MAAOM UPDATE: ACUPUNCTURE IN THE  NEWS!

March 5, 2006

 MAAOM SHOWS PROMOTES A STRONG PRESENCE AT PORTLAND'S
WHOLE HEALTH EXPO 

Portland, Maine:    On Saturday, March 4th and Sunday, March 5th,2006, Portland’s Holiday Inn By The Bay hosted the Whole Health Expo.  Healers and Practitioners of many complimentary and alternative health care modalities were in attendance. A local TV news team shot a film clip of the MAAOM booth which aired  on Saturday’s 11 o’clock news. During the course of the two day event, more than one thousand attendees visited the Whole Health Expo. The crowd was warm very interested and in search of healing, asking questions about the benefits of receiving Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine treatment. 

Thanks to the inspiring work of Tom St.Amand, MAAOM Board member and Promotion and Education Committee Chairman, the MAAOM booth at the Expo was both visual striking and warmly inviting.  

More than eight MAAOM members participated in manning our booth and it was resounding success.  MAAOM Members who staffed our booth were able to educate the public about the benefits and strengths of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbology, those with more personally oriented questions were able to speak to a Licensed Acupuncturist, one on one in a discussion about what that practitioner could offer in treatment specifically to help that individual.

MAAOM believes Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine needs a strong presence in Maine, representing ourselves with strength and compassion; is very evident through our presence and involvement during this recent Whole Health Expo. We are looking to forward to participating in similar events in the near future.

 

There was a wonderful article in the Times-Picayune ( local New Orleans paper) A two page spread on AWB with photos - here is the text.

Pointing the way:
Acupuncturists Without Borders program offers free treatments to help locals find relief from post-Katrina stress, insomnia, pain and trauma.

Friday, February 17, 2006
By Chris Bynum, Staff writer Times-Picayune
It was a brilliant blue February day, and all seemed right with the world.
The aroma of hot meals filled the air in the domed Emergency Communities tent in St. Bernard Parish as the airy sound of a flute being played by a volunteer floated above the bustle of Katrina-induced fellowship.

Storm survivors Curtis and Detra Jackson put away their plates of food and paused by the sign that read, "Free acupuncture treatments for stress, insomnia, pain, trauma." Maybe all wasn't right with their world after all.

"She needs some help," Curtis Jackson said with the intonation of a concerned husband. Husband and wife took a chair and prepared for their first experience with acupuncture, a technique adapted from Chinese medicine through which areas of the body are pierced with tiny needles to relieve pain or discomfort.

Quang Huynh, a local acupuncturist who moved to New Orleans a month before Hurricane Katrina, prepared to treat them. Jackson hasn't been able to sleep since the storm. He and his wife are living in a trailer, waiting for their Mid-City home to be repaired. They consider themselves among the lucky ones, but sleeping at night escapes them. And his shoulder won't stop hurting.

"The most stressful thing about life right now is life," Jackson said. "I hear stuff. I see stuff. People ask me what's wrong. Sometimes I don't even want to talk about it."

Acupuncture is not exactly a mainstream treatment, maybe not even a household word in these storm-ravaged communities. "Acu-whuuut?" a contractor had asked Diana Fried at the Belle Chasse Air National Guard Base when the founder of Acupuncturists Without Borders launched her program in post-Katrina New Orleans last fall.

But acupuncture was what Fried knew she had to offer when, in her New Mexico home, she watched television coverage of the aftermath of Katrina.
Fried, a licensed acupuncturist, wanted to take some kind of relief to Katrina victims, rather than watch their suffering via the distance of a remote control. She mobilized fellow licensed acupuncturists all over the country and headed to New Orleans.

"Box lunches and motel vouchers are important, as are mega-plans to rebuild the levee and devastated neighborhoods. But unless the (emotional) foundation is repaired, fixing broken windows will only go so far," team member and acupuncturist Jordan Van Voast of Seattle wrote on the group's Web site, www.acuwithoutborders.org. "The foundation for any vibrant civilization includes a just and compassionate society which nourishes the body, mind and spirit."

Talking or expressing feelings is not required for acupuncture. One simply sits, fully clothed, to receive treatment. Curtis Jackson was vocal enough, however, to refuse needles and go for the beads, which apply gentle pressure sans puncture.

His wife accepted the full 20-minute treatment with needles, and she closed her eyes as Chris Haskell, an Atlanta-based acupuncturist, inserted needles around her ears.

"I wake up between 3 and 4 every day, no matter what time I go to bed. I would still wake up then, even if I went to bed at 1 a.m.," Detra Jackson said. "You know how you try to think something until you believe it? I try to think life is normal, but it isn't."

She closed her eyes and settled into a relaxed state, tiny silver needles protruding from her ears like miniature satellites trying to pick up any calm in the air.

Jackson is one of 4,000 people who have been treated in 20 local venues since the storm.

