Persuasion Through Repetition

Repeating words out loud to another person boosts memory. Study shows that this technique is better than when they are lip-synched or covertly produced.

According to Professor Victor Boucher, this technique works better if someone, though not listening, is present to hear it.

We knew that repeating aloud was good for memory, but this is the first study to show that if it is done in a context of communication, the effect is greater in terms of information recall. The production of one or more sensory aspects allows for more efficient recall of the verbal element.

The study involved people who were asked to repeat words in four ways: moving their lips, not moving them, speaking aloud to someone, and then to no one in particular. The study further revealed that repeating an information without moving the lips is the least effective recall technique.

But the added effect of talking to someone shows that in addition to the sensorimotor aspects related to verbal expression, the brain refers to the multisensory information associated with the communication episode and the information the result is better memory.

Professor Boucher and his team also found that it this technique also works well with non-words such as ‘snolp’ or ‘snigrit’.

Repetition may be used as a sales tool as it is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact, study shows that people rate statements that have been repeated just once as more valid or true than things they’ve heard for the first time.

Familiarity breeds liking. We tend to be more persuaded by something we think as more true. They even rate statements as truer even when the person saying them has been repeatedly lying.

The illusion of truth effect happens when our brains equate familiarity to truth because familiar things require less effort to process. Cognitive fluency is the feeling of ease which unconsciously signals our brain to think them as the truth.

Read more on:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810015001518

Renaissance Ideal vs. Niche Market

How broad is your menu of services?

There are arguable benefits to both generalization and specialization. 

Generalists believe that every new trend should be added to their spa offerings for fear of losing a client to a competitor. These polymaths say that customers want one stop shopping. Some like to put everything out there to see what will stick. They offer everything from bioidentical hormone replacement to laser toenail fungus treatments. DaVincians are presented with a marketing challenge as their buyers span the entire spectrum of demographics. 

Specialists insist that expertise cannot be achieved by a jack-of-all-trades. They apply the old proverb, "If you chase two rabbits, they both will get away." They focus their efforts on one or several procedures and hone their skills to levels of proficiency.  They get to know their niche consumer and target them specifically.  Sometimes, they will open a very distinct enitity like a vein clinic or a tattoo removal center. However, those with narrower menus may lose the "largely cast net" benefit of the generalist. 

While there is a happy medium between the two extremes, I have made a choice to offer fewer services over recent years.  I did a profit analysis of each service carefully capturing all associated costs.  Those procedures with lackluster returns and a low promise of improvement were dropped.  All associated equipment was liquidated. In the end, my clients respected fewer offerings rather than trying to be everything to everyone.  I am busier now than I was when I offered more.

The economic downturn combined with increased saturation of the cosmetic market has resulted in a more discerning consumer.  Today's buyer cannot afford to jump from clinic to clinic and wants to get it right the first time. This prudent purchaser may perceive a greater chance for a home run outcome in a niche setting over an "everything under the sun" venue.  The attributes sought in a provider are becoming a  matter of mastery over mediocrity.

Where do you fit in this spectrum?

Share An Interesting Article With Our Members

We're looking to help you to share articles that are of interest to our Members.

Share an article, blog post, or announcement with our Members through our newsletter, blog, Twitter, and through our group on LinkedIn.

Submit A Link Of Interest To Members

http://MedicalSpaMD.com/tips

Information that we think will be interesting to our Members will be included. Sales junk and spam will not.

Everybody Needs a Marijana – Marketing of Medical Practices in the Information Age

A young doctor asked me the other day how new patients, excluding patients who were referred by other doctors or previous patients, find their way to my practice. We were hanging out in a crowded party in a loud room so I couldn’t elaborate too much, but I managed to belt out one word that would sum it up: Marijana. That is actually the name of the Director of Marketing, Advertising, and Web Presence in my plastic surgery practice – Discreet Plastic Surgery. If you ask her, she’d probably tell you that she NEVER expected to be working for a plastic surgeon. But if you ask me, she’s an integral part of our practice, and should be so for all doctors, especially those in private practice.

