Your In-office Dispensary Supplementing health and the business of your clinic Setting up a dispensary may seem like a daunting task with inventory and software nightmares, but this is not the case. Dr. Victoria Coleman is a 1994 graduate of CMCC and a BSc in Kinesiology specializing in Fitness Assessment and Exercise Counsel-ing. Working with patients over the years, it became her mission to teach people that everything you eat, breath, drink, and think affects your health. This fuelled her desire to further expand her career and continue her studies. She is an avid follower of the Institute for Functional Medicine and is currently working toward her certification in Functional Medicine. Dr. Coleman is also the president of Douglas Laboratories/Pure Encapsulations Canada. T he focus of this instalment of Nutrabites is not going to be on nutrients to enhance your patients’ health but on the benefits of incorporating a small dis-pensary into your practice setting. THE ADVANTAGES OF HAVING YOUR OWN DISpENSARY In my early days of practice, I simply referred to the local health-food store when I wanted one of my patients to purchase a supplement I felt would improve their health. Over time, I became frustrated with the confusion my patients expressed when I left them to their own devices to obtain what I recommended. Too often, they did not expe-rience the clinical effects I was expecting from using what I recommended, because they had purchased the wrong product, had chosen the incorrect strength, or had bought a poor-quality product. I realized that without much effort I could easily provide to them a one-stop-shop service right there in my office. By offering a top-of-the-line health professional calibre product that had the concentrations I knew reflected the research, had been tested for purity and potency, and was the strength and dosing I wanted them to receive, I basically removed all the guesswork they were struggling with when I left them to do this on their own. I quickly realized how convenient my patients found this, how much more compliant they were with my recommendations, and hence how much better the clinical outcome was for their health experience. I also inadvertently realized the revenue benefit I had created for my business. I think it is important to note that, as chiropractors, we are the ones who should un-derstand the physiology of our health, especially in the area of bone/joint health, inflam-mation, cartilage and connective tissue repair – at the very least. It is not about holding a degree in clinical nutrition or understanding the nature of every health condition that may benefit from a supplement; we have strong allied health-care colleagues such as naturopathic doctors to refer to for that. However, we should understand a good-quality multivitamin may eliminate the many nutrient deficiencies commonly seen; or how im-portant a good supplement of calcium/ magnesium and vitamin D is to bone health; www.canadianchiropractor.ca Victoria Coleman, DC 24 • Canadian ChiropraCtor | oCtoBEr 2011
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