What Students and Other Acupuncturists Think About Community Acupuncture

My clinic has been an assistantship site for NESA students since last September.  It has been a joy and a tremendous help to have students assist me.  As a practitioner I enjoy teaching them about acupuncture and herbs, and exposing them to a community acupuncture setting.  I love getting fired up talking about the community model with them and hearing what their thoughts on the model are at this stage in their education.  When the students assist me they work hard and learn a lot.  They sit in on intakes, watch me give treatments, remove needles, help out at the front desk and fill herbal formulas.  They see lots of acupuncture treatments they will not learn in school, and I teach them lots of “extra” points that work like magic.  They are here every week throughout the semester and tend to see the same folks getting treated and progressing over time, having the opportunity to see the miracles of this medicine in action.

Jess, a first year student who assisted me, had some very interesting things to say about her thoughts and feelings pertaining to community acupuncture:

“When I first stumbled upon CA, it was, undeniably, love at first sight. How could I feel any other way having been raised in a working class family? My father worked a manual labor job 60+ hours a week so that I could have access to what he had not growing up: a good education, quality healthcare, a home – a fair shot at a healthy, happy life. Given my roots, issues of access matter a great deal to me.

Now that I’m a first-year acupuncture student, the budding practitioner in me hopes that as I learn more about treating patients, CA will wow my head like it does my heart. As with anything (or anyone, for that matter) with which we fall in love, I think there is a quiet fear that perhaps this thing we love is not quite what we think it is; that we’ve been swept up and have lost our clear-eyed perspective.

As I’ve started to talk about CA with my teachers and peers, it has been interesting to hear – to feel – the subtle and sometimes not so subtle resistance to this model. While folks generally have some positive things to say, there is often reservation: ‘it’s great for a lot of things, but you aren’t going to treat (name a condition) in a chair.’ ‘There’s no way you can do herbs in that kind of setting.’ ‘You will be totally burnt out seeing that many patients.’ ‘You need to use the back shu points to be effective.’ ‘People don’t feel comfortable being treated together’…and so on.

And the truth is, I have no way of knowing how I will view CA once I know more about treating patients. As a first year student, I am in a difficult spot when an experienced practitioner describes what he or she sees as the limitations of CA. I don’t have the clinical knowledge or experience in which to base my own opinion – yet. So I am trying to take it all in, knowing that I will parse it when I am ready. What I witnessed in Justine’s clinic – a wider door, a sustainable business, a healthier community – will stay with me as I work my way through the many hours of classes between now and the day I begin treating patients myself.

I look forward to a day when I start to feel some ground under my feet as a clinician. Only then will I really know whether this thing I have with CA is a fleeting love or one that will be with me a lifetime.”

What Jess shared brings up many thoughts that I have and many questions that any of us practicing CA can answer to.  What I’d like to focus on most are the myths that we hear other non CA practitioners talking about as if they are facts.  These people have no experience in this setting and then they lie to students about it.  This makes me SO ANGRY (and now I can see where Lisa gets her rage )!  Why do they do it?  Probably for two reasons:  A) because they’re ignorant, and/or B) because they feel threatened by us.  Perhaps they don’t know a thing about community acupuncture except that people sit around in a room together and get treated and it costs less; low cost and group setting must mean less value, which must mean low quality and inneffective treatments.  Perhaps they may think that people only use auricular points or straight up TCM style and ‘how in the world could you possibly treat low back pain that way?’  Maybe they are unfamiliar with the styles of acupuncture we use in our practices, so they don’t know what is possible.  They may think that someone with deeply complicated issues needs much more time talking in private or that someone with a condition such as interstitial cystitis, for example, is required to have their lower abdomen needled if they’re going to get any better at all, and ‘how could you do that to someone in a public room?’  They may feel threatened because they know (especially in this economy) that it’s hard to make a living, nevermind compete with acupuncturists who offer such wonderfully low rates to people.  Maybe they don’t want to change the way they already practice, or are too afraid of making the change, so they fear that they may lose out to people like us in the long run.  They’re wishing on a star for insurance to take over and pay the bills so they can keep doing what they’re doing because they like it that way and are stuck in their ways.

Because I love this medicine, I love treating my patients, I treat people with ALL sorts of health conditions and see them getting better all the time, I can say WITH CONFIDENCE that with community acupuncture you CAN treat (name ANY condition) in a chair, you CAN do herbs in this setting, you have no higher risk for burnout in this setting than in a “boutique” setting (in fact, my experience leads me to feeling that without those lengthy conversations it is much, much easier) and no, you do NOT need to use back shu points to be effective (and if you really think you do, you could always put tables in your clinic, as many of us do…).  People DO feel comfortable being treated together (as so many of us know), and those few who don’t can see someone else (in fact, almost anyone else in my neighborhood).  Keep challenging us on what we can or cannot do, and us community acupuncturists will keep having answers.

And so I am glad I have students who come to my clinic to get brainwashed in the opposite way .   In all seriousness, though, I see this as a sign that we are making progress in our field, but still have a long way to go.  I sometimes feel tired of having to “defend” my work and explain what it’s all about, so I’m glad there’s a whole network of us out there working on it together.  Heck, before I knew anything about community acupuncture I had my own mythical preconceived notions based on ignorance, as I’m sure many of us have had.  But the good news is that we can keep being active and spreading the word.  Yes, we CAN!

Author: Justine Myers