LarryG's blog

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Last night as I, my wife and our two little ones settled onto the lawn of Lions Park in Benson, Arizona, preparing for the annual Independence Day firework display to kick off, we and about 1500 residents of our small, working class town of about 5000 people watched this video.  Immediately after, the announcer called us to our feet for the national anthem. 

What follows is a letter I wrote to my state representatives regarding HR 646.  If the following points make sense to you, you can copy and paste any or all of this letter to word and send it to your Congress person.  You can find your state representatives and state senators at the Congress website under

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This letter is posted here in response to a post on the AAAOM FPD forum by the president of Tri-State College of Acupuncture, Mark Seem.

A primary motivator for proponents of the first professional doctorate in the acupuncture profession is access to and acceptance within the western medical care model.  This infuses the existing dominant medical paradigm with their own essence and relabels it "integrative medicine".  While a collective professional inferiority complex is outside the scope of this piece, we would d

Lately I have taken to keeping a dream journal at home in the attempts to develop the skill of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the awareness that one is dreaming while dreaming. It’s been a fun experiment. Keeping the journal gave me the idea to do it in clinic.

70 grand opening treatments on June 17th
69 treatments from June 18th to June 30th in 8 business days
115 treatments in July in 13 business days
62 scheduled for free Friday on the 25th
316 total treatments

$1430 in June
$2195 in July

These are our numbers for our first full month of operations at Tucson Community Acupuncture. Our projections for the first month were way low and we are actually just under our projections for month three.

I should also note that we have done a number of trades and sold several acu-passes, which skews our numbers a bit. If we filtered these out our average take per treatment would be a bit higher.

As far as the numbers go, we are very happy with the rate of growth so far. The summer in Tucson is a down time for everyone, so the fact that we have been as busy as we have been for our first month of operations has been great!

The power of the sliding scale is its ability to provide an inlet for working and middle class people to experience acupuncture. A $15-35 or $40 sliding scale is a strong motivator for people to try something they have no experience with. Couple this with a recommendation from a trusted friend or family member and you have a new patient. Often times, however, I am asked how I know that people aren’t taking advantage of the sliding scale and paying at the low end when they could afford to pay higher up. Wouldn’t it make sense to perform some form of income verification or means testing to assure that I am being properly compensated?

This afternoon, my business partner Keith and I went to Gersons looking for a door handle for our clinics bathroom. Gersons is located in South Tucson in the industrial district and salvages used furniture, building materials and other various items that can be purchased for a fair price. The materials there are old, but functional, rescued from a premature burial in some landfill graveyard. As one worker quipped to us, as we strolled across the vast, dusty outdoor warehouse, “You never know what you’ll find here.”

“…physicians should not rely on their own excellence, neither should they strive with their whole heart for material goods. On the contrary, they should develop an attitude of good will. If they move on the right path, concealed from the eyes of their contemporaries, they will receive great happiness as a reward without asking for it. The wealth of others should not be the reason to prescribe expensive and precious drugs, and thus make the access to help more difficult and underscore one’s own merits and abilities. Such conduct has to be regarded as contrary to the teaching of magnanimity. The object is help.”
-Sun Si Miao

Please allow me to introduce myself, as this is my first ever blog on CAN. My name is Larry and I am a new practitioner out of Arizona. I was schooled back east at the Tri-State College of Acupuncture and graduated in 2007.