Having strong muscles, bones and joints can make a tremendous difference in a person’s quality of life as they age, enabling them to prevent falls and continue to engage in activities of daily living – enhancing their overall independence. Surprisingly, many people are not doing as much as they could to preserve their musculoskeletal health and strength, and others are doing nothing at all. Morgan Price, DC, a staff chiropractor at the Veterans Administration (VA) Puget Sound Health Care System, Seattle Division, has seen both scenarios in her VA practice over the years and wants to help patients – and their chiropractors – do better.
Dr. Price will present “Rehab and Conditioning for Older Adults” at ACA Engage this January in Washington, D.C., sharing insights as well as programming and resources to assist DCs in helping patients set and achieve goals. Register for the conference here.
Below, Dr. Price shares additional information on the topic and her program:
Q: How is the topic you are presenting at Engage 2025 relevant to today’s chiropractor?
This one-hour course is designed to discuss the importance of movement and exercise from the perspective of flexibility, balance, strength, floor recovery, bone density, muscle composition, activities of daily living (ADL) independence, fall prevention, and quality-of-life maintenance that you are well-positioned to program as a chiropractor. As our patients age, we need have conversations with them surrounding the importance of bone, joint, and muscle health that are different from our 30-year-old patients. Every year we age, it is more challenging to maintain things such as muscle mass, bone density, and walking capacity if we are not actively training to do so.
Older adults have a vast variety of “starting lines” and “finish lines” for exercise pursuits, and many can tolerate advice beyond the generalized stretching they are usually prescribed. We will discuss resources available for movement and exercise support for our patients as well as common barriers (lumbar spinal stenosis with neurogenic claudication, joint replacements, fall risk, etc.) and how to navigate them.
This course will discuss how to reverse engineer functional goal setting and how to incrementally progress. We will discuss ongoing initiatives such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s STEADI Algorithm, the American Public Health Association’s 2023 Fall Prevention initiative, and any updates from the Clinical Compass Best Practice Guideline. Take homes (i.e. ”Monday morning application”) will include easy to implement, low-tech rehab programming examples and foundational knowledge that every practitioner should know.
Q: What makes you an expert in this area?
Working in the VA, I treat a wide variety of patients between the ages of 22 and 92. I have been able to see who thrives in older age as well as the shortcomings of those who do not. I also am a provider in a VA multidisciplinary clinic called Movement is Medicine with a physiatrist and rehab psychologist that is solely focused on exercise and movement pursuits.
Prior to VA practice, I was in private practice and treated mostly high school athletes for performance and injury. While I was still living in Florida, I would volunteer at a veteran-run powerlifting gym, and that also opened my eyes to the physical capabilities for many. I have been able to apply much of the same programming directly to my VA clinic. I have taken courses that include Greg Lehman’s Reconciling Biomechanics with Pain Science, Andreo Spina’s Functional Range Conditioning, McKenzie A-D, and Carlo Ammendolia’s SpineMobility boot camps in persistent shoulder pain and lumbar spinal stenosis.
Q: What first interested you in this area of practice?
Seeing such a wide range of aging was very eye-opening when I started working in the VA years ago. There were, and are, many people not undertaking even the most basic efforts to maintain functionality year to year; and many more that think that it will be maintained without any effort. In the same breath, there are many chiropractors who are not prescribing adequate physical activity or therapeutic exercise efforts to address this. Most older adults can handle more than just passive stretching, and functionality, and physicality efforts of course have a direct relationship with chronic pain. There are resources that exist to assist with this, but few that I have seen targeted at chiropractors.
Q: Can you provide one or two takeaways from your presentation/topic that Engage 2024 attendees will not want to miss?
Attendees will build confidence with a systematic way to both program and ensure their patients are getting enough physical activity (and the right types of physical activity) to age gracefully.
Q: How will what attendees take away make them better doctors?
Attendees will be able to improve the lives of many older adults and help them build confidence in their own bodies when they are able to improve skills that directly improve their quality of life, such as fall prevention, floor recovery, walking capacity, strength, bone density, and ultimately independence. They will educate themselves on programming that they can do directly, as well as learn how to connect people with resources in their communities and on a national scale, such as Silver Sneakers and Veterans Yoga Project.
Q: What inspired you to start and/or what keeps you coming back to share knowledge with your colleagues in this way?
I have attended ACA Engage (formerly NCLC) since the beginning of chiropractic school in 2017. I have presented on and off over the years as well as at conferences such as ACC-RAC and the WFC Biennial Congress. Additionally, I have had poster presentations for my research at Parker Vegas and the CARLoquium.
We can all always be better for our patients and for those who we mentor in the new generation of chiropractors; ACA conferences have been formative over the years for what I have wanted to do with my own career and how I give back to the chiropractic profession at large, and I think always encouraging our peers to do the same is essential. So many incredible giants in the field have come before us, and it is our duty to carry on their efforts.
Learn more about ACA Engage 2025.
