January, 2008

Hello!

We've created a mini-CAN for promoting our clinics in Minnesota. Of course there's a link to the Mother-CAN! Check it out.

www.mcaclinics.com

Love,
Minnesota

(c'mon, visit. It's warmed up to 4 degrees.)

Okay, well, I don't want to rub it in...but while a lot of the posts I read are from folks in areas where it is cold and/or snowy I have to say it is so beautiful down here in south Florida these days. Our local political climate might not be the best but the sunshine factor makes it all a little more bearable. I was at my clinic on Monday and was able to throw open all the windows. The rustling of the palm fronds in the wind were so incredibly soothing (almost hypnotic) that I decided not to turn on the cd player that day. Our clinic is a couple of floors up and surrounded by beautiful trees - it almost felt like we were in a tree-house! At one point during the day I thought to myself, "Why would anyone want to be cooped up in a private treatment room when all this gorgeous open space is available....to everyone!"

"You folks in the Community Acupuncture Network have just been so wonderful." Those more or less were the words of the mother of a patient who just left the clinic an hour ago.

It's been a long day and week, with my partner on vacation, and myself working 40+ hours a week in the clinic, but all worth it. Not because I was able to help someone...but because someone was helped....the "I" is really irrelevant, especially when considering that I am part of a network, a community of practitioners all sharing a common mission to throw open wide the doors of an ancient tradition and make it accessible to 95% of the population, instead of 5%. That's us - everyone part of CAN.

Hello!
I've just returned from a successful trip to Tanzania to summit Kilimanjaro. What a fantastic time and place! I highly recommend it. Our trip was cybercast (alpineascents.com) which made it fun for people to follow along. Kind of like this blog...we can see the successes and good attempts and what were you thinkings of our colleagues. We had fantastic, albeit cold and windy weather, but the expedition after ours didn't make the summit due to 70 mph winds and sleet battering them at high camp.

I've been climbing long enough and doing acupuncture long enough (8 years) to know that sometimes you don't make it to the top and rarely do you make it to the top alone. In Tanzania we chose the Swahili word "harambe" for our team name. It means something like "together we can accomplish our goal; teamwork." And, magically, our entire group of ten summited together, which rarely happens.

I’ve spent the last week agitating a small portion of the residents in my community. It seems that for some people, the issue of food can cause their heat to rise high enough so as to boil an egg atop their head. Now I didn’t intend to create anarchy or incite an Internet riot on some of my e-list groups. I wished only to spread love, sunshine, and a little personal experience about how I’d gotten my children to eat more than just apples and bananas in their daily repertoire of produce.

Here is an an interesting take on Front Mu points by Dr. Manaka in Japan that Thomas Riordan uses in his practice:

Whoo-hoo! This is HUGE news folks! We now have a sister organization in the UK!

Here's the link to their website and by all means go explore:

http://www.affordableacupunctureuk.co.uk/

Lets do all we can to help them and if you are traveling there by all means look up one or more of the clinics. We've had a couple of visits from practitioners and they are motivated!

I still haven't read his new book, but I did go to the Muhammad Yunus talk at the Philadelphia Public Library this week. Please, if you haven't already, check out muabird's post http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?22,7688 from January 15th, as well as Lupine's response at the end.

Not realizing that Lupine had managed to hand off a copy of the Remedy and info about CA to Mr. Yunus already (yay Lupine), I went to the talk with that intention. I got no where close to him. When I got there 15 minutes early, the 400 plus auditorium was already full to capacity and they were directing people in to an overflow seating in the main hall of the library, where a big video screen was set up. There, I got one of the last of probably 300 chairs, at which point people were being lead into yet another overflow hall. At least a couple hundred more folk filed in there by the beginning of the talk.

I am offering this quotation regarding our mission to have CA thoroughly permeate our profession so as to accomplish our mission of providing affordable healthcare while making it possible for L.Ac.s to earn a real living.

Thom Hartmann, The Complete Guide to ADHD.
“In 1981 I flew with comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory into Uganda, at the tail end of the war with Idi Amin. We were raising money for a refugee center I’d helped start there the year earlier, and on the plane we were talking about the Way Life Is. And he said something incredibly profound.

”I don’t understand why in America it’s always our first impulse to try to force things onto people,” he said as we were discussing Vietnam and international politics. “When you have something good, you don’t need to force it on people . . . “ He paused, looked out the window, then completed his sentence: “They will steal it.”

