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Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Studin and first I’d like to thank ChiroSecure for the opportunity for sharing the day with you and sharing with you what the future is going to look like. Looking at future trends and understanding what you need to do to compete and thrive in the world. In the future marketplace, it’s real important.
So we’re going to put some slides up for you, but while we’re loading the slides up, I just want to share with you that when I graduated chiropractic school in 1981, I was armed with two things that I thought that’s all I would ever need. I was armed with the ability to adjust a patient, And the belief that when I adjusted them, they would get better, that I would remove interferences so that life would flow from a theoretical perspective from above down inside out, which for me meant for the brain to themselves, to the tissues, to the organs, and people would get better.
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I have to share with you, here it is 40, just about 44 years later, and one thing has not changed. Everyone needs to get a chiropractic spinal adjustment. Where there is a, I’m going to two words, subluxation, biomechanical pathology. I don’t care what you use. As long as it’s there, they got to get adjusted.
However, I’m no longer armed with the belief that the adjustment will work. Those days are long over. I’m armed with the knowledge and the scientific information of what creates Spinal lesion and what a chiropractic spinal adjustment does and how it affects the human body and it’s just Incredible of how a chiropractic spinal adjustment works.
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I will not talk in terms of manipulation We don’t manipulate and it’s not a philosophical issue. I honestly The late Frank Zolli, who’s a former dean at the University of Bridgeport School of Chiropractic, who is a dear friend, used to say, Mark, philosophy, if you understand it, means the study of truth.
It’s not the study of what I believe. It has nothing to do with what I believe. It’s the study of truth. And I am a voracious reader and researcher. And I like finding things in the scientific literature. I’d like to find evidence in the scientific literature. And I have to share with you, there is so much evidence in the literature about what we do.
I could talk for 10 hours just about that. The chiropractic spinal adjustment is sacrosanct, and we don’t manipulate. Why don’t we manipulate? It’s simple, and manipulation is an arthrokinematic maneuver which glides the segment through the joint. One segment to the other. That’s all it does, and the evidence in the literature shows that a chiropractic spinal adjustment has an 85 percent better outcome for patients they’re caring for than mobilizations.
Chiropractic spinal adjustment, and who does mobilizations? Predominantly physical therapists and osteopaths. But a chiropractic versus a mobilization, or done by a physical therapist, has a 313 percent better outcome on disabilities. Has a 55 percent reduction rate of opiates, where physical therapists have a 90 percent increase rate of opiates.
And by the way, I’m not against physical therapy. I love physical therapy. I’ve worked with some incredible ones in an office, and it’s real simple. And how we delineated who got cared for, chiropractors treated spine, physical therapists treated extremities. It worked well. It’s not that we can’t treat extremities, but they’re really good at that too, but they’re not really good at treating spine.
And that’s not my opinion. That’s according to the evidence in the literature. Because that’s all I care about is outcome studies. I just read a study yesterday regarding Tramadol, which is a form, a lower, a water damp opiate, but it’s a big drug prescribed by the medical profession, and there’s I believe a 300 percent increase of chiropractic care doing so much better than the Tramadol patients.
And when we look at outcomes in cohorts, all of these cohorts, which is number of people in a study. Or like 000, it’s not 20 people. But then I looked at a 8, 034, 000 cohort over 40 years by Niteidon done in 2020, which shows a 96 percent positive outcome for chiropractic patients getting a chiropractic spinal adjustment.
Eight million people over four years, 96 percent are positive. That is unbelievably unheard of. And then what I did was, I went into the literature and I looked in 2024 of the latest and greatest treatment for what medicine considers nonspecific back pain. And you know what it is? More of the same crap.
It is physical therapy is the cornerstone, NSAIDs, spinal injections, it is. Spinal cord stimulators. And here’s the next one. I really like this one. It is Psychotherapy to reduce the Catastrophizing of spinal pain. Now, what does that mean? They’re teaching the people that have this pain which is ongoing which they can’t help to how not to create have that create a Catastrophe in their life and give them emotional tricks to get past all of the pain to live their life to not catastrophize pain When in fact, We have a 96 percent solution.
Now, does that make any sense to you whatsoever? The answer is no. And hell no. Okay. Zippity doo dah. And the reason it doesn’t is because they’re recycling the same treatments. Again, it’s physical therapies, the cornerstone, NSAIDs, injections, spinal cord stimulators, psychotherapy. Muscle stimulation, exercise, all these things which pale severely into, by comparison, what we’re doing.
