Oct
6
Why Chinese Medicine is a great healthcare choice during an economic downturn
Filed Under Education, Marketing, The economy | Leave a Comment
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I’ve just begun a discussion about Chinese medicine and the economy over at my other blog, Deepest Health. It’s an issue on many of our minds lately, so worthy of a robust conversation. Here on Natural Medicine Business Success, I want to look at a slightly different angle. It seems that many people still see “alternative medicine” therapy as an expense that fits into the “disposable income” category of their budget. In my money management software, it fits most neatly under “Spa” activities, which are in the same place as haircuts and bikini waxes. I’ve recently gone to great lengths to alter this so I can place it in the same place as “Dentist visits” and “Pharmacy.” That’s where it belongs.
Now, there are many issues involved in this discussion. It’s important not to obscure the conversation by leaving them all mixed up together. One important distinction involves insurance. Many people still do not have insurance to cover acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. In an economically depressed time, people will most likely stop using any healthcare that does not get at least mostly reimbursed by their insurance. Likewise, uninsured people are quite likely to stop getting healthcare services altogether when their finances get tight. The whole question of insurance is a separate, but embedded, concern in this conversation.
All things being equal, I still feel that many people would preferentially choose Western medical treatment over any “complementary or alternative” healthcare treatment during tight economic times. I feel that this is the fault of “complementary and alternative” healthcare practitioners, for the most part. We are absolutely responsible for being an educational force in the world. When we have fewer patients, we should be doing double education duty out in the community. Giving talks, getting articles in the paper, writing to our blogs, working on our books and journal articles, teaching cheap and free classes in our clinics - all of these things can help continue to educate the general public about the great benefits of what we do.
If people are more educated about the benefits of Chinese medicine (or whatever modality you practice) they are less likely to see it as “disposable” and thus more likely to continue visiting you during difficult economic times.
Personally, I believe that this sort of socio-economic climate makes Chinese medicine therapy more important for people than ever. This is also true of most alternative medical modalities. Why? I can think of three major reasons, all of which would make worthy talk/article topics for your renewed public education efforts:
- Stress relief : Nearly all alternative medical therapies are well-suited to help patients manage stress. When economic pressures are high, people get tense, and the damaging health and relationship effects of stress are well-documented. While it’s hard to keep a long-range view when short-range difficulties are so present, being aware of stress’ effects will pay off. Even from a more short-term perspective, the improvement in daily functioning, work performance and sense of resilience should more than justify the relatively small costs associated with acupuncture (or other) treatment.
- Avoiding major illness : When your belt is tightened, the last thing you need is to miss work because of a terrible cold - much worse to have a flare up of your lupus symptoms, need to increase your pain medication, or end up in the emergency room because of some serious health concern. Keeping one’s body in balance with Chinese medicine or other complementary medical therapy just makes good economic sense from the perspective of avoiding a paycheck draining visit to the MD or ER. I have seen many patients stay strong through cold season (thus no visit to the MD, plus no loss of work time) when normally they would have had to take sick days. I’ve also seen patients have the opportunity to decrease pain and other medication (thus reducing costs) because of acupuncture and Chinese herbal treatment. Think about it!
- For some conditions - natural medicine therapy is just cheaper! Let’s face it - Western medicine doesn’t have great solutions for a variety of medical conditions. Consider Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - Western medical intervention is both expensive and largely ineffective for the majority of CFS sufferers. Why pay exorbitant office visit fees (even if you only have to pay a co-pay) and fill your body full of expensive pharmaceuticals (that rarely get to the root of the problem)? While I’m legally obligated to avoid saying that Chinese medicine can “cure” CFS, I can say that I’ve seen CFS sufferers have energy and optimism for the first time in many years after a fairly cheap course of Chinese medicine therapy. Even a fairly expensive practitioner should be able to make good progress with a CFS suffer for under $1000. This is a seriously debilitating condition for people who experience it - $1000 is a small price to pay for the ability to go to work, have satisfying relationships and get on with one’s life.
I’m interested to hear others’ perceptions about how economic downturns impact natural health practices. Please leave your thoughts in the comments!
Eric
Aug
26
Where do you find help in getting started with your natural medicine business?
