Your Ideal Patient
Posted on January 24, 2007 - Filed Under Uncategorized |
Who is your ideal patient? If you don’t know that, how do you attract them?
If you ask people their ideal patient, often they talk about the fact that they like to work with a particular disease. However, working with a single disease can be limiting.   Working with just an age group or just women’s health can be limiting.  One thing I learned from Lynn Grodzki’s book is that you need to think more broadly.
It’s not just what does my ideal patient have, but who is my ideal patient.  Are they motivated? Are they working on their health? Are they someone how just wants a single problem solved?  Are they quiet? Do they just want me to shut up during a treatment? Are they someone who is curious about how acupuncture works? Do they want to know how it can help them in other ways? What do they value?
To really know who my ideal patient is, I need to think about the practitioner I am and who I want to be. Obviously if I want to be a practitioner who sees many patients an hour, my ideal patient wants far less from me than if I see only one person an hour.   If I lack certain qualities that keep me from being the practitioner I want to be, then it is far more important to spend time on changing those qualities in myself. Once I have created those qualities it will be easier to attrack my ideal patients.
I found this exercise quite mind opening. It made me see that I had limited my ideal patients before but now I have a whole new opportunity to try and focus on who my ideal patient is.
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