Start with easy acupuncture cases, they said

Graduating soon

Finally almost graduated our Acupuncture training, only exams and internship in China to go, one of our professors advises us to gradually ease acupuncture in to our practice starting with “easy cases". Start with something easy, like a tennis elbow, he said.

Most of my fellow students and myself are already practicing physiotherapists so it would be easy to slowly entice our “easy” clients into trying, or changing to, acupuncture treatments.

This is perfectly possible for existing physio clients that would benefit from changing to or have additional acupuncture treatments, but what about new clients coming just for acupuncture?

I want to share with you the case of one of my first real acupuncture clients in my clinic.

My first acupuncture case

I let my new client in, asked him to sit down and asked him which issue I could help him with. From my physiotherapy background, I think I was still expecting him to have some musculoskeletal problem. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is the story he told me.

Well, he said, I play billiards, for a long time already and I’m pretty good at it. Typically Belgian he was quite modest I found out later, he was top 15 in Benelux. Lately when I play, he continued, mainly on tournaments, not as much in practice, I have this thing where I look at the position of the balls on the table and in my head I calculate the trajectory and speed of the ball I have to play to score a point and make sure the ball I play ends up in a good position to score the next point, so far no problem.

Then I move to the table, prepare and aim, and then… I doubt. I come back up, look at the position of the balls on the table again, assure myself my calculations were right, prepare to take the shot again and last minute I change my mind, do something else and miss the shot or get ball very poorly positioned for the next shot.

Can you please help me with that?

Expecting a client coming for treatment for his hip, shoulder, knee or back pain, you can imagine my surprise, I didn’t expect this, nor did I feel prepared to treat a case like this. I took a deep breath and started thinking, not about billiards but which mechanisms in Traditional Chinese Medicine can cause him to feel anxiety, doubt, loss of focus.

I took his pulse and diagnosed his tongue and compared my findings with the energetic mechanisms I was thinking of and made up a treatment plan.

Reducing anxiety, centering focus, creating more resilience against stress were my focus points.

Later that evening when I got home I dove back in my books to check if my treatment really made any sense. It was a good basic treatment for his condition and with some tweaks I optimized the treatment for his next visit.

My client returned for 3 more treatments, reporting improvement every time until the last visit he said he regained his confidence and was more stress resilient than before.

For me personally this case meant a complete shift from treating mainly musculoskeletal problems to embracing a very different kind of new clients that come for more mental emotional related issues too.

It also taught me there are no easy cases.

Every person is different and has its complexities. TCM is not a prescription medicine where you can treat all similar complaints the same, every one is a new puzzle, and you have to make the puzzle pieces fit, for every single person over again. That is what keeps it interesting for me, every client and every day again, for almost 30 years already.

There’s an almost endless list of issues you can treat with acupuncture.

If there’s something that you would like to address, mind or body, and you’re not sure wether acupuncture can help you, contact us and ask, we are here to give you advise and help you.

#acupuncture #mindbodyconnection