So the first part of the MD/nurse love was the admin stuff. Getting my foot in door, planting my feet inside the door, making sure people came through the door, etc. That’s the not-fun stuff. The fun stuff (again if you can call dealing with people’s pain “fun”) happens once they’re seated and ready for acupuncture
When I first started at the hospital I was nervous of course. My biggest question was: will I get enough results to keep people interested? As I have now learned, the better question was: will the results I get be interesting enough to keep people coming?
One of my first hurdles was clean needle vs. sterile technique. Doctors will insist on sterile technique in their procedures and with good reason. They’ve seen what infections can do and they work in a breeding ground of superbugs. However sterile technique and acupuncture don’t mix easily. I’ve tried gloves: they reduce my finger sensitivity (in the end I can work around it) and slightly more dangerously they have tangled in the glove itself. Having a used needle hanging on to me isn’t especially dangerous (the needles are so flexible you need good technique to free-hand them) but it’s not something I want to deal with. Plus glove use puts out a great excess of waste for the amount of exposure I have. If there is something questionable about the person, a good handwashing will suffice (usually I just use hand sanitizer, which in itself creates problems). Alcohol swabbing is a given at these sessions, though I’ll address it’s necessity below.
So absent sterile technique, there’s clean needle technique. Basically it’s a much less rigorous version of sterile technique, though it states that I shouldn’t touch the spot once it’s been swabbed. I’ve broken that rule since I started ‘punking. Whatever. I can say whatever at this point because I’m in a hospital, treating nurses and M.D.s among others, and I haven’t had any one of them say “uh uh. Swab me” when I’ve used an unswabbed point or touched a swabbed point. So there went that concern.
A related concern at the time was that with these knowledgeable, trained people coming in and out that they would say something about how I was risking them injury with some of the locations I was using. That concern was easily forgotten since not once has there been a comment about location. They were there to be taken care of, not correct me.
So with those initial concerns quickly taken care of, I worked for results. I started these sessions as a test for myself to see what kind of results I can get in as short a time as possible. Some hospital staff come in and out for ear seeds, most stay 5-20 minutes. A few lucky ones stay about 30 minutes (on their days off no less). I deal with a lot of stress, headaches, neck/shoulder tension, back ache, foot pain. I’ve had a few patients come in for digestive issues but with inconsistent treatment I’m not sure what kind of results I’m getting. But the pain results have been interesting.
Most everyone who I’ve treated for neck/shoulder ached and tension have had great results. Many (not all unfortunately) have said that they not only feel much less or no ache, but also that they feel decompressed and relaxed. Cool. Backache? No problem. The worst cases were 2 women—1 with backache strong enough to have her limp in, another with backache + sciatica—that walked out with the biggest smiles on their faces with the degree and speed of relief from these treatments. Awesome.
Headaches also. People have come in with frontal, temporal, occipital, tension, and migraine headaches. All have walked out with pain reduced at least 80% if any at all. The most interesting one was a woman who came in with a stabbing temporal headache that had started about 45 minutes before she got there. She came in squinting, talking in a low voice, just showing all demeanor of being in strong pain. My first needle muted the stabbing sensation within a few seconds but didn’t drop the level of pain. The second needle, about 5 mm away from the first, stopped the headache completely in 1 minute. Again, her face lit up at how much better she felt and how quickly it happened.
There are other, similar stories but here’s the last one. An M.D. came in with shoulder pain. He said he had been to PT with no luck in reducing the pain. Ok. Palpated some very tender shoulder points to locate the pain as exactly as possible then went to the palm of the opposite hand and found a tender area. 2 needles less than an inch apart, a deep breath, and then had him test the painful shoulder. All this in less than 10 seconds. His face also lit up immediately when he realized he could move it with no pain. Outside I just smiled; inside though my heart was racing and I was saying “Oh my God that was cool!! And with an M.D.!”
So you see, the right question is will the results I get be interesting enough to keep people coming? For now they seem to be enough to keep them coming. And I do hope it stays that way.
