Chiropractic Use: Prevalence, Patterns, and Marketing Insights | Podcast Ep. 196

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I am your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. The prevalence patterns and predictors of chiropractic use among US Adults. Spine took a look at this just a year back. We're going to take a look at their findings today. Analyze who exactly is using chiropractic. How can we predict who might use chiropractic. Chiropractic in the future? A little bit of MD relationship building built into it. This is going to be a great episode. Today we are examining a paper that came out in Spine in 2017 and it's titled the Prevalence Patterns and predictors of Chiropractic Use among US Adults. And this was results from a national health interview survey. And what they found might surprise you a little bit because it definitely surprised me. They found that the lifetime and 12 month prevalence of chiropractic use was 24% and 8.4% respectively. So they found on the individuals that they surveyed, over the course of a person's lifetime, 24% of people experienced chiropractic care at some point in their life. That seemed really, really high to me. I thought it was much lower. But then the second stat probably makes a little more sense in my mind, which is over the last 12 months, 8.4% of people said that they had seen a chiropractor at least once. That's typically where I kind of earmark or have my thought process in on the usage of chiropractic is around 10% of the population. They're saying 8.4% of US adults had used chiropractic in the last 12 months. Now, one thing that they noticed that was interesting was between 2002 and 2012, there actually was an upward tick. There's a growing trend of chiropractic use. And not surprisingly, back pain and neck pain were at the top of the list. Back pain, over 60% of the individuals who sought chiropractic care reported doing it because of back pain, about 30% for neck pain. So the bottom line is there's a pretty substantial portion of US adults have utilized chiropractic over the last 12 months. And more interestingly, and we're going to dive deep in this in a moment, they reported associated positive outcomes for overall well being and or their specific health problems. So not only did people generally say, hey, I went there for back pain, my back pain got better. Hey, I went there for neck pain, my neck pain got better. And you know that because I asked docs each and every day, hey, what percentage of people come into your practice, leave happier than when they came in, AKA got the benefits they were looking for. Typically it's like 90%. So chiropractic is safe and effective. We've seen that through numerous studies over the past 10 years. But the bottom line is this takes a look and says, hey, overall well being and health was also reported as being improved through chiropractic care. That's anecdotal, but that's something. And it starts to become interesting, especially when this is published again in Spine, which is an unbelievably top tier journal. This is great publicity for chiropractic. So they found a couple what I'll say characteristics of individuals who use chiropractic care, and this is probably going to be not surprising to you is people over 30 years old used chiropractic care more than people under 30 years old. Now I think probably sub 30 year olds are growing due to sports, due to CrossFit, due to athletics. But when we look at the stats, over 30 years old more likely to use chiropractic than under 30 years old. And that makes sense in every way, shape and form as well because with back pain being the driver for over 60% of people, hey, back complaints usually come on when you start to enter into your 40s and 50s. That's when the disc starts to degenerate. That's typically when disc herniations, bulges, protrusions start to pop up as you age. Beyond that we start to look towards spinal stenosis and neurogenic claudication. All those fun things to look forward to as we get older. But this makes sense then when we look and say a lot of people over 30 were more likely than under 30. Another fact is college educated or more more likely to use chirophractic. This is something we've known probably and seen in the literature for the last decade or two. But people who have a higher level of education are more likely to use chiropractic than those who do not have that higher level of education. And then spine pain, headache and migraine or arthritis were sort of those top three conditions. Now spine pain could be neck, could be thoracic, could be low back and lumbar, but spine pain, headache and or migraine, that kind of classified those together. And arthritic changes, joint pain basically were the top three reasons why people reported visiting a chiropractor. So I want you to start to get your gears turning. We talked a little bit a couple weeks ago with Grant Elliott on Instagram, et cetera. These are the pain points. These are the reasons people are going to see chiropractic. So what does that mean to you? And why am I saying Instagram? And what does that have to do with this? These are the topics you need to be talking about. These are the pain points. People are looking for benefits. They are why people visit your practice and why people visit chiropractors. So the question might comes to you, are you talking about these things across your social media channels day in and day out, it would be a good idea to do so. And if you're targeting people, perhaps targeting above 30, perhaps targeting individuals who have a college or more education, and then talking about the most common reasons those individuals would come into your practice and is probably a pretty good strategy to get some traction as far as getting people in your front door. So as we talked about earlier, there's kind of a well being component of this as well. So there's a lot of respondents that reported positive outcomes of chiropractic utilization saying that there was an improvement to their overall health, which was over 66%. Nearly 67% of people said, my overall health improved after seeing a chiropractor. That's really interesting. And perhaps even more interesting is over 40% said they're sleeping better. Now, clearly if you improve pain, if you improve dysfunction, you're not going to report great