Workshop: How to set up and run a multibed clinic. Hove, E Sussex, UK: Sunday 24th June, 2012.

Taught by Charlotte Whitestone, this workshop will cover all aspects of setting up and running a successful multibed clinic, such as: choosing whether to practice alone or in a team; finding suitable premises; crunching numbers and doing a basic business plan; choosing the right practice model for you; ethical and safe practice issues of group practice; and more.

While we will cover all these basic issues, I am keen that the day will be guided by the questions and experiences that you, the participants, come along with. Please be willing to share your wisdom and ideas with other participants, to make this a dynamic and interesting day.

This workshop will be held at The Acupuncture Clinic, where I practice.

Venue: The Acupuncture Clinic, 143 Portland Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 5QJ. Hove train station is less than 10 minutes walk away; there are frequent bus services from Central Brighton; and there is parking available nearby (free after 11am).

Date: Sunday 24th June, 2012

Time: 11.00 – 4.30ish (may run til 5 if we get carried away).

Cost: £60 for practitioners, £55 for students, or £50 for ACMAC clinic members and Supporters (You can join ACMAC first, get lots of great discounts, and get your discount on this workshop – see Join ACMAC for more details.) Places will be limited, so please book early. You must pay in advance, by cheque made payable to “ACMAC”. Please write your name and phone number on the back of your cheque, and send it to: ACMAC, 104 Tower Ride, Uckfield, TN22 INS. AND PLEASE COMPLETE THE REGISTRATION FORM BELOW:

We just shipped 20, 000 needles to Ananda Nagar in West Bengal, India!!

Thank you to everyone who came to the conference and generously donated needles and moxa to send to the Acupuncture Institute of Ananda Nagar. We sent our big box of goodies to Balance Healthcare, who very kindly added it to a load of needles that they have donated, and the whole consignment has just been shipped off to India. Another example of Balance Healthcare going out of their way to support community acupuncture at home and abroad. Thank you to Adam, Helen and Jim, you all rock.

We also raised over £200 on our raffle at the conference, which has now been sent to the clinic.

One of our conference delegates, Charlotte Johnstone, recently volunteered at the clinic at AIAN. Charlotte was straight out of college and you have to admire her spirit to serve and willingness to learn! She has written about her time at the clinic – READ MORE HERE.

It cost a fair chunk of cash to ship all these needles to India. Balance Healthcare is willing to donate more in the future. If you would like to donate an amount (how about £10 – 20?) to help with future shipping to AIAN or other deserving international community acupuncture projects, then please send a cheque made payable to ACMAC, write your name and ‘needle shipping’ on the back, and send it to ACMAC, 104 Tower Ride, Uckfield, TN22 1NS. Thank you very much – this is a great way we can avoid wastage of needles and instead use them wisely! Your money will only be used to ship needles.

ACMAC conference 2012: Thank you to everyone involved for making it so magical!

I want to say a massive thank you to… Lisa Rohleder, Skip van Meter and Cris Monteiro for traveling all the way from the USA, for being so generous with your information and for being so much fun… to Nick Pahl for giving your time so freely… to Katherine Berry for your presentation and hosting… to Slava Sviridovs for technical support and filming, all weekend long!… to Mo Froud for loads of support leading up the conference and for looking after many details over the weekend… to Denise Millar for handling the raffle… to Peter Deadman – your energy and support was in the room even though you were poorly and couldn’t attend… and to Helen Kenny, Jim Belcher at Balance Healthcare for masses of office support and taking all the bookings….

…But most of all, thank you to all of you who attended. Your energy, dynamism and willingness to share your thoughts, opinions and emotions meant that that there was a kind of infectious can-do feeling in the room, on both days.

And finally thank you to everyone who bought tickets for our raffle to support The Acupuncture Institute of Ananda Nagar. We raised a fabulous £162, to which ACMAC will add a donation of £50. Thanks to Balance Healthcare, JCM and WCA for generously donating raffle prizes. Plus we amassed a huge pile of needles which will be sent direct to the clinic. I hope that we will continue to support AIAN in the future.

Please take forward the energy that we all created together. Stay in touch with each other, meet up, get on the forum. I think many good changes are afoot! CW

Here’s Paige White‘s appraisal of the Conference on Sat 24 Mar:

“I just wanted to say what an inspirational weekend I have enjoyed in Brighton at the ACMAC’s 3rd annual conference. The passion, altruism and practicality of Lisa and Skip were truly mind-altering. As a new practitioner, acupuncture practice can seem so daunting with the vastness of our medicine and the varied paths and modalities at our disposal. For me, they blew a lot of that confusion away with their straight-forward approach – something which fills me with deep gratitude.

Hearing about the genesis of the community acupuncture movement and the specifics about their experiences with acupuncture was fascinating and inspiring. I never thought needling people (aggressive drunks) actively averse to treatment would still work, it did. Or needling only on the trunk for a seriously ill patient would have a very good effect, it did. Or that hundreds of people would come and have acupuncture reclining on chairs in circles, they do (and Lisa is very hopeful we will try it in the UK.) Calum and Nik provided an important local viewpoint to the panel with their success at The Dragon acupuncture project.

