Overachievers and Anarchists – Some Thoughts Re: The Milwaukee Smackdown
Now perhaps we can all take a breath for a moment and consider a couple of other ideas about what all this adds up to. One of the things I admire most about this movement is that it isn’t just about the medicine. As a matter of fact, it’s less about the medicine than it is about the ideas underlying it. In this model, acupuncture becomes a specific application of greater, far more inclusive concepts, and in turn. the practice and experience gathered thereby feed, challenge, expand and renew the theory. I wonder if at least part of the fight we’ve been witnesses to and participants in on the last thread isn’t also indicative of something rather larger going on that we might not have fully taken into account. Ms. Flynn and Co., I include you in this, because regardless of our differences in practice style, and despite the brickbats lobbed back and forth across the fence over the last few days, I think when it comes to what we’re all after in the world, from your description of your practice, we hold a great deal more in common than the recent thread might indicate. I heard something the other day that seems to make this point better than I ever could. I don’t know who the quote is attributed to, but I’m going to try and find out, so if anyone recognizes it, please let me know.
“When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor don’t have food, they call me a Communist.”
I wonder whether I or any of us are fully aware of the degree to which we are products of an abusive system, and how many of the partisan squabbles within the profession are really indicators of our various efforts to free ourselves from the effects of having been raised, professionally-speaking, as bastard children of the profit-driven medical industrial complex. As is common in abusive constellations, we have the over-achievers on one hand, knuckling under and breaking themselves in pieces in the hope of getting even a shred of daddy’s approval, or at least avoiding daddy’s wrath for one more day, and on the other hand, we have the wild children, the bomb-throwing, pot-smoking. weenie-wagging anarchists who gave up long ago on even trying. And inevitably, because ALL are actually starving, each group is natively suspicious of any gains the other might make. The crowning irony in this situation is that in that abusive constellation, every time the over-achiever and the anarchist fight, DADDY WINS, because the kids spend their energies contending with each other instead of turning on the real cause of the problem, DADDY!
There are certainly many discussions to have within the profession about how we should be trained, how we should practice, and how we should interact with the existing medical order. There will always be many ways to embody the astonishingly rich tradition we are lucky enough to practice in, and sooner or later, most of us will take our turn being priggish assholes about something or other. Some of us may take more turns than others, but I think it boils down, regardless of whether we’re over-achievers, anarchists or something in between, to whether or not we believe first in taking care of the medicine, or taking care of the patients.
The other night, Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS aired a film based on Maggie Mahar’s book Money-Driven Medicine, which you can watch online at the URL below. It’s the first time I’ve seen anything even approaching mainstream journalism at that level come out and finally call the profit-driven “healthcare” system out for what it is. I recommend that everyone on CAN watch it, and that anyone else that reads this do the same. Then, SEND IT TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. They only scratch the surface of the issue, but they’re saying it. and that’s a major step forward.
https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html
CAN is making one clear and carefully articulated response to this situation, and it’s a system that works. Ms. Flynn is clearly making her own effort and the beauty of it is that no one has to do it the same way in order to help patients. Spending our time guarding some mythical “purity” of practice or contorting our integrity to emulate the mistakes of a corrupt system is a waste of valuable energy. No matter what kind of medicine you practice, if the system you’re working is designed to make your work more available to everyone who needs it, and you are helping people, then while we might argue details late into the night over beers, come morning, you’ll still be on my team, every time.
Author: Brent Ottley, L.Ac.
I am shifting from BA to CA because after many years in all kinds of practice situations, I just finally said ENOUGH. It's either do this or quit practicing. Time to put my money where my mouth is. All of you have been immeasurably helpful to me in making the jump. There is much to do to make this work, because I'm doing it insanely fast on a shoestring budget, but the support is coming in from all directions, and hell or high water, it goes live on 6/29/09. The community you have created is making a difference, and I am grateful to be a part of it.
quote attributed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_Helder_Camara
Thanks, Nora
I knew it was a Brazilian priest, but not specifically who. i like chasing down good quotes like that, because they usually lead to good books and that’s the way I learn.
thank YOU…
…for your addition to this discussion. I really liked what you said in the previous thread.
Also, yeah! now I want to read “Spiral of Violence.”
Crumbs from Daddy’s table
The fact is at this stage of the game the leavings from Daddys table are still crumbs….
and that by providing shop front , round the corner , in your face, acupuncture the CA movement can make acupuncture as an option something that can be ubiquitous in our communities.
Imagine if we were the first option for a patient just out of a MVA just because the CA clinic was there, open after hours and on the weekends and affordable. CA is lifting the boat for the whole profession I believe simply by exposing this option to a huge population of unserved patients.
Timely that M just walked in.She is homeless and her friend brought her in.She has low back pain x 1month that she describes as a 20 out of 10 on the pain scale.She has had many visits to a MD, the Emergency room for pain killers muscle relaxers and anti inflammatories that make little difference to pain that doubles her over
. I am able to do an intake and get her into a chair in about 10 minutes and she sleeps as I return to this. My point is that allopathic medicine cannot help this type of patient in terms of treatment options and effectiveness, like acupuncture can.BA or chriropractic are not options as she has no insurance or income but Her friend can budget to get her in 3 x in the coming week and with that frequency and hopefully similar frequency in the next few weeks I know that we can improve her quality of life.Will she make it to appointments.?I really dont know.
