Open Letter to a Fellow L.Ac. -- or, a Case Study on What Not To Do

Dear Fellow L.Ac..,

Last Wednesday I had a very interesting day at work. The first part of my interesting day had to do with the fact that WCA is getting our floors re-done (I’ll get back to that part later) and the second part had to do with my business partner, Lupine, being in a really bad mood.

Lupine is rarely in a really bad mood. The way she arrived there was that earlier in the day, our receptionist, Sandy, had gotten a puzzling call from a new patient. The patient said, “Hi, I made an appointment with you last week, but I just realized that your Northwest Portland location is a lot closer to me than your Northeast Portland location -- so I’d like to change that, please.” Sandy said to her, “Well, things do tend to happen very rapidly around here, but I’m not aware that we have another location. But let me check just to be sure.” So she called Lupine and confirmed that indeed we had not opened up a second clinic without telling our front office staff. Naturally after that Lupine got curious about what had prompted the patient’s call.

Which was when she discovered that you are advertising your acupuncture practice, both on your website and in the local weekly newspaper as “Working Class Acupuncture NW.” She became even more curious, at that point, and called you. As she related the conversation to me later, she said that you explained that since you considered “working class acupuncture” to be the style of acupuncture you were practicing, you thought that there was no problem with claiming that as a title for your practice, or using it as your website address, which is www.workingclassacupuncture.net, or linking our website to yours under the header “more information” -- despite the fact that on our website we explicitly ask other practitioners not to name their clinics “Working Class Acupuncture”. Lupine explained that this style of acupuncture is actually referred to as “community acupuncture”, and asked you to change your clinic title to reflect this, in order not to create confusion among patients. You replied that you thought “working class acupuncture” had “better name recognition” and suggested to her that perhaps “we could all just share the resources”. You explained to her that you were having a lot of trouble attracting patients, despite the fact that you are doing what we are doing.

I wasn’t part of the conversation, obviously, but it seems pretty clear to me that you are using our work for your marketing without asking us for permission. You are also claiming to be doing what we are doing, yet I don’t actually remember you visiting our clinic.( I do remember having a conversation with you when we happened to run into each other at Mt. Tabor Park.) You are not a member of CAN. It seems likely to me that you are claiming to be doing what we are doing without really understanding what we are doing. Which makes it not really astonishing that it’s not working. Which also brings us to the reason for this letter. I’m not worried about you taking patients from us (there’s an infinite supply of patients) but I am worried about you confusing patients. I’m even more worried about you claiming to do what we do, and doing it wrong, and turning patients off acupuncture.

I wouldn’t be surprised if when we talked I encouraged you to adopt this business model. I do that a lot; it’s my job, actually. And the hands-down worst part of my job is hearing from acupuncturists some variation on “well, I tried doing community acupuncture, but it didn’t work/ I didn’t make any money/ you can’t make any money that way.” So I hope you don’t mind if I take you up on your proposal to “share the resources”. Your side of the “sharing” has obviously already taken place, in terms of you using our name for your website address. Lupine also mentioned to me that you thought you knew me well enough to do this, since we were in school at the same time and were briefly neighbors. I’d call us acquaintances, actually, since I don’t think we’ve ever had more than a few real conversations. But if you say we’re close enough to link our work in public, I’ll take your word for it, and if you say you want to share, I’m game. There’s something you are offering that I could really use, which is an example of how NOT to do community acupuncture -- which is potentially a very helpful teaching tool for me. So I am going to take your situation as a case study, in the hopes that others can learn from it, especially those who say that they have tried community acupuncture but it didn’t work. Incidentally, I use my own mistakes like this all the time; I’m sure you understand that by using the name of my business, you’re volunteering yourself for the same level of public dissection and scrutiny WCA undergoes.

Let’s start with your website. Diagnosing a business’ troubles by looking at its website is a little like doing tongue diagnosis with a patient -- you might not learn everything, but you can see a lot with a quick look. I also believe the saying, “how you do anything is how you do everything” -- so whatever mistakes you are making with your website, you’re almost certainly making them elsewhere in your practice.

