camclub March Articles
March Articles
- A spotlight on Advertising - Advice from the CNHC
- Can Massage Help People Living with Altzheimers Disease? - Kate Thompson
- Developing a Marketing Mind For Therapy Success - Gill Tree, Essentials for Health
- 6 Easy Steps to help Maintain Your Brain - Natural Therapy Pages
A Spotlight on Advertising
Why is advertising so relevant at the moment?
Is complementary healthcare being ‘got at?’
There seems to be little doubt that issues to do with ‘advertising’ are some of the ways in which those who are sceptical about complementary healthcare are choosing to try and make their point.
What is actually happening?
We know that a number of people who either disbelieve the efficacy of complementary health, or who are very sceptical about how (or indeed, whether) it works, are trying to ‘attack’ a number of therapies. Chiropractic has been subject to hundreds of complaints to the General Chiropractic Council (GCC) over the past year or so. Homeopathy has also been targeted to the extent that a significant number of courses have now closed in several Universities. It appears that reflexology is also in the spotlight and it is possible that other therapies will be targeted in due course.
Why is this happening?
At one level, it is good for any profession to be challenged about what it does. We should never listen only to our friends if we want to have a balanced view of our actions. We should all be able to provide a rationale for our activities and be able to justify what we do and why, when it involves other people and their health and well being. For those reasons we should listen to those who are sceptical and work out the best way to answer their queries.
What could happen?
If you write or say anything which is considered to be misleading, it is possible that a complaint could be made to the Complementary & Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), if you are registered with us, or to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
If the complaint goes to the ASA it is likely to be considered against the strength of the evidence available for the claims that are being made. CNHC is currently in discussion with those with research expertise to provide evidence that might be acceptable to the ASA where necessary. One of the difficulties relates to what type of research will be considered acceptable. Randomised control trials are accepted by the ASA but don’t feature very highly in the complementary healthcare sector.
What can you do about it?
Make sure that you are very careful about what you write. Always bear in mind that you may need to provide evidence to back up any claim you make about efficacy in particular. After March 2011 website information will also be subject to ASA scrutiny and complaint. Also, be cautious about what you say – don’t make claims that have no evidence.
How to get help
Please don’t worry too much - not everyone is out to get you, even if it feels like that at times! Just be cautious and sensible. Click here to read the advice provided by CNHC, check any advice provided by your professional association and look at the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) Code.
The CAP Copy Advice Team provides a free advice service and will check advertising claims prior to publication – usually within 24 hours (please ensure you leave ample time between seeking advice and amending your advertising prior to publication). They can be contacted at [email protected] or on 020 7492 2100 Monday to Friday from 9am to 6pm. Additional helpful information and advice on advertising is also available on the Advertising Standards Agency website at www.asa.org.uk
Continue to be proud of your work and the help it brings to those who need it.
Who to contact:
CNHC – www.cnhc.org.uk / email [email protected] or tel: 020 3178 2199
ASA – www.asa.org.uk
CAP – www.cap.org.uk
Maggy Wallace, Executive Chair, CNHC
Can massage help people living with Alzheimer’s disease?
- Kate Thompson
What experience comes to mind when you consider a truly effective massage treatment? A deep tissue massage, a pampering ‘me time’ session or a holistic treatment to reduce stress?
Massage therapists devote a lot of time getting to the root of physical problems and easing other peoples stress and tension. But have you ever considered the benefits of nurturing touch - a sensitive, caring, non-invasive and deeply relaxing treatment as taught by Inspire Massage Workshops in their Head and Hands course.
As a therapist far and away the most rewarding and powerful treatments I have done are working with elderly people, in particular those living with Alzheimer’s. disease.
Nurturing touch is all too often neglected and I believe people living with dementia, so often caused by Alzheimer’s disease, can and do benefit from massage.
People living in care facilities, who may be spending their days in chronic pain, fear and confusion are more in need of massage than any other sector of society. They are vulnerable and for the most part voiceless.
Consider for example the woman who has spent hours having physiotherapy, being poked and prodded by doctors, and generally feeling man handled by the medical profession but no longer possesses the ability to convey her frustration. What better way to replace negative associations of touch than by providing gentle, calming massage and still touch? Or the patient who is scared and knows she is not living in her own home but can’t remember why. A calming hand massage, or simply holding her hand, can reduce this sense of fearfulness and anxiety. Or the restless man prone to agitation and pacing, a common occurrence in dementia. A foot massage can be a calming antidote to his distress.
But these treatments are not without their challenges? How do you measure improvement in a situation condition where decline is expected? Your client can rarely tell you where they feel they most need the massage and what pressure is right for them. I depend largely on facial cues, such as spontaneous utterances from usually non-verbal patients such as “Oh, that’s nice,” or non-verbal responses such as smiles or general relaxed expressions.
