OUR
PROGRAM
What To Expect:
Our Passion Is Your Peace Of Mind
At Richmond Chiropractic Neurology, all new patients will usually experience a three-step process as we look into your specific health condition(s), how it has evolved, and how it has been affecting your neurological and biochemical systems. In some case, these three-steps may be expanded to five or more.
THE FIRST VISIT: We know how important it is that you feel that your health care team is actually listening to you, and we mean really listening. Plan on spending an hour at your first appointment including a consultation, a complete history, a preliminary exam and other tests as time allows. Please bring with you any and all laboratory, imaging or other pertinent tests or reports from other physicians you have seen, as well as the online new patient forms and questionnaires that we request you fill out. It is also when you should ask your important questions. Read more.If you have a particularly complex history, we often take the first hour just to make sure that you know that we know what is going on in its entirety. It is critical that you know and feel that someone has actually heard you. At that time we may also request further information, and thus at the next visit we will begin your examination process. If your situation involves an emergency, or if you have travelled a considerable distance, we may initiate a preliminary treatment for relief as well as to find out if our type of care has a probability of helping you. Read less.
THE SECOND VISIT: This second visit usually gives you 30 minutes with Dr. Smith. We start with state-of-the-art, painless and non-invasive diagnostic evaluations that assess your brain function. We evaluate brain function by looking for right and left-brain activity, how the brain is working in relation to balance, posture, gait, strength or weakness Read more.patterns and movement (especially the eyes). During the second visit, we will usually initiate some preliminary treatment to ascertain if these methods will work for you, and if they do, we will offer you a third visit where we will present a care plan. Read less.
THE THIRD VISIT: During this visit, we go over what our examination findings revealed and what that means. We will then discuss your care plan, the proposed frequency of your visits, what types of brain rehabilitative exercises may benefit you, and what other rehabilitation therapies may benefit you. This is also a time when you will have more questions, so we usually need 30 minutes for this visit. This visit involves discussing financial considerations as well. Read more. With a care plan established, we ask you to schedule in advance, as it is the best way promote your recovery. That way you can choose the best times according to your personal schedule and responsibilities. At each subsequent visit we monitor your progress and as you improve you can expect changes to your in-office and home programs. We are confident, however, that as you see as the positive changes begin to take place you will come to regard your treatment with our team at Richmond Chiropractic Neurology as a top priority. Read less.
THE FOURTH VISIT & BEYOND: These visits involve a series of on-going examinations followed by an appropriate treatment. This is to see if what we are doing is working, and if you are progressing or not, and then we may alter our treatment protocols depending on how your condition(s) are doing. At the end of the scheduled care plan, we may do some repeat evaluations and/or laboratory tests, and offer the next level of care as needed.
Take Control of Your Health! 804.897.9194 
The Program:
After Dr. Smith has taken you through to step three, he will ask you to participate in a care program designed to get you the changes that you are seeking. May people ask, why a program? The answer is because that is simply the best way to get you the results that we all are seeking. But why is that? Well, this will take a bit of explanation, yet it is actually quite simple.It has become apparent in neuroscience, as well as in the evaluation of laboratory tests, that disturbances in function precede disease pathology, or if you have a pathology/ disease, you will usually have disturbances of function along with the disease itself. Many conditions or disorders are often nothing more than parts of the brain or body that are under or over functioning. Read more. Using the principles of neuroscience, an evaluation for neurologic signs of dysfunction will reveal either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ neurologic signs, or both. Hard neurologic signs are those that indicate tissue destruction, such as stroke or Parkinson’s disease, etc. On the other hand, soft signs reveal functional changes that are not associated with tissue destruction, but are associated with areas or regions of the brain or nervous system that are under or over functioning. Traditionally trained physicians of all types typically ignore soft signs, even though they are the best way to understand your issues, because there are no drugs or surgeries for the majority of soft signs. Most of us that practice Functional Neurology and Rehabilitation have repetitively seen that treatment to reduce or eliminate soft signs will often restore function to the point that symptoms come under control or disappear. Additionally, after a thorough soft sign evaluation, it becomes apparent that most of the soft signs will be representative of one side of the brain being more dysfunctional than the other. Because areas of soft sign dysfunction have been shown to respond to physical and cognitive types of therapies through what has come to be called ‘neuroplasticity’, we will then administer diverse therapies to stimulate a more normal function of your brain, nervous system and physiology. The key point here is to stimulate only those areas that are dysfunctional: for example, if your right brain is slower, do not stimulate the left-brain. This is absolutely critical and it usually makes all the difference in the outcome. Read less.