Filed Under Business Planning, Getting Started, Personnel | 1 Comment
This is the last in a series of three articles about getting started in your natural medicine business by Bonnie Koenig. You can find the previous two articles by clicking on either I’m an acupuncturist, not a business person or Open for Business…I think. You can find Bonnie’s bio here.
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In the last two articles of this series I have reminded practitioners that running a small business can be a full time job, just as practicing medicine can be a full time job. I then focused on the types of help one could expect. This leaves the question of where to find this sort of help.
In the initial stages of starting a business places like SCORE (I looked in my yellow pages for this) will work with small business owners to work out what they want their business to look like and also discuss the types of licenses they might need. At the time I contacted them, I was sent a wonderful packet of business related information that outlined what various government offices (state, county and city) needed what from me.
Another great place to check out online is Insights for Acupuncturists. This site is geared towards acupuncturists, obviously, but it can be applied to anyone who will be in a healthcare practice running a small business. Lisa Hanfileti, the site creator, is an acupuncturist with a biology background. She graduated back in 2000 and she and her husband, a medical doctor, set up their office.
Very often practitioners tend to think small at the beginning. Lisa did not. While she discusses the pitfalls of this at points in her website, the important thing about this is that Lisa had to find out a lot more about various aspects of running a business than many of us have had to. This makes her site a great resource. One thing to remember is that this is a website geared towards anyone trying to start an acupuncture practice. Some information must remain general as exact laws vary state to state, county to county and city to city. Lisa is good about pointing your towards specific offices that may need to be contacted to find out specifics.
If you don’t have a vision of what your practice should look like there are many personal coaches out there. You can search online or ask your friends who they used. Like natural healthcare providers, business coaches use a variety of approaches.
Jenn Givler is a business coach I’m familiar with. Her website is Create a Thriving Business. Jenn works with practitioners who are trying to figure out what they do and do not know about the process of running a business. She says, “I refer to this as putting an infrastructure in place for running a business.” Jenn can take new practitioners through the process of visualizing their ideal practice, focusing on the strengths they have to create this ideal practice (not just their healing strengths but their business strengths) and then help them clarify the areas where they need help.
Additionally Jenn will keep working with practitioners through all phases of their business, whether that be creating new marketing opportunities or creating new opportunities for revenue streams as well as re-evaluating the business and what help is needed as the business vision grows and changes. On Jenn’s website you’ll also find a link to her group which keeps people in contact with like minded people who can offer feedback.
One area many practitioners get stuck is figuring out how to market their business. Of all the business tasks this one is often the most hated task for practitioners. Not only do practitioners seem to dislike it the most, but marketing is one of the most ongoing tasks a business owner faces. If that isn’t enough, marketing is the one task that most often needs updating and changing.
One of my favorite books on running a small business is Lynn Grodzki’s book, Building Your Ideal Private Practice
When I started the Acupuncture Marketing Blogthere were very few sites out there for me to draw information from. The Alternative Health Practice Blog existed (but did not look nearly as lovely as it does today). It’s a great resource, though updated about as irregularly as I update the Marketing Blog.
Kevin Doherty came out with his site Build Your Dream Pracice. Kevin is an acupuncturist and he also does some web design and personal coaching. Kevin’s information is about keeping acupuncturists in business and one area he really focuses on is website information.
Burton Kent is one of the newer names on the scene. Burton began with Acupuncture Clinic Marketing. I’ve had conversations with him about his “No More Closed Clinics” blog post. Burton’s area is marketing. However he’s used acupuncture and had fantastic results with it. He feels that acupuncturists can benefit from the information on marketing that he can provide. He’s also serious about the no more closed clinics. Both Burton and Kevin offer ebooks and some personal coaching.
Another great source that new practitioners might overlook are people who are currently in practice. These people know what has worked for them and what hasn’t. They understand the little pitfalls and misunderstandings based on how you, as a healthcare provider, might think and the way the government offices might think. They can also tell you how to find good help and may know where you can find office space. The downside of another practitioner is that their understanding of the laws may be incomplete so you might not details or get inaccurate information from them.
Finally, when you know you need to find employee help, how do you do so? Many practitioners have gotten good help via word of mouth. While any position may come via word of mouth, nowhere is this more true than with insurance billers. In fact, if you talk to someone specializing in this area, get references from people in your healthcare specialty.
