Education is the Key to Marketing a Functional Medicine Practice
Despite its increased popularity over the past few years, many people are still new to the idea of functional medicine. This means marketing a functional medicine practice is all about thinking outside the box. Your functional medicine marketing strategy should include at least three major stages: Increase awareness using online tools. This is brought เกม pg about by letting people know who you are and what you can do to help them. Educate the public about the therapies and treatments you offer. Since most people don’t know about functional medicine, you need to clearly convey what it is and how its different from a traditional hospital or clinic. Convert interested visitors into paying customers. Once your customers start to understand what functional medicine can do for them, you need to sign them up for services, therapies, and membership plans. This article will focus on the educational component of a successful marketing strategy. Use the helpful marketing tips in this blog to drive revenue and achieve lasting patient transformations. Functional medicine practitioners Functional medicine is a patient-centered, science-based healthcare model that empowers patients and most practitioners to work in harmony to tackle the underlying causes of chronic disease and provide optimal wellness. Patient education is crucial during all steps of the process. Patients will want to work with a practitioner with credentials, licensure, and experience. These qualifications increase confidence in the patient on matters to do with drugs and supplements administered in the functional medicine clinic. Functional medicine marketing strategy Marketing strategies are more than picking the right colors or a unique font message. Most successful virtual businesses programs are emotionally engaging and slowly but steadily build connections with existing patients and prospective patients. Note that up to 70% of consumers may not purchase the first, second, or even a third engagement with your practice. Some take a couple of months, others even years to buy. Due to that, you can’t depend on hit-and-run pull marketing to increase your revenue in the functional medicine business. It would be best to have a long-term plan that uses purposeful techniques to cultivate long-term customers. Showing up every day, operating your new business, interacting with your customers, and conveying confidence in your missions is the best form of practice marketing. Use these tips to create your marketing master plan. Build a self-optimizing funnel. A funnel is a system that generates, educates, nurtures, and converts lead into repeat customers. Doctors who work 80- hours a week burn out and are usually manual funnels that demand too much attention and upkeep. Therefore, creating a self-optimized funnel that works for you and your career is critical. A typical conversion funnel would start with the customer searching for a service or seeing an advertisement, they would then navigate your website before converting the visit into a sale. The presence of your link or advertisement allows a fraction of those that see it to click it, and then a fraction of those that click it to purchase your products or services. Building an optimized funnel leads your clients to purchase without ever sounding slimy. It doesn’t require more time or effort on your end, but it consistently converts customers and generates excitement for your offerings like in email marketing. Having the services of experts like Functional Medicine Marketing gives you an edge and results in more conversions. Let technology do the work for you. It may seem like technology makes your work harder, but you can make it work for your business. Once you successfully implement it correctly, it becomes effortless, i.e., Paid advertisements, Google reviews, video content, and email marketing. In this age, having an online presence is a must. This is why virtual integrative healthcare is taking off right now. Leverage multipliers: Branding and niching down After you become efficient with the functional medicine marketing tips, you can squeeze even more power out of them by leveraging multipliers. Multipliers are simple methods that exponentially increase the impact of your community outreach as a functional medicine practitioner. An excellent example of branding yourself as an integrity-based, mission-centered brand can be a massive multiplier. People will relate to and feel your company’s genuine desire to help others and will most likely choose you instead of your competitor. Emotional engagement with your potential clients is the most powerful tool to have. Niching down is another proven multiplier. A niche is a specialized avenue of your market that focuses on particular products and services. Many doctors fear having a niche because they’re worried about choosing the wrong niche. The truth is nothing down enables you to focus more, have more impact in the market field, and generate more revenue because it allows you to pay a lot of focus on the potential patients you’re meant to assist the most. A smart, cohesive, and functional marketing campaign plan could be a game-changer for your medical practice. You can enroll the help of Functional Medicine Marketing to effectively and successfully leverage multipliers. Consider these benefits: You can, Avoid patient compliance that doesn’t make your practice grow. Ensure you educate patients minds about your mission and vision. Prequalify ideal patients for reputation management. Drive leads into your funnel. Position your brand strategically as a go-to authority in the industry. Differentiate yourself from competitors. Top Tips for Medical Websites. Your website is the marketing foundation of your functional medicine practice. With that in mind, here are some essential recommendations to assist your team in bringing more patients. You will avoid wasting time and money if you pay attention to these tips. Don’t build your website or hire a friend to do it. The audience should position you as the medical professionals’ expert in your field and reflect the quality of services you offer to new patients. If the website is not optimized, you might have difficulty attracting new high-quality patients to your healing practices. Functional Medicine Marketing provides you with a strategy session that involves search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization makes researching keywords that people in your locality are searching for easy.
