Only on SkinInc.com: Spa Visionary Susie Ellis Explains How Spa Evidence Can Improve Your Business
Posted: July 20, 2011
By Susie Ellis, president, SpaFinder
There are some very practical ways skin care professionals can use the spaevidence.com portal. These include:
- Finding research studies that support a particular therapy and printing them out to share with fellow spa professionals or clients.
- Making decisions as to what treatments to include on a spa menu. In addition, some research studies can be cited on spa menus.
- Some research studies can be linked to or used in communications by the spa via newsletter, e-mail blasts and more.
- Showing others (fellow spa professionals or clients) how to use the portal by going directly to a computer terminal and demonstrating its use.
- Using the information to back up claims or to challenge claims.
The most valuable part of the spaevidence.com portal is initially in education and empowerment of each of the users individually, and then as an industry as a whole. By just spending perhaps 15 minutes on the site to begin with, the entire world of evidence-based medicine will be opened up to the user. As a spa professional, this is of profound importance and interest.
No longer do you have to rely on someone else’s “review of the data” regarding what is and what isn’t a proven modality. You don’t have to sit in silence while a physician derides the use of yoga, music therapy or acupuncture to help people improve their wellness. You now have the power to go and look up the data ourselves.
So one result is an increased level of confidence—not just in knowing which therapies have the most data to support their use for certain conditions, but also in knowing which therapies do not have much data to support their use in order to speak more knowledgably about them. For example, the spa professional will learn that “no evidence” doesn’t mean necessarily that something doesn’t work, but rather that, in many cases, it hasn’t been studied enough.