Four Levels of Care

There are four progressive levels of care in our chiropractic office.  It is important that you understand what is available to you here so you can choose the level of care appropriate for your health objectives.

Simply stated, the four levels of care are:

• Initial intensive care
• Prevention
• Maintenance
• Wellness or Health Development

So, what do these mean to you?  When new patients come to our office, we ask what their health objectives are.  Often, the answer is to help them get rid of a health problem that they have and do not want.  Assuming the problem is either acute or chronic, but not permanent, we can often help turn the direction of a person’s health around during initial intensive care.  To many, this is the treatment phase of care though that is an over simplification.

Once the outward signs of the problem have been addressed, the obvious question is, “would you be willing to take the additional steps that would be necessary to strengthen and stabilize your health so that the problem that caused you to consult us would be far less likely to return?”  Almost everyone understands the value of this step and we move on to the prevention stage of care.

Almost always, patients who work towards stability and strength in order to prevent the return of a health problem find that their overall health also improves and they want to maintain it.  More often than not, if we make the analogy of a gym, what would you need to do to maintain weight loss after you have achieved it?  The answer is to keep doing everything that you did to accomplish your objective in order to prevent the problem from returning.  Maintenance in this office is almost always at a reduced frequency of visits than either correction or prevention.

Health development clients consult with us regularly about which lifestyle strategies could be employed to cause their health to improve year after year.