While much of my workday is spent treating patients who are in pain from an injury or a flare-up of a chronic condition, more and more often I am seeing patients who are not in pain. You may ask, “why would someone without pain go to the chiropractor?” The answer: maintenance care. These patients have been in pain before and want to avoid it in the future. Some figure out the advantage of maintenance care right away, while others have taken years to find out that if they receive care periodically, they don’t have recurring issues with their “bad back” or “old football injury.”
Many patients will schedule a checkup monthly, knowing that their lifestyle will cause enough wear and tear in four weeks’ time that an adjustment will be needed to prevent pain later. Others, usually those who have been under maintenance care longer, will only need a treatment every few months.
But how often is enough and what is too often? While seeing your chiropractor too often won’t cause problems, it isn’t more beneficial than receiving treatment at the right time. The real trick is finding when a patient needs care to prevent pain, without treating more times than needed. To determine this with patients who are currently under care for pain, I simply add time between visits when they don’t have pain. For example, if a patient has been seen once a week and now has no pain, I would schedule their next appointment for two weeks and see how they do with more time between treatments. If they have pain at two weeks, we stay at that increment. If they are still doing well, it goes to once a month and so on.
