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Welcome to the Look to the Children’s Show. Dr. Erik Kowalke here, excited to be with you again, thanks to ChiroSecure Dr. Stu Hoffman for all that you do for the chiropractic profession and putting on shows like this. Uh, I do the first Thursday of every month, um, and we usually use a whiteboard. I’m going to give you guys some practical, real stuff that you can use in your practice right away today, uh, to see more kids see more families ultimately make a bigger impact is what we’re so passionate about. Uh, we have a chiropractic office in grand rapids, Michigan, uh, where we see tons and tons and tons of pediatrics and kids. Um, and we’ve been voted the number one pediatric office in our city four years in a row. Um, and we’re just super passionate and excited about it. So let’s get started.
All right. So if you love to see kids and you love to see pregnant moms and families, uh, one of your passions probably is to see infants and, you know, in your heart that it’s really important that infants get checked right away after birth as soon as possible in most cases. And if you see nurses or you see, uh, other people in your clinic that take care of moms, um, through the birthing process, you know, the birthing process itself can be really traumatic and we’ve all seen infants come in and kids come in where we’re like, oh my goodness, something happened at the birth process. It would have been great to see this baby right away. And so we really understand the importance of that. And we have six kids ourselves, and obviously all of our kids have gotten checked. And if you’re a chiropractor and you have kids, your kids I’m sure got checked right away.
So how do we get more families and parents to understand the importance of getting infants checked for subluxations and nerve interference right away after the birth process and how do we connect and communicate that whole process to ultimately be able to see more infants and remove nerve interference right away and help kids grow up healthier and livelier and all their bodies to do what they’re intended and supposed to do. You know, I, I use this example a lot in our, in our clinic. We see kids come in five years old with ear infections, eight years old, and they still have bread-winning problems, uh, 10 years old and they have asthma issues, uh, six years old and they have allergy problems, uh, a 12 year old with headaches, like all these scenarios. And we do our analysis. We see nerve interference, we see muscly symmetry, we see spinal misalignment, we check them remove nerve interference.
Their body’s able to adapt and heal, and those conditions go away. Well, that underlying root cause of the problem, which is subluxation and nerve interference, was there prior to them turning 12 and having headaches and experiencing bedwetting and all of the things that they’re experiencing. They just didn’t know it was there because kids aren’t complaining of symptoms. And most the time for tea, real subluxations, aren’t symptomatic, all right away in all those areas, especially primary civilizations. So, uh, if we could, uh, check those kids when they were asymptomatic and there was no symptoms, we would have fixed the same thing that we fixed now that got rid of their symptoms, but it would have set them up for a life of never having that symptom in the first place. So wouldn’t it make sense that we would get kids checked early on, be proactive. Let’s see what their spine condition is.
Let’s see how the nervous system is functioning. Let’s improve the function of the nervous system of that child, and ultimately help them be healthier and live a better, happier, healthier life. That’s the message that parents need to really understand. And there’s a difference between the need to hear the message and they need to understand the message as they might need to hear it five times in five different ways to really understand and grasp the concept of that. And every parent and every family unit is different based on their previous experience, how much they trust you, uh, who they have in their life. Speaking into them. There’s a lots of variables there. So seeing infants is a, is a multi-year process, usually of education and, um, changing the way people live their life and think about their health, um, from reactive to proactive. It’s this, isn’t a simple, easy, Hey, you should bring your kid in to get checked in there and be like, oh yeah.
Okay. Here’s my two day old infant. It’s a process. It’s a lot of educating. So the three keys that I really think you should focus on. Number one is building trust. So how do you build trust in your community, in your clinic? Uh, the best way, number one is you get results for the family. Like the family is already coming in. The mom’s pregnant. She gets results. The dad who had an issue, he gets results. The kids had issues, they gets results. So number one way to build trust in your chiropractic clinic is to, is to get results and then clearly communicate those results and celebrate with them. Oftentimes we get so used to seeing people get better, that we don’t take time to celebrate the wins. So celebrate, you got to deal with my handwriting here. Celebrate, uh, testimonials is also trust testimonials. So do you have testimonials all over your walls?
Have they seen testimonials of other people like them in other infants getting adjusted in your clinic? You have a testimonial wall. Do you have testimonials go out via text message? Do you have testimonials that, uh, are on your website or on your blog? You have testimonials on your social media. Do you have a testimonial survey that makes it really easy for people to give you testimonials? So you can do a survey through survey monkey or some easy free survey software where they can, you can text them a link to the survey. So this is helpful. As in our clinic, mom brings Johnny and Johnny’s eight. They have six kids. Johnny’s the only one that has bed with him. They’re worried about Johnny. Uh, Johnny comes in, gets chiropractic care. Bedwetting goes away. Mom tells me in the room. You’re not going to believe it. Johnny’s doing so much better.
