We often tend to forget that we have, in ourselves, the very best and most essential of diagnostic tools by which to track down our patients’ guardian elements. For it is only through us, rather than through medical equipment or clinical tests, that we can work our way towards a diagnosis. It is our own sense of smell, our eyesight, our hearing and our emotional antennae which create the sensory mediums through which we assess what is coming from the patient towards us.
Above all, though, none of the diagnosis we make through our senses, however acute they may be and however accurately they lead us towards a particular element, will be sufficient in itself to encourage a patient’s elements to respond well to treatment directed at them, unless the practitioner has first managed to establish a good relationship with their patient. It is the strength of this relationship which helps the patient’s elements to respond positively to treatment.
We often overlook the need to establish the groundwork for this relationship as early as possible. The elements will be reluctant to respond positively to treatment, however well it is focused on the correct element, if this relationship has not yet established itself on a secure enough footing to make the patient relax sufficiently to trust his/her practitioner.
The order of priority in treatment should, therefore, always be, first to establish a good and caring relationship with your patient, and then to concentrate on trying to pin down their element, rather than doing this the other way round, which we often tend to to. If our patient is at ease with us, it means that we are offering them something which is helping to relax their element. It is then by taking steps to trace what it is within ourselves that we are actually offering our patient that we will find that, often unconsciously, we are basing our interaction with our patient on a correct assessment of their needs. And that means that at some deep level we are responding accurately to our patient’s element. And we should, of course, then use this information to help us in our diagnosis,
