Mark Abreu

Transcript: Mark Abreu, chiropractor

Hi! My name is Mark Abreu and I’m a chiropractor. I’ve been practising for about 21 years now, and I’m 44 years of age. I live in Brisbane, Australia. The clinic that I own is open just three-and-a-half days a week, so we are full day on a Tuesday and Friday, and we do a Wednesday and a Saturday morning. An average day for me starts at six in the morning. I get up. I normally do my seven-minute posture exercises to start the day, get myself dressed and ready. Breakfast is always the same for me. I have a vitamin drink and I have, I guess you’d call it a vegetable drink, and it’s always a protein-based meal. I travel to work, takes me about 16 minutes to get to work on average. I like to get to work about an hour before I see any clients. The purpose of that is that we will draw the X-rays or mark any X-rays or do any reports that need to be done prior to the clients being there. Once my staff arrive, we’ll have a meeting with the staff. We call it a “huddle”. We’ll go through all the cases of that day, so all the long visits, all the new patients, if homework needs to be done, if anyone requires extra attention, if anyone’s hurt themselves, and get prepared so the day flows nicely.

Clients start at eight o’clock in the morning. We do one hour of what I call a “power hour”, which means we just do adjustments in that time. Then we have an hour of long visits. These are when your new clients come through, or you do your reports, or you go through your X-rays. Then the following hour after that, which is always the same, we do another power hour of adjustments only, so it’s a three-hour shift. At the end of the shift, I normally go off to my room and do any paperwork that I need to finish off. I meet with the girls again, and we go through the day. At that stage, we catch up on all the new patients and the reports that have been done and make sure that if there [are] any reports that I need to do, that they’re written up. I work in shift-type compartments, so everything that needs to be done in a shift is done and finished before I leave.