Bankrupt, Former and Moonlighting Chiropractors Give a Valuable Lesson In Getting New Patients and Referrals

A recent encounter with a Bankruptcy attorney, who is a trustee for a state bankruptcy court shockingly revealed a trend that many doctors of chiropractic had been filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Such information was indeed puzzling. Why, after all, was there such financial trouble for such an effective profession?

This was reminiscent of an encounter during late-night grocery shopping in a local supermarket. It was most disappointing to have a chance meeting with a former associate from a client's office. When last seen, he had enthusiastically left that practice to open his own. Unfortunately, he was not at the supermarket grocery shopping. He was stocking shelves. Further horrifying was the decline in his attitude toward the chiropractic profession and the apathy with which he explained that he had given up altogether and was considering study to be a physical therapist. What happened to someone who so loved adjusting patients?

Yet another chiropractor recently mentioned that he took a temporary part-time job to "make ends meet" while "things were slow". Why were they so slow?

Even more demonstrative were the bombardment of offers to consider "business opportunities" which involve "revolutionary nutritional products" sold Network or Multi-Level Marketing style for Screening Experts clients to sell to their patients, products which have been increasingly appearing on the front counters of chiropractic offices. What about the business of chiropractic care?

The common denominator? Financial Stress.

While it is known that chiropractic does not generate the highest income of all "health care" professions, it is not this fact that causes such financial stress. It is not even lack of "marketing skill" or knowledge of promotion basics. It is fundamentally an issue with basic purpose and how well that purpose is being fulfilled on one's patients. It is this that opens the door to reversing financial downtrend.

Recollection of one's original motive to join such a purposeful profession seldom, if at all, would be financial in nature. Medicine, surgery, drugs - these are the serious financial fields, ones which any number of chiropractors could have chosen had they been motivated financially.

Perhaps it is time to examine, reevaluate, refresh and decide upon goals and to unbury that original, unique spark. Treat the dwindling few patients you may have left with the original vigor and thrust toward wellness which drove you to work so hard to become who you are and new patients and referrals become the "side effects" of what you do. The financial benefits always follow.

Doctors repeatedly ask, ad nauseum, why DON'T my patients refer? This is unanswerable until one reverses the question. Why DO patients refer?

Speaking from experience that led to a career in the profession, patients refer because chiropractic provides a result where other practices have promised but never delivered. Surgery and drugs are not often found to change lives, in fact demonstrate conclusively that adverse health conditions cannot be changed and one must "live with them". This is also from direct experience with prescription drugs, medical "specialists" and the "you-have-to-live-with-it" attitude which has proven to be anything but living.

Through assitance to someone's ultimate healing, their life is forever changed and restored to them is the ability to enjoy it. Moreover, a confidence is gained that their health is under their control, regardles of what medicine says. It is this factor alone that makes someone refer, this directly from the first-hand experience of one who has referred thousands to chiropractors since first treatment in the mid 1990's.

How can bankruptcy, potion-selling, change of profession or moonlighting be avoided and financial success achieved in practice? Recall your original purpose and channel some of the attitude and swagger you had in first attending college. Rediscover and list all you can recall. Then, formulate it into a purpose for your current practice. Apply it all the way with your current patients. Insist that they follow through and do everything within your power to get them well. They will refer others for sure. Take it from a patient who has for nearly two decades and counting.

You are hereby challenged NOT to prosper doing this!

Frank Sardella
Chiropractic Screening Experts
www.chiropracticscreeningexperts.com
(845)787-3349