Before, During, After Chemo: The Patient Journey Most Aesthetic Practices Aren’t Built to Handle

Angie: So for most aesthetic patients, an appointment is elective. But imagine walking into the same environment knowing your appearance is about to change from a treatment you never chose. That puts every promise we make about patient experience, personalization, and trust under a very different kind of pressure.

Welcome back to the Business of Aesthetics podcast. I’m your host, Angie.

Today, I’m joined by Deborah A. McDowell, Founder and CEO of Oncology Aesthetics & Wellness. Deborah has spent more than two decades across beauty, wellness, aesthetics, and practice operations. And since 2016, her work has focused on helping women navigate one of the most emotionally complex side effects of cancer treatment, medical hair loss.

Her team has built a patient journey around what happens before chemotherapy begins, while treatment is underway, and during the transition back into hair growth and restoration.

So today, we’re going inside that journey. We’re talking about how you prepare someone for a change they never asked for, how you create trust when that patient is at her most vulnerable, and what every aesthetic practice owner can learn from designing care around dignity and control.

This episode is brought to you by Ekwa Marketing. Deborah, welcome to the Business of Aesthetics.

Deborah: Thank you for having me, Angie. I’m happy to be here.

Angie: All right, let’s get into the conversation. Now, Deborah, when a woman comes to you before chemotherapy begins, how do you structure that first consultation so she leaves feeling like she has a plan rather than another problem to solve?

Deborah: Typically, when a client comes in, I try to refer to them as clients versus patients. When they come to the treatment center, the first greeting is that of a silence and a hug because they’re walking into an unfamiliar environment, they’re nervous, and they’re unsure of the process.

So once we greet them and there’s a hug that occurs, it kind of softens the encounter and the experience.

Once we start speaking with the client, we listen so that they can share their fears and have questions that we can answer. Everything becomes about a connection initially when they first walk into the treatment center so they can, again, feel safe.

We start the process after listening to them by explaining what to expect in regard to when the hair will start to shed and at what point they will need to prepare for a wig.

If they’re deciding on preserving their own hair, we walk them through their options for that. But again, the start of the journey is that of connection and that of listening.

Angie: Now, once the treatment is underway, how do you structure the patient experience so she still feels a sense of control when so much else in her life may feel outside of her control?

Deborah: We structure it by giving them the information of what to expect and when they should act. That gives them control of time.

When they know that they can have the option of preserving their hair through cutting it and repurposing their hair into a wig, that gives them a sense of control versus waiting for the first shed.

So we structure their pre-chemo journey so that they are able to still have their hair, a sense of self-identity, through the hair preservation and the reattachment through a wig while they’re going through chemotherapy.

That information alone helps them feel empowered and that they still have a sense of control because they know what to expect and they know what to do. So we provide them with the tools.

Angie: I think that’s such an important distinction because at that stage, you’re not simply delivering a service. You’re helping somebody maintain a piece of normalcy while everything around her may be changing.

Deborah: Absolutely.

Angie: So then treatment eventually ends, but that doesn’t mean the patient journey suddenly ends with it. How do you decide when a patient is ready to transition from managing hair loss into rebuilding her own hair after chemotherapy?

Deborah: Post-chemotherapy, during the initial structuring of their journey, we walk them through the pre, during, and post stages. So they’re very well educated in regard to their options and their hair loss and hair recovery journey.

Post-chemo, we always educate the clients that once your hair is about an inch in regrowth, at that point you can start reconsidering. Once the hair is about an inch long, that’s like two months post-chemo once all the treatments have concluded. We can start the process of reattaching their hair.

We let them know that you can wait it out. You can go three months. You can go four months post-chemo, or you can immediately transition shortly after.

A lot of times, Angie, when clients are finishing their final rounds of chemotherapy, they do have hair regrowth.

We’ve had clients as early as one month post-chemo when they’re able to start the process of getting back to normalcy, back to a sense of self.

Again, it’s the education around the client, knowing that we walk them through starting their treatment, we’re there with them during their treatment, and then post-chemo, we help them get back to themselves quickly.