"We do 'community-style acupuncture,' " Fried said of the treatment style that has been used in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and in Honduras after a hurricane there. People sit in chairs in an informal circle as acupuncturists tend to each, one by one. Then they sit quietly, most often with eyes closed, for at least 20 minutes of relaxation.

"We can treat 10 to 40 people in an hour's time. And the treatment is powerful due to the group dynamic," said Fried, who says the group sessions are an effective and efficient way both to treat a variety of conditions and to reach the large number of people found in disaster areas.

The recent midday group at the St. Bernard Emergency Services tent formed naturally when storm victims and workers came for lunch. After the meal, people gravitated one by one toward the acupuncture area, where licensed volunteers were standing by. An abundance of chairs provided an open welcome for anyone seeking relief from stress or pain or fatigue, or even a case of curiosity. Paperwork was a short questionnaire of five yes-or-no questions. And there is no charge for the service.

A woman named Annie still lingers in Haskell's mind, someone she had treated days earlier at a health fair at the Audubon Zoo. Annie's husband had drowned in the storm after he and Annie had stood in line at the Superdome and then at a hospital, waiting for assistance. Because of their medical conditions, they were unable to stand in line for hours, so they went back home. After Annie's husband drowned, she was evacuated by helicopter and went into the evacuation tailspin experienced by so many.

"When she came to the health fair, she was depressed and had no appetite,"
Haskell said. But the 65-year-old woman found herself in a circle of support; she began to eat. Then she began to share the memories of her husband as she ate. Haskell, whose acupuncturist role was expanded into that of a friend, recalled the story:

"On a day like today, he would make gumbo. He would always say his gumbo was better than mine. And I would ask him why, and he would say, 'Because I wiggle my toes in it.' "

On that day, they all laughed.

But it is not unusual in the process of acupuncture for someone to start to cry, Huynh said.

"With the relief of physical pain often comes the release of emotional pain," he said.

There are even those, he said, who before treatment thought of acupuncture as "sticks and twigs" but who returned for more sessions.

Shannon Bowley of Bellingham, Wash., has returned for several treatments.
As a volunteer coordinator for Emergency Communities, she has battled stress and "Katrina cough" in the five months she has spent in New Orleans.

The battery of points used in ear acupuncture is targeted to relieve insomnia, muscle pain, joint stiffness, anxiety, depression and fatigue -- the majority of complaints from storm victims.

When volunteer acupuncturist Korben Perry of Philadelphia left New Orleans, he told Fried of an Algiers resident who said, "Dealing with Katrina and its aftermath is like trying to get off crack. Your body is a battle every second, and cannot relax. You're desperate for a little hope, a little good news."

Fried hopes this social style of acupuncture provides a little hope or at least a healing respite from the waiting game of recovery. Due to licensing laws that were suspended temporarily to allow out-of-state medical and health practitioners to offer their services immediately after the storm, AWB was able to operate here. But the last group of volunteer acupuncturists will be leaving soon as those extensions expire, Fried said.

"We're hoping to return," she said, "if they extend us the right to continue."

Fried's work has solidified her belief in the power of community healing.

"I do believe," she said, "that having groups of people sit together in a circle where they are getting love and care and healing for the body-mind-spirit is a very powerful method of bringing people together."
. . . . . . .
For more information about Acupuncturists Without Borders,including where their services will be offered next,call (504) 232-7091 or e-mail info@acuwithoutborders.org.

Staff writer Chris Bynum can be reached atcbynum@timespicayune.com or
(504) 826-3458.

Report from New Orleans Feb. 14, 2006

from Acupuncturists Without Borders by Korben Perry, Acupuncturist

Early in my stay, a resident of the Algiers neighborhood told me that having your city devastated “is like your spouse having a stroke. You still love him, and he’ll never be the same. You really don’t know what will happen next. You’re kind of waiting for the next part of the sky to fall.” She said that “dealing with Katrina and its aftermath is like trying to get off crack. Your body is at battle every second, and cannot relax. Your desperate for a little hope, a little good news.” 

The comparison was not lost for me. In fact, Acupuncturists Without Borders is primarily using a protocol of ear points developed originally to treat persons “detoxing” from alcohol and drug use. This battery of points helps relieve, among other things, insomnia, extreme muscle pain and joint stiffness, blood pressure fluctuation, high levels of anxiety or depression, headaches, and fatigue.  When given the opportunity to describe what they wanted help with physically and emotionally, the people we were treating referred frequently to some or all of these symptoms. We’re talking about the kinds of things experienced by someone coping with intense stress or violent change. 

It’s true that I’ve done some previous work with the style of acupuncture we’re using in Louisiana. However, nothing could prepare me for how consistently profound these treatment experiences proved to be for those involved. It was incredible to watch people people’s bodies relax for the first time in three months; see raging migraines and nagging backaches loosen their grip on tired, tired souls; have people return to thank us for their first peaceful sleep in weeks. As a set of patients settled into their chairs and into some deeper breathing 10 or 15 minutes after being needled, it was clear that some perspectives were shifting a little, allowing for moments of hopefulness and joy. 

