Setting Expectations: Chiropractic Care

If you are thinking about seeking chiropractic care for an acute condition or a chronic one, it is important to discuss your goals and expectations for your care with a Crofton, MD chiropractor that local patients trust. If you don’t clarify your needs, goals, and expectations both at the start of your care and necessary throughout the duration of your treatment plan, you may not achieve the maximum results that you otherwise could under the circumstances.

Why is setting expectations, goals, and priorities so important? At Mid-Atlantic Spinal Rehab & Chiropractic, we believe in personalizing our treatment plans to fit the needs of individuals. Unlike some other practices that tend to focus on the same kind of treatment plan regardless of a patient’s circumstances, we understand that the more personalized we make our care, the greater the chance that our patients will achieve the results that they seek. By clarifying your goals, needs, circumstances, and expectations with us, we can help you to both achieve what is achievable and to adjust any expectations, goals, or priorities that may not quite line up with what is possible over a specific period of time or with a specific approach.

Goals, Priorities, and Objective Truths

Sometimes, it is critically important for the Mid-Atlantic Spinal Rehab & Chiropractic team to clarify some tough objective truths with our patients. For example, if a softball player has sustained a severe spinal bruise and they let us know that it is their goal to play in next week’s playoff game, so can we please just perform an adjustment that will allow them to play, we are compelled to explain that an adjustment isn’t going to fix the damage done by a spinal bruise… that although we can help to promote healing and recovery, they will need to heal for some time before they can safely resume play.

With that said, it is usually possible to create a treatment plan that facilitates a patient’s realistic goals, discernable needs, and that takes their circumstances and priorities into account. Most treatment plans consist of short-term, medium-term, and long-term components. What “short-term,” “medium-term,” and “long-term” mean depends upon the circumstances that a patient is facing. A patient with cerebral palsy may think of their “long-term” goals in measurements of years, whereas an athlete with an acute trauma injury may think of their “long-term” goals in terms of months. Know that whatever your circumstances may be, the team at Mid-Atlantic Spinal Rehab & Chiropractic will personalize our approach to accommodate them properly.

A Note About Insurance Coverage

It is a good idea to check your insurance coverage before scheduling a consultation to set your expectations for chiropractic care. If your insurance provider is only going to cover a certain number of sessions, we will want to know that so that we can tailor our treatment approach to accommodate this reality. While you may wish to pay out of pocket for additional sessions, we want to be respectful of the reality that not everybody can afford to do so and that they may need us to adjust our approach to accommodate insurance limitations.