I’ve been in practice for nearly 40 years and there has never been anything that has rocked the country and the world like COVID-19, but we all know this. Our lives and practices have been changed and might never get back to the previous normal.
July 30, 2020 MedPage: As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on with... “essentially no end in sight,” the clinical and epidemiologic toll has provided a grim reminder of how unpredictable and potentially dangerous coronavirus infections can be, according to Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Ohio was basically shut down except for essential services for 2 months - May and June 2020. Even if Chiropractic was considered essential, most patients did not make the usual adjustment appointments and your staff might have been afraid to come into the office and see patients. My business reduced office hours and reduced office staffing.
Regardless of what you thought about the virus, quarantine, and the seriousness of the virus, the public was scared and patients were not going to come to the office to get adjusted, therapy, acupuncture, or massage. I’m sure you had the same effects on your practice.
What can chiropractors do in such situations? Do you just close the doors and hope to ride it out? Maybe your practice survived these last 2 months but could you survive another 2 months?
On July 14, 2020, the CDC director offers a bleak public health outlook for fall and winter, from CNN’s Amanda Watts.
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he thinks “the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we have experienced in American public health.”
What will you do if your state goes into quarantine again for 1 month, 2 months, or more? How can you help provide services to your patients? Maybe now is the time to bring back home chiropractic visits, or maybe mobile chiropractic care is the way to go but still, that is limited and a lot of the public is not going to want the exposure. I doubt that the regular monthly or bi-monthly adjustment visits will continue.
"the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we have experienced in American public health."
There is another option that made all the difference in my clinic with 3 other associate doctors during the shutdown. In fact, our business maintained 76% of revenue for April, May, and June. With some extra marketing, our business for June and July of 2020 was actually higher than the same months in 2019. Yes, our business grew this year, even through the COVID crises.
90% of our business is laboratory-based nutrition. We had already been doing telenutrition for the last several years and it was not a problem for us to go to nearly 100% telenutrition. We provided nutrition consults online, ordered lab work, ROF’s and shipped vitamins to our patients without the patient ever stepping into our office or having physical contact because we already had those services in place prior to the COVID shut down. In fact, people were looking for objective ways to assess their health and objective methods to determine the success of treatment.
We maintained full employment for our staff because our staff could do all or nearly all of the telenutrition work online. The staff did work in the office to be able to deliver the vitamins to the patient’s car or ship them to the patients.
All chiropractors can order lab work and make nutrient and vitamin recommendations in every state.
Even if our patients did not want to come into our office, we provided a valuable and much-needed service to our patients and community. People do need more than an adjustment and we as chiropractors can provide telenutrition especially in these times of crisis.
While you have a few weeks, I would highly encourage all chiropractors to start providing laboratory-based nutrition and telenutrition to provide better care to your patients and much-needed care in times of crisis.
Dr. Van D. Merkle DABCI, DCBCN, CCN, is an August 1982 graduate of Logan College of Chiropractic. He is board-certified in clinical nutrition and a board-certified clinical internist, who has practiced in Centerville, Ohio for over 35 years. He is the founder, developer, and president of Science Based Nutrition (SBN) - a laboratory and nutrition, patented computer analysis system. He has been the host of the talk show Take 2 Healthcare on WHIO 95.7 FM every Saturday from 11 AM to noon for over 25 years. Contact Dr. Merkle at 937-433-3140 / www.sciencebasednutrition.com
