3rd Year! And back after a long hiatus...

I've been away from blogging again, school and life have been busy, and the motivation hasn't been there. I recently got a huge boost though - I met a 2nd year CCNM student for the first time, and when I introduced myself, she said that she had read my blog! That is pretty cool, and it really took me back to why I wanted to blog in the first place. When I was doing my undergraduate degree at Laurier, I was considering Naturopathic Medicine, and it was some awesome student blogs from CCNM (Talia Marcheggiani, Navigating Naturopathy - not sure her name and last but not least, Erica Robinson). These blogs were invaluable resources when I was considering school, helped keep my motivated during and after the application process, and have even been useful information during school. So my hope is that I can provide some cool and motivational information in my blog for future students.

I know I've been off with my blogging in the past, but 3rd year is getting really intense with a lot more practical stuff going on, and I think blogging is going to be a great way to let off some of the steam, and reflect on some interesting stuff we learn. I'm also going to post about all the classes again so that prospective students can learn about them a little bit. I'm going to set Sunday as my regular blogging day, and get going with once a week blogging for hopefully the rest of the year, I think if I put it in my schedule then it will actually happen. This will be a big week though, because I'm going to do a quick post every day about all the classes we're in for 3rd year. Hope you enjoy!

So starting today (Monday), here are the classes we're in: (by the way, Monday is kind of a long day....in school from 9am-7pm! But at least we've got a 2 hour common time to relax and see some cool talks or hang out outside, maybe play some sports - like volleyball club!)

Integrative Therapeutics - IT is kind of a continuation of clinical medicine, but with more of a full clinical focus. While clin med was based around integrating anatomy, physiology, micro, immunology and biochem to produce a ddx (differential diagnosis) of potential causes of disease, IT looks at treatment as well, and of course considers what we already learned last year. It's been pretty good so far, some heavy information, but Ellen Wong is a fantastic teacher. She knows her stuff really well and presents a lot of great research. I can definitely see this stuff being directly useful in clinic and beyond.

Primary Care - This is the super serious class/practical of the year. We're in groups of 8 people, and every week we get a standardized patient presenting with some random condition. Each person has to be the "doctor" one time, and during that, they have to manage the patient over 45 minutes as if they were in the clinic - do a full intake and physical exams, and then suggest proper management if possible. The kicker of course is that the doctor has 7 classmates who are busy researching potential causes and can provide feedback and help during "timeouts". The first session was a little messy and I of course was a little too nervous to volunteer as doctor, but I'll get my chance next time. And of course after the case, we have a post encounter probe to work on all week, and then present the case with an appropriate assessment and plan to our TA the next week.

Practice Management - I've heard that this course has been a little messy in the past, but this year, the practice management program has been completely streamlined all the way from first year. Unfortunately I'll only get the course in 3rd and 4th year, but they're altering it a bit for us. New students will have a much better experience than in the past though, and I think this is great. Naturopathic Doctors have an awesome role to play in healthcare, but in the current system, they generally need to run their own business. While it's nice to be philanthropic and help everyone, you need to make money to survive, because if you can't feed yourself and keep the office open, you won't help anyone. I think the new course will really help lead to a more prosperous future for my classmates and me, and it's being run by Dr. Tim Searle who is very knowledgeable and has some great resources. And of course I'm still involved in HEROs this year (which I mentioned in the past). I've got a lot of work to do, but I think I've got tons of great resources to help lead me to a successful future.

Ok that's all for today, see you tomorrow for a review of Tuesdays classes.

Cool Marine Video, and HEROs Class 2

    Today in homeopathy, one of the remedies we learned about was sepia officinalis (sep), aka cuttlefish ink. I won't go on about the details of this remedy, but Dr. Byden-Tailor showed us a really cool video of a cuttlefish before we started learning about the remedy, I really recommend watching it here just for the wow factor (I know its over 4 minutes, watch if you're interested, but if you're time is limited the first 20 seconds are all you need for the really cool part).

   I also had my second HEROs class today, which was the second part of Starting Smart/Leadership. Today was once again a little bit scary and overwhelming, but at the same time made me feel good about my choice to take this course early. My future in the business world is a bit of a scary thought, but it is an important reality and I know that if I procrastinate and wait too long, I'm only going to deny my own success, and with that, deny my ability to help people improve their health.

   So the focus of this class was really on where you can go as an ND. It seems that employment is not a big area for NDs --> it's possible to work for a supplement company, to teach or work for a government agency or other NPO (non-profit organization), but these opportunities are limited. There are also some residencies available, but these are limited, and also not long term. So the main opportunities really involve working for yourself. But, there are some possibilities that don't have to be you opening an office for yourself. We talked about partnerships, sole proprietorship, being an associate, and the management model (or zero partnership entity). What I learned is that partnerships are definitely a bad thing unless it is with a significant other (they seem nice, "us against the world," but once the talk becomes about money, there are problems, especially if one of the partners has a divorce with their spouse), and that sole proprietorship is the way to go if you have the resources to do it successfully (with the ultimate goal of hiring associates and building a successful "Clinic," rather than "Practice").

    However, if resources are tough then being an associate or the management model can be an effective way to start. We talked a lot about the details of contracts and the economics of things, and it's sad to hear that the situation around contracts within the naturopathic professional community is very bad. It really is just that a lot of naturopathic doctors do not know enough about business, and so a lot of bad contracts are written that lead to poor, win-lose situations. My hope is that with the knowledge from this course and Andre's help (fortunately with taking HEROs, my first contract review from him in the future is free), I can avoid these situations and get myself into a win-win situation first thing.

    That's all for now, off to bed and then tomorrow is Halloween (well October 30, but we have common time so there will be some fun events). I'm going for the costume contest as a pretty silly costume, but it should be fun!

This isn't me, but it is the costume I plan on wearing tomorrow. Go big or go home!

HEROs 1st class

    Today I had my first HEROs class. HEROs stands for Helping Everyone Realize Opportunity. It is a course run by business coach Andy Belanger, and is also known as the Health of Business Business of Health course in the United States http://www.hbbhealth.net/. At some of the naturopathic colleges in the US it is a mandatory course, while here at CCNM it is an extra course. Well I am glad I took it, and will go over a little bit of what we do each day. The course involves 4 modules, the first 3 taking place on Monday or Tuesday nights (I'm going to Tuesdays since I have Physiology Monday nights), and then the last one on a weekend in the winter. The modules include Starting Smart/Leadership, Operations, Marketing, and Administration/Accounting.

   Andy has been teaching business to health professionals and working with naturopathic doctors specifically for 26 years now, and it seems like he has a very strong understanding of the field and of what it takes to be a successful naturopathic doctor --> on the entrepreneurship side. I say this because the majority of people who go to school to become NDs will likely have the skills and ability to be very successful and strong doctors, but the problem is that you also need to be an entrepreneur. It would be amazing if we could help people be healthy and that would be that, but the reality is that we need to be successful business people in order to that. If we are struggling financially to live keep our offices running, or even to survive in your personal life (pay your mortgage, buy groceries), then we wouldn't really be able to help a lot of patients. Also, marketing is such a key aspect of naturopathic medicine because so many people still don't know about it or understand the benefits they can get from it, so we can't really help people until they know we exist.

   So the first class today was on Starting Smart and Leadership. Andy provided a bit of an overview of the course, and talked to us a lot about what you need to do to hit the ground running. We talked about goal planning, business plans, how to properly "position" yourself in the market (how to determine where to set up an office and what kinds of things you should do to ensure that you have the correct services to provide for that area), and talked a lot about what successful and unsuccessful people have done. So I'm very excited to move through this course and work hard to learn from it, and use the lessons in my planning for the future so that I can be successful and help lots of people in the future. I'll continue to comment on the next sessions in the future (with the next one being next Tuesday).

Early Practice Management Tips

     We had our last Clinic lecture this morning, my SOAP charting assignment has been handed in, and now all I need to do is go to my clinic shift on November 23 (really excited about it, sad it's not for so long), and write the reflection for that. What I want to talk about today though was the presentation we had before our lecture started. We were lucky enough to have Jonathan Wilde come in and talk to our class for a little while before we started looking at case analysis. Jonathan is the teacher for Practice Management in third and fourth year, but it was nice that he came in to have a short talk with us today.

    I really liked listening to Jonathan because he went over some key points that I think are really important. First and most important is the importance of business in naturopathic medicine. Of course the vast majority of naturopathic students (including myself) got into this field because we want to help people to live better lives; if we wanted to make lots of money, we would've gotten into some sort of business. But it is important to remember that we are still part of a business. Business includes things like marketing, and they are so vital to naturopathic practice. Of course we want to help people, but if you don't have any patients, then you can't really help anyone.

    So hopefully the practice management courses in third and fourth year will be helpful, and I've also signed up for the business club and will look into other avenues for some extra business education to help in the future (great that I've got some accountants and lawyers in the family), but here are some of the great tips that Jonathan gave us that we can start right now:

1.  Get a website so you can start getting your name out --> hopefully by working on this blog I've started that a bit

2. Preceptoring --> I think a lot of people see this as something you need to check off your list, just get as many hours as you can as quickly as you can, and likely with few practitioners so you can just get a lot of hours done faster. Jonathan's presentation really reinforced a key aspect of preceptoring --> working at the front with the receptionist and asking lots of questions about the business. It is obviously important to watch different practitioners with patients and learn from their interactions, but the business side is a key aspect which should not be overlooked. Preceptoring under many practitioners, asking lots of questions, reflecting on the experiences and learning what works well and what does not are key activities that can help naturopathic students prepare for their futures in business.

3. The obvious one --> getting out there. Everywhere you go, when you meet new people or when you're talking with friends and family, it is important to be proud of what you do and are going to do, and to educate people. Developing a strong elevator speech about naturopathic medicine helps to provide people with the information they need to determine if they want to know more, and to know that you are a reliable source for information about this wonderful field.