Why Patients Trust Chiropractors More Than Medical Doctors | Ep. 474

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode we have a fantastic piece of brand new research all about patient experience and satisfaction with chiropractic care. This is a systematic review and of course I will drop a link down in the show notes so you can check it out if you and there are a lot of take home messages. And after today's episode, you should be proud to be a chiropractor Based upon this systematic review and what people really believe when they come in to your practice and experience the care that you deliver. We're going to dive into this and much more. Before we get started, I want to say a few words about neck care. The best objective assessment of the cervical spine out there. Reliable assessments and exercises for neuromuscular control, proprioception, range of motion and sensory motor integration. The best hardware and software package out there by far. Netcare.com you can check it out by clicking down in the show notes as well. But as I said at the top, today's episode we're all about research and this one is a good one. The title is literally Patient Experience and Satisfaction with Chiropractic A Systematic Review. It came out in 2024 and the goal is was to systematically review all the existing literature and identify factors that contribute to high patient satisfaction in chiropractic care. Now we all know that satisfaction and patient centered outcomes are more than clinical results alone. When you think about satisfaction, a lot of this ties into the experience that somebody has in your practice and us as chiropractors are no exception in this realm. This is true of like any service based business, you can sometimes fall a little bit short of what you hoped for in terms of results, but still be super satisfied. And on the other side of the coin, you might have somebody who gets great results but never refers anybody because their experience wasn't that good, right? So satisfaction and experience are really, really important factors for things like referrals into your practice, for ultimately the growth of your practice over time. Somebody that gets good results but has a horrific experience, they might try somebody else next time. They're certainly not going to refer a friend, a family member or a colleague. And ultimately they might say that they're not that satisfied with what happened in your practice even if they received great results. Now on the flip side again, those individuals that might not receive the best results can often still have a fantastic experience, refer a ton of people and be super satisfied. So this research was really aiming at saying what do we know? And they looked at over 43 studies from multiple countries and what they found was within chiropractic we had consistently high patient satisfaction. As a matter of fact, chiropractic care outperforms standard medical care in terms of satisfaction, even when combined with other treatment. And this ties into the fact that satisfaction is driven not only by clinical outcomes, but also by clinician, doctor, physician, chiropractor, you, your attitude and your communication quality. And this is really critical because this is an underpinning of a lot of what we discuss on this podcast, which is communication. Communication can take many forms. It can take the form of your mind marketing. If you're using Patient Pilot and generating reactivation through consistent emails. It can take the form of research and outreach to other healthcare providers such as the MD Connection and building referral relationships. The heart of what we do at the evidence based chiropractor. It can take the form of the inter visit communication. How are you asking questions when a patient comes in? Of course this ties in to your initial intake to, to that initial history and then every single time you're seeing that patient in your practice, all of that dives into communication and we can all continually improve our ability to communicate. This is something where I see, I know it, we all really geek out on. I just wanna go to that one more adjusting class. I wanna get two more letters after my name, whatever the case may be, but please do that. But don't forget about the fact that communication will determine your ability to grow, sustain and have a great practice. Quite frankly, near more than anything else, communication is key because it extends everywhere through every aspect of your practice and that extends through your team as well. Don't forget about that. How are they answering the phone? How are they greeting patients when they come in? All of this critically important to patient satisfaction, patient experience, which ultimately again ties in with all of those reviews, referrals, etc.

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So 43 studies reviewed. Patient sat. Here's a really interesting one. Parental satisfaction with pediatric care and chiropractic. 75 to 95% satisfaction rates. That's surprising to me. Not because we don't do a great job as chiropractors taking care of the pediatric population, but that's probably the most. What's the best way to put this? That's maybe not the least researched, but there's the most variability. Many people out there at this point are pretty familiar with the fact that if you have a quote unquote back issue, going to a chiropractor is a good idea. Pediatrics is not something people naturally put together. So it's still, I'm gonna say, a little less mainstream than somebody coming in to see us for a spinal issue. That doesn't mean it's not important. That doesn't mean that I don't support it. But in the general population, pediatric care is definitely not as common as spinal care. Yet when people experience pediatric care, parents are overwhelmingly satisfied, which is really, really great. Additionally, patients seeing chiropractors were up to twice as likely to be satisfied compared to if they saw a medical doctor. Again, communication, communication, communication. You think about the traditional medical visit, somebody's writing a script, they're tight on time, they're spending two or three minutes, they're not literally not getting hands on, they're not doing really physical examinations quite often in a traditional spinal sense from a medical perspective and a PCP perspective. So your ability to communicate, to be hands on, manifests itself in really, really high satisfaction, which is awesome. And when you added on other, so to speak, modalities, care options, treatment options, however you want to define, didn't negatively affect. So chiropractic care alone, outperformed or matched, supervised exercise and therapies in almost every single trial. Here are a couple direct quotes as well. Patient satisfaction was consistently high in comparison to other professions for chiropractor scores. Quote. Chiropractic care, either alone or as an adjunctive to other interventions, generated