community acupuncture
Community acupuncture is where treatments are given in a room of people, and patients don’t undress. This type of setting has emerged as an affordable alternative to a private treatment with the intention of making acupuncture more accessible to more people. People can sometimes have difficulty paying out of pocket for medical treatments (of any kind), not have health insurance or health insurance that covers acupuncture, or as is the case with me, see a practitioner who doesn’t accept insurance.
The rationale for this goes “if an acupuncture treatment costs X, then if we could treat four people per hour, the cost to the patient would be X/4”.
Yes and also no.
Over the past ten years, I have been using the complement channels to treat everything from post-op hip replacement pain to sports injuries to alopecia to migraines to hypothyroidism to sexual abuse to rashes to an intractable cough to addiction to suicide ideation. There is no one-size fits all for any patient, even when they report, basically, the same thing.
There is listening to their experiences & history, looking for those pesky limiting beliefs that all of us have in order to unwind them, using dynamic pulse taking & sometimes tongue diagnosis, to choose the right channel. And once the channel is chosen, careful needling follows. In my practice, holding space for people’s experiences during treatment has always been a priority, and because of it, I believe people experience a deeper level of healing and often, more quickly, than they could with modern acupuncture or in other settings. A practitioner that doesn’t have to run to the next room makes a difference in the patient’s healing, and I’ll die on this hill.
I’ve been a patient of this medicine as much as I’ve been a practitioner.
I’ve experienced profound healing in clinics where I was treated as the solo patient and slower results when I was treated as one of many. In my opinion, this is the value of using the complement channels and seeing one person at a time. But throughout my time in practice, I have been aware that many people simply cannot afford the out of pocket cost for acupuncture, despite its life changing ability. For years, I’ve thought about how I could close this gap, and I’ve decided that even if it’s not to the full extent of a private session, I want to try offering acupuncture in a community setting, and the way I’m going to do this is through luo treatments—these are the bleeding treatments I frequently talk about on social.
I’m not aware of any other clinic that does this.
I’m going to give it a shot because these are the channels that hold environmental toxicity, as well as unexpressed emotion, so it’s easy to see how they apply to nearly everyone. They can also be treated in a very simple way, where there is just one poke (as my daughter calls it) and the addition of one or two needles. Appointments are available in 15 min increments, and then you’ll be able to rest as long as you’d like, for up to an hour.
Soon, I’ll write another post detailing the luo channels. Admittedly, it can seem weird or scary at first, but they are quite miraculous channels. I use these channels in the majority of my patients at some point, and with very rare exception, most people say they enjoyed the treatment and look forward to the next one because they feel so much better, freer, and more grounded.
