How to Deal with Impatient Patients

published 1 YEAR AGO | 2 MINS READ

Have you dealt with patients who want quicker results? ​(Even when their complaint has been there for years...)

Or patients who are convinced that more is better? ​(More needles, more herbs, more modalities...)

Well here's a story I would tell some of my impatient patients.

Impatient Patients

It's pretty common that patients want fast results, and many people in the west have this attitude that "more is better."

For example, I got this questions recently:

Can I eat 100 grams of fresh ginger and a tea spoon of dry ginger everyday? That's a lot of ginger.

But this is a common thing. I even remember one of my clinic supervisors in school saying, "You tell people that ginger warms the Spleen and is good for digestion, and now they want ginger everything. They cook with ginger, put it in their stiry-fry, drink ginger tea, eat ginger candies. But too much ginger just gives them Stomach heat. Just choose one of those things and do it consistently."

Burnt Fish Sticks

This is a little anecdote I tell those patients:

When I was little I wanted fish sticks, but the instructions said you had to thaw them first. Well I was impatient, so I figured that I could just change the oven temperature from 350° to 425°. Because surely the increase in temperature would compensate for the fact that the fish sticks were still frozen.

I was wrong.

I really just ended up with fish sticks that were burnt on the outside and still frozen on the inside.

Slow and Steady

So this is a story I would tell my patients who think that more is better. This is especially true for tonifying qi, tonifying yang, or warming the interior.

Taking large doses of Korean red ginseng won't give you more energy, it will just create heat. Too much moxa on ST-36 will just give you heat rising up yangming channel (red face, red eyes, shen disturbance). Too many blood tonics will just create stagnation.

So this a quick anecdote to encourage patients to be more patient and take a slow and steady approach.

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What about you?

Do you tell these kinds of stories or anecdotes to your patients?