lumiel's blog

Last week was a very  hard week for me. As you know, we're in the middle of 800 wildfires in surrounding areas.  I don't know how the others in this area are doing, but I'm just thankful that my clinic is air-conditioned, as the air quality here has been astoundingly bad.  Having had childhood issues with my lungs, and having just returned from 2 weeks of heavy hay fever reaction to the green and flowering beauty of Austria, I unsuspectingly got swept up in the general reaction to this air.

It took me about 5 months to get around to finishing it, and you are the ones  I present this to as my humble offering.

BANANA STORY

Austria has no separate acupuncture profession, as the only people legally allowed to poke people are MDs. Period. I know nothing about their training, but one lady I treated (in Millstatt, south Austria, deep in the country) said that years ago she had been acupunctured by a doc who did local points for her neck. It didn’t help her, she said. One treatment with me using only hand points on one side, and she became an addict. She wanted to return the next day. We had been waking for in this beautiful farmhouse, eating less than day-old eggs and grass-fed milk for breakfast, touring the town’s monasteries and chapels afterwards, then spending the afternoon swimming and sunbathing at the town nude beach. Oh yes, and in the evenings the cuckoo calling from the woods. Ahhhh. But back to the acupuncture. She could only come twice, but this experience convinced her that she didn’t need to bow to medical exhortations to use surgery for relief.

What’s dancing on the edge of my list of Possibilities is a project for CAN writers and artists.  I hope that someone other than myself is taken with this idea, because this project would have to get into a long waiting list, and may not surface until 5 years from now.

The idea was born when I read a line in a Helfgott blog on April 8, about writing and poetry becoming a mainstay in medical schools.   I searched for examples, and came up with this:

I’ve been working lately with a very talented rolfer/cranio-sacral therapist who has taken her work to the level of art.  She disappears into her work when the client is on the table, and loses all track of time when working.  She is gentle, yet persistent, and rejoices and celebrates whenever her fingers feel an engagement during the movement.  I find her work quite amazing, and yet here she is, after 20 years of honing her craft and studying with the giants in her profession, still struggling to pay basic bills and sharing a room with other practitioners.

Fellow CANers,

If you can put up with the dry verbiage (brevity and no emotion seem to be required in such published reports!) you will see a very nice definition of social entrepreneurship. 

Are we on track?  Do you enjoy thinking of yourself as a social entrepreneur?  Here’s a carefully considered and researched definition that you might like to explore, to see how you measure up.

http://www.icesi.edu.co/ciela/anteriores/Papers/emsoc/2.pdf

See if you fit the description!

I found the November 2007 issue of the Kan Herb Company newsletter interesting.  First, because it was written by Ted Kaptchuk (whose herb classes is one of my favorite memories of the PCOM masters program in San Diego) and second, because he brings up a topic that many of us on this forum touch on frequently: the fact that Oriental medicine practitioners may be slowly getting sucked into the biomedical (say “western”) expectations of using our tools in Newtonian fashion, forgetting that our acupuncture and herbs are only part of a larger paradigm that includes the way we personally relate to our patients as professionals.