Not very Accurate Acupuncture

Supporting Evidence

I found this on a local review website. Someone was not happy in the least, and perhaps was taking her life in her hands!

Don't even THINK about it...

Rating:
If you are in the market for a naturopath or acupuncturist, I strongly recommend you NOT go to Tamara Macdonald. I saw her at Northwest Natural Health in Bellevue, and she now also works in an office in Bothell (don't know the name but it's on NE 180th). I did not post this under Northwest Natural Health as I cannot speak to the efficacy of the other practitioners in the office there, only Ms. Macdonald. I was given the impression, by Dr. Macdonald's inappropriate comments to me, that there was discord between her and the other office members.

I went to see Dr. Macdonald with very high hopes that a natural approach would have a positive effect on my list of health concerns. When I say “list” I mean it literally – I actually presented her with a list of things that I wanted to work on with her to improve my health. One of my concerns was chronic insomnia. Dr. Macdonald became myopically focused on this one issue and the rest of my concerns completely fell out of focus, never to be addressed. She applied various approaches to my insomnia, the main one being acupuncture.

If anyone asks me if I think acupuncture actually does anything, I say, “Sure!” After all, my many, many sessions I had with Dr. Macdonald, quite a number of which left me bruised and bleeding (I don’t think this is typical), resulted in a change in my insomnia! Unfortunately, the change was for the worse. The four to five hours of sleep I was managing to get per night was reduced to two hours! The absolute most I could manage was 2-1/2. This happened directly following a particular acupuncture treatment (they were all a little different). She never even attempted to “reverse” whatever she had done, and by that point, I'd frankly just had it!

Dr. Macdonald seemed to be guessing at a lot of the things she did. She would get out books and read through them while I was in her office, looking for what to do or what to apply. She used a book to find the acupuncture points for me in many of my sessions. I don't know if this is typical, but I had the feeling perhaps it wasn't. While being a very “nice” person, she was quite scattered and forgetful. She didn't go over blood test results with me but thought she did, she often couldn't make heads or tails of her own notes, she kept “looking” for the “directions” for a treatment she thought would be fundamentally effective for me but she could never find all of the instructional pages in the entire *eight months* I saw her, she couldn't seem to get her billing right and kept presenting me with newly calculated amounts that I owed, she left me unintelligible voice mail messages and then would leave additional VM messages that "corrected" the last but were also nonsensical, etc. Her “treatment” of me would sometimes take a left turn after she spoke with her friend at the blood work lab who asked if she had tried this or that. Dr. Macdonald would then apply the lab tech's suggestions to my treatment. Often times, actually, those applications seemed so simplistic that it was amazing Dr. Macdonald had overlooked them.

The acupuncture treatments were sometimes painful and often left me bleeding. I've since talked with others who never had this experience. She would usually put a needle in my wrists during each treatment. One insertion must have nicked my artery as it started bleeding rapidly under the skin. Dr. Macdonald was immediately very panicked and squeezed my wrist so hard it felt like she would break it! It was excruciating! My entire wrist was blue following the “treatment”.

Something that was additionally disturbing is a kind of guilt complex Dr. Macdonald would attempt to put upon me, her patient, as if by not getting better I was making her look bad. She made very strange comments to this effect, leaving me at a complete loss for words. The entire experience was extraordinarily unprofessional as well as damaging to my health.

 

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