Chiropractor and professor, by way of radio, television, advertising and aviation fields makes for a successful practice for Wayne Henry Zemelka, DC, in Davenport, Iowa
Wayne Henry Zemelka, DC
In no other place on the planet do private-practice chiropractors find it as difficult to attract large numbers of new patients as in Davenport, Iowa. Not because prospective starter cases are in short supply. Quite the contrary. It is because Davenport—a mecca of chiropractic medicine—is home to venerable Palmer College of Chiropractic and 150 private-practice chiropractors (plus at least 600 more if you count the doctors-in-training at the school).
“It’s the equivalent of being in a market with the most incredible competitive forces imaginable,” says Wayne Henry Zemelka, DC, who operates Zemelka Family Chiropractic Clinic there.
“And yet,” he quickly injects, “it’s not a problem. At least it’s not a problem if you approach your marketing the right way.”
Zemelka, 68, came to Davenport in 1972 to study at Palmer and, after graduating in late 1975, the former radio-and-TV personality-turned-advertising-executive stayed on as a private practitioner. He joined the Palmer faculty in 1982 before becoming the director of its media department in 1988 and launching Zemelka Family Chiropractic Clinic in 1995. He has retired now from the college and has scaled back his office days to just three a week. Still, over the last several years, his practice has grown at an annualized rate of between 10% and 14%.
“Looks like we’ll do even better this year. By August, we already were at 14%,” he beams.
Marketing Whiz
Zemelka offers several reasons for his success in spite of the odds against it.
First, rather than plow enormous sums of money into paid advertising (an unproductive strategy in a crowded market like Davenport), Zemelka prefers by engaging mainly in internal marketing—making sure his existing patients are aware of the many services he provides and the value offered by each.
“It’s generally much more cost-effective to always focus on your patient base,” he says. “The key to successful marketing when you’re going toe-to-toe with a lot of other doctors in town is to do things that give you the highest visibility for the least amount of money, and focusing on your patient base is one of those.”
Zemelka and his associate Keven Wapelhorst, DC, educate and demonstrate the Thompson technique to recent Palmer graduate Wendy Weinbeck, DC.
Zemelka’s internal marketing tools include a wellness magazine (an off-the-shelf product containing generic articles he buys with his own special content added to make it seem as though the entire magazine was produced in-house) and a monthly newsletter (similar in execution to the wellness magazine). Zemelka also has distributed to patients copies of a popular laymen’s book on chiropractic.
Additionally, Zemelka makes a point of sending his patients greeting cards whenever birthdays roll around. More importantly, he phones them at home following treatment earlier that same day. “It’s standard procedure here to call patients and check in with them if they’ve gone through major treatment,” he explains. “They really love that their doctor took time to look in on them in this way. They show their appreciation by turning around and raving about you to their friends.”
Zemelka estimates he makes more than a dozen such calls a week. They last no more than 5 minutes each; he makes sure of that. “Some patients will try to keep you on the line a long time, especially the older ones who may not get a lot of social interaction for reasons related to their age,” he cautions. “But when we come to the end of my allotted time for the call, I simply tell the patient that I must be going. You can’t be worried about hurting someone’s feelings by having to seemingly cut short the conversation. The fact that you called at all is a huge positive that overcomes everything else.”
Community outreach also figures into Zemelka’s marketing efforts. For example, he is a frequent presence at local health fairs where he conducts free thermal scans to all who stop by.
“It helps to show rather than tell about how chiropractic can help, which is why I like doing the thermal scans at these kind of events,” he says. “The thermal scan lets you give the person a picture of what’s going on with their body. Before, you might palpate the spine and tell the person, ‘You’ve got a little problem in this spot here—can you feel that?’ And the person says, ‘Yeah, I feel that.’ But he didn’t also see it. For a lot of people conditioned by our video culture, until you actually see something, it isn’t real.”
Another effective technique of his involved passing out sample-sized packets of a soothing, natural muscle relaxant he sells at the office. For these packets, Zemelka printed up a label bearing his name, address and phone number. Now, as he goes around town, he passes out the samples to strangers he encounters who look like they might be suffering from tired, achy muscles. At the very least, the exercise gives Zemelka an opening to chat with them and demonstrate he cares about them (a good public-relations gesture). Then, those who later try the sample product and like it are apt to call him to either order more or, better yet, make an appointment for an examination and chiropractic services.
Recently, Zemelka has been arranging to speak at service clubs. “I’m working now with one organization for the elderly. I’ll be helping them develop a weekly educational program on good health, and chiropractic will be one facet of that,” he promises.
