Wow, thanks for all the comments on “What Stops You?” (from marketing your acupuncture clinic) – 14 of them. I tallied them up and here’s what everyone said:

• Confidence was an issue for 7 people
• Time management – 4
• Marketing Know-How – 4
• Humility – 2
• Money – 1

First of all – let’s forget about “money”. The poster must be new here. If you’ve read my book, you’ll see that I definitely don’t advocate spending a lot of money on advertising. Advertising and marketing should be an investment anyway. This means it doesn’t cost money – instead it makes money for you. Otherwise, why do it?

So let’s look at the other “stoppers.” I could post this all at once, but most people like to read things in small doses. So, I’m going to post three separate articles on

• Confidence
  
• Marketing Know-How and Humility (they’re very related)
  
• Time Management

So here goes:

Confidence

The biggest concern seems to be lack of confidence in clinical skill. (Confidence in marketing is a different area. I cover that in my book - the free chapters touch on this. Also, I’ll write about Marketing next.) I want to be clear here. I am not a practitioner, so I can’t say if one person is more skilled than another.

I do have two points to make, however.

First, no matter what kind of medicine is involved (Western or AOM), the placebo effect is VERY real. I’ve asked Ted Kaptchuk (author of The Web That Has No Weaver) at Harvard about this. Ted thinks that many AOM results are due to placebo (if not just general effects from needle insertion.)

Is this a bad thing? Definitely not… because you can USE this to get results.

You owe it to your patients to act confident. That alone will cause some of the placebo effect. I don’t mean you should fake your way through it, but show confidence in your abilities to help them. Andy Rosenfarb explained this well yesterday in a comment:

…those practitioners who exude confidence definitely do the best in practice. Most have the “I can do it” mentality, and even if they don’t understand something about a case or situation, they are willing to DO WHATEVER IT TAKES to figure out a solution for the patient.

Wishy-washy docs are not 100% committed to the patients and don’t make very good practitioners. The most important thing patients need to get is the sense that they ARE BEING WELL TAKEN CARE OF-ABOVE ANYTHING ELSE.

That leads to my next point.

This may surprise you, but “I don’t know, but I’ll find out for you” is actually a great thing to say. Instead of the patient feeling let down, they’ll be even happier that you are taking special care of them. If you actually research their condition for them, it gives them more confidence in you. It’s obvious you’re taking extra care, and you’re not guessing off the top of your head.

I speak from experience – I’ve done this while coaching, tech support, and made myself very valuable to past bosses. People love this attitude.

So, whenever you don’t know something, say so. Then go find the answer. There’s fellow practitioners, the gancao.net forum, chinesemedicinetools.com forum, etc. (Any other recommendations?) Learning and research of OM need not be limited to the classroom.

One last thing on clinical confidence. The best I’ve ever read, by far, is Kevin Doherty’s Build Your Dream Practice. The chapter you’ll want to read is “You Will Love Your Work If You Don’t Take It Personally.”

Kevin’s focus seems to be half on marketing, and half on life balance/practice building. If you find having your own practice to be stressful, you’ll want to read it. Highly recommended.

By the way, I’ve decided to award Kim Knight a copy of Kevin Doherty’s book for her comment on losing confidence - her wording is almost word-for-word from his book, so I think she’ll get a lot out of it. Thanks for sharing Kim. (If you’ve already bought it, just email me.)