July, 2008

WCA just showed up in Portland's shiniest periodical, Portland Monthly Magazine, in their "Best of the City" issue: "our surefire, gotta-get-cracking, must-do list of the city's most fabulous people, places, and things". And not even in the "local color"  section, in the beauty section of all places. Of course, the needle -er and needle -ee in the photo, our acupuncturist John and receptionist Carolyn, are of course extremely attractive. But what is this strange feeling I'm having? Is this what it feels like to be fashionable?

 Acu-schools

In the greater economic world there's a truism that in a recession colleges do well because more people enroll.  It's a truism because that's what's happened in past recessions; it's well documented. However from my talking with Acupunks and reading emails and blog entries I think this recession will not be so favorable to Acu-schools: they will at most stay even and probably several (or more) will fail. Needless to say for private practitioners the failure rate will increase over the already bad 50%-80% that already exists.

This one is asking us for our feedback.  This is a great opportunity to publicize our CAN movement. http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/429/index.html  The video brings up a lot of issues we address with our CAPs, and falls in line behind M. Yunus' Creating A World Without Poverty.   Anyone have any ideas of how best for us to send our feedback?

This last winter, and now this summer, like many others, I have caught some nasty bugs.  After being sick for quite some time in March, I finally brokedown and went to an M.D. to have some tests done.  I had received my tax refund, so I decided to use that money to go.  When I told my mom I was going, she told me to ask them for a cheaper rate, a no-insurance-discount-rate.  I assured her I would--after all, I didn't want to pay them any more $ then I had to.  But, when I got to the doctor's office, there was a couple of receptionists and a few other patients in the lobby.  I wanted to ask for a better rate, but I was ultimately too embarassed.  I was sick.  I felt weird bargaining for a cheaper price for my own healthcare.  What was it worth to me to get better?  How could I put a price on that and then ask for a cheaper one?

"In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty..."

The essentials of community acupuncture are : an affordable sliding scale (ranging from $15 - $40 per treatment) and treatments in a group setting. And (to be listed on LOC) being open enough days of the week (at least 3) so patients who need it can have frequent and regular treatments. CA business owners  are agreed on this.

Where  some disagreements arise on the CAN site, as I see it, are in  non-essentials. Community acupuncturists are independent business-owners. As long as the essentials are in place, there really is no reason for anyone outside a particular practice to criticize or judge how the bu-owner is conducting his/her practice. CA practices are not franchises, so there are no written agreements or contracts signed before starting up a CA office.

70 grand opening treatments on June 17th
69 treatments from June 18th to June 30th in 8 business days
115 treatments in July in 13 business days
62 scheduled for free Friday on the 25th
316 total treatments

$1430 in June
$2195 in July

These are our numbers for our first full month of operations at Tucson Community Acupuncture. Our projections for the first month were way low and we are actually just under our projections for month three.

I should also note that we have done a number of trades and sold several acu-passes, which skews our numbers a bit. If we filtered these out our average take per treatment would be a bit higher.

As far as the numbers go, we are very happy with the rate of growth so far. The summer in Tucson is a down time for everyone, so the fact that we have been as busy as we have been for our first month of operations has been great!

In March of 2007 I attended a workshop at WCA in Portland on community acupuncture, it was the missing piece in the puzzle for me, I returned home and began the work of creating Victoria’s first community acupuncture clinic.  We opened on October 20th.  Since that time I have become very comfortable in my role as community clinician – each day feels like a working holiday, as I don my uniform of jeans and t-shirt, select a favorite CD, and greet my customers.  When I’m on, I feel so at ease, so grateful.  To me community acupuncture is largely devoid of politics, it is simply a personal preference as a way to practice my trade – it is a win-win.  One area though that I was not as well prepared for, is that of an employer.

I’ve been thinking about the fracas, brouhaha, kerfuffle (or whatever you want to call it) that broke out in the comments under Matt’s post “Teaching CA in Schools”.  I decided to put my thoughts into a letter to the CAN Board and post it in the forums, rather than add to the above-mentioned fracas, or post my whole letter here on the front page.  How come?

There's a link below to a recent Citypaper article about our clinic - it uses the same photo we gave to the Utne reader (but there's a caption this time, and I quoted part of it in my blog title).  

After a slow June, it seems like this article may be helping to make us super busy again (phew!).  And, I just have to report the best response to it so far:  a phone message from someone yesterday who said she saw the article, and was interested in attending a training to learn how to do what we do. She loves healing and has a degree in biology.  We'll call her back today to give her the bad news about licensing and the $100,000 education.  

