December, 2007

Life doesn't need to be complicated - meditation before oatmeal and honey in the morning, a bicycle ride to the local library to pick up a new stack of children's books, followed by a nourishing vegetarian lunch. Participating in the societal food procurement system - responsible for delivering food from the field to my table - represents probably the biggest portion of my family's carbon footprint.

After lunch, Pema and I curled up in a large chair for "Sinbad the Sailor", "Godiva", and "Thank You World", followed by a short nap (just me), and a walk to a nearby park. The week after Christmas is a good time to score free stuff on the sidewalk. Somebody had placed a beautiful wooden chair out with a free sign. I sat down on it and smiled - this will do just perfectly for my desk at home.

I recently received a short email from an acupuncturist friend of mine who went to the same TCM school as I did in Canada. We had been corresponding about my experience with community acupuncture and I thought his most recent email was powerful and worth sharing here. He was kind enough to allow me to post it for others to read. My original letter is below and the response from my friend follows:
Happy Holidays,

Good to hear you are doing well.

I never fully appreciated the power of acupuncture until I did so much of it in a short period of time. I see about 20 patients a day now, 5 days per week, in 10 minute increments.

If anyone remembers my last post on Jingei revelations and distal point treatments, I promised to report on results in the next... and I have lived to tell.

I'll just pretend I remember what the patients said, verbatim:

"Whatever you did for my neck last time really worked...keep it up!"

"The toe that got crushed by a wheelchair lift is still bothering me, but all the back and hip pain that had accompanied it is practically gone."

"What shoulder pain? I have no idea what you're talking about."

And, my favorite: "I'm pregnant!"

My previous ambivalence about what I thought might be a more effective local treatment has flown out the window, and with it, lots of other stuff, like side muscle cramps from twisting too often to needle GB20 in the recliner.

The first thing I remember my business partner Justine saying when I first met her was "I'm only 25!" We met at the Starbucks in Watertown, near Boston after Sandy River had put us in touch. It didn't take us long to agree to go into business together, in fact at one point when we had started to look at office spaces I found myself asking "who is this person, how about if we just hang out and get to know each other a little better?" So she invited me over for dinner one time and a few weeks later I invited her to come see the band the Smashing Pumpkins with me.

We decided to close Grassroots for a week - a whole week! - over the holidays. We have been busier lately, but not crazy busy, and we don't have any patients coming in lately who can't miss a week. It's funny how hard it was at first for me to get behind this; it's hard to close up shop when you want to be available and don't want to miss any potential business. Luckily (I don't know if it was the solstice, or just the anticipation of being able to rest soon), I got tired. I mean, REALLY tired. Too tired to resist; tired enough to realize that it would behoove my patients and partners if I took a little break.

I remember when I first started acupuncture school. For me it was one of the best times of my life. I was so happy to start a new career that I really loved, happy to be around other people who shared my enthusiasm for acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and relieved to have left a job I found devoid of any pleasure or meaning. When I told people what I was doing, some thought I was nuts to go back to school for four years. Others thought it was really interesting and shared my excitement. It was a time of transition, and there were many adjustments to be made by the time I finished school.

I didn’t always feel this great about what I was doing, however. At some point I began to realize that I was important to the school primarily as a source of income. I was playing a typical role in our culture as “consumer” and the product just happened to be an expensive Chinese medical education.

This is Cortnisco here. Ya, I am not super impressed by my personal Brazilian soccer name. It sounds sort of like Crisco. But, I'll try it on for the day just to see where it takes me....

Gosh, I have to admit that I am an every-other-month blogger. Frequently I am lying in bed at night running the beginning of blog posts through my head. Every now and again I come up with a really good starter line and think to myself that I should get up and write it down so that I can remember it and go with it in the morning, But, always, by that time I am too tired and reassure my easily deceived mind that I will remember it when I wake up.

So, this month, I am racking my brain....what should I blog about, what should I blog about, hoping something amazing will happen or that I can transform and relate a simple event into an inspirational one. But, hey, even though it is that holiday time, nothing is falling from the sky beaming with blog worthiness.

The Acupuncture profession can be a lonely profession. Compared to some professions, say being a member of the Brazilian National Soccer team, we just don’t get the adoring crowds, the wild adulation, the groupies, that maybe we deserve. That’s a shame IMO because We Do Good Work.

But maybe if the world were just a little bit different we would get the recognition that so many of us crave. Maybe we would get the prestige…

Well now there IS a way. Am I talking mass acceptance by insurance companies? Nah! How about admitting privileges to hospitals? Phooey! Being allowed to call us the hallowed term of Doctor? Screw that! There’s something much better!!!

