THE BACK PAGE BUSINESS MINDSET Trending topics T Get ready for the economic boom BY DR. ELIAS MARKOU, ND an influx of patients looking for care in the coming months and years. Patients will be looking for regular massages, monthly osteopathic visits, alternative blood work recommended by naturo-pathic doctors, chiropractic doctors helping people get back on track as they resume regular activity dealing with their aches and pains. What’s interesting is that many clinics have pivoted and gone online. The future of online practice will be short-lived. Patients will be looking for hands-on care and not ZOOM health care. For those clinics that have survived the pandemic lockdown, pa-tients will be seeking clinics that treat in person – they want acupuncture, hands on massage care, a chiropractor that will adjust. I predict that clinics will be seeing new patient loads, old patients that re-quire care, and many new patients that are looking towards natural alternative medicine to help them with their medi-cal needs. All in all there will be a dra-matic uptick in patient numbers in many clinics across Canada. It is no secret that during the pandemic the medical profession stepped back from treating their patients. They only took medical emergency appointments. Many of our clients told us that it was tough to get an appointment with their medical doctor, often they had limited zoom calls for their clients. Many med-ical doctors would not have in-person visits happening at their clinics,and it was recommended that patients go to ER when issues arose. We know that the hospital system was dealing with many COVID patients who were reporting there with breathing complications. Doctors at hospitals were overwhelmed with patients with emergency issues like cardiovascular episodes, cancer and with COVID. The biggest issues we heard were patients were asked by government to stay home. Many of those patients interpreted that request as meaning stay home, unless they has something very serious. Routine blood lab visits became confusing and com-plicated for patients – they had to book Get ready for the boom I encourage you all in the next visits online weeks before few months leading up to the their blood draws. Nowhere in the medical conventional We should be end of 2021 to sit down and seeing an evaluate your marketing plan, system could you just show influx of the systems you have in place, up anymore for a visit. This and the staff and professionals created a lot of anxiety in patients patients when they could not looking for that are ready to deliver care. As soon as we return back to address their health con-care in the cerns. We observed during normalcy post pandemic, we coming this time that patient visits months and should be ready for the eco-nomic boom. I see these as and patient numbers did years. exciting times, our professions increase significantly. will be under the microscope, If my observation and hy-pothesis is correct, we should be seeing our alternative professionals will be asked to do a lot from the public as we DR. ELIAS MARKOU, RHN, R.ACU, ND is one very busy naturopathic doctor. He is in private practice move forward. So it is imperative we in Mississauga, Ontario and is the clinic director of pureBalance Wellness. Dr. Markou (ND) has been have all of our systems in place. We a naturopathic doctor for 18 years and has conducted over 100,000 patient visits during this period. should be prepared to tackle every Dr. Markou is a writer and blogger who is regularly featured in the media. Contact him at drmarkou@ patient and their needs post pandemic. mypurebalance.ca Get ready for the boom! 22 Chiropractic and Naturopathic Doctor September/October 2021 www.Cndoctor.ca he other day I had a favorite client of ours reach out and asked if we were still open during the pandemic. I’d stressed to them that we’ve been open since June 12, 2020 and we had continued seeing patients through the pandemic lockdown. They were excited to hear that we were open and stressed to me that they had not re-ceived any treatments over the last year and we’re excited to come and join us for their first treatment in a long time at the clinic. This got me thinking, if this client was one who hadn’t received a treatment in the last year and was very excited to come to resume treat-ment, then how many more patients were out there waiting to come back? So this posed a very interesting question for me, when the pandemic is over and we’ve reached vaccination herd immunity and all of the busi-nesses are finally open, what will this mean for clinics across Canada who offer alternative medicine like natur-opathic care, chiropractic, massage, osteopathy and any other alternative care? An interesting idea jumped into my mind: There is a large cohort of patients out there who are desperately craving practitioner care and attention which they have not received for a year. This got me to conclude that health clinics across Canada should get ready for an economic boom in 2022 that we have not seen for many years. We will see patients flocking to clinics in droves looking for care, hands-on care, from health profes-sionals in the alternative health care space. Conventional medicine stepped back
Chiropractic + Naturopathic Doctor September/October 2021: Page 22
