Drugs Won’t Stop Muscle Shrinking, But a Chiropractic Lifestyle Solution Can & Get You More New Patients!

Muscle keeps our metabolic system intact. Helping patients maintain it protects them against chronic back pain, hormonal decline, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. By offering a Chiropractic Lifestyle Solution, you can avoid and reverse age-related muscle loss and in doing so never have to worry about how to get more new patients.

How to Help Prevent Age Related Muscle Loss & Get More New Patients to BOOT!
Chronological aging begins at birth, and even chiropractic care can’t stop the clock from ticking. However, there’s also “poor lifestyle choice” biological aging, where new evidence suggests the aging of your patient’s cells can be slowed, and in some cases even reversed. This is particularly true of muscle tissue, which can be regenerated even at an advanced age with appropriate lifestyle modifications that I believe should also include regular chiropractic adjustments.

It may come as a surprise to a lot of my fellow chiropractors that muscle aging in our patients typically starts at a relatively young age. By the time most of them enter their third decade of life, age-related muscle decline may already have begun, especially when they neglected to take proactive steps to maintain the health of their spine and nervous system, plus embarked on a steady pursuit of poor lifestyle choices. Without intervention, patients can lose an average of nearly seven pounds of muscle per decade.
“I need more new patients” is a common mantra among chiropractors. Well, I’m a chiropractor and I’m excited to tell you that many other chiropractors are finding it easy to create a greater demand for their services and a waiting list of new patients, by focusing on the lifestyle modification “Niche” and providing each patient with a Lifestyle Modification Action Plan in concert with their chiropractic care.

Consider this, if you take the time in your clinic to educate your patients on the benefits of modifying their poor lifestyle habits in combination with receiving regular chiropractic care, you will be providing a very important Value Added Service that will enable you to stand out in a very crowded and confusing healthcare marketplace.

Why Maintaining Muscle Mass is So Important for Chiropractic Patients
Typically as a muscle ages, it not only diminishes in size and strength, it also loses its aerobic capacity. A less obvious side effect is that this loss of muscle mass can also lead to an overall decline in metabolic function. In fact, the biological role of our patient’s muscles go far beyond mobility. Their muscles are also responsible for keeping their metabolic system intact, and maintaining muscle mass helps protect them against musculoskeletal disorders such as chronic neck and back pain, metabolic and hormonal decline, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It also enhances a patient’s cognitive function and slows down their aging process. Given the musculoskeletal, biological and metabolic importance of patient’s muscles, age-related muscle degradation can herald a significant health crisis.

It’s important to realize that patient’s daily lifestyle habits play a key role in this process. What they eat, when they eat, how they exercise, their stress levels and how they sleep, all translate into gene activities that dictate the speed at which muscle mass declines and their body ages.

In short, once muscle loss sets in, our patient’s health is on a steep downhill slope. Loss of muscle equates to a general loss of physical energy, a tendency to gain excess weight, increased chronic inflammation, enhanced vulnerability to disease, and accelerated aging.

Offering a Chiropractic Lifestyle Medicine Screening to determine the exact amount of actual muscle mass a patient has and compare their results to published normative data for a healthy person of their exact age and gender will provide you a valid and “objective” starting point to offer both chiropractic care and effective lifestyle modifications, and make you very unique in your healthcare arena.

In a future article I’ll share with you how you can “objectively” and non-invasively measure muscle mass in your clinic and how you can combine lifestyle modification recommendations with your chiropractic care to not only stop age-related muscle shrinking, but to actually restore this “life-force” metabolically active tissue.