Go to this website,

http://www.minimalsworld.net/BrazilName/brazilian.shtml

Input your name and it will give you your name if you were on the Brazilian National soccer Team! What could be better than that? Nothing- that’s what! Just think of the fame that will come your way!

My post-meditation brainstorm (Thank you!) for a holiday gift is working so well, I thought I'd share it with you all. I went to Ranch 99 store and found these really nice plastic Chinese soup spoons for $.39@, bought a BUNCH of them. Went home and quickly ran off little slips of paper with these instructions (attached) and began presenting them on Monday. I didn't have time to wrap them at all, just put them into a basket lined with gold paper, with a green ribbon tied around the basket handle. Some of the patients had heard me lecture on gua sha and cold prevention, some had had it done on them (by me) just the week before. I told them I didn't want to see them anymore for this condition because we had more important work to do with the needles, so I was giving them the responsibility of staying well during Cold season. They all really, really liked this.

http://www.blessedunrest.com/video.html

What's that you say?

A vocabulary game while donating food? AT THE SAME TIME????

Madness! It just might work!

http://www.freerice.com/

Check out this craigslist posting.
http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/mis/512700199.html

( sing to popular holiday jingle about bells)

Community is the new normal
health is really fun.
community acupuncture normalizes healing
in your local area

nana nana mmmmm oooooWWEE

making spirits bright

de de de de

(well, ok , I am no William Joel)

As I dissolve into my community practice
and attempt to reach out to share this tremendous gift of nothingness to more folks

sometimes fretting the how
and how much of a theory of outreach or marketing

I love the simplicity and sublties of changes now in my life:

the community is showing Me who they are and what they need

it seems all I have is smile and learn to welcome this

....easy to say and harder to non-do

it seeems I worked far too hard before running a 13p/week BA
trying to edu-sell acupuncture and myself

Now Who worries?
I am just a guy with pointy sticks and a state liscense to jab them.....appropriately ,of course

Yesterday, my Dharma teacher was in town and I had the good fortune to host him in our small apartment.

Of course, I was a bit self-consciously apologetic for the Saturday night street noise, as our guest bed room fronts a busy street that has bar traffic until 2am or so.

None of it mattered to him. He told me that he dreamed of orangutans in Indonesia. When I got up to pee at 5 a.m., his light was already on, and I could hear deep slow breathing coming from his room.

A little after 8 a.m., his assistant went back and forth to his room, carrying bagels and jam, tea, or a notebook, and for the next 8 hours, he simply gave freely of his time, with very little apparent concern for his own needs.

During the two hour intermission between the morning teaching and afternoon teaching, he engaged people in conversation, patiently responding to all questions without a hint of annoyance, always beaming compassionately.

I love this song:

Divin' Duck Blues

If the river was whiskey
And I was a divin' duck
Baby if the river was whiskey
And I was a divin' duck
I would dive to the bottom,
Lord knows, and I would never come up

You know the sun gonna shine
In my back yard someday
I say that old sun gonna shine
In my back yard someday
And the wind gonna rise up
And blow my blues away

Well now the little girl I been lovin'
She got hair that shine like Klondike gold
Well the little girl I been lovin'
Sweet mama got hair shine like Klondike gold
She got a lien on my body
Got a mortgage on my soul

Well you know I'm gwine to Memphis
Just to see my pony run
Well I'm gwine to Memphis baby
Just to see my pony run
If I win some money little girl
Sho nuff I'll bring you some

We get e-mail. Justine Deutsch's e-mail speaks for itself. Wow:

Why I Couldn’t Ask for More

Day-glow orange tourist buses through the streets of Delhi; pink, yellow, green and blue pom-pom festooned camel carts in the desert of Pushkar; walking through the palace gates to see the splendor of the Taj Mahal; riding on a rickshaw at night through chaos on the streets of Varanassi and an early morning boat ride pilgrimage on the Ganges River…Ohmygod….

Our lives where in the drivers hands as we rode through the quagmire of "traffic lanes" on our trip.

So many images as this ancient and mystical land of India float through my mind - complete sensory overload. Learning to navigate through a foreign culture and come back to my center again was crucial. I would have to say my integrating experience through it all was that as an acupuncturist.

My December blog is 2 weeks early.

