Few alternative health care practitioners start out as business people. If you poll the ranks of the chiropractic, naturopathic, acupuncture and TCM colleges, to name a few, you’ll find a myriad of reasons for attending, but few of them would be, “I wanted to start my own business.”
You’ll find a genuine interest in helping others. You’ll hear tales of obsession with health and the human body. You’ll even hear ambitious plans to reshape the future of health care, or to find a new way to bring health to even the most economically disadvantaged in all corners of the earth. But you won’t hear many Donald Trump-like tales of building empires.
CAM practitioners enter their training with the goal of running a practice. Not a business, but a practice. We’ll get into the distinction soon enough, but it’s enough for now to know that there is a distinction, and that alternative health care providers fall almost universally on the side of the practice. After all, they call them practitioners, not CAM businessers.
Having entered their training this way, most schools are only too happy to cater to this predisposition. And to be fair, why shouldn’t they? The students have paid to learn about health care, not commerce. And health, as you no doubt know, is a extraordinarily complex subject. Most good practitioners will spend their lives studying it, and never “catch up”. So needless to say, there’s just no time to learn about running a business.
Graduation does arrive, though. After all the anatomy, biology, diagnosis and practical application, the day comes when the student becomes the doctor. And then the game abruptly shifts. The new practitioner finds herself in a world of business relationships and decisions. Leases and contracts. Revenues and expenses. With almost no training in these areas, the new practitioner hangs up her shingle, plugs in her phone, and hopes for the best.
Most CAM professions remain largely unfunded by public health care systems. The lack professional status, and as such can be excluded from workplace and private health insurance plans. Unlike established allopathic health professions, many CAM practioners are on their own. Every dollar they generate comes from a private transaction with a patient – no insurance or government cushions. They are in the world of business, plain and simple.
The great irony of the CAM industry is that hardly anyone starts out to be in business, yet just about everyone has to be in order to succeed.
