There’s no way to tell how many of these are being run by chiropractors and other natural health care practitioners, but Googling Chiropractor OR Chiropractic results in some 16 million hits. Add the word “blog” to your search words and you still get 1,810,000 results. Obviously, a lot of people are talking about chiropractic — and a lot of chiropractors are talking to people via the pages of a website or blog.

But can having a blog really attract new patients and build a more success practice?

Of course. ANYTHING you do that helps gets the chiropractic message out to people in your area, and gets your NAME in front of them, can increase patient volume and retention. If you stand on the street corner in a clown suit handing out business cards, eventually you’ll hand one to someone who’ll end up being a patient. If you print up 10,000 flyers and superglue them on every car windshield in the entire shopping mall parking lot, you’ll get a new patient or two out of it.

The question isn’t whether a particular marketing strategy will bring in new patients. It’s whether that marketing strategy is worth the time, money and effort it takes, and if the ultimate result will be more patients. The clown suit trick will get you a new patient — but probably lose you 20 current patients who see you and decide not to return. The superglue tactic will get you a new patient but it’ll be the most expensive patient you ever attracted (especially after you figure in the lawsuits for ruining people’s windshields).

Blogs CAN bring in new patients, because they give you an opportunity to put a human face on your office, to communicate regularly with both current and potential patients, to tell the chiropractic story (however you feel it should be told), show off new staff or equipment in a non-advertising manner, and position yourself as a caring and active member of your community.

Health care consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for help in making their health decisions, including which practitioner to go to. It’s not the ONLY factor in their decision, but it’s a major one. According to the latest report from Manhattan Research — a health care market research company — the Internet now has far more influence over consumer health decisions and actions than traditional channels like print, TV, and radio (“Health Influence Mapping: Benchmarking the Influence of Various Sources on Consumer Health Actions,” Feb. 2010)

So, being on the Internet is almost a must today. But blogging is something different. It’s far more time consuming than many people realize, since content has to be added frequently (at least once a week). The content also has to be “fresh” and personal. And it has to be written carefully so that you don’t say something that will get you in trouble with your board. Sloppiness in spelling and grammar or even the formatting of your page can turn potential patients away. After all, if you aren’t careful about your own blog, will you be careful with their health?

You’ll also need to either turn the “comments” function off or monitor comments carefully. Robot spammers WILL get to your site within weeks of it going live and you need to make sure that your blog doesn’t get cluttered with crap.

You also have to make a long-term commitment to keeping the blog. If someone goes to your blog and it’s either no longer there or hasn’t been updated in several months, the natural assumption is that you’ve closed your office. Click. They’re on to the next hit on the list. Same thing if your site doesn’t load properly or if it’s hard to navigate. Click.

Luckily, blogs are pretty inexpensive and, with blogging software like WordPress, they’re far easier to use than “real” sites. (TIP: Host your blog on your own web hosting company. To be successful, you have to appear successful to the world and having a “freebie” blog on the wordpress or blogger.com servers looks amateurish to many.)

Before you begin, make sure you understand what’s really involved. If it’s something you might really enjoy doing (or have a talented staff member who can do it for you), it might be worth a try. Just don’t go into it thinking your blog will “go viral” and you’ll attract new patients by the hundreds.

It looks very much how I envision the nervous system, with nerve impulses traveling from point to point within the body, carrying their own “cargo” of messages and instructions.

There are busy times and slow times, but the nerve centers never completely go dark.

Can you image the work air traffic controllers have in keeping all this coordinated and running smoothly? They redirect those yellow dots to reduce the risk of accidents.

To me, chiropractors and other wellness professionals who deal in the neurological functioning of the human body are like air traffic controllers. We don’t create the energy but we help it flow as it should and prevent “accidents” that occur when the energy flow is disrupted. Also, like air traffic controllers, we can’t always prevent accidents — pilot/patient “error” is still a factor.

At the risk of belaboring this analogy, there’s another thing we have common with air traffic controllers: we can suffer a great deal of stress because of our “calling.” We worry about our patients, income, profession, and families. We work long hours and battle insurance companies as well as those who favor a medical monopoly over health care. We even, at times, have to deal with bickering within our own professions and organizations.