The process of selling my community acupuncture practice has revealed some interesting insights to me, about myself and about the CAN practitioners. Contrary to my lifelong view of myself as a garden-variety middle-of-the-road person with occasional creative bursts, I am now beginning to realize that perhaps I am really brave, resourceful, hard-working, and maybe just a little twisted (with a real penchant for truth)! If that is the case, then this applies to all the rest of you sister-brother clinics out there.

This is embarrassing. I'm going to tell you why I like my partner, and why I like having a partner.

I was just biking down Baltimore Ave. and passed Ellen walking the other way. We had a microscopic interaction that left me smiling.

Ellen and I both work 4 day weeks at PCA. We do three days together, and then each of us works one day alone, so that patients have 5 days of treatment times to choose from.

Today's the day Ellen works and I don't. I had just stopped by PCA to write myself a check and pick up some notes, while Ellen was on her way in to work her shift. I was moving along about as fast as you'd want to go on a potentially icy bike path, so I didn't wave or slow down or even turn my head much towards her when I went by. I probably had her in my sight for a total of 3 or 4 seconds, but a whole lot got communicated between us in that time.

I have some research to share re: the first professional doctorate and the workings of the ACAOM.

Those of you who are following the CAN internal forums (for those of you who are thinking what are those? Isn't this the CAN forum? No, this is the public blog. To see the forums you have to go through the "join CAN" process -- see the header at the top of the page. And yes, we are working on redesigning the website to make this less confusing) -- you know that I had what I thought was a nifty idea -- contact the ACAOM commissioners directly to convey the strength of our feeling about this first professional doctorate thing.

Those of you who know me know that I have a lot of nifty ideas that don't actually work...but that sometimes turn out in interesting ways anyway. This is one of those.

I found this on my calendar today...

"Once a personal mind is into need, it is in trouble. Because, when 'I' is in need, God is not with you. When 'I' is determined, 'Thou' leaves you. All suffering comes to us from 'I'. There is no suffering in 'Thou'. What comes from Thou is always useful. 'I' is very strong. 'I' confines us. 'I' keeps us together. 'I' is our ego, our self to hold. 'I' plays a great part. But when we use the power of the 'I' then we are in the prison of the self."

-yogi bhajan 2/8/95

I found the following poem in the staff bathroom of an acute mental health facility:

The Harvest Prayer

(Anonymous 17th Century Sermon)

Please be gentle with yourself and others.

We are all children of chance,

And none can say why some fields blossom

While others lay brown beneath the harvest sun.

Take hope that your season will come.

Share the joy of those whose season is at hand.

Care for those around you.

Look past your differences.

Their dreams are no less than yours,

Their choices in life no more easily made.

And give.

Give in any way that you can.

Give in every way you can.

Give whatever you possess.

Give from your heart.

To give is to love.

To withhold is to wither.

Care less for the size of your harvest

Than for how it is shared,

And your life will have meaning

And your heart will have peace.

That is to say, I have a pretty standard private practice here in western Maine, that is doing quite well in fact. I started it up about three years ago. The minute I finished building my office out into two little treatment rooms and a tiny waiting room, I found and read Lisa Rohleder's book. I thought, dang it, I could have just left those walls out and could have had something really unique. But I started up my regular practice and found that people are really hungry for alternatives in health care, no matter what. So I went three years at a breakneck pace. This December is my first real slow down.

Last June I organized a conference in Maine for Lisa to teach, and was interested in the comments from the crowd as well as noticing that not many community clinics have started up in Maine yet. I am sort of disappointed, but since I have not really changed my practice over to a CAN type clinic, who am I to talk?

For the past several years, Winter in Minnesota hasn't been what it used to be. I capitalize it because growing up, Winter was an event. Our snow was known nationwide -- so well that once I escaped, I often had questions about whether it ever rose above 40 degrees in the summer! But lately we've had to wait and wait and wait for snow. Last year, the biggest snow storm came in March!

But this year, winter is BACK.
With the snow falling every other day, roads are slippery and freeways are backed up.

A great reason to cancel your acupuncture appointment.

SO far, in my small startup CA clinic, at least half of my patients have come from areas where they need to travel through rush hour traffic to get to me.
Some of them come to me instead of a closer CA clinic because they like my energy, and just feel comfortable with me.

Well, that is wonderful for my ego, but it doesn't help anyone if getting to me becomes stressful, and ends up in more stress and less acupuncture.

This post is meant to accompany Diana's and Cris' posts below, "The Business of Modern Medicine" and "Wanted: Your Comments" respectively. Back in October, the New York Times published an article about dentists that I found very illuminating.

Here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/business/11decay.html?pagewanted=2