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

Mahatma Gandhi

One of my last two classes for my acupunk schooling is practice management where we discuss different aspects of running an acupuncture clinic. The other night the topic was insurance, basically its purpose, how it works, and some overview of what is needed if we want to bill insurances for patients, etc. A topic such as health insurance mixed with the hippy, alt. med. environment of acupunk school naturally leads to the telling of insurance horror stories and how patients are frequently hurt by the big, greedy, uncaring insurance corporations. I am not saying the stories aren’t true or horrific because they probably are; it was the irony of the situation that struck me because the next topic for the class was….fees.

Some clinics in the survey described in my blog, "Survey of CAN clinics" also included data about how many people pay at what level on the sliding fee scale.  The conventional wisdom outside of CAN seems to be, "Why would they pay more if they can pay $15?"  Below is the experience of 4 mid sized clinics in the Twin Cities area and one in Wisconsin.  These numbers reflect 3-12 months of figures for the clinics.

TC and WI data June 08

Percent of those paying at different $ levels by # chairs in the clinic

Skeptics in the acupuncture community say that CA clinics can't be successful.  A variety of reasons are cited - prices too low, patients want one-on-one attention and wouldn't like treatments in a room with other people, Dr. Tan's methods don't produce lasting results, using second hand furniture means the clinics aren't pleasant and no one will come and more.  

 I decided to see how the clinics are doing.  I did a survey of the clinics on Locate a Clinic in May of this year.  The results are below.  

Overall Conclusions:

The only correlations I could see from the data are that:

With a 7 week old baby, I hardly have time to shower much less blog!  But I wanted to check in and update everyone on our new clinic.  My husband and I had Inner Source CA in Bradenton, FL.  We relocated to Sarasota, FL and joined forces with 2 colleagues (for more flexibility with the baby).  

We have 1 community room with 6 La Fuma recliners, a library, reception, 2 areas for tables and a back area for our stuff. 

Our new clinic is Sarasota CA.  We had a "mini" grand opening on June 28th.  We offered refreshments and free treatments.  We sent out mailers to all of our patients and spread the word.  We had about 75 people come through, and about 25 treatments.  People made donations and it was a success. Now we are working on other marketing and such.

I like the focus on group qi. Here's another couple angles.

1)I
think our nature as humans is to be interconnected: emotionally, creatively, by
touch, and all sorts of other inexplicable ways. But, our daily lives
are largely set up to shut down these connections so that we can be
more productive, so that we consume more. We all try, though, all the
time, to restore these connections; and, every way that we do is a big
political act. If our natural connectedness was fully intact, it'd be
much harder for powers to wage wars in our name, flaunt contempt for
democracy and human rights, or deny us health care.

Has anybody else seen this video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY

Be sure to click "watch in high quality" right underneath the video.

My favorite comment on YouTube about it: "This is just so ridiculous -- so why am I crying?" 

And my second favorite comment: "ANYBODY WHO IS HAVING A BAD DAY SHOULD WATCH THIS VIDEO"

I think I might have to use it, plus Justine's post, to explain why I love community acupuncture. Or I might just keep watching it over and over.

When I first learned about community acupuncture, I was told about the benefit and existence of group qi.  Being the lifelong-skeptic of all things non-provable as I am, I was quick to file that thought back in my mind as an unimportant fringe benefit in the grand scheme of things regarding community acupuncture.  After all, what really mattered most to me was being able to offer people affordable rates so that they would be able to come and get better and I wouldn’t feel strange asking them to pay something that I myself would feel uncomfortable paying.

Fortunately, however, by the simple time I've spent in several community acupuncture treatment rooms, either as the acupuncturist or as a patient, I have been able to sense the group qi and I truly feel it is an amazing, REAL part of the community acupuncture experience.

We finished the book.

Hurray! Then we re-read it.

It still doesn't work.

A thousand curses

instead of spring blossoms or

clouds or whatever

fill up my haiku.

That figures. Sorry, comrades.

Time to start over. 

A few months back I was asked by Lisa to give a "guest lecture" for the CA class at OCOM.  Recently, in forums Tatyana brought up the fact that she was going to start teaching a class, asking for experiences/advice from people who had done it.  I was going to just post there, but I feel like there could be a lot of input from the Bloggosphere, so I'm making this my post. 

Also, a lot of this stuff has relavence not just for students, but fresh out acupunks and people who still might be curious as to "what's this CA stuff all about anyway?".  In lots of ways these are some fundamental issues that we all have to deal with in the "deprogramming" from school's standard "Private Practice" model to the Commmunity Acupuncture model.  

I recently discovered wrist ankle acupuncture (WAA) and I started using it with some of my patients who have severe pain in the GB 29 area. I got some 1 ½ inch needles and started learning how to thread them just under the skin, this is usually a painless process especially if I pinch the skin and then start threading slowly. These points seem to be very powerful and there are only twelve of them so there is not too much to memorize.