How do we get the industry to wake up? Now, I believe And I don’t have a hard stat on this. I do have hard stats on utilization of days gone by, that we cycle between a 7 percent to 10 percent utilization in our industry. And they’re saying we’re at 14 percent now. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t see it.
I work in in, in chiropractic and medical academia. I work with medical doctors all over the country. They see 99 percent of the patients. Not us, but we need to see more. We need to do more, but what’s happening is there are changes coming in the industry and you need to understand those changes.
So I’m also going to tell you that I’m going to change my stance compared to 2024 and that’s important because you see my vision. is to change chiropractic through clinical excellence. That’s my vision and clinical excellence has nothing to do with your ability to adjust. It should, but it’s not enough.
It’s just not enough. You need to know how to triage. You need to diagnose. There is such incredible technology out there. That will help you do everything you need to do. And in order to do that, you need to get smarter. Now, here’s one stance. I used to say it was the only solution. That’s wrong. It’s not the only solution.
It’s your first solution. It’s your best solution. But what good is getting smarter if nobody knows? If the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall? If you got smarter and no one can have evidence of that, what’s the purpose? Okay. It’ll make you feel good. It’ll make your mom feel good.
You might get some extra diplomas. You might have answers, but it’s not enough. You have to be able to not only shout to the mountaintops, but people have to listen and hear what you’re saying to affect change. And that’s what this is about. So you need a new mindset. To create new results, because if not, we’re going to cycle back down to that 7 percent no matter where we are.
I hear it all the time. Oh, you’re a chiropractor. Oh, it’s funny. I treated someone yesterday and I don’t see a lot of patients anymore. And I said, they said, Oh, they have terrible headaches and migraines. I said, what are you doing? They’re saying they’re taking, a tremendous amount of excedrin headaches or whatever the heck it’s called.
I said, is it helping? It helps for about 15, 20 minutes, but I go around the rest of my day with this terrible headache. They said, do you have a trichiropractic care? So they said no, I saw, I looked it up in Facebook and I saw these people twisting necks and people waking up, getting off the table and saying, Oh my God, I feel great.
And I thought it was a bunch of nonsense. Then I looked on Facebook and I saw these other things. It’s causing strokes. And the doctor’s not a real doctor, on and on. So I was too afraid to start. So he says and this person had confidence in me. And I said, I’ve been doing this for 40 something years, and it really works well.
Are you tired of having headaches and stomachache from all the Excedrin you take? And she said, I said, get your pop it up like Tic Tacs. So this is he says if you’d like, and they came, they chose, and I saw them one adjustment. They got off the table and I got the biggest hug at it says, I just felt a wellbeing coming over my body.
Like I’ve never felt my headache went away. I feel like I could see better. I could hear better. I could smell better. Oh my God. How come I didn’t do this before? He says, cause you believe everything on Facebook and it puts too many questions because you see folks. We don’t have the clout behind what we should.
We’ve been built on one patient telling another how well it works, and it’s not enough. It’s just not enough. Now I could tell you in my consulting side, this week we just passed the eclipsed The 2 million referral mark. Our programs have effectuated an additional 2, 006, 000 referrals since 2012. That’s over the last 12 years.
And I’m a numbers guy. And how did we do it? We did it by simply getting doctors higher credential. We did it by a lot of different things. And here, 2, 682 referrals. We did it by. Getting the doctor smarter, but then putting something in front of the doctor called referral sources to let them know what’s going on with respect to the references, with respect to the literature.
We’re using the NIH and I’ll talk about that in a moment. We did everything. So what do we do? We are, we use research. Now we’re pushing technology And we’re combining technology and research. So we’re changing top of mind referrals. And I’ll talk about that in a second. Changing the utilization of technology for the highest ROI, return on investment.
Changing carrier payments to docs and lawyers, which has to do with referrals also, and you folks getting paid. Changing settlement and verdict outcomes. Changing demonstrative reporting on pain and injury. All of these things are part of a strategic plan center. on technology and your clinical excellence.
Because if you don’t make the changes, you’re going to be yesterday’s news. I promise you, you’re going to find yourself eroding more and more. And I study future trends. I study them. And future trends are taught by last year’s courts and lawsuits. It’s taught by new evidence in the literature.
It’s taught by lawyer outcomes. And it’s also taught by corporate CFOs. The chief financial officers, which look at only the ROI, the return on investment. What’s the return on investment? And I have to share with you that in the past, chiropractic played a very minimalistic, poor model. Right now, it’s huge.
Because our doctors, and especially the credentialed ones, are actually being positioned to help them get to the surgeons and get a huge return on investment. Thank you for that. And that’s what you’re competing against. So you’ve got to be real careful. That level of competition is real. It’s very real.
