Low Back Pain Ad Campaign Ready to Go
Monday, July 12, 2010 at 4:28PM 
Lisa Holmes, MBA, MHA
Lisa Holmes is president of Holmes & Co., an advertising agency headquartered in Salt Lake City and providing marketing communications services to health-care clients across the country.
INTRODUCTION
Millions of Americans suffer low back pain. It is among the most common work-related disabilities, resulting in lost productivity and cost of treatment amounting to scores of billions of dollars every year.
Just setting aside, for a moment, the discomfort of the condition, and the health-care provider’s responsibility to heal and alleviate suffering, low back pain is, to put it in the most crass of terms, a tremendous business opportunity.
Since most treatments for low back pain range from ineffective at worst to temporary at best, many sufferers are on the lookout for relief. They turn to pain relievers, mostly Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs. NSAIDs sometimes provide temporary relief but, with continued use, often create problems with blood coagulation, kidney trouble, peptic ulcers, gastrointestinal bleeding, and other serious—even dangerous—side effects. Surgery can be even worse, with significant risk of hospital-caused disease, adverse effects from medication, and medical errors. Not to mention that surgery to cure low back pain is seldom effective, or only marginally so.
Which leaves the back pain patient few viable options.
Which is where you, the Doctor of Chiropractic, come in.
DISCUSSION
As you know—but most of the public does not—chiropractic can be effective in treating low back pain. A study of workers compensation claims in Florida, reported in the Journal of the American Chiropractic Association, showed back injuries initially treated by chiropractors rather than medical doctors had more positive results. A similar study in Oregon, reported in the Journal of Manipulative Physiological Therapy, showed chiropractic treatment got people back to work in a third the time of medical treatment. And the Journal of Occupational Medicine reported a Utah study that showed medical treatment cost ten times the amount of chiropractic treatment of low back pain. Other studies show similarly impressive results, including forty-five percent reduction of low back after eight to ten chiropractic visits.
Better still, treatment of low back pain using Chiropractic BioPhysics® techniques produces even more impressive results—one study showed pain reduction of seventy-five to eighty percent!
Well, enough of the introduction. Now, down to business.
Our marketing communications firm, in association with Dr. Deed Harrison and other chiropractic experts associated with CBP®, has created an advertising campaign targeted at the millions of low back pain sufferers, convincing them that help is available, and persuading them to contact their local CBP-trained Doctor of Chiropractic—you—for relief.
The cost of developing a similarly effective campaign on your own, assuming you have the expertise, would be prohibitive. But CBP makes this personalized material—print advertisements for magazine or newspaper or other publications, direct-mail postcards, and digital versions for online or e-mail distribution—available at a fraction of the actual cost. So you get professionally produced advertising at very affordable prices.
Back pain sufferers everywhere are crying out for relief. With this campaign, you can let them know you’re ready, willing, able, and available to answer the call.
Or, you can do nothing, and let prospective patients, and your practice, suffer in silence.
