As I reflect on my education and the previous experiences I’ve had with practitioners over the years, I realize that the average client is not aware of what the cost of an appointment with a practitioner is based on and I believe the general public should familiarize themselves with this information so they can walk into any practice they desire to and know that they have paid a fair and honest price for the services they received. However, I will add nuance (based on personal insight/opinion) to this situation and propose a novel way of determining what the costs should be.

The most glaring example of what people believe drives the costs of a practitioner’s services is experience, but I believe that factoring practitioner experience (how many years they have practiced for) as the major determinant of the value of their services is a misnomer because a practitioner who has been in the game for 20 years, may not provide a better service than a practitioner who has only been practicing for 5 years. This implies that the quality of the service they provide is a superior metric to gauge how much they should charge compared to experience alone. In light of this, people tend to be unaware of other variables that need to be factored when determining the cost of an appointment so I will elucidate what I believe the determinants are, in the form of an equation.   

(inflation + cost of living + business expenses) + practitioner experience + extracurricular training + ratio of successful-to-unsuccessful client outcomes = set monetary value of rendered services

This equation is not to be considered literally because numbers are not involved here per say, as this isn’t about mathematics more so than it is about ethics but yes, factors that incur actual costs (expenses, training, inflation, costs of living) are factored in as dollar numbers. 

(inflation + cost of living + business expenses) 

This is fairly self-explanatory, considering that inflation and cost of living affects every single one of us so we all have first-hand experience of what it feels to walk down the supermarket aisle to buy your favourite loaf of sourdough bread and realize that it costs $1.50 more than it did last year and that this rise in price translates to every other expense we incur, from the price of gasoline all the way to the electricity bill. On the other side of the coin, business expenses include things like practitioner registration, extracurricular training, EFTPOS, professional subscriptions, receptionist (this is expensive), tools/appliances/materials relevant to the modality of practice (massage oils for massage therapists or needles for acupuncturists, etc.). This is where I highlight how important it is for practitioners to carefully review their expenses so they can catch opportunities where they can save money, so they don’t have to unnecessarily raise the costs of appointments.     

Practitioner experience + successful-to-unsuccessful ratio of client outcomes  

As I mentioned previously, the quality of the service provided is a superior metric to gauge how much they should charge compared to experience alone and this coincides with what I refer to as the ratio of successful-to-unsuccessful client outcomes. This, in my opinion, is the single most decisive determinant of practitioner service value because it dictates the likelihood that a person will obtain precisely what they are seeking from the practitioner in the first place. There are obviously variables that dictate how likely a person is to achieve a successful outcome, some of which are out of the practitioner’s control, such as willingness and desire to change, perception of the kind of person a practitioner is and the rapport they can establish with them (practitioners can influence this to an extent), how receptive the client will be to the treatment prescribed, amongst others.

The tricky thing about a practitioner’s success ratio is that only they have an idea of what that may be, the general public does not, and I wouldn’t advise to rely on google reviews alone to gauge this metric. I would suggest seeking referral networks and word-of-mouth references from close contacts before jumping the down labyrinth of google search. Additionally, a good tactic you can use to track down a practitioner whom is more likely to offer you a good service is to find the organisation that registers practitioners within the modality you’re interested in and send emails to a variety of them within your area and see which practitioner went out of their to explain what they offer in as more detail than the others.       

Experience is an interesting metric because it carries a subjective quality; it alludes to the idea that practicing for longer than other practitioners, automatically implies a likelihood of being “better” than those who have not practiced as long. This is akin to a person who carries the title “Dr.”, being perceived as having a position of authority or the eligibility to teach merely because they have an academic qualification. Things are not so black and white and when things are perceived this way, we entertain a red herring. The reasons that older practitioners can be bad at their profession are likely two-fold; they practice based on concepts that they have not advanced from or updated (being outdated) and/or they lack the internal self-awareness/ability to be introspective about their practice and track what their clients are responding positively to, which leads me to the next point.    

Extracurricular training

Extracurricular training is how practitioners advance and update the concepts they were trained in. It doesn’t take rocket science to calculate that what you learned five to ten years ago will have likely changed, if not be replaced altogether so it pays in spades for practitioners to keep tabs on events and seminars related to their modality. In fact, if they are registered to a professional body, they must obtain continuing-professional-education (CPE) points to keep their registration. However, this does not automatically imply they will change how they practice since leaving school. If a naturopath still uses their textbook protocol of prescribing a multivitamin and a probiotic to every client that presents with IBS-like symptoms, then you can suspect that they are outdated and lack the nuance necessary to treat their clients as individuals. I am by no means implying that extracurricular training refers to becoming qualified in a bunch of different modalities (as I explained in “red flags to look for in a practitioner”), as it refers to further training in the modality the practitioner practices and chosen specialty within that modality.