Integrative Medicine

Tefal Actifry : I Want One of These

I've heard a few good things about this gadget and now I've just seen the Tefal Actifry on Amazon too (at least in the Uk - couldn't find it on the .com site).

The Actifry makes a whole kilo (2.2lbs) of crisp fryer-tasting healthy fries with just one spoonful of oil.

We don't eat fries much these days and of course there are ways of making healthy fries by par-boiling potatoes and mixing (or spraying) with a little oil and baking but they are just not the same as fries from a deep fat frier.

Apparently these ones are just like that and without the hassle of boiling up potatoes or watching over them!

If you are loathe to give up eating fries you will find this a healthy way to get them - now I just need to save up the pennies bcause good health does not come cheap :)

See the video

How Much Do You Move?

I did an exercise/quiz the other day which brought home to me how little activity most of us actually do - and I think this has a lot to do with why the population in general seem to be getting more and more overweight in the western world.

The exercise involved filling in a section of a chart for each hour of the day - 24 in total - giving each section a diferent color depending how active you were in each of the 24 hours.

The categories were

• asleep/lying down
• sitting
• on your feet but only mildly active - tidying, shopping, moving about the office
• active - walking, vacuuming, cleaning
• exercise - running, lifting weights, playing sports, swimming

Yikes! I don't know about you but most of my hours were in the first two categories! I am on my PC rather than on my feet an awful lot!

And this pattern would be a marked difference from say 50 years ago when we used cars and labor-saving devices a lot less.

And the point of all this?

To give you a shock (same as I had) about how little time you are actually active each day and to get you to think a little more seriously about getting moving even a little extra each day.

If you give yourself a break every hour or so and get active for 5 or 10 minutes, you may be able to color another box active and save your shape (and maybe your life).

And I'd better go off and do something now too that Ive sat here writing this to you! :)

How to Reduce Cancellations, Reschedules and No-Shows: Our Strategy

We’ve discussed scheduling problems in the past, pointing you to a few resources here and there, but we’ve never really provided a comprehensive approach for those scheduled appointments that go off the rails due to patients canceling, rescheduling, or simply not showing up at all.

Here are the exact strategies we’ve put in place over the last few years. If you’ve got something that works in your practice, leave a comment and share it with us.

Make Reminder Calls
We all forget things, and appointments (particularly those with a long lead time) are among the easiest things to lose track of. Appointment cards are helpful, but in the end, a phone call is your best bet. Email, text message and other automated solutions are starting to make some headway, but a good old-fashioned telephone call is still the most effective tool to combat schedule disintegration.

• Provide some lead time. Don’t make your calls the night before. Give patients at least 2-3 days notice.
• Don’t leave wiggle room. Saying, “Call us if you can’t make it,” is an invitation for people to reschedule.

I don’t think we started making these calls as early as we should have. When you’re not busy, it can feel like it doesn’t matter as much, but the truth is that it does matter. In fact, you could argue that it matters more - those cancellations are pretty painful in the early days.

Some practitioners argue that reminder calls encourage people to reschedule. I don’t buy it. Better to know, and take steps to deal with it, then have a sudden hole in your day.

Stay on Time
If you want patients to respect your time, then you need to start that process by respecting theirs. Make sure you stay on time. Don’t reschedule patients. Keep regular office hours.

Yes, emergencies crop up, but your clients will accept that if you explain it to them, apologize, and don’t let it happen regularly.

Book Tightly
What we’re really after here is teaching your patients to value their appointment. A large part of that is demonstrating that you’re busy and run a tight ship. Many practitioners tend to spread patients out over the course of a day, but for us the looser the schedule gets, the more reschedules we seem to encounter - patients figure they can get an appointment on just about any day, so what’s the big deal? It is a big deal, and it starts with effective scheduling.

Don’t Overbook
However, if you’re tempted to treat your appointment book like a discount charter flight and book it 120% full, you’re going to have problems. Overbooking to deal with last-minute scheduling changes is like treating symptoms instead of causes - it’s not getting to the root of the problem. In fact, just like running late, it’s probably creating more of them.

Book Acute Care Visits ASAP
Acute care visits are fertile ground for scheduling glitches. When patients call with an acute care issue, it’s because they want to be seen now. If you can’t see them soon, recognize the fact that they might get better or find someone else in the meantime. That increases the likelihood of a no-show or cancellation.

Follow the 1-2 Month Rule
When a patient wants to reschedule or cancel, remind them that they may not be able to get another visit for 1-2 months. Patients often reschedule simply for convenience, and this technique can often resurrect the appointment. You can read more on this approach here.

Deal With Repeat Offenders
You may discover that a large proportion of your problem appointments are with the same small group of patients.

