The Patient - Practitioner Relationship
Treatments as Cloud Gate have a compassionate patient-centred approach.
Chinese Medical classics speak of how the patient-practitioner relationship can in itself be a therapeutic agent. Practitioners treat patients as a whole person rather than the bearer of symptoms. Patients are engaged to co-create a treatment plan including simple interventions that they have the capacity to make. The world that a patient inhabits accompanies them into the clinic. As a practitioner we are trained to consider the whole person in front of us. This means accounting for not only the body, mind, heart and their interplays, but also the particular context of life a patient’s life and its implications for health and wellbeing. Symptomatic relief is often important and necessary, however practitioners of Chinese Medicine are always seeking the root cause of the condition and aiming to intervene at the source.
We may take into account:
Qi
Quality of sleep
Stressors and coping strategies
State of digestion and diet
Emotional weather
Effects on your body/mind from the work you do
The climate or culture that surrounds you
Where you live
Your capacity vs demands
The emotional dynamics in significant relationships
External pathogenic factors, toxins, viruses, pollens, pollutants, parasites, moulds, bacteria
Ability to relax and when you experience tension and pain
Jing
Family history including dynamics and health of your parents
Significant events throughout childhood, teenage years, and adulthood
The environment in which you were raised
Genetic or inter-generational issues
Stressors, coping and survival strategies
Trauma
Effects of chronic stress
Shen
Your nervous system and its capacity to respond and cope with external factors
Your internal narratives, such as self-limiting beliefs or perceptions
Self actualisation ability and agency of the person.
Ability to experience peace, pleasure, self-acceptance, freedom and flow
Ability to connect and maintain generative relationships
We collect this data through observing signs and the symptoms that you are experiencing, in addition to posture, skin tone, speech, gait, and the light in your eyes. We use diagnostic techniques of enquiry, listening, tongue analysis, abdomen palpation, and pulse taking.
As practitioners observe life, health, disorder and disease, we ask ourselves:
What is obstructing the inherent vitality of this person?
Where can we locate the change that is imminent? Where is there discord, a lack of coherence or harmony?
How can we disrupt pathology and support health?
I love this quote by Thomas Richardson, a colleague and sometimes mentor, writing about the human that comes for treatment:
“The individuated human being that stands before us as a patient is a unique, dynamic, and multidimensional entity that is equal parts mystery and revelation. They are an impermanent, ever-changing field of paradox and complexity, influenced by their history and experience yet always capable of experiencing freedom from the tyranny of the past.”