Grow your practice online for functional medicine marketing
Running a functional medicine practice comes with its own unique challenges. Besides announcing your presence to your target audience, you actually need to educate them about what your practice can do for them. Apart from highlighting the conditions that you can treat, you also need to outline the larger benefits of turning to this branch of medicine. That is why a functional medicine business plan has to factor in smart, effective, and modern approaches that fulfill all of these aspects. By using a comprehensive marketing plan or hiring a digital marketing agency, you can establish your practice as a center of functional medicine Colorado Springs residents can rely upon. From crafting engaging content to using an alternative medicine marketing agency, here is how you can grow your functional medicine practice online. Educate Your Functional Medicine Audience Through Content While functional medicine is a reliable branch of alternative medicine, it still gets pushed into obscurity by more popular practices. Even those who can benefit from holistic care often don’t know what functional medicine is all about. This creates a gap between the demand and delivery of this branch of medicine. By creating educational content in the form of blog posts and articles, you can have a reliable knowledge base to educate your target audience. You can then disseminate this content through your website, third-party platforms, and even in the form of marketing materials as a part of your functional medicine business plan. You can write this content by yourself. But you can also consider hiring professional writers who can take the burden off your shoulders and let you focus on your core practice of functional medicine Colorado Springs can rely upon. In essence, you must focus on providing functional medicine to people within your area. It is common knowledge that experts such as yourself will want to make sure to invest more time in core competencies. You will have a wide variety of aspects to focus on in functional medicine that ranges from learning about new research in the integrative medicine field and ensuring that all patients have the best level of care. Functional medicine experts take a more holistic approach to care and need to ensure to spend time where they can be the most effective. That is where a professional digital marketing firm will be critical. The right digital marketing firm will provide a comprehensive digital marketing strategy and help you to spread awareness of your functional medicine practices. If you are looking to obtain new patients and to enable prospective patients to understand the difference that functional medicine brings to the table, you will want to make sure to have a functional medicine marketing strategy from experts that focus on this particular field. Your marketing strategy for your medical practice should account for clarity, simplicity, and core message delivery to yield the best results. Hire an Alternative Medicine Marketing Agency You may very well create factually sound content. But in order to make it engaging and interesting to read, you need the help of a digital marketing agency. This also holds true if you want to use the content for potent marketing strategies, which needs technical input to appeal to search engines and audiences alike. Through the help of a marketing team, you can explore strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and email marketing with ease. When your hired professionals take care of all tech-based and technical elements for these organic and paid marketing plans, you can see the presence of your practice grow overtime. In turn, you can pay full attention to running your practice while knowing its marketing is being handled by seasoned experts. This allows you to enact your functional medicine business plan for effective outreach and lets you enjoy a high return on investment (ROI). The right digital marketing agency will be aware of functional medicine practices, will understand the benefits of functional medicine, and will deploy a holistic functional medicine marketing strategy that makes a difference for your medical practice. It is true that functional medicine marketing will have to focus on understanding the main pain points of new patients in the local community and ensure to show how a functional medicine practitioner can help to make a difference. Focus on Your Social Media Outreach Hiring a functional medicine-oriented digital marketing agency does not mean that you have to stand back from using your professional input or medical knowledge while reaching out to your audience. Instead, you can use a collaborative approach with your marketing team to see how you offer a center for functional medicine Colorado Springs residents can trust. For instance, even if you welcome an alternative medicine marketing agency on board to handle your social media, you can look through the content that the experts create before it is marketed to your audience. By publishing high-quality content on your social media through posts and infographics, you can show the effectiveness of functional medicine to local communities. You can also boost these efforts by asking your staff to follow your practice page, share