Finding office help can be more challenging. You can post on Craigslist or in your local paper. Ask other practitioners and friends if they know anyone who would be good for a specific job in your office. Very often they may think of someone who is looking or can at least have that person send you a resume. Always check your references.
Office cleaners and laundry services are usually contract positions. You will often find advertisements on Craigslist or in the yellow pages. Again, ask other people in your local area who they use and you’ll probably get some names as well. As many small businesses, not just healthcare providers, use services like these, you may have a larger pool of people to from whom to find referrals.
The biggest gift you can give yourself while your business takes off is the gift of help. As a healthcare provider, I know that finding help was also one of the most challenging things I needed to do. By asking for assistance in various areas of your business you will find you get a lot more satisfaction from what you do than if you try and make do on your own. A streamlined office that is organized and well run is invaluable when you are seeing that one extra who patient who absolutely MUST get in. Further, a well run office can make sure you get to the point where you have that “extra” patient you don’t have time for from time to time.
That’s it for this series!
Bonnie
Aug
23
I’m an Acupuncturist, Not a Business Person
Filed Under Blogging, Business Planning, Getting Started | 2 Comments
This is the first in a series of three by Natural Medicine Business Success contributor, Bonnie Koenig, writer at the Acupuncture Marketing Blog, among other sites. You can view her short biography by clicking here.
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The business of being an acupuncturist is very different from practicing acupuncture. This is often the reason that those students who are the stars of acupuncture classes achieve only mediocre success in their personal practices.
Successful business people have one set of skills and this particular skill set is not necessarily the same skill set required to be an exceptional acupuncturist or other healthcare provider. Additionally, it’s human nature to absorb more from studying those things we love as opposed to those things we are told we have to learn. This means that people who love the business end of running their practice often learn more far quickly than those who run a their practice business rather under protest.
I checked out the school of business at my undergraduate alma mater. They have a total student body of approximately 2500 students. Their business school has 480 students. There is a requirement that in addition to the regular core undergraduate classes that 49 semester hours (students normally average 16 to 18 credit hours per semester, with 20 credit hours being a doable but heavy load) of business classes. This means that if you only studied the business courses, you would need an additional 3 semesters, or a year and a half minimum to learn what this college feels is appropriate to someone who wants to manage a business. This is for an undergraduate degree. The masters level coursework is an additional two years (assuming mostly full time enrollment).
Acupuncture students are lucky to get two business courses during their entire education.
Certainly you don’t need a business degree to run a business, nor am I suggesting this. I point out the fact that business majors get this much subject matter because as new practitioners we often expect ourselves to just know this information. Many business people say that most business information is just common sense. Most of our life lessons apply to business. The problem is that many people who are new to running a business don’t realize what they already know and even if they do, they don’t really know how to apply it.
Initially, I had thought to make this point and offer suggestions in one post, but it’s gotten ponderously long. I’d like to tackle a couple of points in future posts.
In the first post, I’ll discuss the need for finding good help. Good help may start with finding people who can offer some basic business advice to those just starting out. Additionally very few practitioners are strong in all aspects of running a business so at some point we’ll need to find help. Part of this post will focus on the types of help we may need, from deciding if we need a book keeper or legal assistance or maybe we just need someone to do our laundry.
In the second post, I’ll discuss some of the places practitioners can go to find assistance in starting their businesses. Some of these resources are online and some are offline. I’ll offer some potential pros and cons for the different types of services and try to help practitioners set appropriate expectations for the type of help they receive.
Starting up a business requires a lot of effort and energy. Very often, as healthcare providers who have just come out of school we tend to minimize the amount of work starting a business requires. We also like to just push through this part of creating our business because suddenly our student loans are going to come due. However, creating our ideal healthcare business takes time and effort. Thinking carefully about exactly what we want can lessen headaches in later years.
Bonnie
Aug
20
Natural medicine business planning : Start Early!
Filed Under Business Planning, Our Story, Vision and Mission | Leave a Comment
All of the advice I’ve ever been given about business planning boils down to one essential truth : the early bird gets the worm! Business is as complicated as healing - when we think it will be quick, it’s slow. When we think it’ll be slow, it speeds up! When we think we have a handle on something, a new permutation crops up. When we believe that something is way too complicated, we find it to be fairly simple when we get down to it. These contradictions stymie many people who are trying to plan their business. This is why starting as early as possible is such a sound strategy.
