"Show don't Tell" Part 1 - Learning Style Integration

I just want patients to see the value in what I'm doing beyond just being a glorified back cracker. This is a comment I had from a colleague recently I was chatting to. We've been discussing some things around their practice, how certain things are going well, but some of their frustrations as well. And one of the things that a lot of practitioners struggle with, and not just new grads either. This chap's had his own practice for a couple of years now is getting patients to see the value in the care that you provide. You know, I know that all the TikTok videos, we all worry that patients just see us as cracking backs and, you know, glorified back crackers and this kind of stuff. And as well as that, we often feel like there's much more we can provide to patients beyond pain relief and beyond symptom relief. But it's difficult to get patients to understand that. And I used to, when I first started out, I used to think this was really about the report of findings. And so I worked really hard on my report of findings, how to explain it in a way that it makes sense, how to get patients to see what we're doing, how that's going to get in their things, get them back to their goals, that kind of thing. And that's all good. But something I've learned over time is actually, it goes much deeper than that if you want patients to really have that lasting impression, to not just, you know, know, hear the value, but to internalize it and to feel it and to believe it. And what I'm going to do in the next series of short videos is I'm going to show you the multiple ways that I do this in my practice and how you can modify that for yours as well. One of the key things that I think has led a lot of practitioners astray. First of all, there's the idea that if you explain something to patients, they'll understand it. If that was true, then we wouldn't have to keep nagging them to do their stretches and their exercises and this kind of thing, and we wouldn't have this frustration. I see lots of practitioners who explain things really well. See, still have patients who don't get it, don't take it on board. And they're the ones visit 3 and 4. They're saying, so what are you doing again? Or when the pain goes away, they're like, why do I need to come back? The pain's gone. They don't really get what we're doing. At more that physiological Level and giving physiology lessons and talking about proprioception, this kind of stuff that doesn't do it either. It's much more than explaining. Now, one of the approaches that I encountered, actually, while I was a student at uni and when I first graduated many years ago, was this idea, it comes from nlp, of different learning styles. So you had some people were visual learners, they learned by seeing. Some people were auditory learners, they learned by hearing, and some people were kinesthetic learners, and they learned by feeling and getting their hands on things. And this was taught in terms of identify which style your patient is and then modify your communication to them. And it did kind of work. In hindsight, I realized it actually just worked because it made me really pay attention to things like their body language and to match them where they were at. And that can be useful. But newer research has come out showing that actually all of us use all three styles and we don't even have one preferred style. We will learn differently in different contexts, and that can change. And rather than trying to work out where your patient's default is that day, I found it works much better to make sure that you are addressing all three where you can. And in my experience, the one that we do the least of as chiropractors is feeling, which is ironic given that we focus on movement. But we do a very good job with the auditory learners because we explain and we use our words. Most of us do a pretty good job visually. We pull out our spinal model or we show them some pictures on a screen, or we send them handouts many times in terms of getting to actually feel the difference. This is where we're missing something. And that's a shame, because feeling is believing. If a patient can feel a difference, they don't even necessarily have to understand verbally what has happened, but they know that there has been a change. And yes, you still should be explaining, giving a great report of findings there, but really it's about proving it's that feeling is believing idea. If they can feel the change and they can feel what's going on and they can feel what you're doing, and you can give an explanation that adds context to that, then that is going to go far, far deeper for them. They're going to learn it much more effectively. It's a bit like when you were learning to adjust. You can look at all the pictures and watch all the videos and look at all the diagrams and work out with a spinal model, where am I trying to push here to do this? But you only feel that you can do it. When you feel that change, when you actually feel the adjustment, you do the movement, and that's when you start to go, oh, I've got it. I can feel it now. So that's what we need to be doing with our patients. And one thing to think about, I'm going to go how I do this over the next few videos here. One thing to think about right now, though, is how are you cueing patients into what they're feeling? How are you showing them that there is a change occurring within them? You know, something doesn't do this very well is looking at leg length saying that, oh, your legs were a bit uneven. Now I've adjusted you, your leg lengths are even that doesn't really feel like anything to the patients. They often can't feel that. So that's not a very good example. There's many different ways of doing this. I personally use motion power patient. I find it one of the best teaching tools for patients. Not just about working out where to adjust, but whatever you do, if you're not thinking about this right now, I'd have a think about how do you get patients to feel the difference in what you're doing? And also thinking about how often do they feel that? Because I think we actually miss a lot of opportunities, we could be helping patients to do that more often. So have a think about that and I'll be back in the next video. I'll walk you through exactly how I do this and all the opportunities you have right through the course of care, including before you started treatment, to help prime patients to really understand this and to get it through feeling as well as the auditory as well as the visual side of things as well. So keep an eye out for that video coming soon.