October, 2007

October 31, 2007

Saturday, October 20th, marked the beginning of our community acupuncture clinic here in Victoria. We offered free treatments and had nearly 40 people in 5 hours! I felt like a busy waiter on a Saturday night – dancing from chair to chair, a big smile on my face. I was in heaven. They came!

Monday, official day one, I treated one person. I was a waiter on a slow day, hovering, checking my watch, wondering when the rush would begin. It felt like the first day of school, or worse, the first day on a new job – a job that I felt untrained for. The empty chairs afforded my brain the opportunity to generate a myriad of beliefs: “What have I done?” “How do I do this?” “I don’t know how to do this!”

Today's the day that will rock the acupuncture world like an orange tree with scurvy! Yahoo! The Pindoctor Show is now up on YouTube and we'll soon be getting a much better quality vid on the home site www.thepindoctorshow.com

I'm posting here at the request of WCA. Adrenaline, the Yellow Emperor and I are so excited that we have at least three fans (Lisa, Skip and Lupine). They also got a sneak peek and some under the table money to say they liked it.

At the core of this project is my feeling that Chinese Medicine is still largely being presented to the public at as this mysterious entity. My hope is that by using humor as the vechicle, I can help break down some of those walls. I so admire those of you who are working on legislation issues and who are committee organizers, etc. After a decade of practicing, comedy is all I have left to offer the profession! Well, at least this month.

Two weekends ago my husband and I drove 4.5 hours into the mountains of northern California, to make a pilgrimage to a place I remember spending the longest stretch of time being just plain happy. I wanted my husband to see the place I refer to so nostalgically, a place called Plumas County, where I lived for 2 years, from 1971 to 1973.

October 1st marked our one year anniversary at neighborhood acupuncture project.

It slipped by without notice until standing in the office, Tony looked up at our project calendar and said, “huh, looks like our anniversary was a couple days ago”. We had to laugh at our irreverence. Paul, Tony & I have a hard time finding a day that we can all meet, let alone put together a celebration. It’s not that we don’t love our baby, we just rather invest the time figuring out how to make her survive! :>

Things continue to pick up. We have a good base of loyal patients. Patients are passing out cards, putting up our flyers. We are definitely on the right track.

The income sucks right now but the experience is priceless.

Just to be clear...

If you want to do what we here are calling Community Acupuncture, you need to have large numbers of clients or you won't be financially successful.

To get large numbers of clients you must appeal to the middle, lower middle, and working classes of your town, city , and neighborhood.

To appeal to the middle, lower middle, and working classes, you must remove barriers that prevent them from feeling comfortable.

Most acupuncture clinics in this country have such barriers in place. They are geared to the upper middle and upper classes only. That is what we are taught in acupuncture school.

Again, you must remove such barriers.

Community Acupuncture on Cape Cod is crossing another milestone. Nearly two years after starting in the smallest of ways (two afternoons a week as part of a conventional practice), this week I am welcoming in paid staff.

I've had volunteers running the front desk since May, but now I will have an office manager. My friend deer Sullivan begins working with me today.
We're starting small at 12 hours a week, and dividing the position three ways. 1/3 or so will be working with the volunteers. I need someone other than me to recruit them, train them, schedule and supervise them, and perhaps most importantly, acknowledge them and make sure they feel appreciated. At the moment I do some of this myself, rather sloppily due to lack of time, and some of it doesn't get done at all.

As we know, at present, there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease. Prescription medications aim to slow down the progressive deterioration of parts of the brain.
From the Alzheimer's Association, Fall 2007 newsletter: "Our current statistics indicate that there are 5 million people in the United States who have Alzheimer's... One in eight people over the age of 65 will develop the disease and half of those over 85 will."

About 6 years ago, a neurologist advised that a relative (I'll call her Mary, not her real name) has Alzheimer's. The family had noticed that her memory had been failing-- she would repeat herself quite often. The Dr. prescribed Aricept and Mary took this for about one year.

For about 6-10 months, Mary had weekly acupuncture treatments at a school clinic. The acupuncture seemed to help her. She would doze or nap during the treatments. These ended when she became too sensitive to the thinnest Seirins and a Clinic Supv'r. recommended acupressure for her instead.

This post is about keeping a positive outlook in life despite difficult circumstances we all face in our personal and collective lives on the planet.

