A Gateway of improving health care relations

Approximately 500 hospitals in the United States—roughly one in 12—have at least one doctor of chiropractic each on staff. Chiropractic is becoming an integrated part of mainstream healthcare. One recent survey reported that 65% of physicians reported referring patients to chiropractors, and 98% of chiropractors made routine referrals to medical physicians. In 2004, Cleveland Chiropractic College, Kansas City established a chiropractic clinic within a suburban mid-western medical facility. This medical center has full inpatient, outpatient and outreach services and was rated as one of the top five teaching hospitals for medical students and residents in the United States. The chiropractic clinic has served as an excellent opportunity for chiropractic interns to develop a collaborative relationship with medical providers. It also exposes chiropractic interns to patients with a wide variety of musculoskeletal and non-musculoskeletal conditions. This presentation will focus on the unique clinical cases that interns experience working within a collaborative setting and the implementation of a “Socratic approach” to clinical learning. The interns are provided a greater preparation for the real world of private practice by working under pressure with queues of unscheduled patients and learning through the use of a blank page approach to case management. I have been an attending chiropractic physician at this hospital-based chiropractic clinic since October 2006, and it has served as an excellent teaching tool for the interns and will only continue to grow, when alternative medicine and allopathic medicine realize the need of cohesiveness for the betterment of our patient care.