posts with their social circle, and spread the word for others to also follow your accounts. Whether it is social media marketing for patient education or professional medical advice, it is necessary to approach it effectively so that you are heard. Create Engaging Video Content Whether you want to push engaging content on social media or place it on your website, creating short-form videos can work wonders towards catching your audience’s interest. By outlining the different advantages, approaches, and effects of functional medicine, you can reach out to those patients who can benefit from this form of alternative medicine. You can create your video content all by yourself. But in order to fulfill your functional medicine business plan, it is better that you research trending topics with the help of a digital marketing agency. Using the services of an alternative medicine marketing agency also allows you to create scripts that are embedded within your YouTube
Huge opportunity for functional medicine practices in 2022
Over the past couple of years, it has become evident that health is the most important asset for all age groups. If you are in good health, you can have greater chances to fend off different viruses, infections, and diseases that wreak havoc on civilization. But if your well-being is compromised in any form, you may have more difficulties protecting yourself against these challenges. Since functional medicine improves your overall well-being, boosts your immune system, and helps you get relief from chronic conditions, it stands out as one of the most sought-after ways to elevate the health of those who struggle with different health problems. Due to this reason, those who want to live a healthier life are turning towards functional medicine. This has also opened different opportunities for functional medical practices in 2022. If you run such a practice, here is how you can use functional medicine marketing to your benefit in the world today. Improving Outreach Through Social Media In a day and age where everyone uses social media, utilizing these mediums to increase your outreach is one of the most logical steps to take. For your functional medicine practice, this includes the development of engaging posts, infographics, and short-form videos. From there, you can attain organic engagement from those looking for health-related topics. This allows you to obtain the attention of different groups through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In turn, you can raise your chances of getting more patients and improving more lives. With it, you can also utilize paid ads that allow you to target specific demographics. This ensures that you can announce your presence to people from all walks of life. It also lets you obtain the interest of those who can benefit from functional medicine. If you want to present more value and share how functional medicine practitioners can play a key role in many people’s lives, reach out to us at Functional Med Marketing today. We want to help you show how functional medicine practices can certainly make a difference in your potential patients’ lives. Your functional medicine approach can certainly play a role in bringing more value to increased mental health, chronic diseases, and can accelerate how the body heals. We use our specialized knowledge in elements like tweets, LinkedIn sharing buttons, and more aspects of social media to help you reach more people and increase your patient volume. We create a story and might focus on your visit to a recent annual international conference, or we might talk about a recent study by the Institute for Functional Medicine. We may talk about health systems or the rise of independent practices in the near future. Whatever the case may be, we always help our functional medicine practitioners to share their work and connect with future patients. Enhancing Visibility Through Search Engines Social media lets you reach out to a passive audience that may or may not be interested in holistic healthcare. But search engines connect you to those actively trying to learn about functional medicine to improve their overall well-being. By looking into search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you can improve your rankings in search engine results and capture the eye of these individuals. From there, you can drive traffic to your practice’s website and easily describe the benefits of functional medicine to this audience. This gives you a well-rounded way to harness functional medicine marketing. This is crucial to building your patient base and helping patients open to trying comprehensive medicine approaches, especially after not getting relief from conventional medicine. As a result, this lets you attain the goal of assisting those who need your help the most. This allows you to educate, expand people’s knowledge about most of your practices, and show you present outcomes. Your business model is simple, help people get better with independent practices. Our goal is to help you reach more people with virtual care, group visits, other patient care, and more with our services. We know that practitioners are busy helping to increase the quality of the health of their patients. Our experts make sure that patients can find practitioners and