So, what have I been so busy doing for the last two years?

2005/2006 – Sabbatical (Indonesia, Nepal, Thailand, Africa)

2006 – Design training program for Acupuncturists & Chinese Medicine practitioners

2007 – Implement course at the Seattle Institute for Oriental Medicine

2007/2008 – First field trip (Bali, Indonesia)

2008 – Second training (NY)

While I was away I got this idea (with nudges from lots of people – Ted Bissell, Dan Bensky, Paul Karsten, and Craig Mitchell) to try and bring Chinese medicine to areas in the world that had limited access to Western health care. The idea was based on my experiences while traveling in the developing world on my sabbatical. I saw everything from a dislocated kneecap, TB, leprosy, and of course lots of malaria. I could see a future in which my brothers and sisters in Chinese medicine could be on the forefront of the battle against disease, poverty, and suffering. A future in which where there was a catastrophe, you would find us. Where there was a war, you would find us. Where there was economic injustice, you would find us. Given that acupuncturists on the whole are an unruly bunch, I thought there would be no shortage of interest in a project like this.

Given my peculiar training (a traditional formal apprenticeship) most of the things I saw fell within my training. A traditional apprenticeship (and by traditional I mean the same methods that were used 200 years ago) forges a person into a practitioner that can treat just about anything. Back in the day, WE were the hospitals. There were no “drugs” as we know them today. There were no machines, only hands, eyes, nose, ears – to diagnose.

While I was trained to treat all those strange diseases by my teacher, I never thought I would be called on to actually treat those things. I almost never see them in my Manhattan clinic. Nevertheless, I found myself face to face with many of the diseases I had only heard stories about from my teacher – almost 20 years ago. I dredged up those foggy memories. Brushed the cobwebs and disbelief from them, and plied the trade I was born to do.

Low and behold – it worked. And worked again. And again.

This was where the snag occured. Practitioners trained in the West were not trained to treat conditions like epidemic infectious disease, nor were they trained in emergency medicine (the two disciplines I called on the most – with pediatrics running a close third). I had met a couple of acupuncturists while traveling – who were treating patients and getting great results, but unbeknownst to them they were recreating the wheel. What took them years of trial and error to figure out, was already well known – and usually far more consistently effective.

So I spent most of my time in 2006 designing a curriculum that would fill those deficiencies. We put together a top notch crew and implemented it in Seattle in 2007. Followed by our first field trip to Bali at the end of the same year.

The pilot trip went well overall. We delivered about 2400 treatments over the course of 21 days. We treated some people that had never seen any kind of health care practitioner in their lives. We had many small miracles, and even a few big ones. But all was not perfect, as one would expect in any pilot venture there were snags. Most of them had to do with communication between groups, and how to appropriately handle care when team members get ill (in our case one member got pretty severely ill). Luckily all worked out okay in the end but the experience was a harrowing one that none of us want to relive.

Until now the project has been very low key. Now we’re ready to bring it out from under wraps and see what happens. I think it’s a great idea, and we have some super people working on it.

I’ll try and keep things updated as we move forward.