My blood sugar shot up. Within thirty seconds there was a prescription: up with the insulin, and something else on top of it.
Reading up, medication up. That is what she was trained to do.
I did not refuse. I asked why.
Because a high reading is an outcome, not a cause. One measurement, one number, and hanging off it is a treatment you keep for the rest of your life. You are allowed to ask that question before you start.
She had no answer to it. Not because she is a bad doctor, but because no one in that room had looked at when that number was high. Only that it was high.
So I started measuring myself
Before every meal, after every meal, before sleep, fasting on waking. Weeks on end.
Every high reading fell between four in the morning and nine. During the day: nothing wrong at all.
That is not a dosing problem. Something else is going on there, and that has to be worked out first. Had I let her get on with it, I would have been treated for a problem I do not have, and the problem I do have would still have been sitting there.
The same reflex, on every sales floor
Deal stalled? Ring more often. Objection? Better argument. Too expensive? Discount. Silence after the quote? One more email, worded a bit more warmly.
Symptom up, medication up. No one asks when it went wrong.
And just as with that doctor, there is nothing wrong with the people doing this. They work hard, they are polite, they follow up properly. They do exactly what they were taught, and so does their manager.
The dose is being raised on a diagnosis that was never made.
And then there is the picture of the good salesperson
We have decided together that a good salesperson is an agreeable sort. Accommodating, smooth, patient, good at reading the room. Someone who above all must not push.
Those salespeople are recognisable by one thing: they wait. For a reply, for the right moment, for permission that never comes.
That is not a salesperson. That is someone hoping.
A salesperson is someone who dares to establish what is actually going on, and says it out loud. Even when the answer is: there is nothing here, we should stop.
What you do instead
Three conditions decide whether someone moves: stake, trust and urgency. If one of them is missing, nothing happens, however often you ring.
So establish first which of the three is missing. That is the whole method, and it is written out on Diagnostic Selling.
Stop upping the dose. Measure first.