understand the importance of the type of approaches these functional medicine practitioners bring to the table. If you are looking to provide more information and services to more patients, our team of physicians can certainly help and support you to accomplish your goals. Raising Awareness Through Educational Content Whether you are using social media or search engines, looking into educational content can pay off in the long run. This ensures that you can boost your practice to even those not aware of functional medicine and how it works. As a result, you can open doors to helping various people who may not have otherwise known why functional medicine is important for them or their loved ones who struggle with different health challenges. When you work with an inquisitive audience, getting them to visit your practice and seeing how you can help them also becomes easier. Since content also helps you rank higher in search engines and acts as a medium to improve views on social media, this aspect also helps your practice through other approaches. We use a data-oriented approach to help you treat more patients with chronic diseases and those with various symptoms. Our experts know that you focus on helping patients reduce their risk of issues while optimizing their health. Boosting Engagement Through Videos Another remarkable way to benefit from functional medicine marketing is creating highly engaging videos for your practice. These videos don’t have to be strictly short-form or long-form. They also don’t need to be monotonous. Instead, you can create interesting videos on different topics related to functional medicine. You can then promote these videos on social media and place them on your website. By uploading these videos to platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and even TikTok, you can generate higher interest from your target audience. Whether you receive questions or active requests for
Marketing Resources for Functional Medicine providers in the United States
Running a functional medicine practice is no mean feat. In addressing different health-related causes and their resulting conditions, you need to approach each patient with individualized care. Besides practicing this holistic form of medicine, you also need to explain it to patients who benefit from it. But before you can come to the explanation and practice phase, you have to reach out to patients who might be interested in functional medicine Colorado Springs can rely upon. Otherwise, your practice can get affected by obscurity before it even has a chance to spread its wings. That is where an alternative medicine marketing agency can help. At Functional Med Marketing, our digital marketing agency solutions can assist you with your most pressing outreach needs. From crafting a functional medicine business plan to enacting a fruitful advertising campaign, our seasoned experts can support you through every step of a beneficial marketing approach. With our specialized expertise in marketing functional medicine practices, you can rest assured that we will handle your requirements with the care they need. Whether you want to start with the process or have any inquiries, our team remains just a call away. [Contact Us at Functional Med Marketing For a Functional Medicine Marketing Strategy] The Alternative Medicine Marketing Agency You Can Trust While reaching out to patients who may benefit from functional medicine, you must market your solutions smartly and engagingly. Since you are offering an alternative medicine approach that many people still don’t know about, you must take the time to explain your solutions to your target audience. Otherwise, your answers can get mixed up with a sea of general medicine. Similar to how you have to develop your functional medicine business plan with the practice’s marketability and profitability in mind, you need to craft your marketing plan with the same approach. If you keep following the generic method, it does not provide you sustainable results in the long term. As a specialized alternative medicine marketing agency, Functional Med Marketing understands these pressure points and fulfills the requirements that stem from them. It provides you with a highly personalized marketing strategy that fetches your audience’s attention and allows patients who need your expertise to contact your practice. It is possible through high-quality marketing content, efficacious outreach strategies, and advanced exposure campaigns. By combining the benefits of helpful information with digital advertising, you can benefit from different marketing resources for functional medicine Colorado Springs residents have come to trust. As a prominent digital marketing agency in the Centennial State, Functional Med Marketing is equipped to handle the needs of multiple functional medicine practices at once. Whether you want to discuss your goals or start with the process, our team is right here to help. [Contact Us at Functional Med Marketing For a Holistic Marketing Strategy] We Use the Most Effective Marketing Resources Before you move forward with executing an outreach plan for your functional medicine practice, it is important to learn about the different marketing resources available at your disposal. In addition to helping you choose the right solutions for your needs, this also enables you to boost your return on investment (ROI) for maximum results. These resources include some of the following approaches. