thomasriordan's blog

I recently discovered wrist ankle acupuncture (WAA) and I started using it with some of my patients who have severe pain in the GB 29 area. I got some 1 ½ inch needles and started learning how to thread them just under the skin, this is usually a painless process especially if I pinch the skin and then start threading slowly. These points seem to be very powerful and there are only twelve of them so there is not too much to memorize.

I checked out the Acupuncturists Without Borders website
yesterday and I noticed that they are starting to focus more on giving free
treatments to veterans. There is a local
chapter in the Boston area (in Arlington) that I contacted to see if I could
do my part. I feel that this is
particularly relevant now because of a story I heard on NPR this morning where
an administrator VA hospital in Texas
sent out an email to her staff asking them to stop diagnosing PTSD, presumably
because of the cost of treating it. I am
convinced that Acupuncture is an effective, low cost solution to this problem. I am looking forward to getting involved and blogging about it!

I was in New York City earlier this week and when I went to the Metropolitian Museum of Art I discovered that they have a sliding scale.  I must have looked surprised when the woman told me because she said "That's just the way we do it here."  This sliding scale idea must be really catching on! 

It is only because of the sliding scale at my clinic that I can look a patient in the eye and tell them to come three times per week without feeling guilty about charging them more than most people can afford.  I was recently trying to explain the sliding scale to an acupuncturist with a boutique clinic and she said "But people would just always pay on the lowest end of the scale!"  That's not the reality though, especially when you help them get better!

After my business partner Justine decided to go set up her own clinic I thought I would hire a professional feng shui consultant. I ended up calling Feng Shui Boston which is run by Mary Stewart of the compass school of feng shiu. When she mapped out my office she calculated the “flying stars” for the year for my office. She made a point of saying that room we were using for office work was in the Five Yellows which apparently means great misfortune. No wonder I was getting headaches working there!

After reading Skip's 55-85% blog, I thought "That's the kind of thing you could only learn the hard way". After I thought about it I realized that there are a lot of things that Justine and I have learned by trial and error while we were setting up our clinic. I hope folks find some of these ideas useful; here they are in no particular order:

I found Score to be helpful especially for legal and financial questions and I loved their one day seminar in which they made it very clear how much work being a small business owner is. It also had great ideas on how to manage the finances during the first few years while the business is paying back the start up loans.

We clearly laid out all of our business agreements in a document that included a detailed section on how we would end our business relationship if we chose to do so.