As your practice grows, you will reach the mid-growth phase in which in some months, your total monthly patient visits are mediocre; in other months, they are great. During this phase, you will be in a difficult position where you may be unable to devote your full attention to the patient sitting in front of you while still being able to answer the telephone; greet patients; collect payments; and make patient appointments. Intuitively, you know that your practice will grow and that your stress and exhaustion could be reduced if you had a receptionist, yet your current practice profit does not allow the $2,000-plus monthly salary for a receptionist. What do you do?
One solution is to open your practice in an office in which a receptionist is part of the services offered. This frees you from locating, training and maintaining the employee. This is the easiest solution, assuming the receptionist performs satisfactorily.
If you currently do not have a receptionist, consider the following: The goal is to provide quality service with undivided attention to your patient while also answering the telephone for new and established patients. Remember, both new and established patients do not want to speak with an answering machine during business hours. Patients want a human on the other end.
Some practitioners may hire a telephone answering service to handle incoming calls while with a patient. However, the difficulty lies in locating a service that answers the phone in the manner you desire. There is often poor quality control in this situation.
I recommend that new practitioners in this situation purchase both a traditional land-line office phone and a flat-rate cellular phone. There are some cellular phone packages that charge a flat fee for unlimited monthly use. Keep the cell phone on your belt when treating a patient. When the patient is changing into a gown, call forward the office phone to the cellular phone so that is someone calls while you are treating the patient, you'll be able to answer the call. Triage the call as described in the "Telephone Answering Procedures" article, which appeared in the April 2001 issue of Acupuncture Today, then get back to treating the patient as quickly as possible.
There is one warning I wish to share. This method takes away from the patient, but hopefully this telephone method is a short stopgap until you can afford to hire someone full-time as a receptionist.
Another benefit to this method is that it allows you to take calls when you are away from office networking in the community. This will give the caller the illusion that you are in the office when in fact you are outside marketing yourself.
Over my almost 30 years in clinical practice, I have used Chai Hu Long Gu Mu Li Tang extensively for a wide array of clinical presentations ranging from chronic headaches to anxiety, insomnia, and prescription drug withdrawal symptoms if these situations fit the appropriate patterns – all with extremely positive clinical outcomes.
There’s no doubt that many of your patients visit your practice because they are in pain. And there’s certainly no doubt that curcumin from turmeric (Curcuma longa) can be incredibly effective in stopping that pain, whether due to chronic conditions like arthritis or acute pain from intensive workouts. But your patients may also benefit from curcumin for other reasons.
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Low back pain is defined as pain the posterior superior iliac spine (PSIS), and it can be acute or chronic, localized or radiating. It is a common ailment for adults in the United States, with a lifetime prevalence as high as 65-80%. Whether or not an MRI is available to provide definitive knowledge of a structural issue, acupuncture can be an effective treatment for low back pain.
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