Here’s what is on your website: 1) a page about you, with a list of all the degrees and diplomas you have, a list of important things you’ve done, a list of what you specialize in, a statement that you’ve been interviewed as an expert on Chinese medicine (without links to the interviews), and a paragraph on what you think healing is; 2) a long list of conditions that acupuncture can treat; 3) a technical description of what laser therapy does; 4) a description of how Chinese herbal therapy works; and 5) a potentially interesting page about healing foods that lapses into technical TCM language without explaining it (Lung and Kidney Yin Vacuity?); 6) lots of pictures of flowers; and 7) a statement that your clinic is “a working class acupuncture “ style clinic.

Here’s what’s not on your website: your hours, the top of your sliding scale (on the front page you only list the bottom), how your sliding scale works, what herbs cost, what laser therapy costs, what Tui Na is and what it costs, what you mean when you say “working class acupuncture” since there is no other discussion anywhere on your site of anything relating to class or politics. Now that, per Lupine’s request, you’ve changed the title of your website to “Community Acupuncture NW”, there’s also nothing else about community, what you mean by that, or what it means to you.

Reading your site as if I were a potential patient, I get a clear idea that you are important, that acupuncture is great, that laser therapy is possibly better, that there are other therapies maybe involved (because after all, you are an expert at a lot of things). I don’t have any sense that I or my family or my community might really matter to you; in fact, you have so many degrees and important titles that I’m pretty sure we have little in common. Your website is pretty but it doesn’t feel as if you put a lot of effort into it, at least not a lot of effort into making sure it really communicates something substantial with someone like me. In short, unless I’m just drifting through life waiting for someone to be impressed by, your site doesn’t have much to offer me.

Let’s move on to how you described your practice to Lupine. What she told me was that you have some nice zero-gravity chairs (four, maybe?), set up in your waiting room. Which implies that you have another room where you do individual treatments. Whether or not this is what your actual set up is, this is what Lupine took from the conversation, and since we’re basically talking about marketing here, that is what counts. As a potential patient listening to that description, I have the same reaction that I did to your website; it doesn’t really sound to me like community acupuncture, or the people who need it, are all that important to you. It sounds like a way to make some money on the side, while you are actually primarily interested in things like laser therapy, and herbs, and labor intensive things like Tui Na that you do one-on-one.

From my point of view as an acupuncturist, a lot of acupuncturists have these problems. They think that their specialized knowledge is impressive to patients, and all they need to do is to toss out some chairs, post a sliding scale, slap up a website that uses the word “community acupuncture” and patients will flock to them adoringly. When that doesn’t happen, they usually blame the sliding scale and/or the patients. They are missing the source of the problem, which is that they have not put themselves wholly into their practice. Their hearts aren’t really in it.

Patients actually do flock to me adoringly, and though at times I have mixed feelings about that, I know why it happens. Because, basically, I adore them, and they know it. Devotion is not an easy thing to fake, in part because it ruins your dignity. People tend to realize that if you are willing to look passionate and foolish, you are probably sincere, if only because you lack the finesse to be anything else. It’s pretty obvious to everyone that accessibility in healthcare means the world to me -- and that is why I have so many patients.

Which gets us back to the other interesting part of my day Wednesday, which is WCA’s floors. After five years of having cement floors covered by increasingly scruffy rugs, we are laying down new floors -- beautiful red Marmoleum floors. In preparation we had to take all of the furniture out of the clinic space yesterday, so for the first time in five years, I saw the clinic empty, the way I first saw it when I walked into it with my future landlord, before WCA, before CAN, before I had any idea of what all this was going to mean to me. Because when I first saw the clinic, I didn’t know what it was going to be -- I was just trying to get my tiny boutique practice out of my house so that I could stop yelling at my kids about picking up after themselves.

If you ever do join CAN, Fellow L.Ac., you will find a thread on the forums talking about the beauty of butt-ugly buildings. The truth is that I forgot how ugly our space really is without anything in it. I could see that last night, but I could also see that, stripped of everything, it was beautiful as well. My clinic is beautiful because I love it. It’s successful because I love it. And I loved it before it was beautiful or successful, which is how it got to be those things. Using our name isn’t going to give you anything if you don’t have the same kind of love for this work. And if you loved everything about your practice, if you really loved your potential patients (enough to think about things from their point of view), you wouldn’t need to take our name. You could call your practice whatever you wanted and you would be busy.

Hey, come to think of it, maybe we should change our name to White Trash Akkupunkture...We Stick It To Ya! Perhaps you’d like to share that resource as well.