Here's why I started doing community acupuncture: the structural inequalities and, specifically, the explicit racism and classism baked into the health care landscape in the U.S.
At acupuncture school, the cost of which was exorbitant and therefore unnecessarily exclusive, I was only taught how to set up a practice doing private treatments for people who could pay between $80 and $150 for a single session. Acupuncture schools, professional organizations, and licencing and regulatory bodies were all set up to create an industry that essentially fenced off the simple and powerfully effective medicine of acupuncture and maintained it as almost exclusively a privileged luxury. In a glaringly insidious example of structural racism, my acupuncture school had also not even mentioned the vast history in the U.S. of acupuncture being used in liberation movements with powerful and transformational results among black and brown and asian communities. Acupuncture in the U.S., it turns out, has a very different origin story than the one I was presented at school and the one most of us still hear. I invite you to take the time to watch one of the videos or read one of the articles I linked below to learn about what that story is.
Just after Hurricane Katrina, I joined a group of acupuncturists treating people in New Orleans on sidewalks, in churches and mosques, under Red Cross tents, and school gymnasiums. Even though our training didn't prepare us in any way for this kind of clinical experience, I immediately felt more useful than I ever had. And, I had rarely seen healing as profound. That's not just because there was crisis. It was also because people who cared joined together in solidarity and left behind the delivery system of you-get-the-healthcare-you can-afford in exchange for a community supported model that meant widening access to more people and improving results of treatments. This is what I want, I thought to myself: building a future of community connection and support with more democracy, and more healing potential. What I'm learning is that everywhere that acupuncture has been used, it has been used in the daily lives of common people. And that the real story of acupuncture in the U.S. is a story of powerful liberation movements among poor and violently oppressed communities of color, of cross-cultural solidarity, of the loving transmission of a brilliant medicine through the hands of people committed to the health and survival of their neighbors.
Please explore these links about acupuncture and liberation in the U.S. These stories should be known. As Tenisha Dandridge LAc. says, we've had 50 years of not telling these stories; and that's 50 years of black and brown people and of poor people not seeing themselves in the story of acupuncture, and therefore not being safe in the white space of acupuncture clinics.
In the Hands of Revoltionaries and Communities: A Social History of Acupuncture
A short two-part video series
An Unusual Tale of Acupuncture, Racism, and African American History in the USA.
Short article by Tenisha Dandridge LAc
Using Acupuncture and Traditional Asian Medicine to Treat Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and Racial Battle Fatigue.
Short article by Tenisha Dandridge LAc
Dope is Death.
Podcast and film
The story of how Dr. Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Shakur, along with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords, combined community health with radical politics to create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973 - a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist
And, join local acupuncturist and artist, James Shelton at his exhibit, People’s Medicine: Acupuncture, Liberation and Recovery.
Outside the Common Ground free health clinic, residents of the Algiers section of New Orleans rest and receive acupuncture after Hurricane Katrina.