OK. So you've mastered the properties, constituents, uses and contraindications of a few dozen herbs-- or a few hundred. You've read so many herbals you start to speak in Latin when admiring your mother-in-law's garden. Heck, you don't even stumble over the pronunciation of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, and think other students who still call them "PA's" are somehow inferior to your supreme intellect. Well hold on to your pinking shears, neophyte-- you haven't dived into the world of clinical work just yet.
In my considered opinion, more would-be-herbalists (and many of them quite learned) are turned off the path by the rigors of clinical evaluation than at any other point in their training. For some, it's the ever-so-delicate balance between collecting good client data and crossing the line into unlicensed medical diagnostics. Others have a difficult time accepting the poor choices lifestyle made by their clients and can't resist the temptation to lecture instead of educate. And a good number simply have a difficult time implementing their classroom and fieldwork into practical applications and the biological complexities which await them in a clinical environment.
Helping living, breathing people with their health decisions is hard. In fact, if you were to poll any holistic health care provider, you'd probably get the same sentiments, regardless of the healing modality offered by the practitioner. Unlike allopaths, there are no hard and fast rules of what symptoms tell you when to prescribe a magic pill. We are taught to tune in to the client with all of our senses, and choose an appropriate path based on the living, breathing person in front of us, a much more demanding responsibility than schlepping whatever pharmaceutical the rep has incentivised us to promote.
A successful clinician exudes a sense of confidence, but not arrogance. He is not required to know everything, only his limitations. He should make the client feel at ease, not intimidated. His body language, attitude and demeanor should all work towards building a trusting, sharing and nurturing atmosphere between himself and the client. Leave the pride and "professional detachment" in your other suit, for the person in front of you needs you as much as a friend as a practitioner.
Posted by Evo Terra at September 22, 2003 10:49 PM | TrackBack (0)