I've seen Dr. Nguyen for acupuncture at East West Medicine nine times, and after my ninth visit last Friday, I no longer intend to see her again, based on reservations I have about her business practices.
I first visited her in late November for chronic tendinitis in my left knee. She was friendly and my first encounter with acupuncture was a largely positive one. Afterward she asked me how I felt and told me that for lasting results, frequency of visits was the key. She offered a pretty decent discount for scheduling three appointments together in a six-day window. I told her this sounded reasonable, but due to the holidays and work, I saw her only once more in December. In mid-January, I came in a third time and promptly scheduled a set of three-times-in-six-days. After the third of those visits on a Wednesday, I was feeling like I was making progress, and Dr. Nguyen told me that with just another set of three visits, she could have me cured of my tendinitis. Naturally I said yes, though I had to schedule around a trip to New York I was making that weekend. I returned from New York on a Monday and had three more appointments on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Unfortunately, the walking around New York City that weekend had left my knee more sore than usual, and the three subsequent visits hadn't made a noticeable difference.
At the end of Friday's session I walked back into her office inclined to probably sign up for another three-times-in-six-days session. She asked me how my knee felt, and I admitted to her that it was probably about the same as when I'd started with her. Before I could ask if acupuncture was really working for me, she rolled into her pitch for why I needed more of it. This time, she said that it would take months of frequent visits before I would see results. I thought about quoting her previous claim to have me "cured" by now but let her continue. She went on by trying to make me doubt my memory for not already believing this would be a months-long process, going from, "Don't you remember that?" to "Maybe I didn't make myself clear..." She brought up frequency, telling me that since my total of nine visits had been spread out since November, I couldn't expect serious results. When I pointed out to her that seven of those nine visits had been in the last two and a half weeks, she paused but then brushed the point aside. Then she brought up the New York trip. She repeated what I'd told her about the knee feeling worse afterward, looked at me with a long pause and said, "Now, I don't want you to feel *guilty* about going...." and then smiled with another pause.
This last remark completely misses the point, of course. Without any treatment at all I could have easily predicted that my knee would feel mostly fine beforehand but worse after a weekend of walking around New York. I did the same amount of walking as all my friends (while also wearing expensive orthotic inserts, in fact) and engaged in no unusual physical activity. The reason I'm spending time and money on acupuncture is so that I can do normal things like visit friends in New York and have my tendinitis symptoms, if not eliminated, then reduced from what they would be anyway. Acupuncture has not helped me achieve this goal. While I may have been amenable to keep trying a bit longer, it's Dr. Nguyen's sales pitch that has convinced me to stop going.
'Moving the goalposts' to set back previously advertised results, impugning the target person's memory for having different expectations, and attempting to trigger feelings of guilt in that person are three classic moves of a low-level manipulator, and Dr. Nguyen exhibited all three in the span of about a minute. To be clear, I'm not writing here to judge the efficacy of acupuncture in general or even to dispute that some people apparently can have positive results from her practice. I'm saying that I've dealt with Dr. Nguyen directly, and in this case I know a hustle when I see one. read more
