Were you prepared for business and practice management when you graduated? 90 per cent of the chiropractors surveyed reported that they were not. biggest fear was and this is what they said: 1. I have a fear of not getting any patients. 2. I have a fear of not having enough money to start a prac -tice. 3. I have a fear of failure. Clearly, these are fears that almost all entrepreneurs have at one time or another. I believe the difference is that we, as health professionals, are brought up within a culture where the focus is more on the art and science of diagnosis and treatment and less on business and economics and, there -fore, we receive minimal training for this other very real element of opening a practice. For example, according the Chiropractic Council on Education, the minimum number of hours for completion of a doctor of chiropractic degree is 2,419 hours (not including clinical practice). Of these, 468 hours need to be in anatomy, 408 hours in diagnosis, 271 in X-ray . . . but zero hours of training in business are required to graduate as a chiropractor. One college that is known to house one of the more extensive chiropractic pro -grams in North America dedicates only 3.2 per cent of its curriculum to business and practice development. Now that we have this information, we can understand why chiroprac -tors feel unprepared, feel fearful and lack confidence about their practising future. Mentoring “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill Thirty-three per cent of the chiropractors I surveyed re -vealed that they were taught business practice courses in school by non-chiropractors or by chiropractors who never practised a day in their life. This was troubling to me, and further rein -forced my understanding as to why chiropractors lacked confi -dence in business. For this reason, it is extremely important to adopt a chiropractic mentor in your life. Achieving clinical and business success requires you to put your patients’ goals above your own financial goals by making the commitment to find a mentor you admire in your profession. Seeking out a mentor will allow your own practice goals to take on a specific direc -tion through the guidance and support of their mentorship. I was fortunate to find my mentor early in my career, and that allowed me the luxury of gaining confidence early on. Debunking the Myths “A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.” – Alan Watts There are two myths we have to debunk to allow chiroprac -tors to move forward into the world of business practice: • that you need money to start your own practice; and CANADIAN CHIROPRACTOR | MAY 2013 • 13 HOW DO WE ‘ADJuST’ THIS PROBLEM? I would suggest that there are some remedies we can apply to help mitigate this problem in our profession. www.canadianchiropractor.ca
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