But our work is so important that we can’t afford to allow ourselves to succumb to stress. We have to take time to care for ourselves, to rest and recharge our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual batteries.

If you’re feeling like an air traffic controller trying to juggle all the planes in that video, you need to back off and take time for yourself. If you don’t, you’re going to “crash.” Which will be more disruptive to your practice and your life: a few days off to relax, or a month off to recover?

The drug industry is already beginning its back-to-school vaccine push, and once more chiropractors and other wellness professionals will be leading the campaign against mandatory vaccinations. You can help by learning the facts about vaccines (a good place to start is the National Vaccine Information Center and sharing that information with patients as well as community members (they have a number of excellent downloadable flyers).

Become aware of the exemptions allowed in your state for school children and protest the forced vaccination of children against their parents’ wishes. Many states are inserting “philosophical exemptions” that permit children to skip vaccines if their families have strong but not religious opposition to the drugs.

It’s also the time of year drug companies pump up their advertising for cold and flu medicines (every season is cold season to them!). In response, distribute information on the studies done on chiropractic and immune function (see the WCA position paper and the lengthy list of references supporting the claim that chiropractic can boost immune strength). Place a big poster with this quote in your waiting room:

“People who receive regular chiropractic adjustments have immune system competency that is 200% greater than those who don’t.” — Dr. Ron Pero, New York Preventative Medicine Institute and Environmental Health at NYU.

Chiropractors need to start a campaign to remind parents that health comes from INSIDE the body — not inside a bottle of pills.

And, of course, there’s the problem of backpacks, which seem to grow each year. I’ve seen kids wearing backpacks that would bring a longshoreman to his knees. The strain they put on back muscles, and the damage they can do to posture definitely involves the chiropractic profession.

CJ Mertz, DC, president of Full Potential Leadership, warned about this problem years ago: “The weight of their packs and the one-sidedness has led to an epidemic of adolescent back problems. The time has come for chiropractic to take the leadership position and save these children from a lifetime of suffering.”

There are a number of excellent resources online for information about backpack safety (such as Backpack Safety America and Posture Pro) where you can download research data. You might want to consider stocking some good backpacks to sell to your patients for their kids. Not only will you increase your revenue, but you’ll be going the extra mile to help protect the children’s health.

And don’t forget to use your local newspaper to spread the word about your efforts. Sending in an article, letter to the editor or press release helps educate the public AND position your office as a true “back to school” health resource. (search Google news for press releases by other chiropractic offices to give you some hints on how and what to write).

The kids may be going back to school soon, but we have to get back to work if we’re to help them get through the months ahead!

Those percentages get eaten up very quickly, given the cost of the almost obligatory (though of questionable value) Yellow Page ads; print or broadcast media ads; promotional and marketing material including flyers, mailings, brochures, etc.; and the marketing of open houses, health fair booths, and other activities and events.

That helps explain why many wellness professionals turn to the internet. Look at some of the press releases posted by chiropractic offices online at 1888 Press Release and PR.com. They announce almost everything — changes in staff health, health lectures, new equipment or services, notable events, etc.

Press releases can (and probably should) be posted on press release distribution websites, but to take full advantage of free publicity, they should also be sent to newspapers in your area — along with high-quality photos showing your office in action or a professional portrait shot of the person highlighted in the release.

While press releases should be a primary part of your marketing campaign, you don’t want to submit material that sounds like an advertisement.

Examples:

“The Acme Chiropractic Clinic will hold a public educational forum this Sunday on how a balanced diet and chiropractic care affect your immune system and may help prevent colds and flu this season.” Here we have true press release material. It serves the purpose of publicizing your practice and offers a needed service as well.

Then there’s this: “Say well with Acme! This Sunday, the doctors at Acme Chiropractic Clinic will tell you all you need to know about how coming to us can boost your immune system — and keep you from getting colds and flu this season.” This belongs in an advertising section. An internet site where you pay to have your press release posted might accept it, but most print publication editors will reject it as being too promotional for editorial copy.

Also, be careful how you word your press release so it doesn’t violate any of your state’s regulations. Thankfully, chiropractors have fewer limitations on advertising than medical doctors do, but press releases could be classified as “marketing and advertising” by state boards, and be subject to the same restrictions.

