Don’t Let Vlad Be Your Acupuncturist
I had a man call inquiring about acupuncture last week. He didn't know me at all and was calling different acupuncturists to decide who he wanted to see. We talked for a second and he asked me why he should come to see me over the other acupuncturist. I laughed and said, “Let me tell you about the guy I'm stuck with, Vlad”.
Vlad is my office handyman. Let me preface this story by telling you that I love Vlad. I will never not use Vlad and I am 100% loyal to him for life so don't e-mail me and say, “Gabriel, make the move, Vlad needs to get the AXE”. Vlad isn't his real name, it's made up for this blog. OK, it's his real name. He is so Vlad and there is 0% chance Vlad reads my blogs. The first time I met Vlad he said “Who do I look like?” I felt bad saying it, but, Abraham Lincoln. He said yes, Abraham Lincoln, so you can trust me. I fell for it.
Vlad always tells me he can fix everything electrical, plumbing, put up shelves, and repair anything. Vlad sucks at all of those things, he’s not good at all. He's a little cheaper than everyone else and of course works by the hour. But secretly, things that would take everyone else with experience 30 minutes takes Vlad a good two hours. Usually, there are at least 2-3 trips to the hardware store. He always has a great story about how my job was so abnormal that it was a one-in-a-million case. How can I always be the one-in-a-million? The problem is usually fixed but it might be upside down, you might need to hold the lever down a little longer and sometimes he has to come back multiple times.
I asked the guy on the phone, “Do you want to go to Vlad for acupuncture?” I think the metaphor was lost on him by the time I got to the hardware store but I said, “If you were going to court, would you want the lawyer to show that the glove actually fit? If you were going in for surgery and someone says to you as you’re going under anesthesia, ‘your surgeon is ok-ish, like a 6/7, would you feel comfortable with that surgeon? If you were getting on a Spirit Airlines flight that was transferring to a Frontier flight and the pilot looked nervous and said, ‘I’m excited, this is my first time up in the air’, do you want to get on that plane? If you are playing basketball and you need to win you are choosing Michael Jordan and Steph Curry, ie Gabriel Sher.”
3 key things I find essential to a great acupuncturist are a good education, intuition and experience.
As much as Chinese medicine is a science, it's also an art. Every time I meet with a patient I ask my standard questions: How's your sleep, diet, fluids, bowels, energy, emotions, and I look at their tongue and pulse. This gives me a good feel for how the body is running. People come in with chief complaints but getting a true understanding of what is actually going on with the patient is the most important part of my job. Looking at the tongue, feeling the pulse, and understanding the patient both emotionally and physically is the art of my job.
I remember when I was a starting acupuncturist in China. I knew the material — I had been trained very well — but taking the medicine to the next level wasn't plausible without seeing patients, and a lot of them. You can't teach experience. When patients come in with complex issues one of my first goals is to break it down. Don't think Western medicine diagnosis. Look at what you see. Put the symptoms together with what their body is telling you. ChatGPT will never be a good acupuncturist. Knowledge, experience, and intuition is what you get at the Sher Acupuncture Center, with maybe a slightly tilted light switch.