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Similar to how a functional medicine business plan lets you reach your superior profitability, running an SEO campaign lets you knock down barriers in the way of getting your target audience. Simply put, this approach allows you to rank higher on search engine results. When someone is searching for solutions that match your practice’s offerings, this lets you outline your answers to them. SEO is executed with a mix of high-quality content and carefully-obtained links from across the web. It lets the search engines such as Google know that you are a credible entity, which helps you boost your rankings on your target keywords. In turn, you can expand your presence over the web for patients to find you easily. Local SEO Solutions As an alternative medicine marketing agency, Functional Med Marketing understands the benefit of maintaining a local presence through your online profile. If you run a practice for functional medicine Colorado Springs residents, expanding your outreach on local keywords and profiles can boost the flow of patients towards your training. This approach fetches you more exposure in your target practice area. If your goal is to entertain walk-ins and service more patients in-person than through telemedicine, local SEO can help people find you through search engines as well as profiles such as Google Maps and Yelp. As a specialized digital marketing agency, Functional Med Marketing uses targeted techniques to improve your presence in your target area. It gives your functional medicine solutions the local exposure that it needs. Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisement campaigns allow you to show your ads to individuals actively searching for your services on the search engines. When managed properly, these ads are shown at the top of the search engine results, which lets you cut through the noise without having to wait for long-term effects. PPC advertisements also work on third-party platforms, where your ads can be shown to people on many websites that they visit. It includes but is not limited to blogs, news, and entertainment websites, while also comprising platforms such as YouTube. Using the marketing funds outlined in your functional medicine business plan, you can get the most out of running a PPC campaign. Functional Med Marketing’s effective solutions can help you reap all the rewards of this approach. Email Marketing Solutions Email marketing solutions can help you build trust with existing patients and branch out to new audiences when executed by a specialized alternative medicine marketing agency. It not only allows you to improve your presence but also strengthens your overall image in the sector. Email marketing solutions can include newsletters, informational content, and discount offers on medical visits. Functional Med Marketing can help you obtain your goals through a comprehensive solution by understanding your needs and approach. To
How to Attract Functional Medicine Patients Through Marketing
It’s no secret that digital marketing is now the go-to approach for reaching a wider span of people and potential clients. Social media has made it easier than ever to affordably market your products and services to whomever your target audience may be, and, in many cases, being able to do so instantly. There are, however, certain caveats to utilizing digital marketing, and most of them pertain to strategy. In other words, while the tools for digital marketing are easily accessible and available for new and seasoned marketers alike, how you market and what you are marketing will still heavily influence your turnout, regardless of these conveniences. This simple guide over functional medicine marketing goes over one avenue of digital marketing and how strategically incorporating functional medicine marketing to attract the right target audience is the key to functional medicine marketing success. If you are looking for effective functional medicine marketing, reach out to us today. At Functional Medicine Marketing, we tailor our services to match what works in your industry. Our goal is simple – bring more clients through your functional medicine practice door, so you can help more people. We love to see other businesses succeed. But even more than that, we love to see people succeed in life with optimal health. Because we’ve experienced the benefits of healing our bodies from the inside out, we are excited to help support you in providing that benefit to others! We would be honored to help you grow your patient bookings, so you can help more people. With that, here is all you need to know on how to attract patients to functional medicine using digital marketing. Understand Your Functional Medicine Marketing Strategy and Product/Service The first step in successful marketing is understanding what you’re selling and what your customer profile generally looks like. In this case, we are attempting to attract patients to functional medicine. So, what is functional medicine, and what kind of people are intrigued by it? Functional medicine is an unconventional approach to modern