I remember the 4, almost 5 years of private practice before Communichi, as such a conflicted time. I went through the process most new graduates can relate to; of laboriously and gloriously shifting “book-learning” into a form of innate understanding of our medicine and what my part was. Honestly, this is a process that continues to be refined as long as we work in our chosen profession. I also had to contend with my unconscious ideas of what a ‘doc’ was acu-or otherwise. Most of which, didn’t really feel native to my sense of self.
So the news that there was a group of acupuncturists (AWB) who were taking their sense of social responsibility, love of adventure, and their unique skill set on the road to NOLA to treat evacuees/first responders…. water/desert, thirsty activist: you get the idea. I was profoundly moved by the work we did there and it successfully shook up all my preconceived ideas about how we as acupuncturists fit into the health world and how we need to present ourselves to be ‘professional’ and ‘respectable’. Back in Seattle, it was frustrating as a relatively newbie in the field, to feel like you were in competition for the few patients that had amazing insurance or the disposable income to pay for our services. It made me feel like I had to be a used car salesman to have a successful practice. How frustrating to love the work, yet have no natural head for business and an absolutely hostile relationship with insurance paperwork. So there I was in New Orleans, realizing anew that there was a whole swath of people who get great benefit from the medicine but who won’t even consider it unless (free and) under extreme conditions. I was re-inspired to love the simplicity of acupuncture, its effectiveness, and the irreverent nature and variety of its practitioners. I definitely had a hard time with reentry after this adventure. I knew there was a way for me to bring my fieldwork experiences into play in my everyday work, but was unclear about how. Then in the AWB forum afterward, someone mentioned the term “‘community acupuncture’ like those folks down in Portland were doing“…with a link! I greedily soaked up what little info they had on their site then saw that the Working Class Acupuncture folks would be at the next NADA conference in AZ! I sat in the front row and apparently turned into a bobble-headed doll. It all rang so true and workable that I just kept nodding and my heart was doing that thing that the Grinch’s does at the end of the Christmas show (expanding almost to bursting!). The rest is kinda history, or at least documented here in the Communichi blog…
There is an element of returning full circle to this story for me because my parents were integral parts of their community and often administered health care in exchange for potatoes, construction work, and many other barters. I grew up with a sense of community responsibility, the dignity inherent in all working people, and belief that making the world a better place is a practical necessity, begun between neighbors, not a lofty, abstract goal.
This work at Communichi has been some of the most rewarding work I have ever been a part of. And what is so amazing about it is that it is my J.O.B. not a once a week side-dish to make the regular job palatable. The number of patients we see every week (94 last week!) means that a substantial number of people are benefiting from acupuncture that wouldn’t otherwise. It also means that my personal skill set, my confidence, and needle technique have improved enormously over the last year.