I appreciate you walk a fine line between healthcare provider and marketer. I appreciate that some of you would rather die than sully yourselves in the cesspool of commercialism. However, my friends, it is a fine line, not the Great Wall of China. Upon graduation, were you planning to practice only on each other?
There’s selling, and then there’s ‘selling out’. The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is being criticized by some for snuggling up with a major pharmaceutical company to develop an education program for Canadian physicians. Pharmaceutical companies are in business to make money, after all, and should not be involved in the education or treatment decisions of physicians. And despite assurances from the CMA, some ‘experts’ feel that regardless of the best of intentions, opportunities for influence exist. Studies have shown that doctors are more likely to prescribe a particular company’s drugs if they have a personal relationship with someone from that company. You don’t say?
It gets worse for those in rose-colored glasses. A senior executive of that same pharma company (Pfizer Canada, a division of the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, Pfizer Inc.) was appointed to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Shudder. For some, this is the personification of a world gone mad. The ‘for profit’ corporation has infiltrated a body that Canadians rely on to finance unbiased research in the public interest.
NDP health critic Judy Wasylycia-Leis is reported to have said of this appointment, “Having drug companies advise the government is like having the big, bad wolf advising the three little pigs on how to build their homes.”
Back to ‘selling‘ dentistry. Guess what? If you are the owner of your dental practice, you are a CEO.
As Peter Barry wrote in the summer issue of DPM, “For most dentists, the concept of “selling” is not something they signed up for when applying to dental school. In fact for many clinicians, especially first decade dentists, when they hear the word “sales” it conjures up images of manipulating people into parting with their hard earned money. This belief is rooted in the underlying mentality that we are a medical profession and should simply be able to tell people what they need and they should just be able to trust us and accept our advice. This viewpoint can be somewhat self-limiting because most of us practice in a fee-for-service environment where even if the patient has dental insurance, the average policy does not provide benefits for a lot of what modern dentistry has to offer. This means that our ability to deliver optimal health and wellness to society will rest largely on our ability to ‘inspire’ our patients to desire and pay for what we can do for them.”
I’m not suggesting that you lurk outside an office where hundreds of workers have just been laid off, thrusting your business card at them as a reminder that those dental benefits will run out soon enough! Sell yourself, sell your services with ethics and integrity. You are a healthcare provider and an entrepreneur. DPM