medicine, as it combines holistic and western techniques for the most effective total body healing a patient can receive. Functional medicine strives to look at the root causes of issues, and how western medicine successfully manages symptoms. You can consider functional medicine to be the middle road between all-natural and all-pharmaceutical medicine. We are clear on what it is and then we break it down into the specific treatments you provide. Our marketing strategies will focus on what you provide, why it matters, and who it matters to over the long run. We focus on your functional medicine practices, your story, and how your story ties into that of your new patients and functional medicine clients. Understand Your Target Audience Now that we know that functional medicine incorporates both holistic and western medicine into treatment, we can take this fact and brainstorm a list of the kinds of people who would feel drawn to this approach for tending to their health. In the US, most people go to their primary care doctor to ease symptoms of whatever ailments they are facing. They may be encouraged to engage in healthy lifestyle changes, but more pressing is the prescribed medication as part of the regime for healing. Sometimes, patients find that their relief is short-lived with these medications, that the medicines stop working, or that the medications never worked at all. Others want to heal their body entirely rather than address symptoms. As we can see, situations and personal preferences impact the kind of customers who may gravitate towards functional medicine. Define Your Overall Medical Marketing Strategy We have recognized that failure with traditional medicine and an interest in holistic wellness can cause people to gravitate towards alternatives like functional medicine. Strategies for your marketing can be fine-tuned using this information. You can ask: Who has been failed by traditional medicine? Who is interested in holistic wellness? Compile a list of general personality traits and demographics that resonate with one or both factors to learn more about your audience. Perhaps you discover that younger generations gravitate towards functional medicine more often. Now you know to make your marketing youthful and appealing to younger viewers. From here, you conduct branding research to ensure that the colors, slogans, themes, and general advertising are consistent with the audience you are attempting to reach. Post in Promising Places You might think that getting a website up and running or incorporating a hashtag or two is enough to engage the right people in your functional medicine campaign. Unfortunately, it is a bit more complicated than that (unless you get lucky). In all likelihood, you’ll need to do additional research and complete a deep dive into the many different places that your target audience regularly engages. In doing so, you’ll discover the platforms and websites that your customer base utilizes most often. It makes sense; if your customers cannot actually see your ads or attempt to engage, they will not have a way to gravitate to you. Post in promising places for the best results. Think Like A Patient or A Group of New Patients As the old saying goes, put yourself in their shoes. Think like your customers and post your ads accordingly. Ask yourself: Where do people go to seek advice when they’ve tried everything? The answer? People usually go to Q&A platforms like Quora, Redditt, or Twitter to find answers to questions they can’t find answers to anywhere else. Ask yourself if patients follow this approach too, or if there are specific platforms or sub-threads for health that are more commonly utilized. You might end up discovering a social media platform you were entirely unaware of that is critical to your digital marketing. Remember that you are focused on finding customers engaged in health communities, so your general social community (like Instagram or Facebook) may not be ideal despite being an obvious starting point. Use this approach of stepping into the customer’s shoes to find places your ads would be
Marketing Solutions for Integrative Health Practitioners in Colorado Springs, CO
Are you an integrative health provider in Colorado Springs? Do you want to market your integrative health services in Colorado Springs and wondering where to start? Do you have a nasty experience with integrative health marketing in Colorado and have given up after spending time and money without getting the right integrative marketer? These and many more thoughts could be racing through your mind especially if you are an integrative health provider and wondering what you could do to make yourself known. At Functional Medicine Marketing, we have come for service providers like you. We ensure you are ahead of the rest and that customers know about you, and can visit your site and easily access your services. We use different approaches in ensuring your integrative medicine is ahead of your competitors. A result-oriented team to start with. Second, customized plans to ensure we sell your integrative medical services to the targeted group and within your city. Lastly, we focus on market exclusivity. We give each patient the closest possible attention. We make them feel special and enhance their mental wellness and