The Importance of Tipping
Tipping is vital for the success of The Acupuncture Hospital. Medicine is a business where ‘client’* needs and healthcare provider can have power imbalances. This means that doctors have a unique role in society.
Imagine you are having a heart attack and feel that you are going to die. A callous and uncaring doctor could, at this point, offer you life-saving surgery in exchange for your house. In this situation, if you were sensible, you would save your life and lose your house. However, is this fair?
We won’t go into the ethics of whether this is, although my opinion may surprise you, but this is currently what often happens especially in the USA. This is not hyperbole either, I have at least one personal anecdote of pretty much exactly this story.
The Acupuncture Hospital is dominated by a strong ethical code which is concerned primarily with your health, not profits. However, this doesn’t mean that myself, the practitioners and interns don’t live in the real world with real bills and real overheads. We need to eat and enjoy all the things you enjoy too.
Rather than price gouging we would rather appeal to your gratitude. This is where tipping comes in. Tipping when you get better.
To get perspective on how much you tip you could consider the real world benefits of improvement:
How much is a good nights sleep worth?
How much does a (private) hip operation cost?
What is being free of pain worth?
These are not necessarily easy questions to answer so to put these in context you could consider practical expenses:
How much have you spent on holidays in the last year?
What have you spent on meals out in the last month?
What is your monthly income?
Tipping is entirely up to you and a reflection of your gratitude. The Acupuncture Hospital exists for the health of the community and we treat without prejudice. That said, realistically, without gratitude from said community it will cease to exist.
As one example, there was an individual for whom acupuncture saved his sight so he could then drive again and also corrected his heart so he didn’t need an operation: how much is this worth?
In the intern clinic all tips go to the interns. Patients can also tip the hospital to develop the hospital. All tips to Dr Keown will go towards running and growing the hospital.
*Importantly, this is why patients should not be called ‘clients’. Clients have a choice as to whether they take a service or not; wheras, implicit within the doctor-patient relationship is one of possible dependency built on trust. In the example above, having a heart attack, you can hardly shop around or go home to consider it.