Chiropractic Posters, Charts and Wall Art

Using chiropractic posters and charts properly can help overcome one of the greatest challenges facing today's chiropractor: explaining what makes chiropractic different from medicine. Chiropractors, who are least effective at this, are often guilty of vast expanses of blank walls or worse, squandering their valuable real estate with impressionist art, irrelevant pictures or dust-collecting knick-knacks.

If you're a chiropractor and you're serious about communicating chiropractic principles, you must go beyond the spoken word and make proper use of your office environment. That means choosing and using chiropractic posters and wall charts wisely.

Unless you're going to make your own chiropractic charts and posters, you'll be looking to the three or four major suppliers in the chiropractic poster space. Dig deeper and you'll see that chiropractic wall art comes in two major flavors, clinical and conceptual.

Clinical Chiropractic Charts

These are the anatomical charts that adorn the walls of many examination rooms. The most common are individual wall charts for the major systems of the body. In a chiropractic office, these would generally be the skeletal system, muscle system and nervous system. These types of charts have become almost commodities in the profession, available in college bookstores and online medical supply companies.

Conceptual Chiropractic Posters

Have you heard the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words? That's what's at work here. Conceptual posters help patients connect to the broader principles of chiropractic. Perhaps it's the classic, above-down-inside-out "chiroism," or the bedrock of chiropractic philosophy about looking to the cause rather than treating symptoms. Conceptual posters tend to use very few words, but feature interesting images that do most of the heavy lifting metaphorically.

Presenting Your Chiropractic Posters

Simply put, if you value the information (and the poster itself) enough to put it on your wall, it needs to be framed. It's breathtaking how many chiropractors deface their posters with four pushpins and consider the job done. The resulting college dormitory look not only devalues the message, but also exposes your wall art to the finger oils from occasional touching, and the unprotected bleaching of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. If you're serious about patients taking your poster messages serious, you must invest in proper framing (behind glass). Not only will your posters last longer, they'll look better.

Rotating Your Chiropractic Posters

In far too many chiropractic practices, the wall posters and charts are in the same place today as they were years ago when they first put up. Not only do chiropractors ignore them, patients become blind to them as well. Instead, this "chiropractic art" becomes part of the background noise and essentially becomes invisible.

If you're serious about inspiring patients to adopt a new belief system, you'll want to rotate your posters on a regular basis. Perhaps on the first day of each month, move one of your conceptual posters from one adjusting room to another. Retire a few. Revive a few others. In other words, make your practice an ever changing visual feast, with each poster becoming a "pattern interruption," getting attention and producing patient comments and questions.