Amanda and I have been working our business model seriously for about six months. We hope to open in just over a year. So, we’ll have seriously worked on our business for a little over 18 months by the time we open our doors. At first, it was a hazy dream - and it stayed that way for a long time. At this point, we have a fairly good idea of what we’re doing, and have already pre-hired our first employee! I want to mention the decisions we’ve already made and the process we walked through to get to where we are right now.
1. General vision and mission : This is always the first point in any business planning model, yet is one of the most frustrating things to work on. I think a lot of people’s business planning careers start and end at the vision and mission. While it sounds fun, when you get down to it this part can be pretty frustrating. The majority of the six months above has been taken up by hammering out our vision and mission statements.
What is a vision statement?
I don’t like to talk about “vision statements” as much, because while it is important to have a boiled down sentence or two to work with, far more important is the process. The vision is the more ethereal part of the mission/vision pair, and often authors talk about it as the ultimate goal of the business that, if you were to achieve it, would be really “something.” It is the guiding principle of the business, not necessarily something to set goals around and tirelessly work to achieve. Instead, everything that the business does is related to the principles set out in the vision. It can be used in making decisions about the business (should we expand? should we hire these new practitioners?) as well as making sure you keep on track with your original ideas. While in the early stages of business planning, we have referred to and revised our vision statement OFTEN.
Sometimes the process of creating our vision statement(s) has been pretty frustrating. Just when we though we knew what we wanted, we’d visit someone’s clinic or hear something from a mentor that would totally change our thinking. This is why it’s so crucial to work on, explicitly, WELL in advance of the time you plan to open. With our vision intact, I feel much more confident about moving forward with decisions about concrete things like building leasing and employee hiring, because I know that we have already made the decisions about the kind of business we want to be.
For our natural medicine clinic, our principles rest on three pillars: Community building/interactivity, Environmental and social integrity and dedication to the deepest principles of our medicine (this includes things like continued scholarship, personal cultivation and the like). Your principles will differ, but it’s important that you figure out what they are as soon as you are able.
What is a mission statement?
The mission statement is different. It is here that you answer the questions about what, exactly, you will be doing and on behalf of whom. In other words, here is where you talk about the actual modalities you are practicing and who you are hoping to serve. In our case, we will be using Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, Qigong, Swedish and Deep tissue massage, Shiatsu and Lomi-Lomi Hawaiian massage. We have a couple of foci when it comes to demographics. We really want to serve people experiencing cancer, but also will specialize in the treatment of mental and emotional maladies. Finally, we have an interest in promoting “every day” health, helping people to overcome the seemingly minor diseases (like the common cold, basic aches and pains, etc) that, in our opinion, eventually accumulate to bring about the major diseases.
Having clarity around these issues really helps us to focus our studies and our thinking around business strategy. There is more you can put into a mission statement, but these are the basic ideas. I love having this figured out while already in school, because it helps me choose the doctors I want to work with in clinic as well as focusing my non-school related research. It has directly shaped the choices Amanda has made about her continuing education.
2. Where you will be practicing and the size/type of practice you will have
Because this post is already getting dreadfully long, I will just focus on one more point Amanda and I have worked very hard on. After establishing our vision and mission, we started to figure out what our actual practice is going to look like. This includes WHERE we will practice (country, region, state, city, part of the city, etc) and the actual form of the clinic itself. Of course, all of this presupposes that one will have some version of a private practice - perhaps in clarifying mission and vision you will find that you don’t have a particularly strong one and would prefer working under someone else’s vision and mission. This is certainly 
okay to do!
Deciding where to practice
I really don’t believe there is a “best” way to decide where to practice natural medicine. Some people say you should do it based on economic information - where are there fewer practitioners, but plenty of patients? Some people say you should just go where your heart leads you. I figure you need to use both of these methods to find the perfect place to practice. Amanda and I knew that we didn’t want to leave the Portland area. Our life is here, our daughter is established in her friends and school, and we love the many features that Portland offers to people like us. There’s the heart connection.