As I finished up my training in plastic surgery and went into private practice, I soon realized that free market forces are constantly working to edge me out of the market. Competition is fierce, and people in large markets have many choices in obtaining plastic surgery, as they do in other professional services. A few print ads and radio talk shows later, I further realized that in today’s world, the majority of marketing dollars in a doctor’s practice must be geared towards their internet presence. Even your print ads eventually all end up as PDF files in the “media” section of your website – funny that people still put so much weight on how many times their doctor shows up in “People” magazine. I guess a comment about whether or not Kim Kardashian had a Brazilian butt lift really makes you an expert…

So where do I get started? …you ask. Easy. Just like most questions asked in life these days, the simple answer is: “Google it!” I have no financial disclaimer here so “Bing it” or “Yahoo it” works just as well, and is in fact, recommended as well. Seeing what internet content is out there associated with your name, an old article that you published, a hospital website listing you as a physician, a yellow pages or rate-a-doc style website, or any other peculiar locations, is of paramount paramount. In our office, we started doing our search engine optimization (SEO) by calling each of these websites and online listings and getting all the details right, including linking to our own website. From there, you will soon see how rapidly you’ll be approached from different directions regarding potential help. There’s a huge market for this work, and it rarely goes unnoticed.

As in any rapidly progressing internet-based enterprise, getting someone on your side who knows the tricks of the trade is the key to success. Sure, you can outsource all of these services away, and many do. But, when you add in all the costs of internal office marketing, advertising in a wide gamut of different media, and other costs of brand development, you have a full-time job on your hands. Please beware doctors, stick to doing what you do best. Get an expert on your side. Get yourself a Marijana!

Dr. Daniel Kaufman
Discreet Plastic Surgery

The Secret, Shadowy World Of AMA Price Fixing In The US

How the AMA secretly sets prices for health care in the US.

The Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (or RUC, pronounced “ruck”) is a committee of the American Medical Association (AMA) that meets in secret to divvy up roughly $85 billion in U.S. taxpayer money every year. Of course that's just to get started. Because of the way the system is set up, the "values" the RUC comes up with wind up shaping the very structure of the U.S. health care sector, creating the perverse financial incentives that dictate how U.S. doctors behave, and affecting the annual expenditure of nearly one-fifth of the United State's GDP, $2.7 trillion dollars.

Is there anyone who really thinks that this is a good system?

From this article from Washington Monthly

While these doctors always discuss the “value” of each procedure in terms of the amount of time, work, and overhead required of them to perform it, the implication of that “value” is not lost on anyone in the room: they are, essentially, haggling over what their own salaries should be. “No one ever says the word ‘price,’ ” a doctor on the committee told me after the April meeting. “But yeah, everyone knows we’re talking about money.”

That doctor spoke to me on condition of anonymity in part because all the committee members, as well as more than a hundred or so of their advisers and consultants, are required before each meeting to sign what was described to me as a “draconian” nondisclosure agreement. They are not allowed to talk about the specifics of what is discussed, and they are not allowed to remove any of the literature handed out behind those double doors. Neither the minutes nor the surveys they use to arrive at their decisions are ever published, and the meetings, which last about five days each time, are always closed to both the public and the press. After that meeting in April, there was not so much as a single headline, not in any major newspaper, not even on the wonkiest of the TV shows, announcing that it had taken place at all.

In a free market society, there’s a name for this kind of thing—for when a roomful of professionals from the same trade meet behind closed doors to agree on how much their services should be worth. It’s called price-fixing. And in any other industry, it’s illegal—grounds for a federal investigation into antitrust abuse, at the least.

and this about why the AMA want's to control this:

The first boon is that, in order to be on the RUC, specialty societies must become dues-paying members. At a time when the AMA has struggled against being overshadowed by specialty societies, controlling the RUC prevents what might otherwise be a rapid exodus of membership. As one RUC member told me bluntly, “No one cares about AMA. They care about the RUC.” And that’s a lucky break for the AMA. In 2012, dues collection actually increased by 3 percent, topping out at $38.6 million for the year. Cha-ching.

The second boon for the AMA is that by controlling the RUC, it controls much of the source code that our health care system uses to operate. Every single one of those roughly 9,000 medical services and procedures has its own five-digit code, known as current procedural terminology (CPT), and the AMA owns them all. That means that anyone—physicians, labs, hospitals, you name it—who wants to bill Medicare, Medicaid, or a private insurance company has to purchase either AMA books and products, or products from other software companies that pay AMA royalties and licensing fees to use the CPT codes. According to its annual report, in 2012 the AMA made $83.1 million in “royalties and credentialing products,” a large chunk of which comes from licensing CPT. Again: cha-ching.

