During our sabbatical in Paraguay, we started a free clinic using donations from patients back home.
As word spread, it became a common sight to find people scattered about the various shady spots outside our makeshift clinic waiting for la doctora, and trying to get a some relief in a place where a dollar day wasn’t an uncommon wage.
Randi Drinkwater is the president of Alternative Growth Streams (AGS), a company whose mission is to help alternative health care professionals grow their patient base. She’s also a colleague of ours from IntegrativePractitioner.com, where we both contribute to the growing community of practitioners.
We asked Randi for a case study from AGS’s work with CAM practitioners, and she was kind enough to share this story. Enjoy! -Dan & Tara
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I credit much of our good fortune in practice (and other things) thus far to a voracious appetite for learning, especially via books.
Summer’s here for our part of the planet, and Tara and I both tend to increase our book consumption a little more than usual. Here are a few of the books that I think have had the most influence on our practice evolution so far - we thought you might enjoy them, too.
For some time, Google’s been showing search results differently for geographically specific search terms. In English, that means when someone searches for something like “Chicago chiropractor”, “Las Vegas Acupunture”, or “Miami Massage Therapy” the results that come up look a little different.
To see the difference in the search results, click on these two links (they open in a new window):
“Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.”
-PT Barnum
Jenn Givler, is an Intuitive Business Coach. She teach healers, alternative therapists, coaches, and spiritual teachers how to effectively market their practice using her Mindful Marketing Process. For more information about the process, her background, and informative marketing articles, check out her web site and blog at http://www.CreateAThrivingBusiness.com
We asked Jenn for a case study from her client work, and she readily agreed. When I suggested “something different”, she definitely delivered. Enjoy! -Dan
Tara and I had the honor earlier this year of becoming founding contributors of Integrative Practitioner, an amazing online community for practitioners of integrative medicine:
The Community already has more than 2,400 qualified members, including physicians, chiropractors, acupuncturists, naturopaths, herbalists, nurses, traditional healers, dieticians and massage therapists. In all, they represent more than 30 disciplines and come from 15 countries and all 50 states.
We’re thrilled with our new clinic. We’ve been able to offer better (and more) services because of the extra space, and the goldfish effect really seems to be kicking in.
One of the small drawbacks, though, is that our patients have to pay for parking - ouch. It was one of those little things that didn’t sit well with me, and it didn’t seem to fit our vision for the clinic.
A couple of years ago we noticed that although we’d had a great year as far as new patients were concerned, our return visits seemed to have flattened out. Patients seemed pleased with the service, success rates were high, but it still felt like we were gaining new patients but not growing.
The problem, of course, was in the scheduling.
