the nice spring light returns to the PCA clinic

A belated Happy May Day to all!

Acupuncturist and co-founder Ellen Vincent and a room full of people being treated.




We'd like to publish some original descriptions/testimonials/essays/poems on what a treatment feels like, where you go, who you become, the way time moves, etc.
Feel free to email us stuff and let us know if it's not OK to publish.

Here's an excerpt from Lisa Rohleder's "Working Class Acupuncture for Patients", available as a download or book from www.lulu.com.

Acupuncture works best in an atmosphere of quiet and internal focus.As one of our patients explained, "when I come in here I feel like I can let go of everything and get completely into my own internal space. I can concentrate on myself completely. This is my sanctuary. I don't even notice, much less care, what's going on around me."
Treating patients in a community space also allows a unique kind of synergy to kick in. When everyone in the room is in a state of deep relaxation, the energy of each individual treatment spills over into the whole and creates a powerful shared state, similar to the experience of group meditation - even though the majority of our patients are not meditators. That shared state in turn makes each of the individual treatments more potent. From that perspective, the community allows us to do more for each individual for less money. Furthermore, the patients are creating the healing atmosphere as much as the practitioners are, which helps us remember where the real strength resides.

Art and Healing Network

Please check out this amazing podcast project of interviews with artist/activist/healers around the subject of art and healing. It's part of the Art and Healing Network

what national health care looks like right now

Walmart is opening 400 new health clinics nationwide by 2010. Wow.

Here's an article:
Baltimore Business Journal

Remember "company scrip", the currency issued in certain industries to pay workers. Such scrip can only be exchanged by wage-earners in company stores owned by their employers and often charging inflated prices. In the UK, such systems have been formally outlawed under Truck Acts.

In the U.S., mining and logging camps were typically created, owned and operated by a single company. These remote locations were cash poor and workers had very little choice but to purchase goods at a company store. With this economic monopoly, the employer could place enormous markups on goods, making workers completely dependent on the company, thus enforcing employee loyalty.

HealthCare for All!

Join PhilaHealthia founder Paul Glover as he discusses why and how WE can create our own cooperative health coverage plan, based on his successful Ithaca Health Alliance in New York: www.ithacahealth.org

Health Democracy contributes, by local example, to the campaign for universal health coverage. Check out www.HealthDemocracy.org

PhilaHealthia

· Benefits both the insured and uninsured

· When 1,000 people pledge $100 a year, we will begin a

minor medical plan

· As more people join, coverage expands!

Great article in YES! Magazine about community acupuncture

Here's the article

Community Acupuncture Workshop at PCA

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.

Grand Open House

This last Friday, September 28th, we hosted a Grand Open House to celebrate a successful first month and to thank neighbors and volunteers. About a hundred people stopped through to chat with neighbors, learn about community acupuncture. Everyone enjoyed some of the delightful and healthy food prepared by Rath Radelman, and listened to the beautiful and inventive music performed by guitarist Michael Mantra and violinist Kenneth Parker, both of Audio Emotif.

I had a fabulous time talking to current patients and meeting lots of new people interested in acupuncture. Ellen and I are so grateful to get to practice acupuncture with our own community and with our neighbors we don't yet know in the beautiful sanctuary of the Firehouse. Another BIG thanks to our volunteers, Pascal, Amy, Waliyyah, Jacks, Jennifer, Lou, and Rafik, and yoga instructor Leilani.