On November 17th, PCA hosted a workshop for regional acupuncturists on community acupuncture. The workshop was lead by Skip Van Meter and Lisa Rohleder, founders of Working Class Acupuncture in Portland and of the Community Acupuncture Network.
About 25 acupuncturists and students from New York, New Jersey, Pa., Delaware, and Maryland attended.
Lisa Rohleder discussed classism in the acupuncture industry, and how to date in the U.S., it has been available mostly to the very wealthy in a spa environment, or as charity to homeless and people with alcohol or narcotics addictions, but not to people with normal incomes.
Lisa, Skip, Ellen, and I discussed the "nuts and bolts" of our business model, as a rough blueprint for creating a sustainable practice that supports the practitioners and makes a long course of acupuncture treatments accessible to working and middle class people in our own communities.
Skip lead a mini workshop in the afternoon on a pulse taking method which quickly gets to a patient's underlying pattern and is a jumping off point for creating a simple and powerful treatment.
It was wonderful to fill up PCA with new colleagues and friends trying to figure out how to expand access to the brilliant medicine of acupuncture.
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