“The 0-100 Principle”
How healthy are we really? Our physical health? Our mental health? Our spiritual health? The health of our practice?
Dr. Michael Schuster developed a "0-100 Principle" from his early work with Drs. Maslow, Cheraskin, and Hans Selye that you will likely find interesting.
He used to tell a true story of a patient that had come to see him that exemplifies the 0-100 concept.
Dr. Schuster developed close working relationships with several physicians in Iowa. Dr. Eugene Coffman became a patient of Dr. Schuster’s and referred many patients. One particular patient who Dr. Coffman referred was around 60 years old. He had many missing teeth and many other teeth decayed to the gumline. He was referred due to Dr. Coffman's concern about heart disease.
After learning his dental story, what he hoped to achieve, and gathering records, the patient made an appointment to just sit down and visit. Dr. Schuster was concerned about his heart, the potential for many difficult dental visits and what might be the best alternative for him.
The appointed time was 4 p.m., as it normally is for these types of consultations, at the end of the day with plenty of time to just sit and visit with the patient.
It was 4 p.m. and there was no patient — around 4:30 p.m. there was a siren outside Dr. Schuster’s office. Then, the medics came into the office. The patient had dropped dead of a heart attack while walking up the steps into Dr. Schuster’s office.
If you were to ask the patient, “Where are you on the health scale from 1-100?” I’ll bet anything he would have rated himself around 60-70! We all do the same thing. We normally rate ourselves healthier, wiser, wealthier, happier than we really are.
One thing we can all agree on is that when he dropped dead on the steps of the dental office, he was at 0! We have a tendency to rate ourselves either far better, or worse, than we are. It is extremely difficult to be objective about ourselves — our health, our wisdom, our wealth and even our relationships.
Dr. Schuster used to tell this story to each of his patients with profound effect. Then he would ask each person, where do you think you are relative to your own physical health? Your oral health?
He would ask them to rate themselves. Then he would do his own rating of their periodontal health, their state of existing dentistry, their tooth wear, their TMD function or dysfunction.
I am often amazed that we go through life living in our bodies, and we don’t even know the real status, Ideal Health (100) to Active Inflammation and Disease (0-50), remembering that most chronic degenerative disease is silent. . . until it isn’t.
In today’s world of wearable health devices, people WANT to know their level of health in many different categories. By spending time with them, getting to know their values and why their teeth and health are important to them, we can help the “data,” or health ratings, mean something more than just a number — they can serve as motivation to move forward to higher states of health.
Helping a patient get to an accurate rating of their health and a mental picture of their desired outcome are the necessary ingredients to utilize the most powerful principle of success — creative tension.
Creative Tension and establishing a culture of health will be just a few of the topics discussed in January at our PC conference with Dr. Michael Schuster, Dr. Michael Edwards and the entire PC community.