A Chiropractor was left feeling like he’ll be pushing shit uphill for his entire career following a deflating in-service last week. 24 year old, second year graduate, Justin Dooinmebest was performing an in-service for an audience of predominantly senior colleagues on the latest evidence based guidelines for the treatment of whiplash injury. A fellow junior colleague witnessed the event.

“He was doing great. He had all the up-to-date info and had put together a snazzy powerpoint presentation. He was self assured, he was nailing all his key points and even had a few jokes in there to counter some of the info that was, you know, not the most exciting content to listen to. Anyways, like I said, I thought he was doing great, but you could see some of the audience rolling their eyes- especially the older guys. Justin must’ve noticed too because he kinda pushed his point you know? Doubled down on his rhetoric… and then it happened.”

In-service attendee and Senior Chiropractor, Dr Myndif Wekrackewe was happy to explain what happen next. “Well, Justin was going on and on about the evidence for this and the evidence for that… And the guideline for this and the guideline for blah blah blah. So I did him a favour and stepped in to lend him a hand. It was clear to me and the other senior staff that he needed to have all this evidence based stuff placed within the context of practical, real world clinical reasoning processes. To be clear, I wasn’t critical of Justin, he just got himself caught up in one of those online evidence based groups. It’s not his fault. So, I took over the in-service and helped Justin and the other younger practitioners understand that when it comes to clinical expertise, the evidence can only guide you so far… You won’t succeed as a clinician unless you master your manual skills and gain expertise in salesmanship. In the end you could tell they were all grateful”.

We asked Justin what he thought of how the afternoon’s events transpired. He replied “Useless old pricks… How am I supposed to get anywhere in this clinic?”