confidence boost their confidence in you. The patient feels your availability. This boosts exclusive experience and earns new referrals as well as maintaining the confidentiality of the existing group, enabling you to dedicate your expertise to giving quality care and a healing touch. This boosts their well-being. The Role of Education in Marketing a Functional Medicine Practice Education is an essential, yet underrated necessity in popularization campaigns. It is always left out in any sales program. Yet it needs to be part and parcel of every sales program. Traditionally people buy what they have knowledge about. Sometimes, they are influenced by close friends, relatives, or clients who have knowledge about the product or service. What if you gave education seriously? We have done this in Colorado Springs. With a rising number of patients, we educate the existing and potential clients on the therapies and treatments you offer so as to create awareness for them to have knowledge on where to turn in times of need. This information is also available to them for free on your site. Unlike other marketers, we constantly create awareness among the general public on the amazing work your facility does. We make your practice the best viable alternative to traditional medical treatments and not the last resort in desperation. Therefore, education is the key to making these medical practices known in order to successfully capture the attention of this growing number of patients and avoid relying on luck. The Role of Brand Awareness in Functional Medicine Marketing Your marketing strategy is essential to boosting your brand awareness. It needs a well-laid program of how it will be executed. Sharing knowledge with people about your practices and letting them know who you are and how you can help them is also essential. Brand awareness focuses on helping them know what you can offer them. They don’t want to spend their entire life seeking care for one disease that can be sorted once. The good news is that they can get this information for free. Integrative Medicine Integrative medicine refers to the blending of Complementary and Alternative Medicine therapies with conventional care to aid the prevention and treatment of health conditions with a healing touch. The two blends traditional medical care with the centuries-old healing arts to help reduce psychological stress, strengthen the immune system, reduce pain, arthritis, infertility, pregnancy, sleep disorders, and speeds up recovery. A good example of complementary medicine is acupuncture. This is a system of complementary medicine where fine needles are inserted into the skin at specific points along what are considered to be lines of energy commonly known as meridians and are used in enhancing healing of various physical and psychological conditions to facilitate disease healing and improve quality of life. Even though its scientific evidence remains unclear, it is suggested that acupuncture is a form of energy medicine that reduces pain, works scientifically remain unclear. It is highly controversial among medical doctors, physicians and scientists. And its use is highly questionable. The information contained in research papers that try to justify acupuncture isn’t clear either. However, traditional Chinese medicine holds that health is the result of a harmonious balance of the complementary extremes of “yin” and “yang” of the life force known as “qi,” pronounced “chi.” Illness is believed to result from an imbalance of forces. Balance, thus, has to be maintained for good health. Qi is believed to flow through meridians or rather pathways, in the human body. Traditional Chinese medicine maintains that these meridians and energy flows are accessible through 350 acupuncture points in the body. This means that inserting needles into the points with the right combinations brings the energy flow back to proper balance, thus making acupuncture an energy medicine. While there is no research evidence of this, numerous studies suggest that acupuncture works for certain conditions. Other experts have explained acupuncture through neuroscience. To them, acupuncture points are visible around nerves, muscles, and connective tissues that can be stimulated. The stimulation will enhance blood flow while triggering the activity of the natural painkillers of our bodies. German research suggested that acupuncture may help relieve tension headaches and migraines. While acupuncture is said to treat health conditions such as high and low blood pressure, dysentery, allergic rhinitis, facial pain, morning sickness, and rheumatoid arthritis among others, it is not wise to consider acupuncture as energy medicine or treatment for the treatment of health conditions. Acupuncture is dangerous for patients with bleeding disorders or those who take blood thinners. Unsterilized needles may also cause infection. In rare cases, a needle may break and damage an internal organ. Integrative Health The practice of Complementary and Alternative Medicine to offer individualized health care and look after patients’ well-being is referred to as integrative health. It is a client-centered approach to promoting optimum health and wellness while combining a personalized approach with evidence-based strategies to reduce the risk of
