Chiropractic Care in the Workplace: Money Extremely Well Spent



Employers have been getting hip on ways to increase worker productivity and jazz up the workplace.

Some have added full gyms and relaxation areas.  One large, local employer that I’m aware of now has an on-site nurse practitioner.  Overall, the addition of some level of urgent-care-ish care is becoming more and more common.  This saves the employee from having to leave work for routine visits to his or her doctor for things like ongoing prescriptions.

It also means that they don’t have to spend hours going to the doctor for urgent care stuff like sore throats, upper respiratory infections and coughs.  It works out well for everyone involved.  The employer is happy because productivity is preserved and the employee is happy because they waste less time running around to doctors’ offices.

What is notoriously, glaringly absent from these relationships is an on-site chiropractor.

Now maybe my opinion is biased (OK, OK…it’s clearly biased…), but given that the typical office or industrial worker is particularly prone to overuse injuries, it just makes sense to have a provider nearby who can most aptly handle these complaints.  And handle these complaints quickly to get the employees back to working as comfortably as possible.

It is has already been solidly shown that outside of the workplace, whether within an injured workers / worker’s compensation environment or among patients experiencing most types of musculoskeletal pain, chiropractic care is extremely cost-effective, safe and clinically effective.

In this particular study, researchers took a look at what happens when chiropractic care is offered inside of the workplace.  They looks at the claims from a single employer health plan that had employers who received chiropractic care on-site or off-site over the course of two years.  Here’s the details:

  • There were 876 on-site and 759 off-site participants.
  • The off-site group received more radiology services overall (55.5% vs 38.2%) including MRI, ultrasound, and X-rays.
  • The off-site group also had higher outpatient and ER visits.
  • The off-site group also has greater use of chiropractic care and physical therapy.

Given how darn effective chiropractic care is at already reducing imaging, outpatient visits and ER visits, to see that these numbers were EVEN less when a chiropractor was on-site gets me pretty darn excited.

If you happen to be an employer that does not yet have an on-site chiropractor (even if it was just a day or two per week) this should certainly give you cause to think that you’ve been missing an excellent opportunity to do something wonderful for your employees that is going to SAVE you money, not cost money.

So what are you waiting for??

 

James Bogash

For more than a decade, Dr. Bogash has stayed current with the medical literature as it relates to physiology, disease prevention and disease management. He uses his knowledge to educate patients, the community and cyberspace on the best way to avoid and / or manage chronic diseases using lifestyle and targeted supplementation.







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