OK. You’ve just purchased a Halimeter. How do you get your patients interested?
While there is no one right way to market, we can offer some tips.
1. Publicize the notion of breath treatment in conversations with your patients and colleagues, with waiting room materials, on your website, and in billing envelope stuffers.
2. Remember that treatment for oral malodor is not a “get rich quick” scheme, but is another part of total patient care. Millions of people have chronic halitosis, but up until recently had nowhere to turn.
We get dozens of e-mails every month from regular people–your patients–who found out about the Halimeter and bad breath treatment. They are asking us what they can do to solve a problem that they’ve had for years!!
Generally, they ask us AFTER they have checked out our list of Halimeter dentist websites, and haven’t found a practitioner in their area. If we can’t find one in our records, we refer them to THEIR OWN dentist.
3. There are several different approaches to treatment. Please refer to our Experts’ Forum.
Some doctors go whole hog into dispensing of rinse. Others treat the condition as a purely oral hygiene matter, and advocate tongue scraping, with an initial course of chlorhexidine rinse. The choice is yours.
Having the Halimeter in your office allows you to diagnose and then treat, which, of course, is the standard ethical method for delivering health care. Empirical treatment, which in this case, would be to simply dispense rinse upon hearing of a complaint of halitosis is not recommended.
Quite clearly, if self-diagnosis is sufficient, why not self- treatment, as well? You have no monopoly on selling rinse or tongue scrapers. Visit any drug store.
And, in those cases where the malodor is NOT of oral origin, but bespeaks a more serious condition, how would you feel simply dispensing rinse to a patient with undiagnosed diabetes or lung cancer? The Halimeter lets you pinpoint the source of the malodor.
4. Come to us for more tips and materials. We have long supplied an office flyer entitled “Could You Have Bad Breath And Not Know It?” This is a color pamphlet, folded to 3.625 x 8.5 inches. (92 x 216 mm)
You can download this flyer in Acrobat format. If you need to download the latest version of Acrobat click here and follow the instructions to download the Free Acrobat reader. To print it in actual size DO NOT check the “fit to page” option.
5. Sign up for our newsletter (on the homepage). There are usually good marketing tips in it–often taken from successful ideas forwarded to us by your peers.
6. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas with us. You will hardly be helping a competitor. Instead, you will be advancing the field and improving us all!
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