Consultations

What is a consultation like?

Your relationship with Chicken Soup starts with a consultation. Prior to a face-to-face meeting, your practitioner will preview your relevant health history, including western labwork and reports and any treatment plans from other practitioners. She will also want to read a health narrative written by you; this is the best way to guide us to understand not only why you are coming to us for help, but also your own priorities and questions. In this way, the consultation time can be optimally focused on your needs.

In the consultation itself, your practitioner will discuss your questions and health history with you. She will also ask you questions, take your pulse, and look at your tongue in order to come up with a Chinese medical diagnosis for you.

At the end of your visit, you and your practitioner will agree on a treatment strategy, and your practitioner will develop for you a tailored Comprehensive Treatment Plan. Your treatment plan will reinforce for you your practitioner’s diagnosis of your syndrome from a Chinese health perspective, and the steps she recommends to help you facilitate your own health, including acupuncture, herbs, diet, exercise, and any referrals or other recommendations she feels are appropriate.

After your consultation, you are encouraged to come back to the clinic for follow-up. For different people, this will mean different things:

	All clients are encouraged to e-mail or call with questions they have about their treatment plan. Clients who are local to the Bay Area may continue to come to the clinic for acupuncture and/or herbal follow-up and monitoring. Our clients who live outside the Bay Area may take advantage of our Case Management program, in which we keep in touch with our clients by phone and e-mail, continuing to monitor their progress according to labwork and their local providers’ reports, answering questions, and making suggestions for changes in their treatment where appropriate. All of our clients, wherever they live, are encouraged to schedule follow-up consultations where great changes in their health suggest an opportunity or challenge for strategic changes to their treatment plans.

Consultation Fees

Consultation complexity as well as your choice in practitioner both factor into your experience for initial consultations.

For people with HCV, HIV, cancer, complex reproductive health issues such as endometriosis, or other highly challenging situations, we suggest seeing Misha Cohen, OMD, L.Ac., for the initial consultation. Such consultations last 1.5 to 2 hours, including Misha’s time to preview your health history, the consultation itself, and time afterward to develop your treatment plan. If there is time in the consultation, Misha may provide a complementary session of acupuncture at her discretion.

For our clients with HCV who are planning on undergoing Interferon therapy, or who are dealing with such internal medicine issues as irregular menstruation, immune problems, mental health issues such as anxiety or depression, we suggest seeing Nancy Legato, MS., L.Ac., for your initial consultation. Such consultations last 1 to 1.5 hours, including Nancy’s time to preview your health history, the consultation itself, an introductory acupuncture session, and time afterward to develop your treatment plan.

All our practitioners are HCV-certified; trained in HIV, cancer support, and fertility issues; and are able to follow you for any of these conditions in our clinic. Also, each practitioner specializes in Chinese herbal medicine and can write individualized formulas as well as prescribe prepared herbal medicines.

Sometimes clients have an acute pain syndrome unrelated to a larger health issue and need to be seen more expeditiously. In these situations, we are happy to find time in our schedule for a brief intake with acupuncture, intended to meet a short-term and non-complex need.

At Chicken Soup, the practitioners work together as a team. You can be assured that, no matter whom you see in your initial consultation, your practitioner will draw on the expertise and experience of the other practitioners in the clinic as appropriate. In your follow-up treatments, you may see whatever practitioner makes the most sense for you in terms of schedule and knowledge, knowing that whomever you see will be looking at the same treatment plan and working on the same page.