Charlie of ACMAC talked about getting off the triangle of HERO, VILLIAN and VICTIM and out into the productive space that opens up once we let go of these unhelpful positions that disempower us and prevent our energy from being directed to more productive areas of focus. I could hear my own whinging about barriers fade a bit… Katherine Berry managed the microphone like a pro and a few of us think she has a future as a TV presenter as she kept the panel discussion moving and fielded and summarized questions so very well.

I felt compelled to challenge Nick Pahl of the BAcC about the rather

extortionate fees we UK acus are asked to pay for our professional organization membership. I feel Community Acupuncture is the future of acupuncture with more people experiencing acupuncture, not trying to prove anything fighting the skeptics. Only when we are treating people in vast numbers will we have the proof and support we need to really get valid research projects going, not while we are still  boutique providers in a niche market.

The discussions with other attendees also added a huge value to the conference. I look forward to communicating with you all on the Forum in future. For now I am focusing on finding a suitable premises for my new clinic following the recipe of Lisa and Skip. Anyone in Lincoln who fancies joining me please get in touch, because as Lisa repeated acupuncturists don’t make sense alone…

I am so pleased to have been a part of the lovely atmosphere – that literally made my head spin with all the excitement and possibility of it all! Wishing all my new friends all the best. I’m off to look at commercial property this week….and trawl https://www.pocacoop.com/join-POCA/ for info…     PW

And here’s Norman Savigar for some words about Skip’s Jingei Pulse diagnosis day on 25th March:

Jingei Pulse Diagnosis – Another Tool In The Box

One of the challenges in a busy multi-bed clinic, when you are trying to treat perhaps up to 6 people in an hour, is the time it takes to complete a conventional pulse diagnosis using the 3 positions on each wrist. So I was particularly interested to attend Skip Van Meter’s (Working Class Acupuncture, Portland OR; POCA www.pocacoop.com) training session we had the day after the ACMAC Conference, where we learnt a little-known traditional pulse diagnosis technique.

The Jingei method is described in Ling Shu Ch 9. It involves comparing the width of the radial artery to that of the carotid artery on the same side of the body, and can be completed quickly. The relative widths of the artery indicate the balance of yang:yin in the patient, ie you are looking at the core of the patient, beneath patterns and symptoms. The widths of the arteries will often vary so the purpose is to gauge how much wider one is to the other on the scale: 4:1/3:1/2:1/1.5:1 – 1:1.5/1:2/1:3/1:4

A pulse picture where the carotid is 4 times wider than the radial artery is described as All Yang and the patient may be close to death with a condition such as an impending heart attack. Similarly, the reverse pattern where the radial is 4 times wider than the carotid is described as All Yin and on this occasion the patient may be close to death and in a coma.

But as we discovered when we tried the technique on each other in the session, there can be quite a wide spread of the other ratios which in turn represent: Yang Ming; Tai Yang; Shao Yang (these 3 most commonly seen in clinic); Jue Yin; Shao Yin and Tai Yin. The eagle-eyed among you will spot that this is not the normal hierarchy of the 6 Levels.

The other assessment criteria in the diagnosis is the speed of the pulse: above 80bpm you treat the Hand channel of the relevant pair; below 80bpm you treat the Foot channel.

So as an example, if the patient has a 2:1 pulse ratio with a pulse of 75 bpm you would assume that patient’s core imbalance is expressed through the Foot Tai Yang / Bladder channel. This is apparently related to Stem/Branch theory rather than a 5 Element Constitutional Factor assessment.

You treat by adding some UB/Kidney points to your prescription for this patient and typically these would be Yuan-Source/He-Sea points for Bladder (Bl64, Bl40) and Kidney Yuan-Source (Ki3). Skip’s experience over many years is that most of the patients that he sees in clinic are diagnosed as expressing core imbalance through GB or UB (as explained earlier, we are unlikely to see 1:2 or 1:3 imbalances for example, as that patient is probably severely ill and hospitalized).

So, this is not a particularly difficult technique to adopt but it does appear to work best alongside a Balance Method style of treatment where you seek to balance Yin and Yang channels across the 4 limbs, and then include the additional points from the Jingei assessment in the treatment.

I tend to use the Balance Method in my Community Acupuncture multi-bed clinic, so I shall try to introduce this and see how I get on with it and the impact that it has on the treatments for my patients. NS.