Knowing this, we began to look deeply in the city and find areas that are still under-served by natural medicine practitioners. We looked for parts of town that we could see ourselves living in happily, places well served by coffee/tea shops, natural groceries and abundant open space. We also had to consider property values as well as the availability of leasable space that we could afford. Ultimately, we narrowed it down to a couple areas of town. We’re pretty clear that we’re going to choose one particular area, which I won’t reveal here.
Many students at my school (National College of Natural Medicine - NCNM) have revealed to me that they’re not sure where they want to practice. I think this is a crucial thing to figure out as early as possible. If you don’t know WHERE you’re going to be, you can’t even begin to figure out the needs of the place or your economic needs (like, do you need to be saving money because you’re going somewhere with high property values?). These things can be stressful to consider, but the decision isn’t going to go away just because you don’t think about it! 
Finally, discussing the basic structure of your practice is also important. Will you be a sole practitioner or have a group? Will that group be separate partners or employees with you at the helm? Will you be part of an integrative health center, involving many Western practitioners, or would you prefer to stay with other natural healthcare providers? Are you interested in being part of a hospital or other Western clinic? Are you thinking about integrating spa services into your clinic? How big are you hoping to get? All of these questions are important to start thinking about early on. Your last year of school is a great time to network and find other graduating students who have similar ideas to your own. Don’t put this off until tomorrow!
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All of these concepts are important to start thinking about early on in the business planning process. This is because all of these questions have huge ramifications on the rest of the business planning process. How will you know what equipment you need to buy if you don’t know what services you will be providing? And then how can you start to understand your pricing structure and expected profit margins if you don’t know what you need to buy when you start out?
They’re also important to think about early because they’re often difficult to nail down. If you wait until 6 months before you hope to practice, you might find yourself barely able to articulate your vision by the time your student loans begin to come due. Not a comfortable position.
Offer up your ideas about the beginning of the business planning process in the comments! Also, look for increased frequency of content starting today!
Eric
Aug
8
Getting started in the business of natural medicine : Our story, part 1
Filed Under Blogging, Our Story | Leave a Comment
Thanks for hanging in there while we get content production up and running on the blog. I wanted to start out by catching you all up to speed with how Amanda and myself got where we are today. First, it might be nice to know where we, in fact, are today.
My name is Eric Grey and I’m a 4th (and last) year student of Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) at National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, OR. I am a blogger at popular Chinese medicine site, Deepest Health and I also have a personal blog over at Ericgrey.com. My passion for natural medicine was probably partly given to me by my mother who was always trying little home cures when I would get sick. I also developed a very close relationship with plants at a young age, which made me interested in using plants for healing. It’s no surprise, then, that my one true love in Chinese medicine is the use of Chinese herbs. I started blogging about Chinese medicine because I saw that there wasn’t much good information out there about the medicine, yet there is an incredible amount of information that could be useful to people. This blog was born out of a similar realization. While there are many (some good) websites out there about business, there are relatively few about the business of natural medicine.
My partner, Amanda Barp, is a practicing massage therapist at Harmony Therapeutic Bodywork in the Kwan Yin Healing Arts Center in Portland, OR. She has been practicing in the Portland area for three years and has only recently combined forces with Harmony. She will be writing on the blog, though I am a more obsessive-compulsive writer than she has shown herself to be.
Amanda and I are planning to open a natural medicine clinic in the Sellwood area of Portland, OR in September 2009. We began planning our business about a year ago, and the process has been an interesting one. Because we are taking so long to work on our business plan, we have been able to go deeply into various elements as well as work out our relationship with regards to business. All of this information can be of use to other people, thus the creation of this blog. We hope that we can share our ups and downs, our research and our questions, our confusion and our a-ha moments with you and that in conversation with you, we can all come to understand how to be both integral healers AND savvy business people.
My first question - how did we ever start thinking that those two (healing and business) were polar opposites? What a self defeating idea!
It will take us a while to catch you up to speed with where we are and our process up until now. We will release a series of posts this upcoming week that will seek to do just that. We are also fortunate and excited to offer a series of posts from Bonnie Koenig of Quantum Lifestyles that will start us off on the right foot in talking about important concepts in natural medicine business.
Thanks for reading, we look forward to interacting with you for years to come.
Eric and Amanda
