Are you a sage and wise parent?
Kind and caring, but strong when needed.
Do you always have time to explain everything to your kids in a way that leaves them empowered?
I certainly was to my hypothetical children who didn’t yet exist, in theoretical situations I have never actually been in.
In fact, pre-kids, I was a bloody genius in the parenting department.
Who needed to have raised actual real-life children to talk a good parenting game?
Not me, that’s for sure.
Then this popped out:
Turns out, whilst some of my theories about raising children weren’t too far off the mark, the actual reality of being handed your offspring does up the stakes somewhat.
Apparently, babies and kids don’t always want to do what you want them to.
Who knew?!
Here is Floyd aged 18 months after finding out Nana had arrived without the dogs:
Or after Natalie cut his cheese sandwich (the only thing he’d eat at time) into the wrong shape.
So my theories were good for some stuff, but in the end, it’s the actual doing and learning from mistakes that lead to actual skills and results.
For me, this is much like clinical practice.
We need as a profession to reclaim our authenticity and integrity in terms of RESULTS.
Wasn’t that what we used to be all about? They wanted to sort patients out in one session, a “hole in one”.
It simply is not good enough to treat patients without assessing something meaningful.
For me that’s range of motion (quality and quantity), muscle strength and pain.
I test, treat, re-test, repeat.
When my patients leave I am aiming for all three to be improved, if it’s just one that’s OK, it depends on how acute or chronic they are.
When they come back in, I repeat the tests to see how well the treatment has sustained.
If they have lost all the changes, maybe I missed something? Maybe they did something really stupid? Either way, it’s all just feedback.
It is also reality.
Theories are good, but they have to translate into results, and we must live in reality.
In the first few years of practice I spent a lot of time rubbing & rechecking reflex points and checking leg lengths.
I still do some of that, it can be very useful, but when they get off the bench did it translate into a meaningful functional change?
Honestly, most of the time I doubt it.
Recently, I saw a new patient that had been seeing another Chiropractor for her neck pain.
Over a six month period she had 36 visits, and at the end the reassessment (one of three), reported in her notes “the neck was feeling 0/10 improvement”.
This lady is in her 40’s and in decent health, 36 visits without any response to care, or change in care, is either gross incompetence or grossly unethical.
In the years BC (Before Children), I dished out sage parental advice theory, some of it was decent and some of it was utter b****cks.
Now I have a fourteen and ten year-old, I have made many mistakes, learned some hard lessons, and now I have some decent advice that is worth considering.
It can be a lot like that with researchers dispensing condescending wisdom on back pain from their ivory research tower.
Using statistics to create “average” treatment for “average” patients isn’t for me.
I am happy to read research (in the functional medicine world there is too much to keep up with) but it has to be meaningful (in terms of outcome) and applied to the individual patient.
I believe most of us are the silent 80%.
I am now twenty-four years into practice (note that is why we call to “practice” because you are still learning) and the more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know.
As someone way cleverer than me once said:
