FON: THE BUSINESS OF INTEGRATIVE HEALTH & MEDICINE

Becoming an Integrative Health Thought Leader: Part 5—Media

This is the fifth installment of a 7-part series.Read the entire series:Part 1: IntroductionPart 2: Personal Branding + PlatformPart 3: Unique PositioningPart 4: Content StrategyPart 5: MediaPart 6: Monitoring + Promoting Your BrandPart 7: Conclusion–Putting it all Together For 25 years I ran a family-owned media company located in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. We published print magazines, produced conferences, and developed and managed websites for our media brands and

Becoming an Integrative Health Thought Leader: Part 4—Content Strategy

This is the fourth installment of a 7-part series.Read the entire series:Part 1: IntroductionPart 2: Personal Branding + PlatformPart 3: Unique PositioningPart 4: Content StrategyPart 5: MediaPart 6: Monitoring + Promoting Your BrandPart 7: Conclusion–Putting it all Together Establishing thought leadership is not very complex once you’ve built a solid platform from which to operate. Once you have identified your personal brand, created a powerful baseline platform, and differentiated the

Becoming an Integrative Health Thought Leader: Part 3—Unique Positioning

This is the third installment of a 7-part series.Read the entire series:Part 1: IntroductionPart 2: Personal Branding + PlatformPart 3: Unique PositioningPart 4: Content StrategyPart 5: MediaPart 6: Monitoring + Promoting Your BrandPart 7: Conclusion–Putting it all Together Now that we have identified and examined the core elements for creating your integrative health personal brand and platform, it’s time to take the next step to differentiate your unique position and

Becoming an Integrative Health Thought Leader: Part 2—Branding + Platform

This is the second installment of a 7-part series.Read the entire series:Part 1: IntroductionPart 2: Personal Branding + PlatformPart 3: Unique PositioningPart 4: Content StrategyPart 5: MediaPart 6: Monitoring + Promoting Your BrandPart 7: Conclusion–Putting it all Together When most people think about a brand, they think about a name and a logo. While these labels and graphics that establish your ‘look and feel’ are important, a personal brand—when thoughtfully

Becoming an Integrative Health Thought Leader: Part 1—Introduction

This is the first installment of a 7-part series.Read the entire series:Part 1: IntroductionPart 2: Personal Branding + PlatformPart 3: Unique PositioningPart 4: Content StrategyPart 5: MediaPart 6: Monitoring + Promoting Your BrandPart 7: Conclusion–Putting it all Together Many professionals within the vibrant integrative health space possess masterful clinical abilities, significant scientific subject-matter expertise, and entrepreneurial business savvy. However, too few have consistently leveraged their significant attributes in the effort

Integrative Health: Names, Nomenclature, Trends—Where We Are Headed

In 2012, I wrote a piece describing the integrative health community as being one camp comprising many tents. The article discussed the various sub-groups within the field, including: integrative medicine, functional medicine, holistic medicine, restorative medicine, and lifestyle medicine. I posited then, with numerous ‘tents’ falling under the integrative health camp, that newbie (integrative) health consumers often have difficulty clearly differentiating between numerous names and the nomenclature, thus creating a

Ruth Westreich Sponsors John Weeks’ The Integrator Blog: Why it Matters

My friend and colleague John Weeks recently announced that philanthropist and integrative medicine strategist Ruth Westreich made a generous two-year commitment to sponsor The Integrator Blog. This news largely flew under the radar. It shouldn’t have. Weeks’ steadfast publication of The Integrator Blog has been enormously helpful to the integrative health and medicine field for many years. Several years ago when I was planning the launch of FON, and ‘going

Improving the Health of the Integrative Health Enterprise

My recent posts on why integrative and functional medicine practices often fail, and how to go about mastering a ‘sales funnel’ to build patient volume, elicited a lot of positive feedback—as much as any articles I’ve written over the last few years. Could this be because more folks within the integrative health community are recognizing that integrative clinical prowess that is not equally matched to persistent business acumen does not

Medicine Practice failure, image of a man holding an umbrella with name of blog on the image.

7 Reasons Integrative and Functional Medicine Practices Fail

During a recent call with a prospective client—a solo practitioner orthopedic surgeon looking to develop an integrative medicine center—I was asked why integrative health practices fail. I’d never before been asked this important question pointblank. My mind contemplated the myriad things that can conspire to bring a center to its knees, but in the silent seconds I sensed she might want a catch-all answer and I offered up ‘poor planning