As Chinese medicine providers, we are tasked with a challenge we were not trained for: take foreign concepts and language we learned over at least 4 years of Chinese medicine school and translate it into something our patients and referring providers can understand without thinking we’re weird.
How do we talk about Chinese medicine without initiating a confusing discussion about Qi, Yin, & Yang? It’s crucial to be able to communicate how Chinese medicine works without sounding ridiculous to the typical western-educated patient or provider.
When we learn how to communicate simply and clearly what we are doing in our medicine, then we can more easily translate that into a treatment plan so our patients understand both what we are doing with their health as well as what to expect with their treatment plan, and their time and financial commitment.
Key Takeaways:
• To replace the words Qi, Yin, & Yang with more user-friendly terms when speaking with both patients and biomedical providers
• To understand the more accurate definitions of Qi so you can start using words that don’t involve the mistranslation of Qi as energy
• To learn how to answer patient’s and provider’s most common questions about how Chinese medicine works in simple, effective, and scientific ways
• How to extract the right info from your patient in order to write a treatment plan