Lumiel sent me a link to this very, very interesting article:

http://www.livescience.com/health/070611_anger_rational.html

She sent it to me because I keep saying that I think anger is useful, maybe even necessary to doing community acupuncture; that if you're not genuinely mad about the status quo, you run the risk of getting sucked back into it. But I certainly never imagined that there might be a research study that would back me up on that!

And I think it's a really interesting illustration of the Wood Element connection between anger (Liver) and decision-making (Gall Bladder).

Pretty nifty. Thanks, Lumiel.

As a New Jersey transplant in Michigan, the subject of my former home comes up frequently. When people find out I’ve just moved here, they look at me like I have two heads and ask why. Lots of Michiganders are really down in the dumps. Some people hate the dreary cold winters. Some people are demoralized by Michigan’s anemic economy. Mismanagement of the auto industry is a huge part of the reason for this. The result has been massive layoffs, the general demise of manufacturing in the State, and the highest unemployment rate in the U.S. Michigan is also among the top rated states for highest number and rate of foreclosures in the nation. Economists predict more job losses over the next two years or so before things begin to turn around. Most people are getting the hell out of here. Why am I moving to this god-forsaken place to start my practice?

Two weekends ago I got to visit hemma, Michael Lium-Hall's lovely, lovely community acupuncture clinic in Victoria, BC. The first thing I thought when I saw hemma was that it illustrated how much the Internet can understate reality; I remember Michael's September post "Field of Dreams" (http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?35,5705) where he wrote that he was just writing his first blog post because, well, he'd been a little busy over the summer, stripping floors and whatnot. Yeah.

Yeah, wow! Hemma is gorgeous, and not just the floors. It is indeed in an old grocery store, a charming space with big windows and high ceilings and some crazily bold -- but perfect -- colors like bright orange on some of the walls. The overall effect is warmth and light. Michael and his wife are yoga teachers, and part of hemma is devoted to yoga and part to community acupuncture, which got me to thinking again about acupuncture, yoga, and breathing.

Wellness. At times, that word conjures up an idea of carefully parsed advice - eating less junk and more organic unprocessed foods, the benefits of fresh fruits and veggies, how to steam kale and collards so that nutrition is maximized, mental techniques aimed at coaxing oneself to exercise more or quit the tobacco habit, etc. Useful…but not first-response interventions.

For a health professional, the temptation is large to set up an advice factory in which one tries to sound like a knowledgeable expert. At CommuniChi, we consciously avoid that sort of dump truck approach to patient education. Instead, we use acupuncture to help people access the natural healing power within themselves. That’s more effective in overcoming pain and achieving balance than another lecture from a self-important advice merchant.

learn the value of having a community acupuncture clinic, that is!

2 weeks ago I showed up on a Sunday morning at NAP to finish the books for 2007 to be greeted by fire engines and a group of DJs/Volunteers standing outside the KOOP radio station that is right next door to us. A fire had been started (later to be revealed as arson) and there was significant smoke damage throughout the building.

As I unlocked our clinic to go in with the fire department to turn off our alarm, I was shocked to find our clinic transformed from a tranquil place to a dead, eerie space. The fumes and smoke were in and on everything...our herbs, our books, our files. I was so relieved that the fire didn't make its way into our clinic and that no-one was hurt, that I didn't realize until a day later...how much this was going to affect me.

Seeing many patients at once reminds me of waitressing. I enjoyed waiting tables because it was busy, fun and social, for the most part. Sure I had my difficult or demanding customers, but for the most part it was a good way to earn some cash while in school. I am also quite glad to have many of the skills I learned as a waitress now that I am a community acupuncturist. There is that dynamic of always having to multi-task and keep things going smoothly while in the clinic. There is also the possibility of things getting screwed up when you aren't prepared to handle them. Back when I waited tables, for instance, there was this consistent pattern of being understaffed and the whole place filling up on Sunday evenings between 6 and 7 pm, and that was the most difficult situation for me to handle.

A major benefit to joining CAN are the members-only forums where various issues of Community Acupuncture are discussed. Marketing, Techniques, Nuts and Bolts of setting up a practice, Philosophy- all of that and more are discussed.

