I came across this piece of writing a while ago now, actually it was whilst I was going through Palmer and I recently found it again. It was written by a lady called Hunter Lovins who founded the Rocky Mountain Insitute in Colorado, USA. It is a story essentially about patch ups. It is my wish for you to share it with your practice members too.

Here is the writing by Hunter Lovins.

“In the early 1950’s, the World Health Organization was faced with the problem of malaria among the Dayak people in Borneo. They had an answer that was short, simple and wrong. Their plan was to spray DDT all over the place and kill the mosquitoes that carried malaria. The mosquito population declined, the incidence of malaria dropped, and the program was declared a success.

They discovered, however, that the roofs of the people’s houses were falling in on their heads. It seems that the DDT had poisoned wasps which fed off thatch eating caterpillars. Without the wasps, the caterpillars proliferated, they ate the thatch, and the roofs fell in.

The World Health Organization found it also had a worse problem because the DDT had built up in the food chain. It got into the insects, which were eaten by little lizard-like creatures called geckos, which were eaten by the cats. The cats died, the rats flourished, and the World Health Organization was faced with an outbreak of sylvatic plague and typhus. A situation the W.H.O. had, itself, created.

They were then obliged to parachute live cats into Borneo to try again to control the rat population.The lesson one should draw is that in many instances, our current problems are caused by prior solutions that were not thought out well enough. All things interact, often in ways we don’t understand. But at the same time, if we understand the interactions better, the solutions we come up with will go further than we might initially have thought. The solutions can then beget even more solutions”

Are you providing the opportunity for your practice members to see the longer term benefits of the chiropractic approach to health and life or are you and your team focused on the short term?

Tags: Building Your Healthcare Practice, Healthcare Marketing, How to Market Your Practice, Marketing, mechanistic, mechanists, vitalism, vitalistic, vitalists

This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Growing Your Healthcare Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.