During my two years massaging residents of a care home specializing in dementia you see some distressing and affecting sights, but I know that the massage sessions have a powerful and calming effect that work as well as some of the drugs that are administered to manage people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Aggressive, anxious behaviour is a way for the a person with Alzheimer’s disease to show he or she is unhappy and frightened. Massage, alongside use of music and light is the perfect therapeutic intervention with rich potential.
Dawn Nelson, founder and director of Compassionate Touch, wrote: ‘Age-appropriate massage is a cost-effective, non-pharmacological resource for reducing stress, managing challenging behaviors and enhancing quality of life for those who are confined to care facilities.’
So why then do so many in the medical profession routinely prescribe and administer powerful drugs, such as antipsychotics to help manage challenging behaviour instead of investigating more natural treatments?
A question Guardian journalist Sandra Laville, whose own mother, is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, would also like to know the answer to.
‘Antipsychotic medicines are the tools most used to tackle difficult behaviour in those who suffer a vicious terminal illness that acts like a wrecking ball inside the brain, destroying everything that gives us our dignity and identity,’ she says. ‘These drugs are regularly prescribed by GPs to my mother and an estimated 150,000 others with Alzheimer’s .’
Yet “Difficult” should mean those patients exhibiting extreme aggression, which puts them at serious risk of harming themselves or others, according to Professor Clive Ballard, director of research at the Alzheimer’s Society.
As the global population ages, dementia is becoming one of the major health and social issues of the 21st century.
So what treatment methods should be adopted to help people living with Alzheimer’s disease?
When you consider that 820,000 people in the UK live with dementia, that it costs the UK economy £23 billion per year, (twice the cost of cancer) and that by 2025 there will be over a million people with dementia surely this is a question that the relevant government body should be considering sooner rather than later?
In my opinion regular massage alongside other appropriate therapeutic techniques would be a good start.
I am fortunate in that the care home I massage in is extremely enlightened and welcome massage in their home as well as offering a wide range of other stimulating entertainment. This really shows as the staff seem happy, the residents calmer than in other homes I have visited and the relatives extremely grateful and relieved that their loved ones aren’t just being looked after on a physical level but on an emotional one too.
Developing a marketing mind for therapy success
- Gill Tree - Essentials for Health
This article is about marketing, coupled with ensuring you have the right mind set.
I cannot emphasise strongly enough how important belief in yourself and what you offer is. However the marketing part is equally essential. Get the both right and working together and you will fly!
When starting out, therapists often think that they need to charge low fees as they are new and inexperienced. I think this is a mistake- after all you are fully qualified. By undercharging you may not be making enough to live on. Putting your prices up significantly when they have been set low, may then put your existing clients off.
In today’s world people often perceive value and quality by price. Charging too little can infer low quality. Recently I asked a group of our students who were all on the same course how much they were planning to charge. Their answers ranged from £20-£100 per hour. How can that be?? Same training, same therapy.
Quite simply it was down to their beliefs and self worth………….
Deciding on your pricing is an art in itself. Many therapists look at what the therapist down the road is charging, and charge a little bit more or less. This is exactly how not to do it!!
I am not going to go into detail about how to decide your price as this is covered in my “Passport to Business Success” Virtual Classroom.
However, once you have decided your price there are all sorts of things you can do with it to encourage people to buy from you and buy more frequently.
If you are just starting out you can have an introductory offer. This does not mean discounting your price permanently, but for a limited period people like your case study volunteers can be rewarded with a special offer. You can also have an introductory offer to new clients to entice them in through your door. What we are selling is intangible, you can’t on the whole smell it, test drive it or taste it! This makes it harder for people to decide whether to buy. What ever you can do to make it easier for people to sample you and your therapy will result in more customers through your door.
Intangibility leads to potential customers;
1/ Having difficulty in evaluating competing services
2/Perceiving high levels of RISK
3/ Placing great emphasis on recommendation
4/Using price as a basis for assessing quality
Increase your services “tangibility” by:
1/Including tangibles in the price eg: free bottle of oil/diet sheet
2/Allowing people to visit the clinic or meet them at local fairs/school fetes
3/Have testimonials
4/ Have physical evidence such as a brochure with photos
5/ Customise the service to the client
6/ Make the service as simple as possible
7/ Encourage recommendation
8/ Focus on service quality
9/ offer freebies to sample
We are bombarded with those special 3 for 2 offers in supermarkets and chemists, free samples through the door and online free information. You might want to join this marketing wave with advice sheets/free consultation/e-book or whatever is appropriate to your particular therapy.
The next question to ask yourself is….
Are you earning enough?
To increase our income we need to do 3 things:
• increase the number of clients we have
• increase the frequency with which they come
• increase your prices
This illustration shows that with some simple tweaking we can increase our income by 30%
• Lets say we have an income of £25,000
• If we increase the number of customers by 10%
• Our income goes up £27,500
• If we get them all to buy 10 % more
• Our income goes up to £30,250
• If we increase our prices by 10%
• Our income goes up to £33,275
Let’s take each one in turn.
