In practice, your volume is directly proportional to your level of technical certainty.

Years ago, a doctor asked me how I could possibly produce reliable results seeing more than 200 patients per day. My response: by producing reliable results!

Unless a chiropractor has been trained in an adjustment-specific technique, there are a number of adjustments that could be performed upon any visit that would be considered logical or appropriate. The vast majority of chiropractors deliver multiple adjustments during one patient visit in the practice. Most of them would say their results are good. But they don't realize how much better their results would be with even fewer forces per visit.

There are several factors at work.

First, chiropractors have way too much time on their hands because their volume has left them with a schedule that has lots of holes in it.

Second, chiropractors have been led to believe that patients make a value judgment about their satisfaction with care by how much time the chiropractor has spent with them.

Finally, chiropractors have also created a belief that being "thorough" means adjusting a patient from head to toe.

When you put all these factors together, it's no wonder so many chiropractors are having difficulty with getting better results and adjusting more patients.

If you were suddenly forced to adjust 100 more patients daily, because your town finally realized you were the answer to their problem, you would most likely need to change your adjustment style. But, the only way you could continue seeing this patient flow would be by producing better results with fewer forces per visit.

That's why I say that volume is your greatest teacher, because it forces you to get right with yourself. Chiropractors have not been trained to adjust the major subluxation, therefore the protocol of what to adjust and when, changes from visit to visit.

Philosophically, you must understand that it's not your care that's the uniqueness, it's how patients respond to your care that defines the uniqueness of chiropractic.

In other words, if 100 patients were all given the same adjustment (on the correct side of course), we would find 100 uniquely different responses from them. Too many chiropractors are trying to create a tailor-made fit protocol for each patient, as if the diversity of the chiropractor's approach is the answer to increasing results. It's just the opposite! Technical certainty is reached when you can understand how one or a few adjustments will heal the masses.

In fact, most chiropractors training along this journey with me, realize at some point the more adjustments they perform per visit, the less faith, confidence and belief they have in the body's ability to transform a single force into complete and total healing.

I've also found that the more adjustments that are performed per visit means the doctor believes "the work" is being done at the time of the adjustment. It's when you understand that a patient continues to correct and heal for several hours following an adjustment, that the true power of a single or a few adjustments takes hold in your mind and heart.

Recently, a client told me that a patient had traveled more than an hour and a half to see him, three days a week. When he had the patient lying on the table, he would say, "This is everything you need today," and then perform an adjustment with focused intention. The patient would thank him for saving his life and proceed back to his car to drive another hour and a half home again. The doctor said that before, not only would he never have attracted patients from so far away, he would also have felt obligated to do more for them when they were in the office!

The truth is, your patients haven't gotten used to your adjusting, you have. When you're ready to make the change, so are they. The paradox is you won't see a need for change. I'm not saying there's only one right way. Yet, if you listen to the voice inside you, you'll know there's a much better way and that hundreds of lives rest in the balance. Technical certainty is so liberating and at the same time so humbling. After all, the only thing we can be certain of, is the body's ability to heal from above-down, inside-out.

It's so interesting to watch a chiropractor who sees 50 patients per day... and a chiropractor seeing 100 patients per day... and then a chiropractor adjusting 150 patients per day. Each successive D.C. has found a deeper level of getting right with himself or herself and a deeper level of technical certainty.

"Say less and mean more, do less and produce more."