What drives me, spoken at DG 2003
From Brett Hill

Oh! your going to be a back cracker, a quack! Didn’t you get the grades for physio?, wouldn’t you rather be a “real” doctor, my friends auntie had a friend in Nicaragua that was killed by a chiropractor. People often ask me why I want to become a chiropractor and are invariably surprised by the answer they get. In fact by the time they manage to change the conversation about an hour later (normally to my two other passions sport and beer) they either have an appointment booked at the local chiro or they are sorry they said anything at all. It is about this time they usually ask, “what makes you so passionate about your chosen profession, what drives you?”. I have thought about this a lot and narrowed it down to four main objectives. These are four things that I want to achieve in my career and I thought that I should share them so that maybe they would make you think about what drives you.

I want to have a thriving practice, I want to educate people about chiropractic, I want to have fun and I want to challenge myself. I believe that if you can have a practice that has an even balance of these four things then you will do an enormous amount of good.

Firstly I want to have a thriving practice. This should be everybody’s first priority, not for any material gain or status in the profession but so that we can help as many people as possible obtain true health. That is the ability to adapt to the environment and cope with the stresses of the world that comes from the clear communication of our innate intelligence with our body. By a thriving practice I do not mean purely numbers through the door either. What we need to be doing is helping as many people as we can as well as we can. This of course is going to differ from doctor to doctor. What we do all need to decide though is how many people we can help to the best of our ability in the time that is available to us and we then need to do everything in our power to help that number of people.

B.J. Palmer once said of his practice that “the fundamental of this clinic is to see how little we can do, at how few places, how rarely and how quickly to accomplish the greatest changes in the shortest space of time at the least cost to the case and to know what to do and why we do it before doing it”’

The challenge of being able to help as many people as I can as well as I can is something that drives me and the difference that I know that I can make to those peoples lives is what gets me up in the morning (and what woke me up in the middle of the night to write this talk).

The second thing that gives me my passion is the realization that I am a bearer of the truth. I am fortunate enough to know that the power of the innate intelligence that made my body can heal my body. I also know that it is interference to the flow and reception of this information that causes disease. Furthermore I know that one of the main causes of interference to the flow of innate intelligence is the vertebral subluxation. Knowing this and knowing how many people out there do not know this is what drives me. Knowing that people are living shorter lives and having a decreased quality of life because they do not know this information is what keeps me awake at night. It is always easier to say nothing, to not challenge people paradigm of health and to let people hold onto their ill informed opinions of what a chiropractor is. But next time you are talking with someone and they don’t know about chiropractic think of the difference you could make to their life by teaching them. Think of the patient in your practice who you have made the greatest change to and then imagine where they would be now if no one told them. Making sure that as many people as I can possible know drives me.

I want to have fun and heaps of it. By this I do not mean doing silly or stupid things and having fun at other people expense in the short term. I mean the sort of fun that makes everybody else around you have fun as well. Like a contagious smile or the giving of a gift, it is just doing stuff that lifts the spirits of both yourself and others. This sort of fun creates a cycle of fun where everybody can feed off each other and be lifted up by each other. Every Doctor has their own personality and their own way of having fun so how you do it will differ for everybody but if we can all aim to have a little fun in our practices how much will that increase the potential for healing in ourselves and our patients. Having fun drives me.

Finally I want to challenge myself. I know that in this profession there are always going to be challenges thrown at me that make it hard to stick to my goals. There is always going to be that difficult patient that makes you question if what you are doing is right or if you are really doing any good at all. I look forward to this challenge and I will use it to further challenge myself. I will challenge myself to learn new aspects of chiropractic that may help this patient. I will challenge myself to learn about other therapies (alternative or conventional) that I may be able to recommend to these patients or I may merely challenge myself to return to my philosophy and to know that I am helping people and that not all people are ready or able to be helped by me.

These four things then are what drives me, what drives you? Do you set yourself challenges?

I would like to issue a challenge to all of you

I challenge you to have a thriving practice

I challenge you to educate as many people as possible about chiropractic

I challenge you to have fun

And finally I challenge you to challenge yourself

If we can all set and meet these challenges just imagine where our profession can go

Thank you