Treating patients in the acupuncture clinic, I’ve had some definite successes, some moderate successes or ongoing projects, and a few failures. Of course the obvious successes feel great, and the ongoing projects feel, well, like ongoing projects. The failures feel like a blow to my ego.

I define a failure in this context as the inability to get a good result, resulting in the patient deciding not to continue treatment.

Of course every doctor, even a good one, will encounter cases that he or she is unable to treat. Sometimes the diagnosis is incorrect, or the treatment techniques are applied poorly or inaccurately. Sometimes it’s just that the modality one practices is unsuited to the patient. But sometimes you just don’t know why it didn’t work.

A lot of this process is detective work: figuring out exactly what’s going on, collecting clues, sifting through evidence, coming up with a hypothesis or a story. A lot of it is technical: choosing the right points, inserting needles to the right depth, stimulating them the right amount; or, choosing the right herbs, calculating an appropriate dosage.

But so far, the outright failures that I’ve seen actually seem to have nothing to do with these things.

Recently a patient came in with pain in her shoulder. She was jittery and sensitive, and very anxious to be rid of her pain so she could get on with her life. I didn’t blame her — constant pain is difficult to ignore. And yet, something strange happened to me when I encountered that anxious energy she brought with her: I absorbed some of it. I found myself making her concerns my concerns.

Now, of course to some extent that’s necessary when you’re treating a patient — you have to be able to connect with their concerns, and meet them on that level. There are plenty of doctors out there who don’t even do that, and I think that’s terrible. On the other hand, a good physician is able to acknowledge those concerns, but proceed in the best way to achieve results, the way he’s been trained. And the way I was trained was to patiently gather evidence, carefully construct a proper diagnosis, and treat from both a local/symptomatic and a global/systemic perspective.

But for whatever reason, I just threw all of that out the window when I absorbed the anxiety. All she wanted was to get rid of the pain now. And all I could think was, “Let’s get rid of the pain.”

And actually, I’ve done it before. I’ve stuck a couple of needles in someone, and their pain went away instantly. It’s actually a remarkable thing to witness, and I was amazed the first few times it happened. But then I got sorta used to it. So I was pretty sure that I could work miracles on her too, and basically told her so.

During that first treatment I put in just a few needles and they seemed to ease the pain a bit. But then it came back pretty soon afterward. She came in the next week and her anxiety was even more amped up. She was ready to be done with the pain. And likewise, I got more amped up, and was ready to kick that pain’s ass, but good.

So I went all out. I tried everything in the book. I threw everything I had at it, everything I could think of, not just needles but moxa and cups and massage.

And the pain did not budge.

I was stumped.

We made an appointment for the next week, but then she called to cancel it. She had gone to a Western doctor, and she had The Diagnosis. It was Frozen Shoulder. So she was going to get some shots for it, and stop getting treated by me.

It was only then that I stepped back and saw what had happened. I hadn’t been treating her. I’d been treating her pain.

It’s a pattern I’ve begun to notice recently, actually. Those patients that I invest the most energy in, feel the most anxious about, put the most effort into getting them better — they’re the ones for whom treatment tends to “fail.” And I think that one of the reasons is that I don’t meet them where they are in the first place. These are the patients with whom I have something to prove. And the more I try to prove something, the less centered and present I am with my patients.

So it was only on the phone with her, in our final conversation, that I realized that I had never explored stretches and other exercises. Never talked much about diet. Never explored stresses in her life, or anything beyond cursory physical activities. Never really talked about what might be the emotional components to this pain (and I could definitely tell there were some). Those things I’d been taught were so important to proper treatment, I’d set them aside in my mad rush to prove myself a miracle-worker.

Sure, acupuncture can work instant miracles sometimes. Those are neat tricks. But am I really in the business to provide neat tricks? Do I want to build a practice based on patients who come in looking for quick fixes and cure-alls? Do I want to see patients a few times and then never see them again?

The answer is no. I believe in health as an ecology, and disrupted ecologies take time, care, and proper management to restore. I want to see patients who have had it with being unhealthy and genuinely want help and will be an active part of that healing process. I want to have good relationships with these people, long-term enriching relationships that are healing in themselves. I want to facilitate their restoration to health over a gradual progression.

Quick cures are great. They’re flashy, they’re fun. But the question is, what do they leave out? What do they leave behind? And where do they leave you when they fail utterly?

I don’t mean to say that I’m against fast healing; and I’m well aware that people don’t want to be paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to see their health progress at a snail’s pace. What I do want is to have the space and time and energy in my relationship with a patient to penetrate to the root of their problem, and then give them what they need to continue on their path. The swiftness or slowness of their healing, then, is ultimately determined not by me, but by their own needs. Some people may only need one needle, a quick reminder and then they’re done with acupuncture forever. Some may need years.

As an acupuncturist, as a healer, all I do is serve as a channel for healing energy to pass through. I merely facilitate the flow of life. I don’t make energy and I don’t create life. It’s when I forget my role as a clear channel and facilitator that I make these mistakes. It’s when I play God that I stumble. Then I’m humbled by how little I can do.

So, as with so much else, it’s back to the basics of going through all of the steps systematically to arrive at a proper diagnosis, the way I was trained to do. It’s about doing the work and the research to figure out just what the heck is going on. And only then is it about applying the knowledge in a treatment. And even then, maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. But at least it will be about the person and not just about the problem.

As ever, the path of the healer is a path of spiritual growth, with all of the stumbling and bumbling that comes with that uncertain, winding road.