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The Balanced Difference

Balanced • December 31, 2020

The Balanced Patient Difference

We often ask ourselves what makes us different from the other clinics in the area and what we can do to help our patients get the most out of their time with our practice. These are the questions that have continued to help us grow both as individuals as well as a clinic. Below are a few of the things that set us apart from some of the other clinics in town.

First and foremost, we believe in treating people, not just conditions or injuries . Care needs to evolve to look at patients as a complex being, not just a sprained ligament or chronic pain patient. Our practice will spend longer with you at your initial evaluation to ensure that we learn as much as possible about you as a person, as well as your condition. Some of the things we may dive into on the first day besides asking about your injury include your diet, sleeping patterns, stressors, and YOUR goals for care.

We want to help you reach your goals . Sure, we have objective measures that need to improve like strength, range of motion, and pain to justify a need for care to your insurance company. That being said, these improvements will be targeted on the way to meeting your goals for care. We believe in having patients guide their care within reason. Having our patients set goals allows us to design exercise programs and other treatments around the thing you want to get back to. We put our patients in the driver’s seat of their care.

While we have a research informed bias. Our goal is never to arbitrarily give a patient a series of treatments, we ensure that treatment plans are individualized. Treatment is often based around the best available evidence for treating a condition in a population similar to that of our patients. While we are biased toward evidence, we also take into account our personal experience with working with certain conditions and our patients expectations for treatment and care.

No unnecessary imaging . Choosing Wisely is a campaign to bring healthcare inline with the research. In most cases imaging is unnecessary. The main reasons to perform imaging are to check for red flags (fracture, space occupying lesion) or if a patient hasn’t responded to 6 weeks of chiropractic or physical therapy. We will not order imaging, as it can be costly, expose you to radiation, and is often unnecessary to treat our patients. We believe that unnecessary imaging is irresponsible and causes more harm than good. Going back to bullet point number 1, our patients are people, not pictures. Treatment will not correct an x-ray, it will help to correct the biological processes taking place in your body.

No gimmicks . We provide treatments supported by a sound body of scientific evidence that are widely agreed upon as being effective. You won’t find lasers, magic vitamins, or ultrasound in our office. Lasers sound cool (pew pew), but the evidence is weak, and before we recommend an expensive treatment like that, we want to be sure that it will work for most of our patients. If there was a great body of research supporting lasers, then we’d have two! But until there is, we won’t be recommending any fancy expensive treatments that lighten your wallet.

As chiropractors and physical therapists our goals are to help you meet your goals, as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in as pleasant a way as possible. It is also our job to educate! You have questions? Ask away! If you want to know why we are selecting a specific treatment or exercise, just ask and we will be happy to explain. Every patient is treated as an individual, and every individual has their own needs for care.

We also offer free consultations and never make you pay for care up front. We don’t think it should cost someone money to know where they should begin with their care: If we think we can help, we will let you know. But if we think that you don’t need treatment, or would be better served by seeing another provider type we will let you know that too. We want patients to see the value in the care at our clinic, and having someone pay upfront is not the way to do this. If a patient feels they are not getting better under our care, they should be free to seek care somewhere else without an added financial burden.

We are always working to improve as a clinic and individuals and we never stray away from these 7 points. We also keep our mission close to heart to serve the greater Charlottesville community by delivering the best in evidence-based care with integrated chiropractic, physical therapy and massage therapy to help each patient reach optimal health and well-being.

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