Most people who seek chiropractic care come because they have pain or dysfunction. They are broken and they want to be either “patched” or “fixed,” and usually want it to cost as little as possible.
It’s understandable. But it requires thinking deeper than just wanting the pain to go away. You have to think about what the pain or the dysfunction is “costing” you.
It’s not physically pulling dollars and cents from your pocket, but it’s doing something more dastardly and stealthy. It’s robbing you of your joy. Pain usually makes work less efficient and less enjoyable. It steals from you opportunities to engage in your favorite recreational activities. The pain robs you of date nights with your spouse or game nights with friends. The pain even causes you to shy away from menial chores around the house, causing the garden to go unweeded and the trash to pile up. There is a cost to holding onto your pain.
Yet it is hard to see the hidden costs of holding onto pain, the hidden costs of a body that isn’t working like it should, so much so that we turn into bargain shoppers when it comes to us. We put such a low cost on how it affects our lives that often we do the absolute bare minimum to stay healthy. Sometimes we put a higher monetary focus on our cell phone plan than we do on our ongoing health plan.
A number of years ago, one of our patients came in complaining of severe “under the sheets”-type migraines 3-7 days per week...for the last 40 years. Financially, it was costing her upwards of $225/week to medicate the pain. When she started care, committed to care, and followed through with care, the migraines went away to the point where she was having one headache – a single headache – maybe every six months.
Near the end of her treatment plan, we asked her with pleasant sarcasm what dollar amount she would take to have the migraines back again. Would she be willing to accept one hundred dollars in exchange for her migraine-free state? One thousand dollars? One million dollars? The answer was a no-hesitation “no” at each turn. She had something more valuable than one million dollars.
She had her life back. A life worth living. She had health.
So when you are deciding how much your chiropractic care is worth, give yourself the benefit of perspective. If you wouldn’t take one million dollars to hold onto yuor pain for the rest of your life, then how much would you be willing to spend to make the rest of your life a healthy one?
Basically, how much are you worth?
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