Our Healthcare Science-Based Philosophy
Marrying science and philosophy into a single statement might be an oxymoron. Science and the scientific method should constantly be assessed, bombarded, and torn apart to fully validate the stance, question, or dilemma at hand. Without this vigor toward the “hypothesis,” information gathered via the trials and tribulations of the scientific method are subpar and lack luster. Someone will come along and scrutinize the science further to manifest into something more. This process is inevitable in reference to time. Simply, our understanding evolves with scrutiny and time. This is a good thing. For healthcare, we are at the next brink of its own evolution. There are many factors intertwining to make this so, but regardless of these factors, healthcare will keep evolving.
Throughout this process, we constantly stress education. If you do not want to understand how to treat your own pain, then we might not be the right fit for you from whom to seek care. We always want the best for everyone; however, self-care is particularly important in long lasting results – especially with our Specialty Programs. We will work to help everyone we can, but we do want to acknowledge you who also participate with your own health tend to produce faster and more effective recovery results.
Our doctors focus on moving you through a timeline scenario from left to right in order to achieve pain to performance.
Our approach may incorporate passive therapies (dry needling, chiropractic adjustments, A.R.T., cupping, etc.), and nutritional interventions in the beginning; eventually more active therapies (exercises) will be introduced to fully stress the painful or problematic tissue accordingly for positive, long-term outcomes.
Again, we strive to make this process educational, while putting heavy emphasis on homework, AKA exercises, to produce long-lasting results. Our expectation of you is - if you become a patient of ours, you will do the homework. If you want real results, together we can create a teamwork structure around you to help get you from pain toward your desires.
The Deeper Appreciation Behind Us
We believe in the power of the WHY and WHAT questions. Why am I having this pain? What can I do to get out pain? From a very simplistic view, pain is always multifactorial – pain is very rarely one thing. As noted throughout our website, what is pain, what causes pain, what is the source of pain, can become very challenging for all, including healthcare providers, to understand.
Healthcare likes to preach ‘local pain, local problem;’ that we can see the problem and then understand the problem best through imaging. This is simply not the case and is a factor in the increase in cost of healthcare1 2 3 without any improvement in outcomes.4 5 Long story short, this is a lie. It is a convincing lie, but nonetheless a lie.
When in enough pain, you will believe almost anything. This is the first deeper appreciation behind us; our values, morals, and ethics guide us above the fiscal incentives plaguing healthcare. Bringing it back to the beginning, healthcare must become deflationary to help all. Currently, healthcare is not set up to be financially incentivized by treating you less. Our goal is to make a deflationary style of healthcare financially stable for all you who participate. We do this by zooming out and playing the long game. By truly addressing a problem at hand we can eliminate the need for ‘needed pain-relief care’ while maximizing liveliness to your life.
We work hard to make a difficult, painful, and stressful situation fun and simple. This is often the power in what we do.
We are constantly striving to embody this quote from Einstein in educating you surrounding the what, why, how, and fears of pain. This is the second deeper appreciation behind us.
How Our Assessment Protocol Works
We believe in transparency. No one person or entity should hold the keys to your kingdom. The generic phrase “your health is your wealth” is overwhelmingly true. The amount of time, energy, work relationships, family relationships, friend relationships, and money that is directly and indirectly affected by your overall “health” is staggering. Our current health level as a country has already negatively impacted us as whole, noted in GDP expenditures. To achieve our goal of healthcare becoming deflationary, a level of simplicity and transparency is needed – but by choice. Because of this, here are the keys to how we unlock your health freedom.
At this point in time, we believe the best base code can be divided into 6-categories. These 6-categories of pain, which can be read in our brief overview, can be utilized by all within healthcare as the base code.
The Power of Our Assessment
Our assessment protocols, by far and large, establish the powerful outcomes of what we do! Without the assessment, we are lost in the ocean, in a canoe without a paddle. We better hope shore is close and tides are in our favor. Otherwise, we are in real trouble. However, if we can MacGyver a paddle, understand the mathematics of the stress/strain of which this paddle can handle, and the current or tide flow, then the probability of reaching the shore may exponentially improve.
Through this analogy we can gather there is always a way to get things done, whatever it may be; however, understanding the moving variables and leveraging knowledge surrounding a situation can drastically help solve any problem. With this, the base root of all understanding is mathematics.
Mathematics is the fundamental language for all. Mathematics can manifest reproducible, non-biased outcomes if applied consistently. If not, the scientific method will scrutinize the mathematics until a reproducible outcome is achieved.
A current problem of healthcare is its components are working in factions and not through a cohesive mathematical framework or flow. Collectively, healthcare does not understand how to use the paddle, or the oceanic currents because its knowledge is fractioned into parts. Currently, healthcare has no base code or framework to evolve from. This creates chaos.