Thereafter, we are typically with our clients a year post-chemo. So it’s a very structured program. There is nothing left for them to try to discover. They have all the information.

Angie: Deborah, I want to come back to something underneath everything you’ve been describing. None of this happens accidentally.

The patient sees the experience, but behind that experience, there has to be a process. And that same idea applies to practice growth.

You can have excellent providers, great outcomes, and a strong reputation. But if the way patients discover you, evaluate you, and ultimately choose you isn’t working together, growth can become much harder than it needs to be.

That’s why Ekwa Marketing is offering Business of Aesthetics listeners a complimentary 60-minute marketing strategy meeting. It’s a one-on-one conversation designed to help you step back, look at where your practice is today, and map out a realistic 12-month direction for attracting more of the high-value patients you actually want to serve.

There’s no obligation. It’s simply an opportunity to get clarity on what may be working, where the gaps may be, and what deserves your attention next.

You can book your complimentary session at www.businessofaesthetics.org/msm.

Angie: Now, Deborah, I want to move from the patient journey to something practice owners listening today have direct control over: the people delivering that experience.

So how do you train a team member to handle an emotionally vulnerable consultation without slipping into either clinical detachment or sales mode?

Deborah: One of the things is that we have weekly meetings, and what’s important during those meetings is to have a sense of not transactional selling, because it’s not that.

It’s a partnership that we want our employees to build with the clients by gaining trust and not by selling solutions or selling products.

So it’s important that they first have the emotional intelligence and the empathy for this market, this client, this demographic. And so we really hire for that.

During an interviewing process, we do a lot of role-playing. And once we onboard our staff, it’s just ingrained in the culture in regard to the importance of a client feeling like they can trust us and that we have outlined a journey that they can follow because it’s for their good.

And they believe that they made the right decision in selecting us based on that trust and that initial onboarding experience they have when they first come in the door.

Angie: Yeah, definitely. That’s very powerful because so many practices think patient experience is something you create with the room or the branding. But ultimately, the patient experiences the practice through another human being.

Deborah: Exactly.

Angie: So let’s bring this all the way back to the owner listening to us. If an established aesthetic practice wants to support oncology patients responsibly, what should it build first before adding a single new service?

Deborah: I think that an aesthetic practice looking to work closely with the cancer client, the physical experience is important.

Again, they spend a lot of time with doctors. They spend a lot of time in medical facilities. The aesthetics of a woman’s journey is not just the word aesthetics, it’s the experience.

It’s the wellness of the experience, the solutions that an aesthetics practice provides for the patient’s journey throughout their journey, and understanding how they can help that client through that insurance and financial part of their journey as well.

Again, when a client is coming in and you remove the medical information part of why they’re there and you deal in the aesthetics, because after all, it’s their image. It’s what they’re coming there for.

It’s their image, their hair preservation, their skin preservation. I always call it their hair esteem. That’s our area.

But the solutions in the physical environment, and then just understanding beyond that the cost of this experience, is what’s important for a practice to outline for the client coming in.

Angie: All right. So that was Deborah McDowell, Founder and CEO of Oncology Aesthetics & Wellness, on a patient journey most aesthetic practices were simply never designed to handle.

And I think the biggest takeaway is that a great patient experience isn’t defined by how well your process works when the patient is comfortable. It’s defined by how well it works when the patient needs you most.

What Deborah has built across the before, during, and after stages of chemotherapy shows just how intentional that process can become when preparation, communication, privacy, and dignity are designed into the experience itself from the beginning.

So if Deborah’s work resonated with you, I highly recommend exploring Oncology Aesthetics & Wellness and the work they’re doing to support women navigating medical hair loss.

And as we wrap up, if you’d like that same kind of clarity around the growth side of your own practice, you can book a complimentary 60-minute marketing strategy meeting with Ekwa Marketing at www.businessofaesthetics.org/msm.

I’m Angie, and this has been the Business of Aesthetics podcast. Thanks for listening. Keep on leading.