expert's view

Earlier this week, at the end of my weekly community acupuncture shift, I was talking to one of my very regular patients about her recent experience with a doctor. She has been having a lot of digestive problems (possibly parasite stuff) and we have been keeping her symptoms very much under control with regular acupuncture for nearly a year, but she is really working hard to get to the bottom of the situation. So she went to see a really famous “holistic” doctor in Marin County (mostly a very wealthy part of the San Francisco Bay Area). This doc has written several well-known books about nutrition, and so my patient had high expectations of her visit to him. During her meeting with the doctor (who was meeting her for the first time), he asked a lot of questions about her family history and her relationship with her father, etc. He also proceeded to make a lot of assumptions about the influences of those relationships on my patient’s state of health. My patient is a young Latina, born and raised in Mexico in a poor family, and she had to take at least two buses to get to this doctor’s office. She was put off by the doctor’s style of questioning and assumptions and felt violated personally by all the questions. She said she felt that by trying to analyze the supposed influences of her relationships on her physical health, he disregarded the immediate situation, which is: she is in pain and having digestive problems. She was not there to hear an expert who did not know her tell her that she has a father problem. She went to see a doctor to help her figure out what is happening in her actual physical gut and correct it.

As we kept talking, my patient said that after seeing him she was so happy to come to see me for acupuncture. Her explanation of it was that she believes that I am a “real” healer. I gently clarified that perhaps the reason she feels so good after acupuncture, is because of her relationship with the acupuncture itself and the fact that I try not to get in the way of that relationship. I told her that my job is just to be the hands that guide the needles and the energy, not to figure it all out for her. As I said that, her eyes lit up and she pulled herself up to stand more upright. I could see that she got it and it felt powerful. She understood - she does the work, I just provide a bit of encouragement. That’s why it feels more “real”, I guess. It was a very rich moment for me.

Lisa and Skip are writing a new book about the clinical aspects of doing community acupuncture and on the night the conversation I just described occurred, I came home and read an excerpt from their new book posted on CAN member forums. If you are not a member, I would say it’s worth it to join just to read that excerpt – it is that good. Of course the part that struck me deeply that evening was the one about understanding what our job as an acupuncturist really is. I think this part is so important to be clear with ourselves about – then we save so much energy and bring a lot of ease into our relationships with our patients.

I will include one partial brilliant paragraph here, I hope Lisa and Skip do not mind, I just can’t imagine saying this any better:

"To effectively communicate with patients as an acupuncturist, you have to be clear that you are just an acupuncturist, and you are just concerned with the acupuncture part of their lives. You are not a shaman and you are not trying to save their souls. You are not a psychotherapist and you are not trying to find out about their childhoods. You are not a doctor and you probably are not going to need to know the details of their past surgeries. You are an acupuncturist and you are going to help them establish a relationship with acupuncture."

I can’t wait for more, guys. And thanks.

-tatyana