Bedside Manner, what is this? The industry you’re in might determine how you define this. When searched for on Google, all ten results on the first page were for the medical/healthcare environment. Each definition Google provided included references only to doctors, nurses, patients, and healthcare providers. For example, Merriam-Webster.com result reads “the manner that a physician assumes toward patients.”
What about those of us in personal services industries? Is the term bedside manner exclusively medical jargon? Surely clients of body piercers, tattooers, hair stylists, massage therapists, and other similar services appreciate a nice bedside manner. Bedside manner appears to be a concept with a broader application than just healthcare.
Body piercers Cozmo Whitest (Atlanta) and John Johnson (Long Beach) tackled this topic once again at the 2022 educational conference hosted by the Association of Professional Piercers (APP). If you’re a piercer you’ve likely seen them deliver this presentation online during the association’s Core Essentials event in 2020 which provided educational content for body piercers during the COVID19 period when the in-person even was canceled. The APP’s online curriculum for body piercers can be found here. Be sure to visit safepiercing.org each fall to find details for the next Core Essentials event.
In preparing to offer the newest version of this annual class offering in Las Vegas, John and Cozmo discussed the bedside manner definition being almost completely relevant to only the medical field. This isn’t adequate for body piercers and a solution seemed simple, create a new definition specific to professional piercers.
These two body piercing educators agreed to define Bedside Manner for body piercing as “A professional piercer’s approach to providing an inherently an uncomfortable service to clients which is as mutually pleasant of an experience as possible”
