A Tale of a Nightmare Patient and Bullets Dodged

The conversations started innocently enough, somewhere around May.  They weren’t anything out of the ordinary, someone describing symptoms and inquiring if I can help them.  No big.  And, as luck would have it, yes I could.

They didn’t schedule right then, but that’s not uncommon either.  After some very-sporadic back-and-forth, they finally scheduled; I think they might’ve moved their initial appointment a few times.

Some interesting and dysfunctional themes began to develop.

Treating Friends and Family

“Don’t do it,” our school had said, over and over again.  “Don’t treat friends and family.  Refer them out.  Otherwise you’re just asking for trouble.”

I understood the basic message.  It could be summed up as a Boundary Issue.  As in, friends and family members tend not to have any.  Or at least, they’re less likely to consider them (boundaries, I mean).

Family members remember when you were in diapers, mumbling in baby talk.  Friends remember when you wouldn’t share the sky-blue crayon…or perhaps they remember you drunk-dialing your ex.  Either way, the dual relationships can become…awkward.

Screening Patients, Part 2: Personality Disorders

This is the second installment in a post series about screening potential new patients and the importance thereof.

As I stated in the first post of this series (but it’s an important enough statement that it bears repeating here), this isn’t meant to be judgmental, elitist, or exclusionary in any way.  What follows is strictly my personal opinion, which is an amalgam of my own clinical experience and my interpretation/opinions formed about the experiences of other doctors.  Nothing more, nothing less.

So if I’m not trying to pass judgment, cultivate elitism, or exclude anyone from getting care, what’s the point of this post series?  What’s the point of screening patients for various issues in the first place?  Why bother; why even consider it?

What’s up with all the friend requests from chiropractic doctors I don’t know on Facebook?

I am human.  Therefore, I like to have friends.  I like to form connections.  I like to feel connected.

Social media makes that Sweet Spot of Connected Feelings surrealistically and deceptively easy to trip–or, for my fellow Neuro Nerds, “activate”.

I’m totally congruent with average people in average society thus far.  Pretty almost-universal stuff.

What I’m less sure of, however, is whether or not Facebook is the right venue for the first-time establishment of that connection, especially between professional colleagues.  You know, people who might not want to see pictures of my cats.  Or people whose kids I might not want to see pictures of.  Or people from whom there might be personal details, dirty laundry, closeted skeletons, or other fine print that I’d rather keep segregated.

Then & Now: 7 Years In Practice

Ever since we moved into our office around March 2010 and opened our practice the following month, both my partner (in both practice and marriage) and I have felt an overwhelming sense of a time-warp.

Somehow, time supernaturally speeds up the minute we walk through the office door, and returns to its normal clip the moment we leave.

This applies across all common measurement units of time, too–minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and now, years.  Thus, even though it’s cliche to say that it’s hard to believe it’s been 7 years, we mean it: it actually is hard to believe.

When it rains, it pours

Sometimes, one can make the healthiest, most positive changes with the best of intentions and it will still backfire.  And what’s more is, unpleasant events often happen in waves.  (Pleasant events probably do, too, but the unpleasant ones are much easier to remember.)

That’s exactly what happened, and I’m not sure it’s over yet.

And You Give Yourself Away…and You Give…and You Give

Yes, that’s in honor of the hit song “With or Without You” by U2.

So sue me (grin).

I’m not a martyr.  I’m not someone to burn themselves out and say, “poor me, look at what all I do for everyone else!”  And yet that’s exactly what I ended up doing.  I didn’t intend to, not by a long shot.  But I did anyway.  Live and learn…

First-Year Learning Curve – Part 2

Wow, that last post started getting long – it didn’t feel like we’d learned that much in one year alone, but apparently we did–and more!  The rest follows below…

Learn to say no–fast.  This applies to salespeople requesting meetings, verifying those bogus “Yellow Pages” directory listings, and local vendors selling fruit out of the back of the pickup truck in your parking lot.

This also goes for patients who continually fail to show up, people who are repeatedly late, people who “forgot their wallet/credit card/checkbook”, or people who will “square up later” once their insurance is verified (many docs will tell a first-day patient not to worry about that day’s initial exam fees for now, we’ll just apply it to insurance – I say do not take this route!).