You’ll be welcomed into the office and then given an iPad open to our electronic health record system. The initial intake is carefully detailed, so your first visit is longer than follow-up treatments.
After the office forms are completed, you’ll have an extensive intake session, covering a wide range of questions, serving as a foundation for our differential diagnosis and treatment strategy.
Some of the questions may seem entirely irrelevant to your condition, for example, asking about the quality of your bowel movements when you came in for back pain or your emotional state when you came in for menstrual problems. The answers you provide to the questions, however, along with other basic diagnostic tools such as looking at your tongue, palpating your abdomen, feeling your pulse, allows us to tailor the treatment specifically to you.
Most of the time, if you have come for acupuncture, you can expect to be treated at the first visit. The individualization of the treatment is one of the strong points of oriental medicine. It is why people may experience broad changes within themselves after receiving acupuncture for a specific complaint. It also means that the treatments can be modified over time if they are not proving effective.