COVID-19 – What’s Going On?!?
For those of you who feel like Dorothy after the tornado, please know that you are not alone. I have been running down the yellow brick road trying to find answers with respect to where our community is in this current pandemic, how long we’ll be here and how it will affect all of us at Advance Family Chiropractic & Massage Therapy.
In a nutshell, I am delighted to report that the most recent directive from the Province of Ontario has classified chiropractors as “essential workers” and as such we are expected to continue to serve our community. However, in an attempt to continue the practice of social distancing, we have been asked to restrict our treatments to only emergency care such as:
- Care for patients experiencing a sudden and debilitating change in functional abilities (understood as walking, standing, sitting, lifting floor-to-waist or waist-to-shoulder, stair climbing, ladder climbing) or significant restrictions (experienced during bending/twisting, repetitive movement, pushing/pulling) as well as injury to head/neck/back and extremities.
- Treatment aimed at alleviating significant pain, understood as pain that is incapacitating for the patient and interferes with their ability to carry out normal functioning.
To that end, we will be open the week of March 30th but we will be working restricted hours to serve those who need us most. If you have an appointment but your condition is NOT urgent, please e-mail or leave a message at the office and we will happily reschedule you when conditions go back to normal. If you are suffering, we are here to serve you. It goes without saying that if you have been out of the country or have been in close contact with such a person, we expect that you self-isolate for two weeks before coming in.
Why is social distancing important?
I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Loh, the Associate Medical Officer of Health, Peel Public Health answer the question at a Town Hall Meeting and I want to share it.
COVID-19 is in our community. People are going to become infected, that is a fact. 85% of those infected will have a mild infection, 15% will require treatment and a very small percentage will require hospitalization. Self-isolation, social distancing, closing down schools and non-essential workplaces is our most important tool in slowing down the spread of the illness. People will still get sick but large numbers will not get sick at the same time. That is what “flattening the curve” means. This is what we’re doing now. We are preventing the overloading of our hospitals and health resources right now so everyone who needs help can get it.
How long will this last?
Again, Dr. Loh answered. We cannot know. Here’s why: the actions we take now take a while to show up as results. What we are seeing now in terms of rates of infection are the result of actions we took two weeks ago (when everyone was crammed into stores panic-buying toilet paper). It will take two weeks to see the results of the actions we are taking today – so stay the course! Anyone who has ever started a new work out or weight-loss regimen knows that you can’t do one set of push-ups or skip one dessert and expect to look like Wolverine or Sarah Connor. Repeated actions over time get results (just like your chiropractic adjustments 😉). In the meantime, stay healthy, keep others healthy, use this downtime to relax, reflect and recalibrate. We are here if you need us.