He’s down to once a month or none. And he was every single day, uh, prior to awesome. You know what? I’m going to send you a message right now by via text. And you’re going to get it, click on the link, fill that out in the waiting room before you leave the clinic and let us know how great it’s been for Johnny. Cause you know what? There’s so many other kids out there just like Johnny that had Bedouin issues and their parents don’t know that there’s any other solution. And Johnny isn’t able to go to his friend’s houses. He’s not able to stay at his cousins. He’s not able to sleep over because he’s worried about what in the bed. This is going to help a lot of moms, you sharing Johnny story so that we can find nerve interference in those kids and help them get better too.
And then I sent a message to the front desk. The front desk gets the message and they use SCAD in our office to send the testimonial. We have a template already set up where literally you just click a button. Boom, sends a text message to the mom. Mom cooks it, fills up testimonial, submits a picture can take it right in the office. Now we have an amazing testimonial on bedwetting. That’s new live. Mom can share that to social media. It just through marketing, but all of that builds trust because then another mom that has a kid with Betty winnings is going to see Johnny story. Maybe she knows Johnny’s parents. Maybe she doesn’t. And she thinks I’ve tried everything. If it, if it worked for this little kid, I’m gonna at least give it a shot. So testimonials are hugely important. The other one is reviews.
So we used to use testimonials solely. What’s very interesting about the changing dynamic of, of environment. Nowadays in 2021 is reviews are testimonials, but they’re unstructured testimonials. So it’s people just saying from their heart how great the experience was and SCAD automates a lot of that for us. So it’s asking people for reviews after a certain appointment code in our office. So if they’ve been coming for a, a few weeks, we’ll send that audit. It’s automated. So we don’t have to send it, but it asks them for feedback. And then it links them right to Google so they can give us great feedback. Uh, and if you want to see go to higher healthcare project, grand rapids, Michigan, we have tons of reviews. It’s awesome. It builds a ton of trust and people see that and they have lots of trust before they even come in.
So number one, trust number two, you, as the doc need to have competence. This might even be the most important. It probably should have been. Number one, if you’re a student in chiropractic school, uh, you’re wondering how the heck do I get confident adjusting kids? You just need to get out there and get experienced with kids, go intern in an office that sees tons of kids. We have hundreds of kids come into our office every week. If you interned in our office within two weeks, you’re going to be competency kids. There’s this. You just got to get your hands on kids. Uh, or you can do like what I did. I just started having kids. Uh, we had kids in, in chiropractic school and then you can, you know, learn how to, how to handle kids. The biggest thing with kids, isn’t so much knowing what to adjust and where to adjust you.
Probably, if you went through chiropractic school and you have any knowledge of pediatrics and you’ve had some experience, I mean, you you’ll get the experience in that. It’s how do you navigate around a kid? How do you make a kid feel comfortable? Uh, because they have the sense of you that you don’t even have to say anything. And they know whether they’re they like you or they don’t like you, or they’re gonna let you touch them or not. So, uh, kids do weird things. So you have to adjust them, holding them, mom, holding them, laying on the bench, laying on the table, sitting in the chair. Like you always have to do weird things sometimes for kids to make them feel comfortable. Facial expressions are massive with kids. So the more you change your facial expression, the more the kid is kind of reading you in like, okay, am I trusting this guy?
Uh, so you really got to have confidence there when we’re talking about infants, the infants, uh, you just need to know exactly what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it and communicate that to the parent as you’re doing it. So imagine you always think, what could the parent be thinking and how should I address those objections? So this is worst case scenario. The parents thinking, oh my gosh, they’re going to rotary break my two day old baby. I’m going to hear their spine crack. I wonder if it’s going to cause them to cry and scream and it’s going to hurt them. And they might even be thinking that it’s going to hurt them, but they want to do it anyway because they know how traumatic the birth was or something. So you need to be addressing that right away. Like it’s not going to hurt them, but if the baby’s not crying and you put your hands on the baby and the baby starts crying, what do you think?
The mom’s thinking, the mom’s thinking you’re hurting their baby. Even if you’re not hurting their baby. And you’re just touching them, uh, but they’re uncomfortable or whatever. So, or they’re just a baby and they just cry. So you need to clearly show the parent what you’re doing, how much force you’re using, what does it feel like on their arm? Um, and then, you know, learn that process of adjusting an infant. And it’s amazing. You, you, you’re gonna adjust a lesson two week old infant, seeing their body move and unwind and, and their nervous system free of interference. They usually take a deep breath in and go back to sleep on the table. It’s awesome. So you need to have so much confidence. You can’t wait to get your hands on that, baby. If you’re nervous in your head, that’s going to come across to the mom and the baby.
