WHAT IS THE REAL AND INHERENT ECONOMIC VALUE OF CHIROPRACTIC CARE?
Our patients see their attitude and performance at school, sports, and work radically improve! In time, our typical patient families will get sick far less often, thrive more at work and school, perform better in sports, and experience greater levels of energy. Most of the people we care for begin seeing their medical doctor less and less, some eliminate medical care completely, and at the very least can drastically reduce the amount of prescription and/or over the counter medications they are consuming.
When it comes to better health, what are the actual, documented financial returns?
For children, the benefit of greater health, function, and performance does actually have a bottom line. Healthier children tend to be higher functioning and perform better in high school. As a result, they have a greater chance to get into top universities. A 1999 paper in The Journal of Human Resources showed the more elite the school, the better the graduate’s paycheck. Of the students who had graduated high school and who had gone on to a more top tier university, they made 20 percent more than their peers who attended more bottom level schools. This 20% number was confirmed again a decade later in a 2009 Texas A&M study.
For adults, the financial benefits are demonstrably valid. Chiropractic patients have been found in studies to miss less work days and recover faster from work injury. The value to the employee and organization related to sick days, job injury, mental and physical causes of poor performance, and attrition are in the billions.
Beyond pure physical economics, what is the inherent value of this level of greater health?
I had a wealthy patient come in for his first visit to a chiropractor at the age of 72. He suffered from multiple cancers over the last 15 years, was bound to a wheel chair, and given only a few months to live. He said he’d give me his fortune if I could give him back his health. I told him I’d try, but that I wish I met him 50 years ago. He actually did really, really well with the care but never could again experience so many of the joys that life has to offer.
Perhaps the best person to answer the question as to the inherent value of chiropractic is someone like this man who has completely lost their health because they had not invested in it. There are untold tens of thousands of dollars in the near term and hundreds of thousands of dollars long term for well-adjusted people that don’t need the medical treatments, drugs, and surgeries as they prevent devastating pain, illness, and disease.
Trite, but true; there’s no greater investment than in your health. There’s very clear, well documented evidence of this. Yet, you just can’t place a value of what it’s like to experience life at its fullest expression.
I’ve heard this statement 1000s of times after adjusting someone, “How do people go through life without getting adjusted?”
I’d rather not find out.
MORE TO COME ON THE FACTS BEHIND THE VALUE OF CHIROPRACTIC!