So what’s at stake, by the way, is your reimbursement. That’s what’s at stake. Increased income, your compliance is at stake, which has to do with money, license, your freedom, your reputation is at stake, which has to do with your referrals and your time is at stake to give you more patient time and more family time.
All of these things are at stake. And how do I learn this stuff? Federal court cases? State cases? Compliance reviews of I do compliance reviews with doctors, and I’ve looked at just about every EHR program in the chiropractic medical industry. I’ve spoken to over 4, 000 lawyers. I’ve spoken to thousands of medical doctors, primaries and specialists.
I’ve spoken to a countless number of insurance claims examiners. I have 44 years of experience in the industry. I used to see 650 a week. Okay. And I managed four offices simultaneously. And right now I consult probably, God, I don’t know, so many doctors in 49 different states. So all of these things help me understand future trends and I get to see what’s going on and I see it.
But right now, corporate is sweeping the nation. It’s sweeping it. You can thrive. If you do what they do, you could thrive. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Now the largest corporate entities, private equity firms, hedge funds, I could throw names up, but I don’t want to do that on a recorded line. But I want to share with you, they sat with me seven years ago and put a half a billion dollars in my hand, literally a half a bill of which I would have gotten a whole big chunk of that.
And I walked away because what they did was It wasn’t quite all worked out. It would have worked for two years, and then I’d end up with a girlfriend for 10 to 12, probably named Bubba. So that’s not something I had a desire to do. So I can share with you, but what they wanted and what their construct was actually very good.
And they’re now doing it. In the last two years, I’ve been working with corporate to fully understand. But you don’t have to sell out to corporate. If I was practicing today, I would not sell out to corporate. I wouldn’t, but I would do what they’re doing. And if you don’t do what they’re doing, you’re gonna be in trouble.
Because they’re really working hard at top of my consciousness. Now, if we look at a sword and a shield, they’re the sword. And you need to have a shield to be protected against them. And their corporate sword is technology. It’s AI. And I’m not just talking about AI to do your notes. That, believe it or not, is the smallest piece of the puzzle.
You need AI in order to do practice management. You need AI to do billing and collections. Years ago, let me see what slide is next so I know where I’m going from here. You need, years ago, you used to see hospitals going out of business. You don’t see that anymore. How come? Here’s what AI does.
You sit and do your notes, and by the way, your notes, it should be done through AI, and it can be done simplistically with guardrails on compliance. You sign off on your note. It automatically gets sent up to the billing company through corporate. The billing company has AI, which scrubs your notes, and it looks for cross coding edits.
It looks for it looks for modifier issues and a bunch of other things. And if the AI determines that it’s not good, it bounces it back to you to fix it. Now your claim doesn’t go up bad, but now your claim is clean, you send it back. AI has it. You go through a clearinghouse, which doesn’t cost them anything because it’s part of their technology package.
I’m sorry. Now what occurs is The insurance company makes a calculus and it all depends on how much money they have to float in debenture training. I’m not going to explain it to you right now. It’s institutional training to maintain their insurance charter. Have to keep a certain dollar amount. It’s expensive for them.
So what they do is for every industry, including ours, they determine the most frequent denials. And depending upon how much money they have to float, they throttle up. You’re going to be denied for this item. I’m just going to make it up. Review of systems. I’m just making that up. Okay, now, they’re going to deny you for review of systems.
They bounce it back and you’re E& B. You look at your claim and you go, Oh my god, here’s my report. It’s in there. What are these idiots? Send it in again. You send it in. 30, 60 days you get paid. You’re happy. They’re happy because they needed your money for 30 to 60 days. You should have been paid on day one.
So now what occurs is, when you’re the billing company for these corporates, Send the information up through their AI billing software. You hit, there’s a toggle button. You send the notes with it. Now the insurance company’s AI, you don’t speak to a person anymore. The insurance company’s AI gets the note when it goes to bounce it.
It’s going to have over a thousand conversations with your AI in under one second, but now, because your AI is attached to your notes, it’s going to resolve that issue. As a result, 98 percent of claims get paid first pass. That’s part. Secondly, cash billing. Oh, I do it at the front desk. I’m the better cash collector than anyone.
We have all these plans, all this everything. You don’t do it better. Remember you used to go to emergency rooms or hospitals and your last window that you went to was the cashier. You checked out at the cashier. All your insurance, you pay your co pay you pay whatever if you don’t have insurance. You don’t do that anymore because AI collects money a whole lot better than a person.
