September 4, 2019

Over the course of 15+ years of private practice I have realized that there truly is an art to being a continuously successful and completely fulfilled practitioner. Sometimes we get burned out. Sometimes our patients get bored with the same treatment every time they come in. Sometimes we get a patient that our traditional treatments don’t seem to help effectively. So, what do we do? In this article I hope to offer you some ideas. While I have a steady stream of new patients I also have a solid base of returning patients – my “regulars”. They have been coming to see me every week or every two weeks for years. I have found that for these regular patients it is important to keep the treatments fresh, new and exciting. Luckily for us, practitioners of TCM and alternative medicine, we can be creative and add different things to our treatments to enhance the experience, maintain the transformation in our patients and keep them coming back to us. Whether you are a brand new practitioner or a “seasoned” one like me (so much better than saying “old”), it is absolutely vital to keep your practice fresh and keep your bag of tricks filled so you can approach all types of situations. By doing so you will not only increase patient satisfaction, you will also increase your own job satisfaction greatly. In this article I share 6 simple and effective things you can add to your treatments and/or practice to prevent burn out and/or stagnation, enhance the over-all treatment experience and increase patient satisfaction: Aromatherapy. I have always used aromatherapy in my practice and patients love it. The easiest way to incorporate this ancient healing technique is to simply add essential oils or aromatherapy sprays onto a cotton ball and place the cotton ball within your patient’s sniff zone while they are receiving a treatment (i.e. place the cotton ball on their chest or under the head rest if they are face down). Then, when the patient leaves after their treatment have them take the cotton ball with them, instructing them to smell the aromatherapy frequently to keep the treatment going through their body. Even though it is a cheap little cotton ball with aromatherapy on it patients will covet it like prized gold and look forward to their cotton balls with each treatment. I once walked a patient to her car and saw a line of cotton balls on her dashboard from prior treatments. For basic aromatherapy you can add lavender to cotton balls to help them relax or try a citrus oil like grapefruit or orange to move Qi and increase energy. It’s simple – we all have cotton balls. It’s effective – efficacy of aromatherapy has been proven over and over again in clinical trials. It is inexpensive – it costs you pennies and pays you back in spades when your patients want to come see you regularly. It has even been proven that adding aromatherapy to an acupuncture treatment increases its efficacy. Cards.  No, I don’t mean business cards.  I’m talking more about oracle cards or positive affirmation cards.  While thought leaders like Doreen Virtue and Denise Linn were some of the first people to come up with these cards, everyone seems to have their own deck and there are decks for all areas of life.  Louise Hay has positive affirmation cards, Deepak Chopra has several decks for spirituality, Doreen Virtue has dozens of decks and now Gabby Bernstein, one of our newest thought leaders in personal development, has her own positive card deck “Miracles Now”.  There are even little tiny angel notes that have positive affirmations on them that you can have placed in a bowl in your waiting room.  Patients can pull one while they are waiting and take it with them as a little positive pick me up.There are several ways you can use them with your treatments. You can have your patient pull a card before treatment as a way to get them to share what is going on inside them. Perhaps the chosen card reminds them of something they forgot to mention to you or the card really speaks to how they are feeling. So much is revealed in these discussions. You can also use them to provide encouragement. I’d like to share one particular experience I had with using these types of cards. I had a fertility patient who was finishing her third month of treatments as was becoming impatient as she wanted to get pregnant now and didn’t understand why it was taking so long. I asked her if she wanted to pull an angel card from Doreen Virtue’s Daily Guidance From Your Angels card deck. She agreed and after shuffling the cards a bit she pulled one from the middle and it was the “Child” card which reads: “ Your life purpose involves helping children – A child in Heaven is saying ‘I love you’ – Pregnancy or adoption might be part of your life”. She couldn’t believe it and started to cry (I couldn’t believe it either!). Then she said to me: “Hey, are they all Child cards?” inferring that I may have stacked the deck. I went to turn over all the cards and show her that there were 44 different types of cards in the deck and a card fell on the floor between us. I picked it up and we both looked at it. It was the “Have Confidence “card. We both laughed. She felt encouraged and left my office. She conceived 2 weeks later. True story!! Auricular To Go.  If you are not already using ear seeds I recommend adding them to your practice even if you just put a seed on Shen Men.  I do not provide ear seeds on every treatment or even on the first treatment.  I save it to add to future treatments.  It can also be something that you can suggest at the end of a treatment.  For example:  “While