Happy May Day!

So today is the day that we give free acupuncture all day long in honor of International Workers' Day! I am delighted to report that all six of WCA's acupunks graciously agreed to work today (including Moses and Christine, who normally have Thursdays off) and as of last night, we had 98 patients scheduled for acupuncture today!  We're pretty confident that 2 more will probably drop in, and so we will reach our goal of treating 100 patients in a day for the first time ever!

Lots of exclamation marks there...but I am feeling exclamatory.  Today's the day that we also open up our new treatment room (the room that used to be our yoga room), which means that WCA now has a total of 33 recliners and 2 tables. I honestly never thought we would get this big. I never pictured us treating 430 patients in a week and 100 patients in a day. (For some perspective on that, last May Day, when we did free acupuncture, we treated 80 patients. Wow! But now we regularly treat 80+ patients every Tuesday.) When I think back, I can remember so many times that we were told directly or indirectly that this was not possible. "There's no market for affordable acupuncture."  "Working class people aren't interested in acupuncture, are they?" "People go to acupuncture BECAUSE they need a lot of personal attention and they need to talk about their problems; they'll never go for being treated in a room with a lot of other people!"  Happy May Day, all you skeptics.

And Happy May Day to all of our brave comrades who are venturing out into the realm of the impossible by starting up community clinics.  I hope what you all get from knowing our numbers is some reassurance that there are so many people out there who want and need acupuncture -- and if you hang in there, they will find you. This is WCA's sixth May Day; our first May Day, it was just me, just treating about 12 people a week, wondering if I was out of my mind; our second and third May Days, it was me and Skip wondering if we would ever be able to satisfactorily explain what we were doing to any other acupuncturist, ever, because practically everyone we met was so resistant; our fourth May Day, Lupine had found us, and we were beginning to have some hope; last May Day, we were really excited but still often overwhelmed by all the glitches we had to work out with having a clinic this big; and now we're still working out the glitches, but we feel we have so much to celebrate. Especially all of you, our comrades and our community.

It's hard to get any firm numbers about anything in the acupuncture world, but I did some estimating recently, and I think (based on some numbers from a recent OCOM survey and on Oregon statistics) that about 10% of all the acupuncture treatments that are happening every week in Oregon are now happening in a community acupuncture clinic. That's a relatively conservative estimate; it might be more. Given how new this movement is, that's amazing. And hopeful. If all of us keep going at the rate we're going, it's just a matter of time before acupuncture really is, in fact, the people's medicine. It's just a matter of time before we really do subvert the dominant paradigm. It's just a matter of time before the "typical" acupuncture patient is someone who earns minimum wage, someone who may not have insurance, someone who is a single parent or who is raising their grandchildren, someone who is unemployed because of their health -- in other words, it's a matter of time before the typical acupuncture patient is someone who really needs acupuncture. Now that's something to celebrate. Happy May Day!