POCA Tech’s First Show & Tell

A couple of months ago, I was talking with a patient in the POCA Tech student clinic at WCA Rockwood, and she told me about how she'd been tracking her symptoms since starting acupuncture and had used the data as a basis for a statistics lesson for her high school students. I like data, so I'm pretty sure I made some kind of noise indicating how cool that sounded to me. One thing led to another, and my very generous patient wound up offering to do the presentation again in the Rockwood clinic during our off-hours for any POCA Tech students who were interested. Score!

The Rockwood neighborhood, where the student clinic is located, is about half an hour from central Portland, so instead of asking people to travel there for a single short presentation, I decided to organize a handful of them to make the trip a little more enticing. We wound up having six talks —  the one from my patient, four from students, and one from a supervisor — with each followed by an audience Q&A. Since it was during a weekday, we recorded the talks with an iPhone for students who hadn't been able to make the trip. Happily, all the presenters agreed to posting the videos on POCA TV for a wider audience.

First, Megan the patient gave her presentation on what the statistics showed about whether or not acupuncture had helped her over several months and several symptoms. Then James from cohort 1 gave a talk about an independent study project he'd been working on called The Tao and Liberation. He also led a short qi gong practice as part of his talk. Beth from cohort 1 talked about receiving treatments in a variety of modalities in the student clinic and how they felt similar or different. She also talked about how experiencing the different modalities as a patient has affected her as a student intern giving treatments in those modalities. Joe from cohort 1 talked about an experience he had with Korean 4-point treatment and how receiving it helped him overcome his skepticism about the technique. I (also cohort 1) talked about experimenting with treatments based on the luo channels. Closing it out, Moses talked about holding space in the clinic and connecting with patients, a couple of skills we are all trying to improve in the student clinic.

The videos are all available on POCATV, but I'm embedding them here as well to make them accessible to non-POCA members. So if you'd like to see our first show & tell, check out the videos:

1. Megan Jones – Has Acupuncture Helped Me? 

2. James Shelton – Tao and Liberation 

3. Beth Ott – Learning by Receiving

4. Joe Ibrahim – Learning to Like Korean 4-Needle

5. Jen Mylo – Luo Treatment Experiments

6. Moses Cooper – Connecting with Patients

The only reason we're able to share these videos is because of the generosity of POCA in creating/supporting POCA Tech, so thank you to everyone who's been involved so far in making our school a reality! (And as we prepare for the graduation of cohort 1 and the admissions round for cohort 4, it's a great time to become a POCA Tech Sustainer!)

Author: jenmylo