Working Class Acupuncture

WCA made the list of Portland Monthly Magazine's "Best of the City", 2008! See the August issue for the story, plus a great picture of our acupuncturist John and receptionist Carolyn.

Portland Mercury writer Sarah Mirk gives us possibly our best  soundbite yet! click on this link for details. I think we need to put that on a t-shirt.

Thanks to writer Becky Moore for this friendly, affirming overview of  community acupuncture in Portland! Click this link for the article

Recent visitors to the clinic have been commenting that we have spiffed things up lately: new floors, new lamps, some really lovely new furniture (graciously donated by the Singleton family), and a new community bulletin board.  But what everyone really gravitates toward is the prominently displayed "Map of the Revolution", the latest handiwork of our wildly creative comrade Lupine Hudson.

The "Map of the Revolution" is a visual guide to the spread of the community  acupuncture business model across the continental US. Each community acupuncture clinic location has a pushpin; attached to the pushpin is a ribbon; and attached to the ribbon is a business card holder with the business cards of a community acupuncture clinic!  We at WCA have asked all of our acupuncturist comrades who are running community clinics across the country to send us handfuls of their business cards, so that we can keep the Map of the Revolution well-stocked.  This way, all of our patients who want to refer their friends and family around the country to a community clinic can just walk up to the map, find the nearest clinic, and take a business card to send to  their loved ones. Many of our wonderful patients bring in visiting relatives for an acupuncture treatment when they are in town, and we have been delighted to watch these "acupuncture tourists" check out the map and find a clinic in their hometown to visit for ongoing care.

The Map of the Revolution is the tangible manifestation of our long-term dream to make acupuncture available to everyone our patients care about, no matter where they live. It's nice to see how much progress we've made -- though it's clear there's still an awful lot of work to do( anyone know any community acupuncturists in the Dakotas?). So if you haven't seen the Map yet, please stop in, have a cup of tea, and check it out. Help us visualize filling in all the gaps --in the Midwest and the South especially. And if you would like to see a comprehensive list of all the clinics that have joined the Revolution, check out http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/clinics

Acupuncture for everyone! Everywhere! It's just a matter of time.

Working Class Acupuncture has a lot to celebrate this May Day!  Many of you know that our clinic started in April of 2002 as “Window of the Sky” (that happens to be the name for a set of acupuncture points that we liked) seeing 12, count them 12, patients a week.  In April of 2008, our clinic hit a new high with 431 patient visits in one week!  That’s 3591% growth in six years. And we got there because of you!

Not only that, we estimate that there are at least 100 clinics around the country (and a few more internationally) that have adopted our business model and our goal of making acupuncture treatments accessible to people with ordinary incomes. None of those clinics are as big as we are (yet) but still, this means that thousands of people are getting acupuncture who normally would not be able to afford it:  grocery workers, food servers, construction workers, nurses, childcare workers, self-employed people, retired people, students, single parents, and all kinds of other folks who deserve to have choices about their health care.

HAPPY MAY DAY! 

Acupuncture belongs (again) to the people who need it.