It's been a dark and stormy autumn lately. Two days ago, our power blinked out. It was delightful. My wife, my four year old daughter, and I all snuggled into a large chair together and took turns telling stories in the candlelight.

I discovered the writer and educational reformer Parker Palmer because one of my patients works with him. She is one of my favorite patients: a Vipassana meditator for 30 years, a former grade school principal, a lovely and gracious person. She told me that when she first met Parker Palmer, she was smiling so widely he asked her, "Why are you smiling?" And she told him, "Because you are one of the only famous people I've met who didn't turn out, in person, to be an asshole." Apparently he laughed for a really long time.

I know this is not a brief article, but I'm hoping you all will read and comment on it anyway. I found it very encouraging:

http://www.couragerenewal.org/resources/writings/divided

And if anyone doubts that we are indeed a movement now, check out this post in the Integrator Blog, under #7 -- including a nice plug for Communichi:

http://theintegratorblog.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...

Here's to the undivided life.

My kind of book report....

Not knowing what to write about this month I thought I’d share some excerpts from a book I am reading called A New Earth – Awakening to your life’s purpose by Eckhart Tolle. He is the same author of the book The Power of Now. Like a lot of information out there right now, it may not be anything you haven’t heard before. I think it’s relevant with all the aspects of running a practice as well as personal growth. Timing can be key to “getting” something or maybe it’s just a matter of hearing it again. With that in mind I would like to share some passages from this transformational book. I encourage you to get the book for yourself.

The post regarding ABORM brought up some challenging issues regarding specialized licensure for our profession. In my experience, specialized training and licensing creates both inclusion and division.

In 2003 I was trained, along with four other acupuncturists from around the US, in a hybrid form of Micro-Acupuncture for the treatment of various degenerative eye diseases. Since then, I have become known amongst Minneapolis acupuncturists as one of the go-to guys for clients with vision problems.

We were trained and "licensed" with a fancy diploma by an Arkansas acupuncturist. He taught us the simple protocol that has helped hundreds of people go from near blind to being able to read and drive again. It is one of those truly miraculous acupuncture treatments in many cases.

A colleague who has recently hired a new acupuncturist asked me about what helped to get me up to speed as a CA practitioner when I first started working at WCA. To be fair, it took me a while to fully understand and apply the concepts I am sharing here. There are three attached files, an example orientation page for new CA practitioners,

[attachment 135 WCAtrainingmanualexcerptsOCT2007.doc]

a CAN post of mine about my paradigm shift from TCM to CA,

[attachment 136 ParadigmshiftTCMtoCAOCT2007.doc]

and some excerpts from the first draft of the WCA acupuncture employee training manual that I am helping to create.

[attachment 137 WCACLINICORIENTATIONOCT2007.doc]

I hope this information provides new insights for CA practitioners that are getting ready to hire new acupuncturists, or have already done so.

If you are a bit confused when someone talks about straddling classes go see "Michael Clayton", which is a textbook example of a working/lower middle class son trying to fit into the owning class, getting in over his head, and pulling out in the nick of time with the help of his working class family. The contrast in value structure between George Clooney's character and Sydney Pollack's is fantastic. A beautiful supporting role in this class conflict by Tom Wilkinson really sets things in perspective.

That's the main story. But the secondary story of Tilda Swinton's character trying to fit into the rich old boys network is a piece of art too, in part because she portrays evil so well. Unlike Clooney's character, Tilda is all alone in the world (upper middle class, not working or lower middle class) and as the movie goes along has no checks or balances in her descent into the abyss, freaking out as she goes down.

Go see this movie.

First wave, New wave, Permanent wave

First I want to say how completely smitten I am with all of you, my colleagues, here at the Community Acupuncture Network. I read the blog entries and WHAM I am just amazed at this dynamic, intelligent, engaged, passionate group of people all working together towards common goals.

This is also a long post (not a really loooooong post) but I do finger yoga so I’m okay. (Skip, I’m sending you a finger sized yoga mat)

“It’s not hard to imagine the collapse of the organizations as they are constructed these days if these organizations don’t change their orientation from looking for maximum profits for themselves. To do that though they have to stop using the weapons of the first war, that of faux intellectualism, and honestly assess what they are doing.” Skip

From www.aborm.org
“Specialization in Oriental Medicine is not a new concept.”

Being an advocate and future practitioner of CA, prompts one to put a lot of thought into class and classism. Recently, I've asked myself what should be a simple question, but one I have no simple answer for. Folks, help me... what class do I belong to?

