By Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN
I want to go over a key fundamental, one that, if violated, will reduce your possibility of success greatly. This is the one I see most often violated in doctors’ practices where they’re having trouble developing a really successful nutritional practice. This is the most important one and it’s the one that, when I implemented it, greatly improved my success. It took us from a mediocre practice into a booming practice.
Never start a nutritional program or sell a supplement until you know what the patient needs and the patient understands and accepts your recommendations and is committed to doing the program. That’s a hard one. But it’s absolutely vital.
Have you ever put a patient onto a nutritional supplement before they understood the program, accepted your recommendations and were committed to doing a program? I know I’ve been guilty of this myself many times. If you want to have a successful nutritional practice, you need to have people on a correct nutritional program.
A program is not taking a pill. A program is part of something that usually has many parts. Part of having a person commit to a program is aiding them in understanding what the program is! How many parts are there to it? What’s going to be involved? How long is it? What should they expect? What are the ups and downs? What’s the prognosis?
I know I’ve violated this thousands of times in my early nutritional practice. A guy comes in with a knee problem and I know he needs some good Ligoplex Two or something like that. I do kinesiology, muscle test him to verify this. I say, “Here, you need this. Take three of these, three times a day.” Is that a program? No. That’s a band-aid. That’s “practicing medicine.”
What the medical doctor often does is create dependence. How do they create dependence? They never include the patient in on a full understanding of what they need to do on top of the program to take control of their health. They say, “Here, take this pill.”
“What does it do?”
“It fixes you. Maybe. We’ll see.”
Do you see the difference? I have known practitioners whose philosophy is, “I never let the patient out of the office without buying something, because they got to take something home with them”. That’s wrong.
I have worked with practices that were small or failing. I got them to stop selling supplements to new patients, until the patient fully understood what they needed, fully understood the program and committed to doing the program. That totally changed their practices.
It’s a degrade of the whole subject of nutrition to say, “Oh, take this product here. We’ll kind of supplement your chiropractic adjustments.” What the heck is that? That’s not a program. It’s a band-aid, you’re “practicing medicine.” We have to get out of medical think here. We’ve been trained by the Allopathic model, we’ve got to get out of that model. It’s the wrong model. It’s the model that creates dependence.
We’re not here to create dependence. There are too many people for us to take care of them all and have them dependent on us. It’s very stressful and tiring, by the way, to have the entire world depending on you. We want to put these people in charge. How do we get them in charge? First, we have to know what they need. Any many of us think, “Oh, I know what they need, I’ll just give it to them and that’s it.” That’s wrong.
It’s not enough for you to know what they need. You need to know what they need and be able to communicate what they need in a way they’ll understand it as their part of their whole health improvement program. You have to get their understanding of that so that they can evaluate the truth and correctness of that, so that they can make an honest, personal commitment to doing the program in order to achieve the goal that they’re trying to achieve.
You should take this and put it on your mirror or somewhere where you’re going to see it every day. As a matter of fact, put it in five different places, so that you can remind yourself. This is how important this is. Never start a treatment program or sell a supplement until you know what the patient needs, the patient understands and accepts your recommendations, and the patient is committed to doing the program.
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