I fully expect that she will come out of the treatment in 20 minutes or so with a signifigant drop in pain and a treatment plan that should in the coming weeks take down the inflammation so that it can all heal.Is it enough?Of course not.
Is it a valuable contribution to her being able to start healing .Yes it is.
Is the system really shamefully broken ?.Yes It Is.
I am just happy that she is sleeping in there right now.I am not saying that she is typical of patients to this clinic but the issues that bring her here are just different from all of ours by a matter of degrees.
great post!
It makes me think of Dorothy Day saying, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” (Irony: she’s in the process of being canonized.)
I think the point about systems is really important. I completely agree that we are all products of the medical-industrial complex, and we’re all wounded as a result, and the wounds just get expressed differently. And acting out our woundedness with each other doesn’t help anybody.
But not all of the brouhaha is about that, and not all of it is unproductive.
One of the things I decided a long time ago is that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life complaining and reacting to what I didn’t like. Life’s too short, I’m too old, it’s too frustrating. At some point I decided that yes, Daddy is definitely the problem, but most likely, Daddy isn’t going to change, and one thing that I could do that would be productive would be to create a life for myself that actually wasn’t about Daddy at all. Creativity is better than bomb-throwing. And I like to create systems.
Community acupuncture, at least as we define it around here, is a set of intricately designed, mutually reinforcing systems. When a number of people adopt those systems and practice them in different locations, that adds another level of reinforcement, as well as depth and dimension. A type of depth and dimension that I am hoping will make it possible for ordinary people to embrace acupuncture in large numbers — because that is what the whole thing is designed to do, to lay the groundwork for acupuncturists and patients to form relationships not just individually, but collectively.
If I were the only one who was using this system, I could at least be happy that my system was in alignment with my life and my values. And in my mind, that’s what happens if this movement fails — at least a bunch of us get to have practices that fit who we are. If we fail, things remain at an individual level in the acupuncture world, they don’t make it to the collective level. But that’s not what we’re striving for. And if the point of the discussion is to prove whose individual practice is better — better on whatever level, in terms of AOM, in terms of morals, in terms of anything — that really is stupid, and a total waste of time. If we were not trying to make something happen at the collective level, I would have nothing at all to say about the acupuncture profession, and I definitely wouldn’t have any patience for these kinds of discussions, in which people end up saying the same things over and over (though often saying it really well, thanks comrades!). Because the acupuncture profession is really pretty boring, and what some acupuncturist a thousand miles away thinks about the relative importance of guasha does not exactly make my heart race, if you know what I mean.
I got some interesting hate mail recently, the gist of which was, who do you think you are, running down your elders in public, making the profession look bad with all this internal argument, all of us do community service, you are not special so will you please STFU. (Note the overlap to the current discussion, minus the sanitation theme? Though I love the sanitation theme, because it makes me reminisce about a certain long-ago discussion about hand sanitizer…)
A core piece of the community acupuncture system, as we define it, is that the basic price of acupuncture should be something that most people can afford without thinking about it. I.e., cheap. Cheap all the time, for everybody, without anybody having to prove it or discuss it or bring it up. Acupuncture that is cheap all the time for everybody is the foundation for a collective embrace of acupuncture in the US. Acupuncture that is cheap all the time for everybody also has profound implications for how acupuncture gets practiced — it requires the creation and maintenance of many other systems.
This is radically different than acupuncturists doing community service, radically different from sliding scales that patients have to ask for, radically different from individual acupuncturists making acupuncture affordable to a few chosen individuals, when they feel like it. You don’t need new systems for those things. And while arguing about who does what in their practice is a waste of time and pointless, defining the system that we have created is necessary. And if people get upset about that definition, that’s too bad, but it’s also unavoidable. The article that set off the brouhaha was essentially a good, articulate definition of our system.
When people complain about CAN being a cult, part of what they’re complaining about is our effort to function as something more than a bunch of individuals, our effort to explore and adhere to a system that transcends us and links us and gives patients a kind of unconditional access. Acupuncture historically has been very attractive to people whose goal is to prove their individuality over and over, whose goal is to be “different” and “alternative”. They don’t like the idea of giving up any part of that individuality, including and especially the idea of being able to make individual decisions about how to treat each patient, to get to decide who gets what therapy, who is deserving of discounts and who isn’t, etc. We don’t need to harangue them about all that, but we do need to be clear that we have rejected many of those options, and we’re not sorry.
I know I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating: the tone on CAN that people object to, the feistiness or the meanness or the bitterness or the bitchiness or whatever you want to call it this week, I adopted it, and I guess modelled it for other people, because I was really tired of being called a saint. I agree with Dorothy Day, that’s a good way to dismiss somebody — and an even better way to dismiss a system. Saints don’t have systems, they’re just amazingly special individuals, doing their not-to-be-replicated saintly thing. If the occasional smackdown makes it clear that there are no saints around here, I’m glad.
your writing and comments
your writing and comments have been enjoyable to read. during the ugly thread, your comments were generally more respectful than most and i for one appreciated it. while i DID take a swipe at one of your colleagues, i was mostly trying to say something similar to what you have – namely, “all of the practitioner are on the same side, so what the F*** is this arguing all about?”
again, there is no reason both models can’t be successful, and mutual respect and mindfulness of the others’ intentions will go a long way.
best of luck.