For healthcare, this problem starts with the lack of a pain auditing assessment as the base code. Without assessing and categorizing your pain and applying it appropriately into a science-based system dedicated to categorization of pain, then healthcare is not really listening to you. It then becomes the specialist only applying interventions unique to the specialist – which is a constant problem within our healthcare industry. This is a contributing factor to our healthcare costs as a nation. This lack of a cohesive pain categorization protocol within healthcare specialties has consistently been noted as a problem within the entirety of healthcare. Different clinicians then come to different conclusions based on different testing protocols. There is no cohesive understanding amongst healthcare providers with assessing and diagnostic testing. The research concludes healthcare testing is based on the type of healthcare provider providing the testing, not what is statistically a correct course of action based on a pain classification system.6 7 8 9
If you are on this page and this far along in the reading, then you are in the process of seeking help and wanting to find non-fluff answers. For many individuals, this reason for searching is in hope of understanding, reducing, and ultimately eliminating pain or the fear(s) of future problems and/or pain.
By categorizing your pain through a science-based categorization system, we can help you find the fastest outcomes, respecting your pocketbook, and in a timely manner. We are traffic controllers in directing you to the correct provider, only then may actual treatment or help may manifest.
This order of events in powerful in results –
Categorization of pain => Appropriate healthcare provider => Pillar of Health => Treatment
The Flow of Our Sessions and Stress
ICT MJC chiropractors work through your expectations, categorization of pain(s), and select the appropriate healthcare provider. After this, we move onto identifying the pain generator and problem generator. These are two different things. We focus on the current demand to the tissue causing symptoms and understanding the functional gap between your current demand and your wants.
Almost all tissue in the body needs to be stressed – in various ways. It is important to note, stress is not necessarily negative. This is a societal construct on the word. Stress is simply stress. There is positive stress and negative stress which can manifest as chemical, physical, emotional, spiritual, etc. in nature. The word or idea of what stress is has become hijacked.
As we go through our assessment protocol, we then apply stressors into 8 Pillars of Health. Through this process we can categorize pain into multiple pillars and address each pillar accordingly. This is how we get to understanding your pain, the appropriate specialist, the appropriate technique,
Our 8 Pillars of Health
These 8 Pillars of Health – Nutrition, Movement, Sleep, Breath, Spirit, Mind, Relationship, Purpose –allow us to appropriately identify which avenues of health we need to address before others. Without categorizing with this system care often becomes convoluted with limited results.
Think of these Pillars of Health as gas tanks and our programming as the miles per gallon. We want to have large gas tanks, be energy efficient (MPG), and optimize the recycling of the energy source. By doing this, you can go the distance. By viewing your health and our system within these parameters, together we can tackle “qual-gevity” – quality + longevity. We offer many Programs to help get you to this goal – to live a long of quality years.
When Causes are Symptoms of Another Cause
We often find to truly address the Movement Pillar; we must address the Nutritional Pillar. Again, there are many reasons behind this but simply if your nutrition is poor, then tissue (muscle, ligaments, tendons, bones, etc.) cannot heal quickly, which leads to movement pain.
You may be experiencing movement pain (effect) with movement (cause) but the tissue producing that pain may not have adequate nutrition. The lack of good nutrition, or chemistry, within the area lowers the capacity of the surrounding tissue to handle physical stress. As a result, the true cause of the shoulder pain is lack of good chemistry allowing tissue damage to occur and pain originating in the tissue. This is an example of a tissue producing pain with movement without being purely a movement-based problem – it is chemical.
As stated earlier, almost all tissue requires stress to help facilitate healing. The adage, “get some bed rest,” is dead. Healing requires stress based on timeframes; there are almost no exceptions. Even with the best intervention used at the appropriate time, different tissues respond differently. This is important to understand for recovery expectations with any healthcare provider.
Pain associated with physically overstressed tissue is often due to a lack of adequate nutrition. This inadequate nutrition must be improved to allow your physical body to manage the demand being physically applied to it.
If this last step of remodeling tissue is not desired, please expressly verbalize this to us. We want you to feel empowered and in charge of your overall treatment wants, goals, desires, etc. If elimination of short-term pain is the only desired goal, we will accommodate this. However, we will highlight the reoccurrence of pain may be sooner than desired.
Healing Times of Injured Tissues
If there are nutritional, chemical, hormonal, etc. complications occurring we advise you to seek care through one of our Specialty Programs. If pain is purely physical in nature, we must re-stress the injured tissue appropriately for long lasting results as displayed within our Healing Times of Injured Tissue Infographic.
As a result, to truly address pain, we must dive deeper into who you are as person and what makes you tick. We offer many services to help you along your journey, at different price points, with different levels of intervention. When you are truly ready to make a real change, our Eliminate Pain and Restore Health Programs are here for you!
It is on the healthcare provider to produce the fastest results for recovery. It is the gamification effect. It is a game for our healthcare providers to “fix” you faster. It is rewarding for us and what keeps us going. It’s our game.