Charlotte again: I had a great time on Sunday 25th learning not just the Jingei, which I have found immediately useful in clinic, but the nuts and bolts of how Lisa, Skip and Cris treat in their clinics. I took away the idea of balancing treatment on yin and yang channels on different sides of the body, which reinforced what I learned from Dr Tan, to create a more dynamic treatment than bilateral needling. Our American friends were very generous with their information and role-played to demonstrate what a POCA-style patient intake might be like, and demonstrated a treatment. I had my first introduction to some Master Tung points, and how useful they can be in CA clinics because they are distal. By the end of the day we were all awash with new information. (Then I took them all out for a good English curry!) CW

ACMAC now welcomes “Supporters”

Up until recently all ACMAC members have been well in the throws of starting up or already running multibed clinics. But practitioners and students who aren’t yet multibedders have been approaching us asking to join too. So we have opened up our membership criteria and we are now very happy to welcome any practitioner or student to ACMAC (extra special discount for Students, see Join ACMAC page). These Supporter memberships will enjoy all the same benefits as Clinic memberships, minus a clinic listing:

• Membership of a community of professionals, students and supporters, all committed to providing affordable, accessible acupuncture to everyone. We are stronger if we work together as a movement, encourage and support each other. We can learn from each other, share our wisdom and experiences at conferences, meetings and on our Forum.
• Membership also makes financial sense: all members receive a 15% discount off needles and 10% off everything else (except books) from Balance Healthcare (based in Oxford UK, but can supply all over Europe). Balance are long-time friends and supporters of the multibed movement and ACMAC and help us run our events too so we love them very much. Their prices are good, they will happily send you free samples, and we reckon that just by using their discount an average practitioner can easily make back ACMAC’s membership fees over the year. You need to call them on 0800 072 0202 (freephone) or 01608 658862 to order with your discount as the website can’t calculate it. You’ll need to give Balance your membership number.
• JCM already offers ACMAC members 20% off the cost of the JCM CD-rom. (If you would like to order the CD-ROM, please contact the JCM office direct, via info@jcm.co.uk and tell them your clinic number.)  I have just negotiated a new discount for ACMAC members on subscription to the Journal: members can now subscribe at the student rate, which represents a 25% saving. Please subscribe as if you were a student – you will be contacted by email and then you should say that you are an ACMAC member and give your clinic number. See http://www.jcm.co.uk/ for more details and to subscribe. Subscription now includes 3 hard copies of the Journal each year, with immediate access to the entire JCM on-line archive.
• In 2011, ACMAC started collaborating with Dr Richard Tan’s organization, Tanwubian. Dr Tan now offers ACMAC members discounts on all his seminars. No other organisation or group is offered a discount by Dr Tan! For details of his 2012 schedule please see http://www.tanwubian.com/
• I intend to get more member benefits for ACMAC too, watch this space.
• And if and when a Supporter is ready to open a multibed clinic, just complete the registration form at the bottom of the Join ACMAC page, send it over and your clinic pages will be on the website before you can say one inch needle.

So if you or anyone you know would like to join ACMAC as a Supporter we would be delighted to welcome you! Please read our Join ACMAC page, which will give you details of prices, how you can pay, and make sure you complete the registration form at the bottom of the page. Thank you for your support.

Dr Tan’s 2012 schedule is now released! With a discount for ACMAC members!

Dr. Richard Teh-Fu Tan was born in Taiwan where he began his training in classical traditions at an early age. He studied with numerous masters of acupuncture, Chinese herbs, martial arts and philosophy. His personal quest was to find a way to unify the different classical acupuncture traditions. His careful study and analysis of ancient texts led to his discovery of the Balance Method.

He began teaching his method after recognizing that many colleagues in the acupuncture community complained about the lack of clinical results, or the length of time it took to achieve successful outcomes in clinical practice. Yet the classical texts state that the effectiveness of acupuncture should be seen immediately, like the “shadow of a pole standing under the sun.”

Dr. Tan’s unique system is therefore all about yielding instant results for all types of pain, internal disorders, emotional disorders and complex cases. Painful sites are not treated : so the patient can move his joint and feel the relief within seconds. Balance method uses meridian palpation, allowing practitioners to rediscover this ancient and classical way to arrive at an accurate acupuncture diagnosis. Dr. Tan is very generous with his teaching; he reveals his method fully and everything he shares he has perfected through many years of clinical experience.

The quick-thinking process of Dr Tan’s Balance Method is a precious asset for multibed treatments. It is used widely in the US and is becoming more popular in the UK too. Dr Tan wants to support the multibed movement and has offered a 5% discount to ACMAC members only on all this year’s seminars (ACMAC is the only group offered a discount! Don’t forget you can join ACMAC even if you don’t yet have a multibed clinic, and you can then benefit from discounts on events like these, and discounts  at Balance Healthcare and other suppliers. See Join ACMAC for more details.)  The 5% discount is available on any day at the London seminar. On all other events the 5% discount is available if the whole seminar is booked.

Dr Tan is also keen to revolutionise the way that Chinese Medicine is taught. Every class will consist of hours of practical training in small groups. You will be devising and implementing actual treatments using the methods devised by Dr Tan. There is no pressure, as Dr Tan and an assistant will both be available for guidance and feedback. You will be amazed at how much you will absorb in a fun and supportive atmosphere.

Please follow these links to Dr Tan’s Tanwubian website for more details of the seminars, and to book:

May 10^th to 13^th : Paris, France. Taught in English and translated into French. Information and registration HERE

June 28^th to July 1^st : London, U.K. Taught in English. Information and registration HERE

October 18^th to 21^st : Munich, Germany. Taught in English and translated into German. Information and registration HERE

November 1st to 4th : Melbourne, Australia. Taught in English. Information and registration HERE

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