So they turned it all over to AI. Technology collects the money through texting or emailing, and they claim that within seven minutes, 40 percent of every single bill is paid. And when you get, when you do auto pay on something and you have a credit card, and then you change credit cards and all of a sudden the credit card’s there, you didn’t give it to them.
That’s AI folks. So you need to implement that into your practice. That’s AI. That’s why hospitals are profitable. That’s why the private equity groups, the hedge funds, are hugely profitable using all this stuff. But that AI is expensive unless you have economies of scale, meaning you buy something a gazillion people are using.
So we worked and partnered with A company through EMR Chio. I should have had a slide up here for that, go to emr chiro.com. This is a small piece. of what you’re getting in AI in a system, including the notes for less than pretty much anything is in the industry right now. The chiropractic industry, the typical EMR systems can’t compete at this level.
They don’t have any of this stuff. Go to emrchiro. com and you’ll learn more about that. And you really need to learn more about that. So you also need a shield or sort of actually, or let me rephrase that. You need a shield for the carrier sort. Which are your notes? You need guardrails. You need someone to go in and create templates that are automated, that drops in what we call macros, but actually they’re automatically put in.
AI is punching them all in there for you. You need to do that. That’s what we created for you. We created what I believe is the best shield in the industry. You need all these things in order to thrive because the carrier also has changed their settlement algorithms. Something new is coming. It used to be Colossus.
Guess what? It’s the way it was 10, 20 years ago. They’re looking at your reports now. They’re looking at everything. So you’ve got to have a shield and it can’t be this crap. An initial evaluation. Let’s just look real quick. VAS. Is that Vast Deference? Scale of 1 to 10. That should be 0 to 10 folks. If you write 1 to 10, you have some fraud issues going on.
Objective. Too many people leave it out. Pain and tenderness. No pain reported or elicited. Why are you treating a patient if they’re not having no complaints? But now you’ve got a subluxation restriction in L3 Wait, it gets on here. This is an initial evaluation. Current status, asymptomatic maintenance, not a, where’s your diagnosis, complaint.
No complaint presented, but yet you’re manipulating the patient at L3 and L4. And and extra, and no extra spinal regions. None of this makes sense. This is 152 wellness visits. The identical report over eight years. One initial eval, no re evals. You want to know why we’re looked at like we’re like the dog crap on the bottom of someone’s shoe?
This is the reason. You’re treating a patient with no complaints? Now all of a sudden here, they have a level of 4, but there’s no reported pain elicited, no complaints. Hello? What kind of, I would say, what kind of idiot does this? Someone, here’s the thing, and it’s not funny, okay? It’s not funny, it’s disgusting.
And you want to know why it’s disgusting? I took that slide out. If a chiropractor does something wrong, let me rephrase that. If a medical doctor does something wrong, they will say that medical doctor is an idiot. But if a chiropractor does something wrong, all of chiropractic are idiots. And I’ve been listening to that for 44 years.
I’m suffering the sins of my colleagues. I’m suffering. And I want to know why people look at us and they’re afraid to use us. Frankly, I don’t blame them. You look for your own eyes. I don’t blame them. When I’m looking at things, I teach MRI spine interpretation in chiropractic academia and medical academia.
I’m showing, I get calls from medical specialists all the time, teaching them, how to interpret MR and x ray even, but yet I’m not allowed to order it in Medicare. This is part of the reason why, because it’s not what you say or know or do. It’s what’s on paper. And documentation is critically important and it’s the bane of everyone’s existence.
So again, I went out and created emrchiro. com. Why’d I do that? It’s real easy because our industry needs something better and we need to tap in to practice management stuff with medicine. And it’s the only way to compete with the corporates. It’s the only way. Now, from a clinical perspective, one of my roles in medical academia, My goal is to be a peer reviewer in the NIH.
And I am a peer reviewer in the NIH for something called MedPix, medical pictures. And we’ve gotten probably 45 articles published in 2024 already, which is awesome. But I’m putting in their pro chiropractic literature. And that’s predominantly looked at. They get hundreds of thousands of looks a day, but it’s predominantly looked at by medical residents, medical interns, some fellows that they’re really looking at that stuff as part of their education, because I want to cross the aisle.
I don’t want to be me. Okay. It’s not like a nationalistic approach in politics. Okay. Why don’t I believe in a nationalistic approach? I’m the only one looking at me. I want everyone else to look at me. I want medical doctors to look at me. I want certain primary care surgeons, ortho, neuro, neurosurgeon, pain management.