Better Late Than Never Credit the Wright Bros—yesteryear’s famed pioneers of aviation—for helping get the chiropractic career of Wayne Henry Zemelka, DC, off the ground. No, Zemelka wasn’t around when Orville and Wilbur Wright made history exactly 100 years ago with the first successful powered airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. But he was present more than two-thirds of a century later at an air show he organized in Spokane, Wash, where one of the Wrights’ later-edition biplanes had been taken out of mothballs and was soaring and swooping to the delight of spectators. At the end of the performance, Zemelka—himself a stick-and-rudder man who ran a local advertising agency—was helping the pilot of the ancient aircraft load it onto a flatbed truck for the trip home when Zemelka injured his back. For months afterward, “I was on pills, powders, and potions,” the Shadysville, Ohio, native remembers. His physician also had ordered him to wear a back brace. “I had four steel rods up my back.” One day, a fashion model affiliated with his ad agency asked Zemelka if he would be so kind as to drive her kid’s babysitter to a doctor’s appointment. He agreed, but was dumbstruck when it turned out the doctor was a chiropractor. “The first thing I asked was, what the heck is a chiropractor?” he recalls. “So, here I am in this chiropractor’s office, waiting while the babysitter is being seen. I’m sitting in a back brace and happen to pick up some material the chiropractor had set out. It was a pamphlet about backache.” Zemelka understandably found the material quite compelling. “Two weeks earlier, my physicians were recommending an operation on my back—fusing the 5th lumbar and the sacrum, with a disc planted between the 4th and 5th lumbar,” he says. Not eager to go under the knife and figuring he had nothing to lose, Zemelka let the chiropractor have a shot at fixing his back. “He laid me on the table, gave me the 5th lumbar roll and—snap, crack, pop—85% of the pain was gone. I stood up and hugged him.” Follow-up visits to the chiropractor over the next 8 months freed Zemelka of the brace and the need for pain medicine. Convinced he had experienced a miracle, Zemelka expressed his gratitude by donating his ad talents to, first, a handful of chiropractors and then, later, the Chiropractic Society of Washington. “I felt the world needed to know about chiropractic,” he says. Zemelka was so filled with enthusiasm for the profession that the doctors with whom he worked urged him to enroll in chiropractic school and become a practitioner himself. Thus, in 1972, Zemelka signed up at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He completed courses there in late 1975 and 2 months later bought a Davenport practice. He sold it to an associate in 1982 in order to accept a teaching position at Palmer, then bought a practice in Illinois about a decade later. He shortly afterward unloaded the Illinois practice and, in 1995, acquired one back in Davenport, rechristening it Zemelka Family Chiropractic Clinic. He retired from his post with the college in 1998, although continues to teach there from time to time as a guest lecturer. “At my age, my preference is for teaching. Practice is a lot of fun and is something I still enjoy. But when you’re 68 like I am, it can tire you out. With teaching, I find I can impact a lot more people than I can as a private practitioner.” 
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It’s All in the Technique
The practice receives a boost as well from Zemelka’s personal name-recognition. Soon after moving to Davenport, he entered (and captured) the public eye—first as a weatherman on local television and then as commissioner of airports, as well as a participant in various community service organizations.
However, a bigger boon has been the fact that his is one of the few offices in the area offering the Thompson technique for segmental drop adjusting. “I’ve been using this technique for more than 27 years,” he says. “It’s a fundamental and very good way to affect the neurological basis in the body, one of the controlling mechanisms for the entire body.”
In a nutshell, the Thompson technique holds that adjusting the spine should always be done with the patient laying face down on the table.
“You follow the angle of the joint spaces and the way that the spine is designed. Using the drop makes it a lot easier to adjust,” says Zemelka. “Plus, you’re following the basic conformity of the spine. When you thrust into that joint space, the change you’re inducing there is done because of the energy you’re putting into that thrust with some assistance from the table.”
Zemelka insists he isn’t opposed to traditional adjusting techniques. It is just that he is partial to the Thompson technique because “it’s a lot easier on the patient. And it leaves me a lot less tired at the end of the day.”
Zemelka became an adherent of the Thompson technique shortly after buying his first clinic. “It came with a Thompson table,” he recalls. “I figured I better go learn how to use this table now that I own it. Fortunately, Dr Thompson at the time was teaching at Palmer on weekends, so I started attending his seminars.”
Years later, Zemelka persuaded Thompson to let him videotape the sessions and package them as a product for sale hither and yon. It proved a successful venture. “The tradition continues these past 4 years as I’ve lectured to thousands of chiropractors across the United States,” he adds.
Beyond it’s renown as a place offering the Thompson technique, Zemelka Family Chiropractic Clinic is further distinguished as one of only two practices in the area offering video-motion x-ray.
“Video motion x-ray allows us to move, for example, the cervicals and then video tape that motion to obtain a detailed analysis of what happens with the motion of the vertebral unit,” he says. “This is good for joint studies and determining whether there’s a continuing problem that might be there that you can’t detect otherwise.”
As a result of that capability (coupled with full x-ray), assessments provided by Zemelka are very comprehensive. He also uses a subluxation station as part of that process. “We look at what’s happening with the patient from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet,” he says. “Thompson did that too—that’s why he was always adjusting the knees, ankles, extremities.
“This is not a ‘pop-‘n’-pray’ practice. You don’t just walk in and have your neck cracked. We don’t do curb service here.”
The payor mix at Zemelka Family Chiropractic Clinic is 25% cash, 25% Medicare, and 50% other insurances. Zemelka says he wants not more cash patients but more Medicaid and Medicare.
“In Iowa, Medicaid pays very well,” he explains. “Better, actually, than many private insurance companies. And I want more Medicare volume because, before much longer, the over-50 demographic will be the most important; it certainly will be the largest. But I’m not willing to sit back and wait for it to arrive. I’m proactively seeking to attract it and further build this practice with it.”
By the same token, Zemelka says he won’t be giving up on the younger set: in addition to older patients, his practice is striving to add to its caseload of children and young adults.
Zemelka shares his 1,200-square-foot office with Kevin Wapelhorst, DC, an independent contractor who keeps the light burning on the days when Zemelka is away on other business, including the business of enjoying semi-retirement.
“I have no plans to go into full retirement from clinical practice,” Zemelka confides. “Sure, I’ll take some time off to visit places like Arizona and New Mexico. But other than that, I’m going to keep on keepin’ on.”
Rich Smith is a contributing writer for Chiropractic Products.
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