The path for clinical professionals is logical and straightforward, with challenges and avenues for growth. But then for some, it does not afford the environment to explore their creative juices. Some of us like poetry, some dancing, some music and most people find ways to merge our clinical practice with these interests.
One of these, Paul Ingraham, found his niche in writing. Paul Ingraham is a retired massage therapist and publisher of SaveYourself.ca, self-help information for common pain problems, especially myofascial trigger points and chronic low back pain and neck pain.
DA: We would like to welcome Paul Ingraham to PhysioGuru Spotlight for a chat about his makeover from a clinical therapist to a health care journalist. Please tell us a little about yourself, Paul.
PI: Hi, Devdeep. Thanks for the invitation. I'm happy to try to explain the strange turns my career has taken. I get a lot of inquiries from manual therapists, wondering how I have been able to publish such an extensive website, and make the transition to full-time publishing. I’ve only been able to do it because I was a professional writer and web publisher before this. I combined those skills with clinical experience to produce SaveYourself.ca over a period of many years. SaveYourself.ca started earning money a couple years ago, and I was able to afford to retire from clinical practice at the beginning of this year. So now I’m a full-time writer and publisher once again, but with a clearer mission than I had before I got involved in massage therapy. I got addicted to rehabilitation science. Now when I get up in the morning, I know exactly what to write about!
DA: I would like to know a little more about your training as a massage therapist and your experiences as a clinician?
PI: I was trained here in BC during the few years when 3000 hours of training was standard for an RMT. I was in school from 1997 to 2000 at Okanagan Valley College of Massage Therapy, a small school in a small town that had a hard time attracting good instructors. Although there were a few excellent ones, we also had to put up with quite a few classes taught by people who, at best, had no teaching experience or talent. We also had to endure quite a bit of the pseudo-scientific nonsense and “new age” woo that generally characterizes the profession even here with our progressive training standards. I regard my education as barely adequate, and simply didn’t stop studying when I graduated. My highest priority was to catch up on journal reading, because I had the impression that most of what I’d learned in school was 10-25 years out of date. I set up my office in my home in downtown Vancouver, generally working a small-ish number of long appointments for tough chronic pain cases. As I wrote articles about the clinical issues I saw, SaveYourself.ca started to attract a great deal of that kind of business. For the last few years I crammed in as much clinical work as I could handle, and simultaneously continued to research and write as much as I could handle. There was a great synergy between the academic work and the clinical work that whole time. Read, write, massage, read, write, massage!
DA: You mentioned in the introduction that you were a web publisher and writer before taking up massage therapy. So why did you feel the need for qualifying as a massage therapist?
PI: It was actually pretty rational, calculated. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I wanted out of pure computer work, I wanted to work with people. I wanted a good “day job” that would support me while I worked on writing novels. But massage was a day job that took over. In a sense, I chose massage therapy too well: it interested me more than writing novels. I didn’t know that would happen. I remember one of my student colleagues dropped out after three months because she discovered she didn’t like massage therapy, didn’t like touching people. I was the opposite: I loved it, and was entranced by the physiology and anatomy especially.
DA: Quite surprising actually, when everyone wants to be a computer pro, you decided to move on….. So what is SaveYourself.ca about and how did you go about planning and building it up to what it is at the moment?
PI: SaveYourself.ca is about helping people with pain problems. I try to provide readers, both patients and professionals, with three things that are generally hard to find, and almost impossible to find in one spot: a style that’s interesting and even fun; no bull, evidence-based information only; extremely thorough and user-friendly.
It started with self-help articles written for my own patients, extremely personal, providing them with information we didn’t have time to cover during appointments. In many cases, I still remember who I originally wrote an article for. Hopefully the website still reads like a friendly conversation between therapist and patient at a pub, a place where you can put your feet up and say “bollocks” and thump each other on the back. This is the Patch Adams philosophy of health care at work.
Not that there isn’t plenty of scholarship, too. Many of the articles also evolved into best-of-breed sources on their topics, more thoroughly research and referenced than anything else available, literally, by a wide margin in several cases. I put an incredibly amount of work into bibliographic publishing technology.
The business was never planned. I wrote steadily in my “spare” time for at least three years before I had the thought, “I guess this might be valuable someday.” After another three years of workaholism, I was probably starting to hope that I could sell it all someday, but I still didn’t really know how. By 2007 the workaholism was starting to get ugly, and I knew that I had to make SaveYourself.ca profitable … or knock it off. I couldn’t stop writing — inconceivable! — so I turned it unto a profitable business.
DA: I would like to know about your family and how they accepted your decision to move on from a steady day job to writing.
PI: It was all good. The question presumes that there might have been something for my family to be concerned about, but there wasn’t. SaveYourself.ca is not making me rich, but it does produce an adequate and steady income, and it’s also now a passive income — having spent a decade creating my intellectual property, I can now sell it without lifting a finger. Sales are completely automatic. The website keeps earning regardless of what I’m up to. For instance, when my wife was injured while travelling alone recently, I was able to go on an emergency trip to be with her and not worry about my job at all, which was wonderful. That just doesn’t work when you’re a clinician! So in fact my new career as a writer is more “steady” than my “day job” was.
DA: Makes sense…. what would be your suggestion for the other clinicians who do like to write, but yet do not have the courage to make the switch?
PI: Decide what kind of writer you are, and go with it: are you an arty writer who will never change a syllable for profit? Or are you a pragmatic wordsmith willing to pimp out your skill to the highest bidder? Almost every aspiring writer should get over themselves and pick the latter: you can’t write if you can’t eat, and nearly every great writer (except the born-rich ones) had to bow to economics. In either case, though, you can’t be a good therapist and a good writer without working more than is sensible. Assume 80-hour weeks and neglect of spouses and children. I’m serious. If you want a writing income to replace a therapy income someday, you’ll have to relentlessly, obsessively produce content that you think has some value to someone, somehow, someday.
DA: So with all this settling now, where do you see yourself in 5 years?
PI: Pretty similar to now, actually, but I’ll have a Bachelor of Health Science (almost there), SaveYourself.ca’s many editorial loose ends will be tied up, and I’ll be finanically free to work a normal number of hours for the first time in my life. In 2015, hoepfully I will have a lot of peaceful days of reading rehab science and reporting on it. SaveYourself.ca will never be a large publishing business — I want to keep it operationally small — but I do hope it will be one of the internet’s largest and most interesting repositories of science-based information about pain problems.
And I will probably finally get started on writing novels. As much as I like my work, I look forward to writing something that isn’t about chronic pain!
DA: Paul, it was great talking to you. Hopefully, it will inspire other clinicians who have penchant for writing but just can’t find time to be able to take their pens (keypads, I guess) and get the words flowing. Many thanks for your time and hopefully, in the coming years, we will read your novels as well.
In addition to hundreds of articles and reporting on recent therapy science, SaveYourself.ca also offers by far the most detailed information available anywhere about two common knee pain conditions, IT band syndrome and patellofemoral pain.
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
