Me Being Nit-Picky

I was listening to a podcast called the Drunken Taoist, which I recommend highly to anyone who wants to learn more about the world and about themselves, and there was a guest on named Dr. Mark Cheng. Among the many many topics discussed was his practice and his philosophy on healing his patients. Not his method, mind you, just his philosophy on how he approaches each of his clients. He had a lot of great things to say and I really only split from him on one point and it’s something I’ve heard other people say a few times in the last year or so and I wanted to address it. He was referring to his practice and basically said that if he could help cure/fix all of his patients the way he would like, he would be broke. Obviously pointing to the fact that after he cured his current patients he would just have no more patients…I’ve heard a similar argument made about cures versus treatment, and I’ve even heard a few personal trainers and nutritionists say stuff in that same vein. I’m sure that I’m just being nit-picky and that these people are just saying this stuff to be funny for the most part, but I think there’s an aspect of truth in jokes/sarcasm and I guess I feel like poking the bear.

First off, I think that every doctor should want to heal his patients in as few visits as possible, and it’s clear that Dr. Cheng feels the same way. He even made direct reference to giving the patient the knowledge to solve the problem, which is essentially what they’re paying for. They aren’t paying to have someone give a name to something they already know is wrong; my hand hurts, yep, you have arthiritis…Ok, fix it, that’s your job as the physician. It’s not to give the problem a complicated name and hand me a bottle of pills. So, to his credit, I totally agree with that portion of his stance on patient care. As soon as you think that curing your patients leaves you without a job though, that’s where I have to call bullshit. If you’re awesome at fixing problems, people come to you to get fixed. If you do a good job, they tell their friends and their friends come to you to get fixed. Then they tell THEIR friends and so on. There are so many people in LA alone that if you cured ten patients per day, you could work every day for the rest of your life and you wouldn’t make a dent. I get the idea that if everyone got cured then there’d be no more patients, but let’s be honest, when will that ever be the case? There are thousands of people being born every day and there are thousands of people waking up with new aches and pains that were perfectly fine the day before. Plus, you could fix a persons arm and they can still come back to you with a foot or back issue right? And if your patients trust you, then chances are better than not they’ll come in for their checkups once or twice per year just to make sure everything’s on the up and up.

I don’t think that any profession that treats their customers with respect and dignity will ever be in danger of running out of business/clients. Personally, I think there’s a certain number of people that would continue to go to those businesses purely based on the fact that they get treated like a human being there and few other places in their life. I think I’ve already mentioned this in a previous entry, but I think this all comes back to people being kind to one another, human decency. Unfortunately it’s so rare that when you find it, even if you have to pay for it, most people probably would.