Community Acupuncture

What is community acupuncture?

Acupuncture For Wellness is part of a growing network of clinics working to transform health care by making acupuncture accessible and affordable to all. There are more than 300 community acupuncture clinics in this country today!

Acupuncture works best when you can have regular, frequent treatments. For most of us, the cost of private one-on-one treatments makes it impossible to get as much acupuncture as we need. By treating people in a group setting, we can afford to lower our fees while providing high-quality, personalized care to each patient.

As it turns out, the group setting comes with some pretty great side effects. It can be wonderful to have your treatment alongside partners, friends or family members, but even among people you don’t know, this group experience creates a collective healing energy that enhances the power of each individual’s treatment.

So the beauty of community acupuncture is that making acupuncture more accessible and affordable also makes it more effective.

Giving credit where credit is due

Like the medicine itself, community acupuncture has its roots in China where group treatments are the norm. When acupuncture came to this country, it morphed into a more Western style of treatment with acupuncturists in lab coats treating patients on massage tables,  alone in small rooms. It also got expensive.

Lots of folks have worked to reverse this trend and make acupuncture more accessible and affordable. Many of us who are practicing community acupuncture in this country today learned the ropes from Lisa Rohleder, Skip Van Meter and Lupine Hudson of Working Class Acupuncture in Portland.

More about community acupuncture

Learn about POCA, the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture