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It is for this reason that I am grateful for your podcasts and posts. It has made me look deeply at what I do in a day, what I’m trying to achieve and where I’d like to go with myself and my practice.

Keep up the good work. Don’t worry about rambling (I know you say you’re critical on yourself – but you don’t have to apologize for it!), you’re hitting the nail on the head all of the time. I especially enjoy the interviews.

All the best,
Kenton

And my advice for students here is the same as always: read for understanding, study for understanding, listen for understanding. Take things apart, put them back together, apply, observe. When you know how it works, its a lot easier to remember, rather than abstruse information.

So let’s toast to the butterfly, and not disrespect the power of its little flapping wings (no one ever suspects the butterfly… :)

So if boredom, and laziness, are ills created by certain conditions (culture of entitlement and distraction), then those are the conditions we need to address (healing on a slightly more macrocosmic scale). The how is up for debate, and each of us have a place in making a dent in those problems in whatever creative way we can. And maybe all of our efforts collectively will bring about this “renaissance.” Or maybe we have to wait for the big disaster to wake everyone up. I’m hoping it doesn’t have to be the latter.

I totally agree with what you said about the importance of memorization and especially about how important patient rapport/management is. I suspect there are quite a few practices that fail because of this second aspect, especially practices started by Chinese immigrants who were TCM doctors in China (I know because my mother has many such friends and acquaintances). Their challenge has to do with language and bridging the cultural divide and realizing that, although every patient benefits and appreciates warmth and caring from their physician, Americans that seek alternative health care expect it that much more.

But of course, patient rapport is an art that most everyone could stand improvement in, myself most certainly included. My sessions at the student clinic for massage school on the whole tended to be very superficial as far as the actual talking went. Basic intake information, ok, get on the table. And some clients clearly steered it that way, but I know a lot of it had to do with my own nervousness. I also can’t blame on the lack of time because rapport is something that can happen almost instantaneously. Question is how to create that with every client, no matter their personality, manners, etc.

This podcast also made think about the show House, M.D. It’s entertaining and exciting, with very engaging characters and all those other elements of good TV, but in light of thinking about holistic medicine and patient rapport, what the show depicts is a very clumsy way of practicing medicine. I know it’s fiction and doesn’t necessarily reflect what goes on in a real hospital. But as I was watching House’s team dispense toxic drugs and drastic, potentially fatal interventions, in a purely left-brained trial and error manner, half the time without being in contact with the patient (let alone through physical touch), I had to think that this probably isn’t so far from the truth of how allopathic medicine approaches its patients.

Like I said, it’s a fun show but I would like to see a show that emphasizes the human story of the patients, and not just as diagnostic puzzles or merely the boring container for a more interesting disease. I’d also like to see more examples in popular fiction/media that give a little glory to the physicians who aren’t in the ER’s. Maybe some writer will figure out how to pitch that one to the producers.