Daniel L. Wymer, DC, MD, flourishes with chiropractic wellness centers in Gold’s Gyms

Air-conditioner suppliers sell a lot more chillers in locales that turn hot during the summer than they do in places that remain comfortably cool from May through September. A similar rule of business applies in chiropractic. If you want a thriving practice, go where the customers are, advises Daniel L. Wymer, DC, MD.

Daniel L. Wymer, DC, MD, and Carl Hall, DPM, staff podiatrist, give an inservice to Gold’s Gym personal trainers and sales staff. Wymer demonstrates an active-release technique. Because of this team approach, many club members sign up for the sportsMED evaluation.

In Wymer’s opinion, where the customers are these days is in fitness clubs. So in a fitness club is where he’s set up shop.

“Here, I have direct access to people young and old who are most likely to need and benefit from chiropractic,” says Wymer, who finds his choice of location so perfect that he even has been able to do away with paid advertising. “I don’t so much as have a Yellow Pages ad any more. It’s just not necessary.”

He might not be able to make such a claim were he situated in any other fitness club than the one that has welcomed him—Gold’s Gym.

“Gold’s Gym is the biggest name in the fitness center industry,” Wymer says. “Hundreds of highly prospective patients walk past my door every day. They can’t miss seeing me.”

A DC Facility Within a Facility
Wymer’s practice goes by the name of sportsMED™. It started in Virginia Beach, Va, where colleague Joe Marcil, DC, is now the owner-operator of that site. A second sportsMED facility, the one out of which Wymer practices, occupies 1,500 sq ft of the 55,000-sq-ft Gold’s Gym supercenter in Chesapeake, Va. (A third sportsMED is set to open soon at another Gold’s Gym supercenter in Newport News, Va.)

Wymer and Joe Marcil, DC, clinic director/owner of Virginia Beach sportsMED, observe as Hall (on computer) performs dynamic computerized gait analysis.

For the privilege of being inside Gold’s Gym, sportsMED pays a fixed monthly fee. But that’s the only regular outlay: income sportsMED generates (60% from insurance, 30% from cash, and the remainder from Medicare, personal injury, and workers’ compensation) is its to keep, and there are no revenue-sharing arrangements or management fees involved. SportsMED did, however, pay for its own clinical equipment.

“We have everything here that you’d expect to find in a state-of-the-art chiropractic office or clinic, including dynamic fluoroscopy for imaging joints in motion and monitoring gait problems,” says Wymer. “We’ve even got a new computerized foot and posture analysis system brought from Italy by our staff podiatrist [Carl Hall, DPM]. This digitalized imaging system allows doctors to further visualize and evaluate patients during the pre- and postadjustment and orthotic treatment phases.”

Wymer’s staffing model places the in-club operation under the control of a chiropractor in the role of primary clinical director. At the Chesapeake facility, the director (Wymer himself) oversees three chiropractic assistants, two massage therapists, one physical therapist, and Hall the podiatrist, and a medical doctor. Negotiations were under way recently to bring aboard a physician to supervise a weight-loss and antiaging program.

“What attracted me to the sportsMED concept was the idea of a multidisciplinary approach to patient care within an ideal gym setting,” says Marcil. “The broad scope of our practice, including massage, exercise and individual foundation balancing, produces long-lasting results.”

Gold’s Gym’s part of the bargain chiefly entails making its members aware of sportsMED and encouraging utilization of the services offered, says John Galiani, who, with his brother Kirk, owns the Chesapeake supercenter and 10 other Gold’s Gyms in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. Awareness-building techniques include signage and posters deployed at strategic locations throughout the supercenter, plus periodic e-mailings to club members and existing sportsMED patients. Moreover, Gold’s Gym sales staff, personal trainers, aerobic instructors, and other employees have been taught to communicate to club members the benefits of visiting sportsMED.

“Satisfaction surveys of our members show good familiarity with sportsMED and an appreciation of its presence here,” says Galiani.

Club members initially get acquainted with sportsMED at the time they enroll: Gold’s Gym staff extend to every newcomer an invitation to stop in at sportsMED for a no-cost health evaluation before the first workout. About 20% of the estimated 300 individuals signed up each month accept the sportsMED evaluation offer.

In a typical evaluation, Wymer and his sportsMED colleagues measure flexibility, range of motion, bilateral strength, and coordination, as well as to run a check of blood pressure, heart beat, and breathing.