significantly higher satisfaction scores than comparator interventions. And finally, quote, effective communication plays a vital role in patient satisfaction, with clinicians ability to address patient concerns being key. So these are really, really impactful and hopefully for you, inspiring findings. But it doesn't mean we rest on our laurels. It means we get out there and continue to become improved. And how do we do that? Effective listening, empathy, understanding patient concerns, things that we know but is never not important to be reminded of, so to speak. Additionally, delivering personalized care, so tailoring your treatments, including the adjustments in education, self care, guidance that you give, making sure that you're not falling into a rut, clinically so to speak, and you're continuing to be as personalized as possible with each patient. And then also they highlight the fact that a holistic approach is what also drives some of the satisfaction in really great experience people have, focusing on both patient well being, pain decreases and functional improvement. So often we can become myopic over time as we start to see the same thing all day, every day in our practice. And it's almost as if I don't mean to overstate it, but the miracles we deliver. Somebody comes in, they've seen five other doctors, excuse me, they've been through the medical wringer and they're just in abject pain. Their quality of life stinks. And within a few visits to your practice, they're so substantially improved. We see that so often. Sometimes it can be just like, oh, well, that's nice. It's not just nice, that is different. Many people that come into your practice, as you well know, have experienced pain, dysfunction, altered quality of life, life effect for weeks, months, years, sometimes decades, and quite often within a handful of visits or less in your practice. They're well on their way to regaining their life. That is impactful, that's powerful, that's where the results step in and deliver a lot of satisfaction. But you marry that to great communication through your marketing, through your website, through your emails, through your reactivations, through your answering your phones. Now you have a really, really potent combination to be able to grow and help a lot of people. And again, communication matters. This is really the key to patient experience, which dives into retention as well. So do not sleep on the fact that your ability to get out there, communicate with your patients day in and day out is a massive benefit you have. Compared to many other healthcare providers, chiropractic patients were nearly twice as likely to be satisfied again compared to those receiving care from medical Doctors. And almost 87% satisfaction rate among chronic pain patients receiving chiropractic care to barely 70% satisfaction for chronic pain patients under medical care. So that's a really, really important key. Additionally, we talked about the parental satisfaction for pediatrics, ranging 75 to 95%. On the other end of that spectrum, older adults and athletes receiving chiropractic care reported significantly higher satisfaction compared to what they refer to as standard care. Chiropractic care also scored highly in trust and support, with 95% of patients reporting trust in their chiropractor compared to 60% trust for medical care. What were some of the key aspects of that? Clinician empathy, listening skills, personalized care plans. Additionally, Longer patient chiropractor relationships correlated with higher satisfaction measured by increased trust and perception of care. So these are all important things to keep in mind as you go through and see your patients even today. Take that moment, ask that question, communicate with them, get a better understanding of where they're at, motivate and inspire them to get where they want to be, not only with the care you deliver with your hands, but through the conversations you have each and every day in your practice. It will help not only, not ironically, it'll help you improve your clinical results, but it will also help you have the best patient experience possible, which is a foundational key to practice growth. Now, speaking of ironic, probably the most ironic aspect of this is for people. This is really like the inverse of the bell shaped curve. Meaning for many people who haven't experienced chiropractic yet, there's a lot of skepticism and there is a lot of lack of trust. However, once somebody can bridge that gap, get into a chiropractic practice, we see everything totally turn on its head where satisfaction goes up substantially, skepticism melts away, trust goes up super high. So again, I'll say keep this in mind with any of the external marketing that you're doing or internal marketing, digital marketing in your practice, because this tends to be the biggest challenge, I'm going to say, for us as chiropractors, which is to build trust in our community for those who haven't experienced chiropractic before passing around the same 10% of individuals with other chiropractors in your community, 10% of individuals who have been to a chiropractor, that's great, but it's not moving the needle in terms of helping as many people as possible. And in my opinion, when we look at the statistics of those struggling with just pain alone, low back pain, headaches, neck pain, extremity pain, not even referring to human performance, we very well can be ethically taking care of 50, 60, 70, 80% of individuals in our communities. And we see ourselves as a profession kind of stagnating around that 10 to 15% utilization rate. So think about how you can take the aspects of the trust and satisfaction and experience that exist within your practice and extend that messaging out to your community who have never experienced the benefits of your practice. The more you can do that, the more successful your marketing will be, the better your new patient acquisition will be. And ultimately those people will come in more prepared, less skeptical, and more ready to go. So, great study again, I'll drop a link down in the show notes before we wrap up. I want to say a few words quickly about Turncloud ehr. They've stripped away anything that's not essential, they've made everyday functions simpler, and they have created an intuitive app where no one needs a user manual. You can check it out. Just have a conversation with their team. Why not? You have nothing to lose. Learn more at turncloud.com, schedule some time with their team. Let them know we sent you over. They support this podcast. I'll ask you to support them. Additionally, if you have not left a rating or review for this podcast, I would love it if you would do so. Scroll on down. Tap how many stars if you have feedback for me directly. Jeffeevidencebasedchiropractor.com Other than that, I hope you have a fantastic week in practice 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 go faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.