PROVIDER PERSPECTIVE:
Art Chen (3)
Text Transcript

A patient that I had I discovered wasn't getting their medication. And I had done everything to explain about hypertension and the medication and that if there were any problems, we would switch them.

Again, going back to cultural contexts, was seeing a traditional practioner. For those of you familiar with the Yin and the Yang and far eastern traditional medicine theory, it comes down to hot and cold. Hypertension is regarded as a hot disease. Western medicine generally is regarded as hot medicine. And so when treating hot disease, according to far Eastern principles and approaches, one usually tries to bring about and restore balance. You treat a hot disease with cold therapy (and I know this is consistent with other forms of... as well). So that once I took one step back to understand this and recognized that was what was causing the problem with the patient not getting the medication, I tired to re-explain, reinterpret the approach. What I shared with her was that this medication, the kind I was recommending for her, because it is Western medicine, is a hot medicine but I had taken all the efforts to find the least hot medicine I could so this was relatively cooler than all the other medicines. When I explained it in that way, the patient was somewhat relieved. From that point on, the patient did take the medication and fortunately, there were no major side effects.