It is a rare occasion when health care providers from different professions coalesce around any issue. But in Minnesota, providers from almost every profession, with the exception of medicine, are uniting to affect change in Minnesota's emerging health care system.
Formed about five months ago under the leadership and impetus of the Minnesota Chiropractic Association (MCA), the Minnesota Independent Health Care Providers Coalition (MIHCPC), is composed of health care providers representing psychology, optometry, chiropractic, home health care, pharmacy, dietetics, podiatry, occupational therapy, physical therapy, respiratory therapy, nursing, social work, chemical dependency counseling, opticians and others.
MIHCPC is a diverse group of independent health care providers and professional health care associations who believe the quality of health care, cost effectiveness, and consumer-oriented outcomes are most effectively served by a diversity of independent, small business health care providers who continue to improve the quality and accessibility of care to consumers.
MIHCPC emerged from an earlier successful attempt by the MCA to educate chiropractors about health reform in Minnesota, which was mandated by the legislature last February and is in may ways a forerunner to the Clinton national health care plan.
Realizing that our new reform laws required networking with other provider groups within the same regions, the MCA approached other health care associations to help support four educational seminars around the state. Knowing that their members also needed education and because we already had designed a seminar agenda, the Minnesota Optometric Assoc., Minnesota Dietetic Assoc., Minnesota Pharmacists Assoc., Minnesota Podiatric Medical Assoc., Minnesota Psychological Assoc., and the Minnesota Psychologists in Private Practice became co-sponsors of our seminars.
The seminars were extremely successful. Because we had a large list of providers, we were able to attract speakers who traditionally may not have been interested in speaking to each provider group separately. We also generated significant media coverage at each seminar we conducted, which brought to the consumer more awareness of our concerns. With our office coordinating the seminars, we were able to direct the content of the seminars to ensure that our specific concerns were heard and discussed both at the seminars and in the press. Finally, the seminars provided revenue for our association. We marketed the importance of the seminars heavily and netted $7,000.
Based on our success with the educational seminars, other provider groups, including the local chapter of the American Physical Therapy Assoc., were eager to participate and form the more-inclusive coalition composed of the provider groups mentioned earlier.
Although we are only five months into operation, our coalition has accomplished the following:
It is realistic to assume that new members will be added to the coalition and some members will end their alignment as the needs of individual groups change. Coalition building around the issue of health care reform can only foster improved relationships with other provider groups.
For chiropractic, which has for too long been isolated from other groups, this project of coalition building can produce particularly good results.
To form a coalition, here are some suggestions:
Many relevant diagnostic signs are not performed deliberately by the examiner or by the patient at the examiner’s direction. They are observed as the patient reacts to their condition. Fortin’s finger sign, Minor’s sign, and Vanzetti’s sign are three examples of this principle.
Spearheaded by burgeoning scientific and clinical research literature, psychedelics have reached a level of media coverage and popular interest that has not been seen for over half a century. By “psychedelics,” we are referring to the unique class of substances that includes psilocybin (the active compound found in so-called “magic mushrooms”), LSD, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, and mescaline – each of which occurs in the natural world (except for LSD, which is a semi-synthetic compound).
While working at the Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque, N.M., one of the primary care physicians stated that imaging every patient prior to receiving chiropractic was not medically necessary. It was at that point I reconsidered the need for the imaging of every patient to avoid malpractice.
