"You Get What You Pay For", and other American myths

Children’s books are teaching me a
lot these days. Domitila is a Mexican Cinderella story. My five year
old seems to be able sniff these classics out as soon as she enters the
library. Smart girl - gives me a lot of hope for our future. Domitila’s
mother puts love into everything she does, even cooking with scruffy
cactus plants from the desert, transforming them into a delicacy
(nopales). Domitila learns her mother’s art and impresses the
governor’s son who endures great sacrifice, trying to find the
mysterious servant who can reveal the secret. Meanwhile, the evil
stepsister and her mother try to trick our heroine and her father with
delicacies made from stolen food - but the taste is horrible. We love
these stories and honor their wisdom. Why is it often difficult for us
to live by them?

Goods and services made and offered with love and intention are a
rarity in today’s big box world. But even in the healing arts
profession, we often assume that the quality of the service is in
direct proportion to the price. Is this accurate? The dusty old
adage “you get what you pay for” - like any cultural phrase - can only
be discerned objectively to the extent that one can step outside the
hall of mirrors implicit in any culture. And that’s a high bar of
objectivity. Well, for three years I lived on a small island in Western
Canada on the edge of nowhere, no locked door, off the power grid, my
kayak parked just above the beach. For two years I lived in an unheated
one room flat at 6000 feet in the Himalayan foothills. Perhaps a speck
of credibility from the many moons not chasing after the ignoble
American green paper god.

I am a member of a local organic food co-op. You have to be pretty
well off to buy organic foods these days and many of my acupuncture
patients remark that they can’t afford such luxuries. I live pretty
much month to month. The global adventures of my 20s and 30s have left
me with a modest two bedroom apartment lifestyle in my 40s. I have a
few regrets from these more frivolous years, but my bank account isn’t
one of them. In any case, I refuse to scrimp on healthy organic food
for my family. Food is medicine…is Chi for life.

Anyways, I was reading the classified ads at the back of the co-op
newsletter. There are always a few acupuncture ads - some of them
obviously costing several hundred dollars per issue. I could never ever
go there. Indeed, in some circles, it is considered lowly to advertise
when you are a health care provider. Word of mouth is of course best.
But there are other factors. CommuniChi is a unique bird in these parts
though, and probably there are lots of folks who haven't heard about us, so when I spied the classified rate - $5 for 39 characters, my
Scrabble gamemanship answered the challenge: Acupuncture $15 communichi.org 860-5009

39 characters exactly, including spaces. I told the Co-op office if
they wanted to throw in the period for free at the end of the line,
they were free to do so, but we weren’t interested in paying the extra
five bucks for the sake of grammatical correctness. If e e cummings
could, why not i? Ah America, where paying more for something gives you
elevated status - and of course that’s genuine happiness. Right? Ask
the teenagers in public school who refuse to eat a subsidized lunch because they feel stigmatized by their peers. We are such a confused society.

Here in Seattle the big news today is the loss of the $40 billion
dollar Boeing tanker contract. Too bad the so-called “news” seems to
ignore the fact that all these war toys are not making it any easier to
solve our health care crisis at home. Likewise, they do not make it
easier to increase funding for education which would also help address
another shameful American statistic which just came out: 1 in 100 Americans
is behind bars.
There’s another $50 billion a year flushed down the toilet for the
newest growth industry in America - prisons, not to mention the
millions of lives flushed down also.

But back to our $5 ad for $15 acupuncture - surely the laughing
stock of the white coated acupuncture world. We are trained to be part
of a respectful cadre of medical professionals. And that means charging
what you are worth right? If your average M.D. can get $250 an hour,
acupuncturists should get at least $100 a treatment, don’t you think?
And what kind of fool would rent out a funky space on the top floor of
a Latino community center? How will you attract all those high rollers
who believe in the “you get what you pay for” myth.

Besides the fact that there are fewer and fewer people who can pay
$1000 out of pocket for a course of acupuncture, or have the insurance
policy which would cover it, I am not interested in playing that game.
Been there, done that, and while I miss the patients I served in my
boutique clinic, most of them will likely find another network
provider. Meanwhile, it’s a stressed out world we live in, and there’s
millions of people in America who could use regular acupuncture but
can’t afford it at “the going rate”.

Although some of my colleagues may sneer at me behind my back as
the discount warehouse of acupuncture, it does not concern me what they
may think. I feel as if I’ve merely stripped away the unncessary
punctuation marks and left in all the poetry, love, and healing power
implicit in the true art of acupuncture.