overall health. If you're in pain and have crazy dysfunctions, you can't do your activities of daily living right. So there's a certain portion of this that's tied to pain. But also it goes to show there's just so much to chiropractic. We see people come in and out of our practices, day in and day out that are unable to perform these activities of daily living. They're having difficulty sleeping. And it's not always all due to pain. Sometimes it's stress, sometimes it's positioning, it's range of motion. Chiropractic has the opportunity, you as a chiropractor have the opportunity to address all of these things and more. So don't hesitate to talk about them in your practice. And one of the other things that we touched on at the top that I want to reiterate is back pain and back problems counted for over 60% of people who came in. Neck issues were about 30, 30%. So chiropractic was used mainly because people believed it would help when combined with their medical treatment. So over 64% of people were doing a combination. We've touched on research earlier on this podcast and with members of The Evans based chiropractor as they build relationships with other healthcare providers about adding chiropractic standard medical care. That's just pragmatically a lot of times how it happens. Whether or not you like it or not, it's a different story. But in this case, we see over 60% of people had been receiving medical care and added chiropractic to it, which is in line with what we've seen and what we know. So the final component of this, which I think gets really interesting and starts to touch onto those relationships, is that this study found that a recommendation for an adult to consult a chiropractor is rarely initiated by a conventional healthcare provider. Many of the people reported their conventional healthcare provider failed to inquire about their possible use of chiropractic. Now, Incidentally, less than 5% said they were worried about their healthcare provider discouraging chiropractic. So it's not that they were scared to go see a chiropractor for what their doctor, quote unquote, would believe. It was more that most people said, I didn't get the option. This falls again right in line with what we've seen in previous research that 90% of people are inquiring about chiropractic care or might have a question. Yet that huge gap of opportunity that we've talked about time and time again, where previous research shows US less than 11% of individuals report receiving a formal referral to chiropractic from their healthcare provider, to me, that is the huge gap of opportunity. That's where if you're not reaching out to the other healthcare providers in your community, you need to do so. You need to become a member at the evidence based chiropractor so we can make things easy for you, give you an exact process, step by step, and all of the tools necessary to bridge the gap and build those relationships. There is a massive amount of individuals in your community. When we see back pain at 90%, when we see, you know, neck pain at 50%, this is happening to people day out, a majority of people day in and day out in your community. And I look back and say, what do your numbers at the end of your week and month look like? You should have a line out your door based upon the fact that you are the most safe and effective care for spine pain alone. Never mind all of the other things that you can do in your practice. Those should be, you know, back pain should just be able to make up your practice in and amongst itself. Based upon what we see in the literature. But far too many chiropractors haven't bridged the gap or built those relationships. That's what we continue to see in the literature. But those that do really reap the rewards, right? First mover advantage. If you build relationships now, it's probably about as easy as it's going to get. You don't have a ton of chiropractors in your community that have those relationships and now you have to like figure out are you working against them? While you're a competition that is a non factor for a majority of you listening here, you can go out Bridge the gap. Many of these providers have no chiropractors in their referral systems. They have no chiropractors that they have a relationship with. You can be that person by making sure you have a systematic approach to doing so. You want to make it easy, you want to make it effective, and you want to make it effective efficient. That's exactly what we've done at the Evidence based Chiropractor. I'd encourage you if you want to bridge the gap. If you're somebody that wants to work with other healthcare providers and not be an island in your community, then check out the evidence basedchiropractor.com, become a member. Our membership is month to month. There's no contract, no risk. I want to see you get exceptionally high return on investment when you come on board. I spend time with each individual member during an onboarding call, walking you through the exact process, answering any questions that you have, as well as giving you all the tools and systems. So the good news is chiropractic use is trending up. Keep in mind use those pain points to your advantage from a content perspective. Think about Those individuals above 30 years old and keep a tight eye on people who have a higher than college education because they are the most likely individuals to utilize your care. So if you have any questions on this, feel free to shoot me an email. Jeff the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and if you have not left a rating or a review for this podcast on itunes. If you are on iPhone you can do it right from the app right now as soon as you park your car. If you're listening on the way to work. So and if you are, have a great week in practice. Really appreciate everybody that's tuned in and listened. Any topics that you'd love to hear about in the future, don't hesitate to reach out to me and let me know about it because I would be happy to address it and just huge shout out for taking the time to listen. If you are at the gym right now, keep up the good work. If you're driving to your practice right now, have an awesome day in practice. Have an awesome week overall and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.

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