The Patient Who Already Had the Points
They were good points. That's the annoying bit.
Let's be fair about it. There was nothing wrong with that list. Textbook. Defensible. Plenty of practitioners would use exactly those points and get that woman better.
So I couldn't do the thing you always want to do, which is spot the mistake. There wasn't one. It was a perfectly reasonable answer to a completely different question than the one I ask.
Meanwhile, I'm reaching for her sleeve
Because I don't treat hips at the hip. Nothing goes into the painful area, ever. I find the meridian running through the spot she's pointing at, find the one that balances it, and work over there instead.
So there she is, holding a plan full of needles in her hip. And there I am, rolling up her sleeve.
You know exactly how that looks.
And then I did the thing
I started explaining. Nobody asked me to.
The lamp on the ceiling, the switch by the door, you don't climb up to the bulb — the whole speech. And it's a great explanation. It's Dr. Tan's. It works. I've used it hundreds of times.
She was still taking her coat off.
That's the bit I keep coming back to. Not the AI. Me, mounting a defence at a woman who hadn't accused me of anything.
And here's what I think that actually is, so tell me if you recognise it. Most of us work alone. Nobody in the next room. Nobody to glance over and go “yep, that's the one.” And we practise a method that, from the outside, looks like we're ignoring the complaint. So we get very used to justifying ourselves. Then something walks in that sounds completely certain, and out it comes, early, before anyone's even asked.
So I changed one thing. One.
When a patient brings me a list now, I read it out loud. All of it. No sighing, no little smile. The way I'd read a referral from a colleague I actually respect.
Then I put my hands on the area and I tell her what I find. That morning, the spot she pointed at and the spot that lit up under my thumb were four centimetres apart. So I said so.
And then I shut up.
She asks. They always ask. And the lamp lands about ten times better as an answer than as a defence nobody requested.
Besides. An AI can hand you a list. It cannot put a thumb four centimetres from where she pointed. And it absolutely cannot watch her stand up and walk the length of the room with the needles still in.
She didn't believe me. She believed her own leg.
What do you say when a patient asks why you are nowhere near the pain?
And be honest — do you wait for them to ask, or does yours come out early too? Mine still does. Drop me a message, in the comments below!
