By Dr. Chris Cormier, DC
A mother sat in my office a few years ago with a folder on her lap. School reports, a letter from a specialist, printouts from the internet with passages marked in highlighter.
She had come a long way to see me, and I understood very quickly what she was hoping for. She wanted me to tell her that everybody else was wrong about her son.
I want to write about what I did with that, because it took me most of my career to learn and it is the thing I am most sure about now.
The pull is real, and it is flattering
There is a particular feeling that comes with being the practitioner someone drove three hours to see.
They have been told things they did not want to hear. They have read about you. They are sitting forward in the chair. And somewhere in you — in me, certainly — there is a voice saying: you could be the one who sees what everyone else missed.
That voice is not dishonest. It usually comes from something good — the same curiosity that made you want to look past the obvious in the first place. But it wants something for itself, and once I understood that, I started treating it as information about me rather than information about the patient.
What I said to her
I told her I was not going to tell her the specialist was wrong, because I had no basis for it and she deserved better than a guess dressed up as insight.
Then I said the thing I actually believed, which was smaller and more useful. I said: I cannot tell you anything about the diagnosis. But I can tell you that your son is sleeping badly, and I think we can do something about that.
She looked disappointed for about four seconds. Then she looked relieved, and I have thought about those four seconds many times since.
Why the smaller answer is usually the better one
Here is what I have come to think, after a lot of years of watching families go round this loop.
An answer that explains everything leaves you with nothing to do on Tuesday.
The grand explanation feels like progress. It arrives with relief attached — finally, somebody understands — and that relief is real, which is exactly why it is worth being careful with.
What it rarely comes with is a next step small enough to take. The smaller answer does. A cooler, darker bedroom and the same wind-down every night is not an explanation of anybody, but it is something a tired family can start on a Tuesday and notice by the weekend. I have written about how much of that is simply unnoticed in the morning you stopped noticing.
What I have learned to watch for
Parents ask me, reasonably, how they are supposed to know who to listen to. I do not have a system for it, but I have noticed a few things.
The people I have trusted most have been comfortable saying what they do not know. They have been specific rather than sweeping. And they have never asked anybody to choose between them and somebody else. The moment a practitioner suggests you pick a side, something has gone wrong — and I would include myself in that without hesitation.
I would also say this, because it is easy to miss: the most confident voice in the room is not usually the most informed one. Confidence is cheap to produce. Precision is expensive, and it tends to sound more modest than people expect.
The part I had to grow into
For a long stretch of my career I would have handled that morning differently.
Not dishonestly — I would not have invented anything. But I would have talked for longer. I would have offered a framework, gestured at mechanisms, given her more than I had. I would have filled the silence, because the silence felt like failing her.
What changed was watching what actually helped people over years rather than over appointments. The families who did well were almost never the ones who left with the most interesting theory. They were the ones who left with one thing to do and came back having done it. I have written about that slow realisation in ten years of nearly, and about the discipline side of it in I built a reputation on not doing this.
What happened with her son
He slept better within about three weeks, which surprised nobody who has ever fixed a bedroom.
He stayed on everything he was already on. The specialist stayed the specialist. Nothing I did replaced anything, and I never found out whether it changed anything about the diagnosis, because that was never mine to find out.
What I do know is that the household got easier, which is not a small thing when a family has been stretched for a long time. His mother told me the mornings stopped being a fight. I will take that over an interesting theory any day of the week.
Where I would point a parent now
If you are sitting somewhere with a folder on your lap, here is what I would say.
Keep every appointment you have. Ask the people treating your child what they are unsure about — the good ones will tell you, and it is the fastest way to find out who you are dealing with. And in the meantime, look after the ordinary things, because they are yours to look after and they are not nothing.
The practical version of all of that is written up properly elsewhere: the household side at BodyCharger, the assessment side at The Nerve Health Institute, and the everyday concentration question at EBOO Prime.
What I would not do is go looking for somebody to tell you the others are wrong. If that person exists, they are usually selling something — and the four seconds of disappointment you feel when nobody will say it is, in my experience, the beginning of the part that actually works.
More of what I have written is at the writing page. If you want to know how I came to practise this way, that is the about page, and you can always get in touch.
Dr. Chris Cormier, DC
Lafayette, Louisiana
Clinic care at nervehealth.com. At-home protocols at bodycharger.com. Circulation and oxygenation at ebooprime.com.
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