We do have a no-show fee, but we use it with discretion. And while we don’t often charge people for missed appointments - unless they have some hard cost like custom formulated IV treatments - we do try to educate these people over time by explaining that someone else could have used their time slot.

Failing that, we follow a three-strike rule. After they bail a third time, we usually don’t hurry to call them back. If they call, we try to fit them in that day, or tell them to call back again another day when we might be able to provide same-day service.

Track Your Results
Although you may have a general sense of how well your appointment book holds together over the course of a month, nothing beats having some hard data. The easiest way is simply to have your staff track the numbers. This also lets you identify patterns that might crop up based on the time of day, week or year.

If your software doesn’t do this for you, it’s still easy to implement using pen and paper. Head to CalendarsThatWork.com, and print a lined version of their monthly calendar. Use the first line for reschedules, the second for cancellations (with no reschedule) and the third line for no-shows. Have your staff just put a tick on the appropriate line each time, then add them up at the end of the week/month. You can even enter your email address, and the site will send you the same calendar just before the start of each month.

Everyone has a role to play in keeping the schedule healthy -you, your staff, and your patients - and much of this is about teaching everyone involved about the value of a scheduled appointment. Consider yourself the Dean of the School of Appointment Value, and train your students accordingly.

We’ve noticed some dramatic improvements over time using these strategies - if you’ve got any other tips, we’d love to hear them!

Related posts:

1. Reducing Cancellations and Reschedules
2. Avoiding the Pitfalls of Advance Patient Scheduling
3. Building a Busy CAM Practice By Acting Like One
4. Why Your Practice Needs a Receptionist: Missed Calls
5. How To Handle Free Advice-Seekers

Flexible Restraint

There's no doubt about it.

If you stick 100% to one of those diet plans which tell you exactly what to eat every meal you will lose weight.

You will also be pretty miserable with it.

• You can forget eating the foods you love.
• You can forget an evening out with friends.
• You can forget enjoying your birthday celebration, your cousin's  wedding or Christmas.

None of these are likely to fit in with a rigid diet.

And if you slip from your plan for one reason, it becomes easier and easier to find more excuses not to conform. So before you know it you are off the diet and NOT losing weight any more.

That's what typically happens with diets.

They are fine while you are willing to bend your whole life around the diet in the early days and then it all falls apart once you see how much you have got to suffer to lose weight.

This is why I prefer a more flexible approach to eating where you learn

• to eat modestly
• to practice restraint while eating enough so you don't go hungry all day
• to eat when you're hungry (and only then)
• to stop eating when you're full
• to choose healthy food for the most part
• to eat small portions of your favorite unhealthy foods and enjoy every calorie
• to leave aside those unhealthy foods you couldn't care less about
• to handle every occasion with these principles in mind - you don't go mad and blow your diet throwing all caution to the wind but you learn to be selective about enjoying the best of the experience

The good thing about this way of losing weight is that you get into way of eating that you can use for the rest of your life so that you never have to diet again. It becomes a habit.

So what's it to be this time?

Flexible restraint or the latest, greatest tell-you-what-to eat-diet-book?

Over to you....

3 Simple Steps to Stop a Snack Attack

Photo by Jason Rogers

Do you find yourself wandering over to the fridge when you're not physically hungry and grabbing the first tempting snack you see and then maybe something else too?

In the pleasure of the moment it's all too easy to forget our longer term more worthwhile goals of losing weight or eating healthy food isn't it? It's as if the immediate satisfaction of eating something tempting is suddenly all that matters.

What is it that you say to yourself when you're about to grab something loaded with fat and/or sugar?

"What the heck, I want it and I'm going to have it"
"I've had a bad day, I need this"
"I've been so good, I deserve to eat it"

If you want the snacking sabotage to stop, something has to change. And to change what you do, you need to change what you say to yourself.

You see, whatever you say to yourself when a snacking moment strikes, leads directly to a subconscious decision to eat or not eat.

The best way to direct your self talk is to deliberately use the following 3 simple strategies one after the other as soon as possible before the point of "no return".

1. Remind yourself of your health or weight loss goals and why you want to achieve them.
2. Think about how you felt last time after you indulged in this way (regret? annoyed? stupid? stuffed?)
3. Affirm who you want to be/what you want to do  right now ("I am a healthy eater" "I no longer eat junk" "I am working on my new shape" "I am getting closer to my target weight")

Then get yourself from the fridge, pour yourself a glass of water and go back to what you were doing or reward yourself by chatting with a friend (online or off).

Every time you divert yourself from eating when you are not hungry you strike a victory not only for your new shape but also for your feelings of self-control and ultimately your confidence in yourself to follow your plans and dreams.