Putting The Stroke Issue to Bed

many times, no matter what there's going to be a certain number of people, I think it's 279 chiropractors, will receive a patient in their office that winds up with a dissection whether they've adjusted them or not. We have a claim currently of a patient that was in a waiting room filling out paperwork. The staff noticed that the patient wasn't doing okay, had the doctor come out. She instantly calls 911. The patient dies in the hospital. Who are they suing? The chiropractor because the hospital assumed that they wound up with a stroke because of something that the chiropractor did when the chiropractor never even got to examine the patient, let alone adjust them. This misconception is definitely out there, and you've been instrumental in communicating this to the doctors. How would you add to that conversation? Thanks, Stu. The first thing I would say is to carry off a little bit of what Ken said and what Bill said. First of all, the doctor's got to have the facts. The time to prepare yourself, to study, to learn, to get everything in place that you need to have in place is not when you've got a problem on your desk or you got an issue with the patient. It's today. It's this moment right now. This is important in our world. In the scheme of things, clearly it's an association issue, but it's the most significant association that happens in relationship to what we do. It's incumbent upon the docs to have a command of the data and to have a command of the information to be current with it, first of all. That's their job. It's also their job, in terms of appreciating what's going on, to get a handle on themselves, the doc to get a handle on themselves. One of the realities is, and you just made reference to it, Stu, is that complications to our care are very, very rare. Unlike our colleagues in medicine, who have problems with every script they write, with every surgical procedure they perform, with every administration of anesthesia, there are risks that far exceed anything that we do in our offices. In their world, they are far more prepared to deal with the ambiguities of those circumstances than we are. As a result, we wind up, as was said earlier, getting very defensive very quickly, and there's no need to be. The doc needs to ratchet it down and to put the discussion in context, as Ken made reference to, a few minutes ago in his experience. We've all had that. You can amp that up, just as Bill said, with your voice, with your posture, with your attitude, with how you snarl your lip at the thought of it, or you can ratchet it down to the facts of the situation and putting in context of the association matter that John's talked about and that Bill talked about and having the doctor get a good grip of themselves in this process. Then, finally, when it comes to the patient, and you made reference to the data about X number of incidences of this with a drug or an aspirin, for example, so on, versus another. If a person has a particular problem, all the meaning of that goes out the window. That's the analytical stuff that Bill's talking about. If I had a problem with the knee surgery or Ken had a problem with the cardiac surgery he went to, it's an end of one. There's only one patient that matters at that moment, and that's me. That's the perspective that we need to make sure that doc comes back to is that forget your millions of data points. Forget your statistical analysis. Forget your statistical significance considerations. The bottom line is it's an end of one, and that one may be sitting in front of you, have a very legitimate question, and you need to have the ability, emotionally and intellectually and clinically, to provide that answer. It requires you to do your homework on the front end, to make sure you got a good handle on the current facts that John talked about and the data he talked about.

Dr. Clum:

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