The American Chiropractor Volume 36, Issue 6 | Page 34

FEATURE
TAC: Weight loss is not something that people typically
associate with a chiropractic
office. How have you been received by the general public?

TS: The response has been
incredible. People who never
would have come to see me
as a chiropractor now come to
see me for weight loss. And the
interesting part is, after I help
them lose weight, they 'll typically say something like, " So
you are a chiropractor, right?
What can you do to help me
with my lower back?"
I've now taught the system I
use in my office to more than
600 other doctors, and I keep
hearing over and over again
from other chiropractors using this system that bringing
people in for weight loss has
turned out to be one of the best ways to build a thriving chiropractic practice they 've ever found.
Previously, I would have never considered treating weight
loss as a chiropractor, and I certainly would never have guessed
that weight loss could be a lead generator for chiropractic treatment' but it is!

After I graduated from chiropractic school in 1990, we opened
a chiropractic office. My wife, Nancy, had already been helping
doctors to market their practices, so by the time I was ready to
open, she had a great marketing plan for our business. Because
we always made marketing and practice growth a big priority,
our practice boomed.

I now believe weight loss is a perfect therapy to add to a
chiropractic office. I have a lot of friends who are MDs and
they are the first to admit they haven't studied nutrition. They,
of course, can prescribe weight loss drugs, but our goal with
our patients is not just weight loss-it is to get them healthy.

In the mid-1990s, we switched from just chiropractic treatment to an integrated chiropractic model. We hired a full-time
medical doctor, a physical therapist, more support staff, and
increased our marketing. The result was that we grew so much
that we expanded to multiple locations, hired more doctors and
staff, and continued to grow.

As chiropractors, we learn about nutrition in school, and we
are offered a lot of nutritional courses for our continuing education credits. We know how to help our patients get healthy,
and therefore we should be the ones offering health-promoting
weight loss programs.

We ran insurance-based practices. Unfortunately, the more
we grew, the more the audits came from insurance companies.
Our solution was to hire a full-time attorney as an employee
to help us fight the red tape that came our way in the form of
additional paperwork, denial