Acupuncturists Without Borders is using a social style of acupuncture where patients are seated, fully clothed, and usually in a circle with the others being treated. This makes sense in a practical way, whereby we can set up treatments almost anywhere. But, it also engenders a trust in the process and in the practitioners. Meanwhile, each individual treatment benefits from the positive energetic and emotional connections of all those treating and being treated.  

The idea of treating everyone with the same point combination made me uncomfortable at first. This wasn’t Chinese pattern diagnosis, the art to which I’m committed as a practitioner. But, as soon as I had done a few auricular (ear)treatments, using the same five points almost exclusively, I got over my theoretical difficulties. Along with the relief of specific physiological symptoms that the acupuncture yielded, the community style treatments meant that an individual got a chance to feel some tangible results of physical recovery while also witnessing it in the face and posture of  others. Any individual’s exhales or, literally, sighs of relief, got to further infuse the treatment space, and to release stuck qi on a much wider level. In the best moments what ran between participants was a pulse of benign creative nurturance, in the face of numbness, grief or rage. 

Through this softened space and between the softened gazes of those being treated, other people, with curiosity, would enter, on their way to get a tetanus shot, have a prescription filled, or find bottled water. Liking what they sensed, the passerby would frequently be the next to sit down for a treatment. I’ll describe a specific instance along the sidewalk outside the Common Ground free health clinic.  A woman from the neighborhood is walking by and sees several of her neighbors sitting in an oddly meditative manner. Mr. Ali, who has had three unsuccessful surgeries on his cervical spine in the last 15 years is looking at me with heavy eyelids and asking me how the acupuncture can so quickly make his neck looser. I am trying to answer as simply and quietly as possible, and I’m being helped by another man being treated, a 60 something year old cab driver. Mr. Clarke studied Mao and Chinese culture when actively a Black Panther in the 70s. He’s identifying a point I used on Mr. Ali’s arm as lying along the Triple Burner channel. Lamar is a middle-aged painter and contractor who has been working 12 and 14 hour days since the flood. His forearm and fingers are numb and he cannot sleep. Francine is a 49 year old white woman who is working 10 hour days at the one welfare office of New Orleans’ seven which survived. She is here for the third day in a row to get help quitting smoking, a decision made in the throes of the emphysema like coughing that has racked her since the mold set in. She knows of these men but has never spent any time talking to them. She and Lamar are almost whispering to one another,  both crying periodically, which gets the attention of a small orphan dog which has made its way to their feet. The clinic’s only pharmacist, a woman from Detroit, has been sleeping in her chair with one leg elevated  since the needles went in a half hour ago. She had asked for help with an acute migraine and a swollen ankle. The woman passing through catches eyes with another man who’s getting a treatment, a man appears to know well. He’s been orating irrepressibly since 5 or 10 minutes into the treatment. He’s looking at her saying             “Lord have mercy…. Wow…… Like I’m in high school…….. This is alright…..           Aint this something…… Feel like a bird…. Like a body ought to feel in this        world….. Aint this something…. Somebody discovered something…. Lord have            mercy……. Makes my back straight and takes my defenses right down……. Like        a bird I tell you….”  And the passing woman shoots back  “Well, go on and fly…”  Her only question is if the needles will hurt.  "No, sweetheart.”  And, several people close their eyes and reassuringly shake their head.  “Like a little bug bite”, Francine says. She sits down with her neighbors. 

It was hard for me to leave. It’s the work I want to be doing. It needs to be happening everywhere. Two themes emerged for me in New Orleans. One was how completely the natural and unnatural disasters had torn back the layers of our social fantasy to make even more glaring the injustices of our everyday lives. Secondly, I was reminded when economic bureaucracy dissolves enough that peoples’ natural collective initiative is less stifled, just how much creative cooperation flourishes, how quickly people choose courage and contact.

I want to know, when the layers get put back, when a normal bureaucracy returns to Louisiana, when the Good Samaritan Laws expire, how do we continue the kind of work Acupuncturists Without Borders and Common Ground is doing? How do we find ways to make free group acupuncture a norm, not only something for victims of storms and those suffering from drug addiction? How do I do this in Philadelphia? How do we continue to find ways to move from charity to solidarity? Can we go ahead and notice how essential these kinds of interactions and this kind of medicine is for our real security?      -Korben Perry     korbenp@yahoo.com  

About Acupuncturists Without Borders

Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB) is an organization devoted to helping alleviate the suffering, and to supporting the health, strength, and self-sufficiency, of communities in need around the world through acupuncture treatments and training. We focus on treatments for trauma. We respond to disasters with community-style acupuncture. We also create long-term training programs for communities worldwide (where the situation allows) that have experienced war, conflict or disaster. We work at the invitation of local organizations to bring these programs to communities.

Diana Fried, L. Ac., MA,  Executive Director, Acupuncturists Without Borders www.acuwithoutborders.com