You just need to get that audio and, and, um, know that this infant needs to get checked so bad. They’re literally life depends on it and their spine and their health depends on it. So important. So gain confidence, number three, education. This is educating your community on why they kids should get checked. I’ll give you a perfect example. Why basically every person that comes into your office needs to know that infants need to get checked. It’s easy for your team to get lackadaisical on this. And you have the 65 year old grandpa that, you know, threw his back out that can’t hardly walk. And you’re like, I’m not going to tell him about why infants need to get checked and birth trauma on the tour in our office. He’s 65. He’s a grandpa. Why the heck does he need to know, uh, that, you know, he’s not going to care about that, but you never know.
We’ve had scenarios where a 65 year old grandpa has an eight year old son that has been waiting or has a pregnant, um, grandchild. That’s about to have a great grandchild and you teach him that. And he says, wow, you know what? They, my daughter has this going on in her pregnancy. And her last child had all of this. And man, I wonder if this could really help him. And there you go, you spread the message and now grandpa communicates it to mom. And you have, you know, a whole new infant and family that you can impact. So just never stop educating. You know, they’re getting bombarded by the medical system and pharmaceuticals and drugs and everything outside of your clinic. Um, use the space in your office to really inform and educate people, the power of chiropractic and how important it is even at the age of, you know, two days old or one day old or infancy to get checked for chiropractic care.
Um, so that’s the first step is educate everybody. The second step is educating pregnant moms. So pregnant moms usually are thinking just to get through and have their baby. They’re not usually thinking all of the things that are going to happen post. They just want to have the baby out in this world. And so communicating to them, that process, what we do, and we do a care plan for a pregnant mom. We include the first adjustment for the infant in that care plan, um, to make it easy on the mom. So she’s paying, she’s already paid for it. It’s our, you know, we, we can even put it on the schedule sometimes when she thinks she’s going to be due, we’ll put an infant adjustment in the schedule. But, um, you also got to think about the other objections. If you have a really busy clinic like ours, the mom usually doesn’t wanna bring their brand new baby in a clinic where there’s tons of people, you know, at six o’clock on a Thursday or something.
So we let the mom know, you know, what, if you want to come by, after you get out of the hospital on your way home on our lunch break or after we’re closed, come on in, there’ll be nobody else here. And we’ll get you checked. We’ll get the baby checked. You can go home and just rest. Um, so think through the objections and why, what would make it easy to get the mom in, to bring the infant in? How do you make it easy? How do you make it affordable if you include it in their care plan? Um, educate them on all of the objections prior to them even getting to the point of having the infant. So that’s super, super important. Well as well. And then we’re always educating in the office each visit. So it can be easy for your chiropractic office to turn into.
And I’m guilty of this. Myself is, oh man, it’s raining today. Oh, look how nice it is outside. Oh, what are you doing for Memorial day weekend? Oh, what are you doing for labor day? Uh, you know, just chit chatting about random stuff. Um, but you gotta remember, this is the only chance they get. So if you could tie something back to chiropractic every visit, and I don’t care if your grandparents or whatever, if I have an infant story, that’s amazing. Or if I see a two day old infant the whole day, that day, I’m telling people you’re not going to believe, guess who I saw today. And they’re like, what? I saw a two day old baby, really? They’re like, why wouldn’t you see a two day old baby? And then you just have a conversation about it. And you’re just constantly educating people.
You’re not going to believe it. You know, one day I saw a, literally a two day old baby, and then the next room I went into was our oldest PAX member. I think she was 101 and I was a year not going to believe it. There was a 103 year age span between who I just adjusted. And you, um, and so it’s just super fun and, and it, you just gotta be so passionate about seeing infants and have your office set up clearly to see infants, have your processes down. Your team knows how to handle it. Your team knows how to get infants in, make it easy on the mom and that whole process. So go out there, serve more kids. Don’t forget to work on these things. It’s a timed, you know, takes time to develop all these, this isn’t overnight. So you gotta be intentional about all of these things, and you’ll slowly start to see more and more and more and more infants and, um, really just make a huge impact on the next generation.
So thanks again to ChiroSecure and Dr. Stu Hoffman for all you do for the profession, hosting these shows, look to the children. Don’t forget to tune into Dr. MoniKa the third Thursday of every month. Uh, her show is fantastic as well. And I’ll see you guys back in July. Uh, actually, I don’t know if I’ll see them in July. Uh, I’ll see you guys, I’ll see you guys back on the next Look to the Children’s Show at the beginning of next month. Look forward to seeing you then.