How does it work?
In order to create proper brain function and thus bring your symptoms down or under control, certain requirements must be met. Those requirements are that your brain must have adequate fuel and activation.
Fuel means that your biochemistry is optimized, and this may include dietary strategies along with supplements. The cleaner the diet, the fewer supplements are needed in the long run. We run lab tests to find this information.
Activation means that multiple painless and safe therapies are administered to stimulate your brain and nervous system back to optimal function. Because the brain requires stimulation from multiple sources in order to function optimally, we may use a variety of sensory and/or motor therapies that may include light, sound, smell, balance, vestibular, eye movements, neuro-feedback, cognitive or other brain based learning types of approaches. Read more. It has been my experience that therapies targeted to the weak side of the brain, or any weak pathway treated in context of the weaker brain hemisphere, will often reduce your signs and symptoms and may as well as improve ‘hard’ sign manifestations. We see this in stroke rehabilitation frequently. Essentially this involves understanding that traditionally, medical science looks at health issues from a black and white perspective. For instance, it may be that you have a lot of symptoms and feel lousy, but all of your lab tests, or your neurologic evaluation or your other tests are normal. This is not only tremendously frustrating for many suffering with chronic conditions, it misses the fact that most of our chronic conditions are actually in the ‘grey’ zone and will not be found in the classic black or white ways of analysis. Those trained in Functional Neurology and Functional Medicine (the application of nutrition to get at any underlying imbalances) are the ones best suited to understand what areas of your health are in the ‘grey’ zones and find the right combination of therapies to assist you in restoring optimal function and health. This approach looks at soft signs as ‘grey’ biomarkers of dysfunction and is a way to figure out what is going wrong in your system in a safe and is based in current scientific evidence as to what these soft signs represent and how ‘soft’ therapies can be of wonderful assistance in restoring hope. Read less.
Take Control of Your Health! 804.897.9194
What your responsibilities
may be, and why:
You will be asked to participate in a scheduled program of care that involves multiple visits over weeks to months. This is to ensure that you get the results you want, and it is similar to all types of therapy such as stroke rehab or any physical therapy.
It is simply because of the way our brain, nervous system, tissues and biochemistry work: successful outcomes are more likely to occur when a program of progressive care is undertaken. Why? It is because restoration of function requires that stimulations be Frequent enough, Intense enough (but not too intense), and with enough Time (duration) to result in neuroplasticity (changes in brain function). This is the FIT approach used throughout all of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Therefore, you will be asked to enroll in a program of care that is created to result in optimal restoration of function. Your program results will be carefully monitored for adequate progress and therapies adjusted to meet your requirements as you improve.
If insufficient or no progress is seen, we will discuss your options for alternative care sources. Initially, it is common to ask patients to initially commit to three to six months of care in order to create the lasting changes that are desired, especially in the chronic, severe and complex situations.While a significant portion of this treatment occurs in-office, ultimately how successful your program will be can depend upon you, the patient. You will be required to perform specific rehabilitative exercises at home every day, and usually several times a day. As part of your comprehensive program, depending on your lab results Read more. and overall condition, you will probably be asked to make specific upgrades to your diet, and to take certain supplements. Often if your condition is chronic, complex and severe, we will request rather significant upgrades. Such needs for supplements or dietary upgrades will be explained in detail at the time when they will be prescribed. While showing up to your appointments is critical, it will not be enough to create lasting change that you want—you simply must commit to doing the home rehabilitative therapies between visits that Dr. Smith prescribed. Read less.
