For me to sit here and tell you that chiropractic care will 100% work for you would be an outright lie. There is no medical practitioner that can say that; surgeons, GPs, Chiropractors, Physiotherapists or dentists that can tell you that their procedure or their service is 100% going to fix your problem.

The reason is, we’re dealing with the human body, and it is a wholly unpredictable organism that’s very difficult to gauge how it’s going to respond to certain things.

For example, look at surgery, spinal surgery has a 50% success rate. That means that 50% of people will still have pain after an invasive procedure such as spinal surgery.

Taking medications is not always 100%, there are side effects or it just doesn’t get rid of the pain. Taking long term anti-inflammatories such as naproxen or Ibuprofen can be more problematic for your health as it can cause digestive problems.

We have a 90% success rate, we define success as reducing pain and improving mobility.
We want to ensure that we’re getting our patients functioning better and getting them in a better position long term.

When one of our clients falls into that 10% it is our absolute priority to get them feeling better and ensure that we’re getting them the results that they want and also we want.

Our mission at West Chiropractic is to help as many people live a life free from back pain and avoid painkillers or risky surgery.

We ensure that we have regular progress exams to make sure that we are getting the changes that you need. If at any point we’re not hitting those checkpoints within the right time frame, we reassess the diagnosis. We do more testing and re-take posture photographs to see if there’s anything that we have missed, or if anything has been uncovered since we began the programme. This is all at no cost to the patient, we cover this.

If after two months there is absolutely no change, we will start to add some extra services at no extra charge, to see if we can try and speed up the process. This is often decompression or shockwave therapy.

We do believe that everyone can respond to Chiropractic care. However in the 10% where we cannot make the changes in the timeframe we have allowed we want to give our patients the opportunity to respond hence why we extend the treatment period at our cost.*

*I must caveat this, if our patient has not followed our advice, has missed appointments and not followed the programme then this extension will not be applicable.

Our absolute priority is your health and your results. We run a referral based practice and rely on word of mouth hence why we want to try everything to give you the best service possible.

In this type of healthcare there is no definitive 100%, but you need to understand that everyone here will give you their 100%.

The videos on Youtube and Tiktok are not doing any favours for Chiropractors. Just as Arnold Schwarzenneger did no favours for us in Terminator when he broke someone’s neck with his bare hands. The amount of times I have to explain to our clients that this is NOT humanly possible.

The force needed to break someone’s neck is so severe. A neck fracture usually occurs following a fall; like a skiing injury where there is a lot more force involved. Or a car accident where the forces are much greater than a human being can produce.

The adjustments we do are very gentle, we also know exactly what joint to adjust and where to work due to the extensive diagnostic procedures that we have in place. We never rush into treatment on the first visit. We take our time to ensure we are getting it right.

The videos on social media are there for clickbait. People like watching them as they often are ‘shocking’ or ‘dramatic’ because of the big sounds. It is just not like that in a regular Chiropractic office, at least it is not the intention to get big sounds. The intention and purpose of our clinic is to help you get out of pain and back to your goals.

This is something that I hear on a daily basis. I want to tell you a story about a patient that we treated, he was 93 called Alfie. He had sciatica down his right leg, which had been going on for 4 weeks.

He was looking after his wife at home, who wasn’t as active as him. He was mobile, active, and would walk to the shops and take part in regular exercise.

When the sciatica started he was struggling to look after his wife, go to the toilet and look after himself, hence why the family were worried about him.

He was an incredibly proud man, and when I first met him, he was wearing a full suit in order to maintain the impression he would give off.

I did an examination and x-rayed him, and there was a severe amount of degeneration in the spine, which was pressing on his sciatic nerve.

When we are looking after patients in their 80’s and 90’s it is important to set realistic expectations. I told Alfie that it would be unlikely that he would be running a marathon next year, but walking, getting to the shops and doing my exercise, looking after his wife and being able to look after himself was very achievable.

Once we can get the pressure off the sciatic nerve he will feel better and get himself back to normal. We cannot change his bones or the arthritis that he has in his back.

As long as these expectations are in place and you as the patient are happy with them, then you are not too old for Chiropractic care. Nor are you too young.

The type of treatment we do on our older clients can be different to accommodate different body shapes and bone qualities. If we have an osteoprotic patient the type of treatment is very different and much more aware of the weaker areas.

Chiropractic is a safe, natural and effective treatment method for getting your body in the best shape long term. However, it does not mean that there are absolutely no risks.

There is a risk of going to a pilates yoga class. There’s also a risk with Chiropractic care, even if it is very small.

One of the risks that we encounter is in patients who have a lower bone quality and suffer with osteopenia or osteoporosis. This can happen early in life in the 30’s or 40’s but usually tends to be later once our patients are in their 60’s and above.

There is a risk that the bone and when we press on them, they can often be susceptible to fracture or repaired spasms. We need to make sure that we’re being very careful around those areas, and also we do the proper examination to determine where there could be vulnerabilities. For example taking an x-ray to assess the quality of the bone, this is not the gold standard (DEXA is the best method for determining bone quality) but it helps.

Other risks are that we make you worse. We avoid this risk by taking it slowly for the first visit. The initial consultation we do not treat, the reason is we want to ensure we have time to put together a report and review our findings. Then we can build a plan of how we are going to adjust you and make sure it is the best plan for you.

It is very gentle for the first adjustment, so you may feel that not a lot has been done on the first one, and that’s because we don’t want to risk making you worse.

This depends on what you prioritise. Is health a priority in your life?

We believe that health is the most important thing in our patients lives. Without that, they cannot be the best wife, husband, mother, father, boss, employee, athlete that they want to be.

Chiropractic care is an investment but so is an iphone or a flat screen TV. We all seem to have these gadgets and do they make our lives better?

Our Chiropractors will build a programme for you and we are flexible with payment options and will be able to accommodate your budget and needs.

We are not the cheapest. But in my experience you cannot have the best quality, cheapest price and flexibility of appointments. It is not feasible to run a clinic like this. Something has to give, sometimes when price goes down, quality goes down. Or it takes a long time to get an appointment. But if you want the best quality with flexibility of appointments then we cannot be the cheapest.

I appreciate this is not for everyone, but we are not a clinic that is right for everyone. We want to help people that are serious about solving their pain and getting back to doing what they love. They are committed to working with us to make a change in their life and we want to help them in every way we can.

This is a common concern and I think now more than ever it is harder to follow through on commitments due to the noisy nature of the world we live in. So many demands and being pulled from pillar to post, especially where we live in Surrey it is a fight/flight society with commuters travelling into London, traffic backed up for miles and school runs taking hours. It is a fast paced and high stress world.

With that being said we are very good at holding our patients accountable for showing up, doing the work and getting results. At the end of the day it is our reputation on the line and we need to uphold this.

We won’t let you off easy, if you decide you want a change in your life and you choose us, one thing for sure is that we will do everything possible to make that happen.
If you are on the fence about Chiropractic then book a free discovery visit with us here and come and see for yourself how we can help.