“Because a team approach is taken, we can introduce club members to each of our disciplines, which in turn allows us to educate them about the full capabilities we offer,” he says. “In the course of this evaluation, if we find any conditions that might benefit from our mode of care, we can make a recommendation for treatment.”

Wymer reports that roughly 35% of the evaluated members are sufficiently impressed by sportsMED that they become patients immediately. Importantly, a Gold’s Gym membership isn’t required to access the services of sportsMED. As such, quite a few new patients come in straight off the street, most often after hearing about the practice from family, friends, or coworkers.

Gold’s Gym likes when that happens because many of those walk-in patients invariably decide to join after getting an up close and personal look around the overall facility.

“We’re helped by having sportsMED on site,” says Galiani. “It’s a very attractive extra amenity we can offer.”

Break New Ground
The concept of an in-gym practice originally was suggested to Wymer by another practice group already doing the same thing. At the time, the Benton, Ill, native was operating the Wymer Spine Care in Virginia Beach and experiencing difficulty generating enough exposure among those health consumers most inclined to need his services due to their wide dispersion across the community. Wymer recognized that a practice situated under the roof of an established and thriving fitness center would have little if any trouble getting noticed by people with musculoskeletal aches and pains.

Wymer contacted the Galiani brothers in 2002 to propose a cobranded, cross-migration relationship. His pitch basically revolved around the notion that this would be an ideal way to meet the demands of a fast-growing segment of Americans determined to take responsibility for their health.

Throughout his career, the 1972 Logan College of Chiropractic graduate has been cutting-edge in his thinking about the delivery of services. For example, in 1978, he purchased a small Homestead, Fla, motel and converted it to a three-bed in-patient chiropractic care center so as to have access to patients for more than the conventional block of 10 or 15 minutes per visit.

Wymer also has long demonstrated a willingness to break molds, as illustrated by his decision in the early 1980s to enter medical school.

“At the time, I felt that becoming an MD would be the logical next step for a chiropractor who wanted to extend his knowledge and skills,” Wymer says. “But, in retrospect, I was naive for even thinking that was necessary. I found out only later that the two professions don’t share any common denominators, other than the practitioners of each hold the title of doctor.”

Nevertheless, there were some pluses to go with the MD after his name. For instance, a number of the fellow MDs with whom Wymer interacted became a lot less jaundiced in their opinion of chiropractic—his peer status made it easier to get across the message that physiology can indeed be altered, something MDs in times past had difficulty accepting.

However, he was surprised to note the MD credential had only limited impact with his patients.

“Patients were already sold on chiropractic, so my being a medical doctor on top of that didn’t really add anything as far as they were concerned,” he says.

Another example of mold breaking: in 1992, Wymer left clinical practice to pursue his dream of becoming a professional golfer. He poured himself into it, but eventually realized it wasn’t his calling.

“I was a good player—had a 1 handicap,” he says. “But I couldn’t excel, and that’s what’s required to make it in the pro-golf circuit.”

For Wymer, the road leading to sportsMED really began in 1996 when he returned to chiropractic practice, at first working in offices located in Siesta Key and Orlando, Fla, before partnering in 1998 with an anesthesiologist to launch the Pain Medicine Group (a venture that gave rise in swift succession to the Physical Medicine Pain Center and to the Lake Mary Pain Center, all in central Florida). He relocated to Virginia Beach as the new millennium was arriving.

Join the Club
As a next step in the evolution of sportsMED, Wymer says he plans to one day soon begin licensing the model, right down to its brand name. Chiropractors who buy in will not be compelled to locate within a Gold’s Gym, but Wymer says he’ll work hard at convincing them they’d be smart to do so, since Gold’s Gym is the industry leader and has its thumb firmly on the market’s pulse.

“Gold’s Gym isn’t in a niche of the fitness market; it doesn’t cater only to serious, competitive bodybuilders,” he says. “It’s a family-oriented fitness club with equipment and programs for children, women, and seniors as well as men, young and old. That means if you set up in a Gold’s Gym, you’re able to have, in essence, a family practice that happens to be in a super-growth-oriented environment.”

Meanwhile, Wymer has mapped out a strategy by which he will add more sportsMEDs of his own. Already he is making preparations to unveil at least five in other Gold’s Gyms belonging to the Galiani brothers

“SportsMED is going places,” Wymer promises. “The convergence with Gold’s Gym ensures it will arrive at its destination far more successfully than otherwise might be possible.”

Rich Smith is a contributing writer for Chiropractic Products.