Lately though the forums have become a bit intimidating for new members to find the info that they want and need. To answer that concern we have set up a new sub forum- Introduction To CAN. Its located in the forums page, right below the Announcements sub forum and its designed to get new members oriented to the forums, and get older members answers to questions they have. Specifically the sub-forum has three threads:

1) Community Acupuncture in Four Parts, written and compiled by Ann Mongeau. This is a [u]must[/u] read for anyone interested in Community Acupuncture as it contains answers to all sorts of questions about setting up and running practices.

http://oneminuteshift.com/videos/lynne_mctaggart_video/can_intention_cha...

http://oneminuteshift.com/videos/wonder_of_you

I was listening to NPR this weekend and a particular show caught my ear. It was an interview with Mohamed Yunus, nobel peace prize laureate a few years ago. His work is on social enterpreneuralship, sound familiar?
If you have read The Remedy, by our own Lisa Rohleder, then you are somewhat familiar with this guy’s work. He feels that free enterprise is the way to go, but that the way capitalism is set up is bogus. It focuses only on the individual and promotes nothing but greed, inequality, and dissatisfaction.

I gave a talk at one of the local acupuncture schools a while back about Community Acupuncture. I had a lot of fun. The students were interested in this new idea and were thoughtful. They asked good questions. They also ask me how did I find time to do Patient Education. You know - about diet and lifestyle modifications. I told them two stories.

Kevin Wrathall is a 3rd year OCOM student. Earlier this week he attended a lecture by Frank Gemmato and what follows are his notes that he asked Cortney Barber to ask me to post. The CA practitioner that Frank mentions that he sees is Sarah Baden. Here goes:

Earlier this week, OCOM hosted a “strategies for building the practice of your dreams” talk from Frank Gemmato, a long time practitioner in the Portland area. He made some comments that seem encouraging to CAN-land, particularly in showing the relevancy of the CAN message.

For background, Frank has practiced for 20+ years and currently has a private clinic setup within a hospital. He does the majority of billing through insurance and does a net income in six figures.

Points that I found interesting:

· He recommends WCA and Lisa as one of his three most important sources of information for starting a practice (sorry Skip!). He specifically quoted twice from The Remedy.

Hello fellow CANers,

This link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nq2KAl8bwQ is for a youtube video that I just completed with a friend and patient at WCA. It is titled “Introduction to Community Acupuncture” and is searchable by the following tags: community acupuncture CAN skateboarding extreme sport pain management Chinese oriental medicine health Moses Cooper Gage

This is the video description:

Introduction to Community Acupuncture (CA): The Community Acupuncture Network (CAN) is a nonprofit organization of practitioners, patients, and supporters whose goal is to make acupuncture more affordable and accessible by promoting the practice of offering acupuncture in community settings for a sliding scale payment ranging within $15-40 per treatment. Community acupuncture was started by the founders of the Working Class Acupuncture Clinic located in Portland Oregon.

OK, if you don't know me well, you may not know that I hate sports metaphors. So rather than going for something like, "She shoots, she scores!", I decided to settle for the Pulitzer.

All this fuss is because Community Acupuncture on Cape Cod made the local daily paper today, in a big way: http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080110/LIFE/80...

I'm not sure if this link is going to take you directly to the story, but if it doesn't, you can go to our website, http://www.acuforall.com and on the right side of the home page, click on "Read about us in the Cape Cod Times".

All-

Crack Acupuncturist Thomas Riordan has asked me to post a chart he made up for all to see. Its the chart he uses to help him navigate the ways of Richard Tan and its attached here. The following is a message from Thomas himself-

I have come up with a chart of the five systems that Dr. Tan uses. The meridians are in order of the Chinese clock starting with the Lung and I have color coded it with the appropriate color for each meridian, as you will see. I find that I need reminders and cheat sheets like this in the clinic when I am trying to learn a new acupuncture system, I hope some of you find it useful!

[attachment 202 Dr-Tan-2.xls]

Happy New Year to all!

So these days, as I look down at my 5 month pregnant belly, it's all about a little self reflection. So many changes in the last 5 years, each one blowing my mind. Graduation from Chinese medicine school, meeting (in school) and marrying my soul mate, practicing acupuncture in a BA atmosphere and then enthusiastically converting to CA after reading Lisa's articles in Acupuncture Today, starting a new CA practice and last but not least-getting pregnant!