You can write your own press releases if you have the time and talent. Still, it might be best to engage the services of a professional marketing company that can coordinate the releases as part of your overall message. If you decide to go that direction, be sure to choose one that’s thoroughly familiar with your particular health care approach. A company that really doesn’t understand what you do will obviously have difficulty trying to explaining it to the public.

For more information on writing press releases, see PRWeb and WikiHow.

It’s no wonder that the medical and pharmaceutical industries have such a lock on the health care system — people are brainwashed from childhood to “visit your doctor.”  Regardless of age, color, religion or other socioeconomic factors, going to an MD for anything from checkups to cancer “care” is accepted as the norm.

Until recently, non-medical alternative health care providers haven’t done a lot to reach out to the broadest spectrum of the population. We’ve tended to focus our attention on those people who either have enough money to pay cash for our services, or who have good insurance plans.

That explains why a University of Michigan Health System study found that, while 1 out of 3 patients with chronic pain reported using complementary and alternative medicine therapies such as acupuncture and chiropractic visits for pain relief, most of these patients were older white adults.

According to lead author Carmen R. Green, MD, the reason for this usage pattern is either that alternative care therapies usually attract individuals with higher education levels and income or there are significant differences in insurance coverage.

She also noted that older people tend to have to deal with chronic pain more often than younger people, so they’re more likely to seek alternative therapies. Personally, I also think that older people have learned through experience that medical treatment is often ineffective and risky.

The study, published in Pain Medicine, focused on chiropractic or physical therapy procedures, biofeedback, and acupuncture.

Of the 5,750 adults tracked over a six-year period, 35% reported using at least one form of complementary and alternative medicine therapy with 25% using “manipulation techniques,” 13% using biofeedback, and 8% acupuncture.

Those of us involved in “alternative medicine” must continue reaching out to the general public so we can increase the 35% figure overall, but we also need to make concerted efforts to get our message to those segments of the population that are underrepresented in our patient base: younger people, people of color, and those at the lower economic levels.

Remember this whenever you give a community talk, put photos on your website, place ads in local publications, or create public information material.

If we all do that, in time we’ll be reaching the majority of people in every socioeconomic group, and medicine and drugs will become the “alternative” to US!

This notion applies to our journey. It doesn’t take divine assistance to dramatically alter a group of motivated people who believe in what they’re doing and are willing to work diligently.

As a small group of committed doctors, we want to improve our profession. Our mission is to protect and promote the principles of neurologically based chiropractic by:

• educating the public regarding health care and the definition of stress and its affects on wellness

• fighting in court for the rights of patients to receive chiropractic care
• engaging a rather unfriendly media for positive press coverage
• encouraging physicians to provide neurologically-based chiropractic care to more patients

But most important, we work to implement laws that protect the patient’s right to choose neurologically based chiropractic care.  We also continue to ascertain physicians are financially rewarded for the care they provide.

Chiropractors shouldn’t be limited to managing only neuro-musculosketal conditions. Patients should be able to access a chiropractor as often as needed. It’s ludicrous to limit your care to those with symptoms or adults with low-back pain. I am fighting to alter the laws to end this unethical medical discrimination from insurance companies and government agencies.

• I have labored for an appropriations bill that would include ample grant money for wellness and neurologically-based chiropractic research. In addition, I have tried to create an advocacy for legislation to identify neurologically-based chiropractic wellness care our sole territory in Medicare.

• One of our members has worked closely with the World Health Organization and the United Nations NGO network while serving as Chairman of the NGO Health Committee.

• The only chiropractor to serve on the White House Presidential Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine was a member of our Alliance.

• A member of our International Board of Governors, served on the Veterans Affairs Chiropractic Advisory Committee.

• Another one of our member was chosen to serve on the National Advisory Council on Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee said, “Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.”

I have always supported the creation of a wellness approach while shielding our profession. This is the plan to implement thought into practice via political action, public education, self-realization and perception.

This has inspired our profession and has created a team of dedicated and compassionate doctors.

Since everyone is not prepared for the neurologically-based chiropractic, the www.worldchiropracticalliance.org website gives chiropractors complete access to our resources such as, position papers and press releases.

Join us today and make a wise business decision.