My parents were born during the tail end of the Great Depression and come from working class families. My father was raised in New Orleans and his family had very little money. My mother spent her childhood in rural cajun-country Louisiana and her family is a bunch of quarrelling dysfunctional chicken farmers who deny each other's existence (sorry Mom, if you're reading this.) Both were raised without much money and understood what it meant to go without material goods.
So, I have working class roots.

Click on the link below and reply on what you get.

(Click on the title to get the hyperlink to light up.)

Here is is:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

After working for two years as an acupuncturist in a busy community acupuncture (CA) clinic I have started to notice some consistent patterns in my clinical experience. The following are a few of my observations. I hope these ideas help other acupuncturists reflect on the many benefits of the CA practice model.

Feeling safe is a common thread in healing environments:

I am a Licensed acupuncturist who studied herbs and acupuncture and I’m an RN. I work part time as a clinical nursing instructor in an AD program at a community college and part time at my community acupuncture clinic. Since I graduated from nursing school in 1969 I have worked in clinics, ICUs, general hospital floors and spent 6 ½ years as a family nurse practitioner in a community clinic. I currently take students to an acute mental health ward on Monday and a combination ICU/cardiac step down unit on Wednesday. The rest of the week I work in my acupuncture clinic.

WARNING! This is a long post. A loooooog post. Hold-your-arms-out-wide-long. Its long because it attempts to put together thoughts that various other people have been writing on this group blog and in part because, well, I have diarrhea of the fingers. So get comfy and make sure you have the time. I suggest some cookies and milk...

There’s an old adage that says generals fight the last war, meaning that generals (and everyone else) tend to get stuck in the past, not realizing that time keeps changing the world under their feet. As a result poor decisions, missteps and confusion are the order of the day. This is particularly true of the world of Acupuncture these days. Why? How? To answer those questions we must step into Mr. Peabody’s time machine. Sherman! Set the dial to the seventies....

This month marks a year since my WCA training in Portland and a year since I joined CAN. So I have been thinking about growing up recently. I think Lisa wrote somewhere about how our profession is still in the “teenager” stage of growth, but I cannot find the posting. I really like that analogy. I think when we start studying Chinese medicine, all the choices of approach to the various imbalances in the body overwhelm us and we are easily susceptible to the suggestion that we need all that time with the patient to figure out what to do. I think part of growing up as a practitioner means not needing the time to consider all those choices and not expecting to get paid for that thinking time. It means that the patients’ needs for something simple, affordable and effective come before our need to analyze them for a long time and contemplate all the different techniques we could use to treat them. This self-indulgent thing.

Our clinic is loft-like. It would, in fact, be a big loft if it weren't for the front desk area smack dab in the middle of everything. Heck, maybe it still is a loft, I don't know. In any case, the walls do not reach the 19-foot ceilings, and this makes for travelling sound. Even though they are made of compressed wheatboard which absorbs sound and looks really nice, and when the HVAC fan is on we have some serious white noise, sometimes the loft situation can be a little problematic in terms of creating a quiet environment for our patients.

As an aside, let me say this: I love it when my patients sleep. Not a requirement, but still, it's great to see them "out," especially a whole pod of them. We'll take a peek around the corner and then come back to report "they're out," feeling all proud and happy about it. The other day one of my patients said "I don't really have anything going on, I just want to take a nap."

A loaded phrase, isn't it.

How do you choose to live in this world? I recycle, carting my stashes to friends as Denver does not implement recycling in buildings of 4 apartments or more. I do my best to drive as little as possible, but I admit to getting lazy this summer. Do I buy compact fluorescent bulbs which take more energy to manufacture and are more toxic to dispose of?

See what I am getting at here? How I choose to practice is not just about my attempt to heal individuals for a living, but how do I heal and how do I choose to live in this world. How I can can heal more using fewer resources; being bike and bus accessable for patients, making the clinic a viable healing tool for more people, having to heat/cool only 1 room rather than several smaller rooms, but still buying the plastic business card holders cause my resource/networking table was a mess without them.

I'm on assignment to write about sexism in the profession. My thoughts about this subject touch on a lot of other things I'm kicking around right now, about knowledge and power and labor and professionalism; this post can't possibly cover them all (stay tuned!). But I thought it might generate some fruitful dialogue.