Increase your number of customers
To be able to increase the number of customers you have, you need to think about expanding your marketing efforts and to think of marketing as sowing seeds in a number of different places.
This is known as a Sales funnel (See below, the seeds are marked in red)
Each part of the sales funnel needs nurturing just like seeds need water, sunshine and plant food! Look after each on a regular basis and watch your garden grow!
Once you have got people in through the door, you want to keep them coming back. It costs 6 times more to get a new customer than keep an old one
People love to think they are getting a bargain or a good deal so consider:
- Offering a course of treatments with a discount for them paying up front (this really helps your cash flow)
- Have the loyalty cards like the coffee shops where they get the 6th or 10th treatment free
- Have a freebie provided with the treatment- you might negotiate a special deal with the gym down the road to have a free day membership for example
- Have special offers during quiet times of the year
- Have peak and off peak prices
- People are also more likely to book if what you offer is scarce. When starting out, don’t let on that you have a completely empty appointment book. Instead intimate that you can “just squeeze them in!”
- You might also consider utilising the rest of the sales funnel. Once you funnel people into your business look at different ways of keeping them with you and spending more.
- Offering products with the treatment is a classic way to get people to increase their spend.
- Increase your prices
- Now you have the number of clients you want, coming on a regular basis, you can increase your prices!
- And finally “No” means “not yet”!
When people say no thanks to you, they may not mean it! Some people take a lot of convincing and need 7 or more points of contact –meeting you, getting emails, a newsletter etc before they feel secure enough to buy
Accept also that what you offer is not going to be for everyone and don’t take it personally when they say no.
If on average your conversion rate of people saying yes is 40% you actually need 60 no’s to get 40 yes’s!
No’s are good!
Good luck and successful practices!
Gill Tree has 20 years experience in business, is an award winning entrepreneur and is the Managing Director of Essentials for Health- a leading School of Massage in London that now specializes in online business support for therapists.
To support your therapy success the First 30 people reading this article who sign up to our free trial of our Therapist’s Business Passport and then buy it will receive a 16% discount.
http://www.essentialsforhealth.co.uk/Page.php?ID=Business_Passport
Telephone: 01628 476100
Website: www.essentialsforhealth.co.uk
6 Easy Ways to Maintain Your Brain
- Natural Therapy Pages
Have you ever worried about your brain, or felt like you are forgetting things more and more? The good news is that there are some things that you can do to maintain your brain and reduce your risk of developing dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Read on to learn more.
1. Get Plenty of Physical Exercise
Exercise is important for brain maintenance as physical activity will increase the blood flow to the brain, helping it to get the oxygen and nutrients that it needs to work at its peak. Aim for daily exercise – around 30 minutes of walking, swimming, cycling, running, or whatever other exercise you prefer is ideal.
2. Exercise Your Brain
Remember the saying “use it or lose it?” This applies to the brain as well, not just your muscles. Do activities that challenge your brain such as:
• Crosswords
• Puzzles
• Board games
• Card games
• Reading
• Learning a new language
• Learning a new instrument
• Singing
These help to maintain your brain by increasing blood flow, establishing new connections within the brain, and also by stimulating brain cell growth. Being social is also important to the brain. Engaging in conversations or activities with others can go a long way towards maintaining your brain.
3. Look at your Diet
Your diet plays a surprisingly large part in maintaining your brain. Omega 3 fatty acids are important to the brain as they make up parts of the brain cells, and they can also help to reduce inflammation within the brain. The omega 3 fatty acids also help to protect arteries and improve the blood flow to the brain. Bad fats such as saturated fats and trans fats increase the levels of LDL or bad cholesterol in the blood, which can cause inflammation and reduce the flow of blood to the brain. Antioxidants are also valuable for maintaining your brain as the brain can be damaged by free radicals and the oxidative effect that they have. Some great antioxidants are vitamins C and E. Blueberries can be very helpful as they contain substances that can help with short term memory, navigational skills, balance, and coordination. Research also suggests that blueberries can improve weakened neuron signals within the brain.
Gingko biloba is an herb that is commonly used for the brain as it reduces damage from oxidation in the cells.
4. Stop Smoking
It is vital that you stop smoking. As well as all of the other negative health effects associated with smoking, smoking decreases the flow of blood to the brain, meaning that it does not get the oxygen and nutrients that it needs to function.
5. Stress Less
Research has shown that chronic, excessive levels of stress can actually alter the structure of the brain. These changes in structure can make the brain more susceptible to damage from free radicals and it can also result in neuron damage. If stress is a problem in your life, employ stress management techniques such as meditation, muscle relaxation, yoga, and so forth.
6. Start Now!
So now you know how to maintain your brain, when should you start doing it? Ideally, you will begin as soon as you can because the good news is that it is never too late. Everything that you do towards maintaining your brain adds up, and by maintaining your brain, you reduce the risk for diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