I want lawyers to look at me. I want everyone to look at me. How is anyone gonna know I’m great, not me, but chiropractic, if I don’t give them evidence? And there’s plenty of evidence in the literature, and we’re helping to create that evidence in a large way. Thank you. You’ve got to be able to share it and shout from the mountaintops and put it in places people can see.
We’ve gotten two million and six Thousand additional referrals because we’ve tried to shout from as many mountaintops as possible and that number is going up and up and it’s escalating. So I want to share with you these things are critically important. Yes, I believe in chiropractic spinal adjustment.
No, I’m not going to talk subluxation. Does it mean I’m giving away my uniqueness? That’s absurd. But I’m calling it a biomechanical pathology. Why? Because when I talk to a medical doctor Who can refer 25 back cases a week to me? Yes for pain. But you know what, all you wellness doctors, guess what, no one comes to you for wellness.
They start with pain and then you educate them. That’s your portal into our practices. You don’t have to like it, it just is. So when I talk about subluxation, they look at me, they smile, and they say under their breath, because they’ve told me this, what a moron. They don’t treat subluxation in the neck, the bone will be on their shoulder because they’re looking in terms of medical subluxation and we’re trying to reinvent the wheel.
So I talk, when I say that, they smile and they walk away and they share with their friends how I’m an idiot. When I talk about biomechanical pathology, that’s something they understand. Let me rephrase it. That’s a phrase they’re familiar with, but they don’t understand what it is. And then when I explain to them that’s the basis, they For non specific back pain, which they can’t diagnose, which 96 percent of our patients get better based on the evidence of the literature.
And we don’t need any drugs, and it works well, and we have evidentiary demonstrative evidence, conclusive demonstrative evidence, that we could show them on the next right, all of a sudden the referrals start. And to the turns of the millions, the referrals start and they can refer 25 patients a week. I don’t care why they come.
I don’t care if it’s only for pain. Guess what? 80 percent are gonna stay because they love the pain. 10 percent are gonna stay because they want wellness. And the last 10 percent is gonna tell me to go screw myself. They’re not interested. They’re not coming. They watch Facebook. So you know what? I’m happy to treat the 80%.
I’m happy to treat the last 10 percent for the rest of their lives and their families and educate them. Now I’m changing the world and moving the needle. Because I’m now communicating with them in the same language. Without giving up the chiropractic spinal adjustment. That’s what makes us unique. Not treating subluxation.
That doesn’t make us unique. That’s a diagnosis. Who cares what I diagnosis? How am I treating? I am treating them with a chiropractic spinal adjustment. I also know that biomechanical pathology has not only pain implications, but systemic implications. It’s got a whole lot of issues. And that’s not my opinion.
It’s all over the evidence in the literature. Now, we need to tie in chiropractic spinal adjustment and that biomechanical pathology, which I’ve actually done. We’ve got to get it published. It’s something we’re working on, but there’s a lot of solutions, folks. There’s a lot. So you’ve got to stay top of mind.
It’s an old concept, and this is what the corporate’s figured out. If I could stay in the top of mind, medical primaries, orthos, neuros, neurosurgeons, I’m going to get the referrals. I’m just going to get them. And you can stay top of mind with your patients. And it’s, yes, it’s great if you help them, but can you imagine if you said, Hey, I’m, I am now credentialed through the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine.
I’ve gone through medical academic training. You want to know what the patients are going to do? They’re going to refer a lot more to you. You might think, and I used to think that getting them well was enough. It is. But if you want to take your referrals and amp it up on steroids. Now start talking to something they believe in more than chiropractic academia.
That’s medical academia. You ask any patient, who do you, what do you think is better as far as an academic institution? Life University, National University, Northeastern University, Northwestern University, or Harvard Medical School. Duh. It’s, it’s just, it’s a no brainer. It’s just a no brainer.
So now we’re able to tap into something they believe in more Same it’s a different, it’s the same level of education because we got co credentials and in what we learn, but the point is you’re tapping into beliefs. And now all of a sudden your referrals go through the roof. You’ve got to tap into that.
I’ve learned this from Madison Avenue, New York City, the marketing capital of the world. It’s called the concept of ladders. And I’ve taken programs and I’ve consulted with these people and it works. We’ve taken old concepts and made them powerfully successful. November 2nd and 3rd, we have our primary spine care 16.
It is online. You’re more than welcome to join us. There’s my cell phone. That’s my my email address. You can text me, email me, emrchiro. com. I urge you, there’s three videos on there. It’ll change your perception of what you need to do. Folks, 2025 is coming and beyond, and there’s no place but up.
Let’s move. Thank you so much. Thank you, ChiroSecure. We’ll see you next time.
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