In this segment, Kelly Alhooie explains how physical therapists can leverage personal or family health struggles as powerful empathy tools to attract and convert patients, especially in a cash‑based practice model. She contrasts cash‑based care with insurance‑driven care, highlighting that cash practices have the time and flexibility to address the whole person—nutrition, stress, multiple body parts—while insurance limits visits to brief symptom‑management slots, leading to clinician burnout and sub‑optimal outcomes. Kelly advises clinicians to weave these personal pain narratives and success stories into phone or Zoom consultations, showing prospects the comprehensive, lasting results they can achieve versus the fragmented, short‑term care typical of insurance clinics. She illustrates the point with a chronic pelvic pain patient who saw numerous specialists without relief, underscoring the need for a holistic approach.
Chapters
So you have to use the pain, whether or not it's your own personal, you know, story of your own personal health, or maybe it's a family member. Like, I had to deal with two very sick family members during my whole journey and seeing them struggle and go through the system. And again, they couldn't figure it out. And use that pain and that struggle to do it differently, to help patients out the way that we know that they deserve to freaking have help and to have answers. Because we know we can give so many more answers being a cash-based provider. We can, because you know why? We have time with the patients. We have time to understand the complete full aspect of who they are and what their needs are. That's the benefit. Comparatively, every 10-15 minutes a new patient walks in the door. How am I supposed to give every single patient my undivided attention? I can't. And it becomes very challenging and very hard, and you burn out. So the last thing you want to do is go research something like that's not for your patient to like help them if you don't— if you didn't know it. That's not helpful. It's not helpful for anyone. So the point of the episode today is use the frustration to convert more people into coming and being with you and doing, you know, business with you and basically you changing their lives. So what I mean by that is this converts to over the phone or over a Zoom call. If I'm with a new customer on Zoom and I am trying to say, hey, you know, I'm the best fit for you, I'm going to use my stories of patients that have gone elsewhere to an insurance-based clinic or online and have had horrible results only with symptom management, and they weren't actually getting their problem solved. Comparatively, if you look at all of our reviews, The problem has actually been solved completely. And that is the main difference between you using insurance and coming, you know, or going somewhere else versus coming here. In addition to that, we have a method, the way we do things, and we are not bound by insurance. So insurance is able to control, you know, what those providers do over there, but they can't control us. Meaning we can treat many different body parts. We can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. We can talk about your nutrition. We can talk about your diet. We talk about your stress. We can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. If you go the traditional route, you can only focus on that one thing that you are there for, and that is it. Whatever that diagnosis code is, you can only focus on that. And I can't— tell you enough is like, that should be so passionate over the Zoom call or over the freaking, you know, phone that they feel it. The patients feel it because they've lived it. Or, I mean, nothing's worse than like a chronic pelvic pain patient coming to see us and they have literally seen 7 different doctors— urologists, endosurgeons, PCPs, you know, and nurse practitioners, all the things, and gotten zero results.
