients who are a bit resistant to change, those who kind of sit back and go, no, I don't really want to do that right now. And that does happen. It doesn't matter how good a communicator you are, what you find in the examination, how enthusiastic you are, you will get patients who only came to see you for manual therapy, like, I came here for you to crack my back. Why are you talking about diet? You will get some people like that. Not everybody is going to get on board. But the way we handle those who don't get on board straight away can make a big difference to whether they'll look at it later, can even make a difference to whether they come back. So when I get a patient who I've done the EPE framework and I've asked their thoughts and they've just gone, I just don't think I need to do that, or I don't think that's relevant, or, no, I don't really want to look at my diet right now. They're not throwing up obstacles about ways that we can overcome it. They're just saying, basically, no, I don't want to do that. So then what I'll do is I'll let them know, said, okay, we've got two options here. Either we don't do that for now and we put it aside. And this is for somebody who I think, you know, would benefit from it, but maybe can still get better without it just take longer, or you've got other people. And I've seen a few of these where, in my opinion, they're just not going to get better if we don't address it. So how we handle those is a little different. The ones who I think would benefit but can probably still get better without, I'll let them know. So that's absolutely fine. I'm still confident we can get you the results. I believe it's going to take longer without doing this, but if you'd rather do it and you're happy for it to take a bit longer, that's fine. If I feel like we're not getting the results, I expect we can revisit this later on. How does that sound? Again, I'm asking how they think about that and basically saying, all right, let's put it aside for now, but we won't completely take it off the table. Now, for the others who I really don't think it's going to help, we just owe it to them to be honest. I would just tell them, look, in my professional opinion, if you don't address this, my care is not going to work. This is likely going to be a complete roadblock to you getting better. And then essentially the patient has a decision to make about whether they're going to enrol in care or not. And you can say to somebody, if you don't do this, I honestly don't believe that we're going to get you the results you want, whatever their goal might be, and I can't in good faith take you on as a patient. Now you're letting them know this. You're not saying, right, that's it, get out. You're showing it from a caring perspective, but it's absolutely okay if you think you can't help somebody to help, let them know that. Now, in my experience, the vast majority of cases fall into the first bucket, but we make sure that we let them know it's fine for you to make this choice. If I feel like we do need to revisit it, I'll let you know. So we're showing them we respect their choice. We're not making them wrong, we're not blaming them, we're not guilting them, and we're not going, okay, but it's going to take longer. You're just showing them that's absolutely fine and we'll revisit it later if we need to. So check that out again if you want to learn more about nutrition generally, you want to know how to have these conversations and what to give your patients. Thoroughly recommend Simon's course. Check out using the link below. Make sure you do it before Friday so you don't miss out, and I'll see you tomorrow for the next video.