Coordinate Expectations

There are diseases in which the patient need to have patience to start see results or some changes.

This cant be seen or felt right away, for example: patient which get chemotherapy, after getting chemo the blood counts could drop down, so if you get acupuncture or having chinese herbs, after week or two, can start see some improvement.

A month ago, new patient came to our clinic, a guy in his forties who suffer dryness and itching on his palms, over 20 years now. The dermatologists them selves couldn’t diagnose for sure what is the problem.

Some diagnosed eczema which didnt have results with its medications.

We did chinese diagnosis and started treating: acupuncture and herbs internally and afterwards also externally. this week the patient came and said that in last 2 days, he feel some light improvement.
We told him that its good but still cant tell anything, because this kind of problem, need to treat at least 3 month to see if there is result or not and even afterwards there could be lots of ups and downs till we arrive to some stable condition.

2 hours ago, I got message from the patient, he decided to stop the treatment because it aggravated these few days and got back to use steroids.

From this event we came to the conclusion, maybe our coordination of the expectations weren’t good, although this week we emphasized that need to continue treat at least 2 month before deciding if the treatment works or not and also dermatological diseases take time (mainly when we talk about 20 years of disease) of course it also depend on the weather but maybe that patient didn’t have enough patience and its always easy to give up and get back to the old habits- taking steroids.

No need to blame anyone, eventually everyone decides what good for him