Responding to Suspicious Emails

That we all get sometimes. If you've been out in practice in a while, you'll probably have had some of these already. This is when somebody emails and they're asking us to help them with a condition that we're not able to claim we treat. Whether it's I've had graves disease, fibromyalgia, tremors, it's a whole host of them out there. You've probably got some of these before. And it puts us in a difficult situation because on the one hand, it might be a genuine inquiry, and whether or not we feel we can help some element of this person's symptoms or their case, we at least should be able to respond to them, or if we can't help, maybe signpost them. But on the other hand, it might be somebody out there trying to trick us. Now, in my opinion, the Good thinking society, these sort of chiropractic boogeyman, the ones trying to help you get to us in the night and trick us and things like that, they're actually a lot less active than we think. I think the vast majority of these emails that we get as practitioners are genuine. But we do need to be aware. There have been a handful of cases where they've tried to entrap people into saying things so they can then make a complaint. And I don't want to downplay that, and I don't want to say, let's not worry about it, but we need to respond in a way that keeps us safe from that element while still trying to help the person who's reached out to us for help. I see this come up all the time online. Somebody posted recently in one of the groups online saying, I've had this email. Does it sound suspicious? What do you guys think? And there's always some people there who say, don't touch it, don't reply, ignore it. And while that's going to keep you safe, it's not a very professional thing to do, in my opinion, because there's a good chance this is a genuine inquiry. Maybe they've read a case report online or they've heard somebody else say, oh, my chiropractor helped with this or helped with that. And let's be honest, if we're in practice for very long and we're paying attention, we've all seen cases where something unusual happens. After they come to us for treatment, their completely unrelated health condition resolves. I've had it with Crohn's disease before. I've had it with various coughs, cold, lung issues. There's A whole heap of things out there. And it seems that sometimes what we do does seem to help, that it doesn't happen in reliable, predictable fashion. So we can't ethically claim to treat it. But it is possible. And this is why people are going to ask these questions. Now, whether you want to take somebody on is a separate issue. I would argue, as long as you're very clear with the patient, that you could trial a short course of experimental care and you're not recommending they don't have something that's potentially more effective. You're not recommending they come off chemotherapy beds or anything crazy like that. Long as they know that you're not claiming to treat it and it's experimental, there's nothing wrong with trialing that. But if you feel you can't help, how about maybe signposting to somebody who can, because they may not have come across somebody that you can recommend. I had a woman who actually turned up for an appointment hoping I could treat her GRAVES disease from what she'd read online. And we had a little bit of a chat. And I explained that, look, we could trial on an experimental basis. I could feel scenarios of her spine that weren't working well. I said, we can handle those. Whether it affects the graves or not, I don't know. I've not seen that happen. I've heard it has. But to be honest, we had a little chat and her diet needed quite a bit of work. She's quite inflamed. So I referred her to a functional medicine practitioner. I know. I said, look, I think you're going to get much better results with this approach. Because she hadn't come across that, she hadn't tried that the medical route wasn't offering or anything. I said, I think they're going to help more if you try them and it doesn't work for you and you want to come back, the door's open. We could trial it if you wanted to. And she was really grateful for that and really felt like I'd taken her seriously and was trying to help her find the right person. So that's always an approach we can take as well. But coming back to the email, we need to respond carefully here whilst not closing the door to potentially helping somebody, whether we help them or someone else does. And the best way to do that is just to invite them to have a free consultation or a free chat in the clinic. Because if you can get them in the clinic, a, it's practically certain they're not trying to trick you because those Rare few people who occasionally do that, they're not going to take the time, they're playing a numbers game. They would just want to send out emails. You know, it's like the Nigerian email scams. They just want to send them to everybody. They're not going to bother calling people up individually very often because it's much easier just to send out a load of emails and hope you trick one or two people. So if you can do that and just say, look, what we focus on here is treatment of this, treatment of the spine of the musculoskeletal system. We wouldn't claim to be able to treat this thing per se, but it's possible we might be able to help them in some way. We'd recommend they just let's give you a phone call or let's bring you in for a free chat and we can discuss it further because that will screen out almost anybody who's trying to be manipulative here. And if they are, you'll suss it pretty well. There was that one example once of a telephone conversation where somebody tricked a chiropractor's receptionist into expressing some anti vaccination views. To be honest, listen to that phone call. A basic bit of front desk training could have avoided that situation. It's quite sure and it's quite clear that that person was really trying to put words in their mouth and trying to get them to say it. So as long as you don't say anything that you wouldn't say to the regulator, there's really nothing to worry about. So I would definitely respond to them, don't just ignore them. That might be a genuine person asking for help. And I can tell you, I've had patients come to see me who had emails ignored by other people. It upsets them, it bothers them, they feel like nobody wants to help them, they feel it's quite rude and unprofessional and at the very least you might be able to signpost them and help them get help they need from somebody else. So that's my approach. I would give that a try. The other thing I wanted to say is I'm going to be releasing quite a bit of free content soon, all about improving patient compliance, improving how you can get your patients to stick with your recommendations, create a plan that works for them, get them to follow your advice, whether that's home exercise, you know, other lifestyle advice you might give, all these sorts of things that we often struggle with with our patients. The best way to find that, if you haven't already is. Sign up to my email newsletter. If you go to patientcentered.co.uk, you'll see a box at the bottom where you can sign up. You'll see some other free videos you can get there as well. Or the other way is to go to Patient, sorry, Patient Centered Chiropractors, the Facebook group. Just go to Facebook search Patient Centered Chiropractors. I'll be posting the first videos in there as well, so if you don't want to miss out on that, check those out. I'm also going to be doing a live seminar soon as well, just near Manchester in March. It's one of the only couple of live seminars I'm going to do this year. All that stuff you can find if you just reach out to me or you're on my email list, you'll get that info there as well. So hope that helps you guys and we'll catch up soon. Take care of.