The biggest advantage of adding nutritional counseling and dietary supplements into your practice is that your patients will respond better to any treatment that you prescribe for them and they will think you are a great physician.  Nutrition provides the body with the raw materials that it needs to rebuild when it is dealing with an injury or illness.  Every doctor knows healthy patients respond better to treatment, so by assisting your patients to be healthier overall, they will respond better to your treatment.

Many of today’s patients have access to vast amounts of nutritional information over the internet.  Some of this information is dubious at best, so you, as their trusted doctor for every aspect of their healthcare, need to have access to the correct nutritional information.  If your patients feel that you do not have the knowledge that they expect you to have on nutritional matters, they will look for a doctor who meets their needs.  By the same token, if you gain the knowledge, or are able to direct patients who are looking for nutritional information to the right source, you will be able to increase your patient base.  You can either be a leader in the nutritional information age or you will get left behind (by your patients).

You can take several approaches to adding nutritional counseling to your practice in order to increase revenue.  The fastest and easiest way is to hire a nutritionist to work in your office, or sublease office space within your clinic to an established nutritionist.  This way you can concentrate your efforts on what you do best, diagnose and treat patients, while you can refer patients who would benefit from better eating habits to your in house expert.  Your patients will respond better to your treatments when they have the essential nutrition in their bodies to heal quicker.  Your patients will treat you with greater respect for making the proper diagnosis and referring them to the appropriate expert to help their condition.  Of course, you need to be secure enough in your ability as a doctor to make the referral to another healthcare provider who has different qualifications than you.  But, remember that a top notch doctor is smart enough to get the patient to the proper expert to help them with their healthcare needs.

If you really want to change the emphasis of your practice to a nutrition based, preventative healthcare practice, you could spend 3 to 4 years going back to school and getting a degree in nutrition.  But be warned, this approach may cause you become schizophrenic because a complete understanding of nutrition will cause you think and act in a polar opposite way to treating patients allopathically.  When you truly understand the vast differences between the nutritional supplementation theory and the chemical substitution theory of healthcare, you will find it difficult to reconcile the two approaches to treating a patient.

Next week I will give your more specifics on how to increase revenue through selling nutritional supplements in your clinic.