And that’s just the monetary stuff. The third boon—the real power curve—is the fact that the AMA’s control of the RUC makes it indispensible to everyone and everything in a $2.7 trillion health care industry. That includes specialty societies, primary care organizations, and medical device and pharmaceutical companies—all of whom have something big to gain or lose from the RUC’s decisions.

Snide and snarky comments welcome in moderation if you're in the US. Better ideas from outside of the US even more welcome.

Connecticut Governor Vetoes New Regulations For Medical Spas

Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy vetoed a bill that would have imposed new standards on “medical spas” providing cosmetic medical procedures.

The medical spas bill would have required a physician to act as a spa’s medical director, perform every initial assessment and perform or supervise all cosmetic medical procedures. The bills passed with the support of trial lawyers and labor lawyers and associations representing dermatologists and plastic surgeons who claimed that physician only oversight would improve patient safety.

Governer Malloy said that could unnecessarily limit the scope of practice of Advanced Practice Registered Nurses and other licensed medical professionals and that a professional board or the Department of Public Health should make such recommendations and that both bills were "deficient".

“Protecting public health is an essential role of government, and I strongly support the objectives of this bill,” Malloy wrote. “Many of the procedures covered in this bill should only be performed by a licensed medical professional.”

But the governor said the bill may unnecessarily limit the scope of practice of other medical professionals like Advanced Practice Registered Nurses writing, “Requiring physicians employed or on contract with a medical spa to perform all initial assessments may also unduly burden small businesses if such assessments could be done by another medical professional or an individual’s own physician”.

Thoughtful comments welcome.

Medical Spas + Legal Changes

Laws that define and emcompass medical spas and cosmetic clinics are changing all of the time, usually driven by a desire to protect someone's turf under the guise of 'safety'.

Pretty much all medicine comes with some risks. In fact, according to a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine, as many as 98,000 Americans were dying every year because of medical mistakes. Here's a story about that from the New York Times.

Not a nice statistic at all. 

So of course there are going to be mistakes made in cosmetic medicine and there are clinics that are operating unsafely, with insufficient oversight, and with people performing treatments who should not be.

As will all things, these new moves are pushed by complaints, both from injured patients, and also by people, generally physicians, who have an interest in protecting a market space.

Here's part of a Wall Street Journal article: Medical Spas Get A Checkup. Link

A few months ago, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley signed a new law directing the state health department to oversee cosmetic-surgery facilities after one woman died and two others became seriously ill with Group A streptococcus infections traced to liposuction at a Baltimore clinic

Florida now requires that liposuctions removing more than two pounds of fat be performed in a state-licensed surgical center with emergency equipment on hand, after two women died from overdoses of lidocaine, a local anesthetic. In California, it is now a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $50,000 fine, for a corporate entity to own a medical spa; the majority owners must be M.D.s.

Pennsylvania is weighing tighter rules on who can provide laser treatments. Fourteen states are considering "truth in advertising" laws, many of which would require medical spas to list personnel's training and credentials in all marketing. Some proposals, like New York's, would require anyone who wears a white coat and treats patients to list credentials on a nametag.

The push for more regulation is being driven in part by dermatologists who say allowing nonphysicians to perform cosmetic procedures puts patients at risk.

"It's the difference between four years of medical school and four to five years of residency versus beauty school," says Timothy Flynn, president of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery Association, which has lobbied for stricter rules in several states. The ASDSA considers any use of lasers, lights, electrical impulses, chemical peels, injections, insertions or tissue augmentation to be the practice of medicine, which it says should be performed by a physician or midlevel health professional, such as a physician assistant, under a doctor's supervision.

Supporters of medical spas say they get a bad rap when it comes to injuries. "In 2009, there were over 9,000 deaths in hospitals related to errors, but one death occurs in a medical spa and it's on the national news...

"I've treated patients who were burned at the hands of a doctor," says Paula Young, a nurse who owns three medical spas with her physician husband in Pennsylvania. She says she would have to lay off seven experienced laser technicians and close her tattoo- and hair-removal clinic under the state's proposal allowing only physicians or physician-supervised nurses and PAs to perform laser treatments.

So where's the line?

Lest you think that we're for less or looser oversight, let me say that we're not. In my opinion, a physician should be on site and see every single patient before treatment. However, if you're doing an axillia hair removal treatment, I don't think that that physician needs to be a board certified plastic surgeon or dermatologist. Rational opinions welcome.