There are two types of care: symptomatic care and corrective care. In symptomatic care, that’s the patient, Joe will come in or John will come in and they just want to get out of pain. They’ll get out of pain, they’ll leave, and when the pain comes back, they’ll come back. Most people are like Joe. In most cases we can relieve the pain in a few visits although sometimes it can take longer. Symptoms, pain, stiffness, headaches, are always the last thing to come and the first thing to go away. Once the pain is gone, why do you still need care? That’s a good question. So we want the function to be at 100%. Is there a problem just because the fire alarm isn’t going off in your house? There could be smoke somewhere. Is your car functioning at 100% just because the engine light isn’t on? We don’t just treat the problems, we make sure that everything is functioning the way it’s supposed to function.

To fix these imbalances there’s corrective care, which takes it a couple steps further. To prevent the symptoms from returning we need to train the bones to hold in place so the nerves are free. We continue training the body to hold in place and move the way it’s supposed to. It is a gradual process.

In the beginning are more passive modalities. The patient is lying on the bed, we’re doing more leg work and we’re trying to get the muscles to relax because they’re usually overworked and in spasm, so we’ll use modalities like electric stim to calm the muscles down, relax the muscles. As the muscles relax, then we can start working more on the bone misalignments and getting the bones to move how they’re supposed to.

Then we’ll do more on tendinous work and muscular work to get the adjustments to hold in place and we’re stabilizing now. Then we’ll do more of the active therapies, the range of motion stuff, the core stabilization. By the time they’re on maintenance, they’re just coming in to get checked. They haven’t had pain in a while and they want to maintain this level of function.

Typically, from one visit to the next, when the adjustments hold from one visit to the next, your frequency is reduced. So during a typical care plan you are seen more in the beginning and as your body acclimates to the adjustments, the frequency of visits gets farther and farther apart.

The in the last phase, after we have stabilized the problem, then we put you on a maintenance plan of periodic visits to keep the body aligned and prevent the pain from coming back.