Reclaim What is Important in Medicine with Medical Acupuncture
By Tate Kauffman, MD, FAAMA, AAMA Board of Directors
My patient lay prone on the table for a lumbar PENS treatment. As I palpated and needled, he mentioned that he had recently had to have his cat put down. I told him that I was sorry to hear it. After a pause he added, “It was my son’s cat.”
I knew that he had buried his son a decade earlier. We weren’t just talking about a cat, and we weren’t (or shouldn’t have been) addressing just a lumbar radiculopathy.
No, he thought, I do not find it comic any more than it is comic for a boy’s cat to outlive him. — Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
As all of you know, we are in an increasingly hurried, protocolized, and fragmented medical system. Most of my patients no longer have a primary care physician who knows them, despite going to the same primary care practice for many years. Specialists’ focus grows increasingly narrow; some of my patients follow with multiple providers in the same specialty office, sometimes multiple providers in the same orthopedic office for the same joint. A parent told me that her child was not given a pediatric appointment because the acute slots were for one problem only, and her child had both cough and congestion. The status quo is unsatisfactory for both patients and physicians, and that may be part of what has brought you to medical acupuncture and to the AAMA. We can do better.
I finished placing the PENS needles and put current to them. I then placed BL42, Pohu, and listened. A curious meridian treatment followed a bit later. That afternoon I felt profound sadness, but also profound gratitude. I felt gratitude for a practice that allows patients to feel comfortable talking and allows me the time to listen and to know their complicated, messy, tragic, fascinating, beautiful lives well enough to hear what is unsaid. I felt gratitude for a specialty that has allowed me to reclaim what feels important in medicine and to address whatever it might be that ails the patient, a specialty in which it seems quite natural to smooth the edges of unresolved grief while treating a musculoskeletal pain problem. I felt gratitude for a community of like-minded practitioners.
Care of the whole patient is certainly not an idea that is unique to acupuncture or to Eastern medicine, but my acupuncture practice has helped me make a place for it in an increasingly hostile medical environment. Has medical acupuncture allowed you to also reclaim what is important? If so, might you be able to help another physician to do the same through teaching, mentoring, or simply increasing awareness of what we do? If you have not (yet) found a way to make medical acupuncture work in your practice, what can we as an organization and a community do to help you achieve your practice goals? Please reach out to the AAMA with ideas to make us better.
The AAMA is here for you, but you, too, are the AAMA. We’re here for each other, and stronger together.
Thank you for being here.
