August 16, 2008
Well, I’ve gone and done it, something I’ve been considering for years. I have rented out my house in the woods to the new teacher at the high school, and moved into the old house that holds the Two Rivers Clinic and Center for Sustainable Medicine. One of my colleagues had moved out and another was looking for a shared space with his sweetie, so I said “This is it: an opportunity to try truly sustainable living as a health care provider.” Yes, we’re all here–kids, medical dog and all. The chickens are on their way as soon as I get a fence up. Not all amenities are quite in place yet, but it’s amazing what a localvore can cook up on a single electric burner when friends are coming for dinner, and lucky for me I have several close friends with showers and the best secret swimming hole just a minute’s walk away, since a claw foot bathtub turns out to be a lot more expensive to install than I thought.
My old office is now my bedroom and writing space, and the office next door is back to its original use as the boy’s bedroom. Henry and Alden asked me if they could spray paint the ceiling, and I said “sure.” We went out and collected a bunch of leaves and ferns, and used them as stencils, along with a few paper cutouts of baseball players. We now have the coolest ceiling in town.
Downstairs we have three “clutter-free” zones, the waiting room, my new office (the one with the big window looking out on the old tree, the sunniest room in the house.) and the kitchen. These zones are all in use for my medical practice in homeopathy and community acupuncture, but after school the waiting room turns into our living room, and the kitchen is in use all day, as I often have some wonderful soup or curry cooking up while I’m working—one of the reasons I wanted to live and work in the same space. I told my friends: “Instead of never being home, now I’ll always be home.” It’s great to be able to run upstairs and grab a t-shirt as the day warms up, rather than wishing I had brought a change of clothes since I don’t want to drive 8 miles to get something cooler or warmer to wear. Likewise if a kid forgets a lunchbox or his homework, no biggie, I can just zip it up the hill one mile to the school, rather than having to cancel a patient just to rectify the situation.
Living on Route 113, a two-lane state road that goes all the way from East Thetford to Chelsea, Vermont, and next door to the highway department and their sandpit is a bit of a challenge, noise-wise. My initial panic has calmed down a bit, since I have made an arrangement to use a friend’s hogan for quiet time when I need it. When the pickup trucks start blasting by at rush hour I have learned to flip on a country western station and start frying something up for dinner, and engage in a fantasy that I am a waitress in a little roadside café in some cowboy town out West, waiting for my honey to drop by. (You didn’t know I have a secret desire to be a country western singer, did you?)
In more meditative moods, I pray for a future when the only sound outside will be an occasional bus, bringing all those folks back home on one set of wheels, the way things are in Cuba—with almost no cars on the road, except those turquoise and chrome beauties that have been kept running by sheer ingenuity since 1956. At an alternative clinic I visited there, busloads of elderly people were given free transport from the outlying towns to the clinic in Matanzas where they received every imaginable form of alternative medicine: massage, acupuncture, homeopathy, magnet therapy, and more—all paid for by the Cuban national health care service. The roads are beautifully quiet, even in the city. And the cars that are on the road are required to pick up hitchhikers, in order to conserve fuel.
We have a lot to learn from Cuba, and will soon wish we had paid more attention to what they were doing as they transitioned to a self-sufficient, non-petroleum-based society, rather than bashing them for their politics.
The Cuban model of community medicine is part of what inspired me to try living here in the clinic. In Cuba, there is one doctor for about every 250 people, and the doctor lives right in the neighborhood, practicing out of a home-based office, so that she is available to the people who live there at all times, and knows her patients in more contexts than just office visits.
By having a home-based clinic, I don’t have to pay to heat my home when I’m at work, or my work when I’m at home, or waste all that fuel either. I can pay one electric bill, and have one internet service. I can start supper during a break and mail out a package of medicine as I take my dog for her morning walk. My kids can jump on the school bus in the morning, and get off in the afternoon, and I can spend several days at a time without needing to even start the car (not to mention that I’m right next door to the auto repair shop.) If a kid has a cold, I don’t have to cancel the whole day’s work; I can stash them up in their room and check in on them periodically while they sleep it off. Snow, sleet, rain? No problem, I’m already at work. If patients don’t get here, well, I can catch up on paperwork, or take a nap.
As for the road noise? Well, I may look for a quieter place to do this work/home thing, or I might just bank on the inevitability of buses in rural Vermont, or the fact that even my hearing will probably dull with the years. In the meantime I’m on the pick-up drop-off drop-in route for friends ready to pick up kids on the way to little league practice or just stopping by for a chat, and passing farmers who stash raw milk, fresh meat, and hand-picked raspberries in my fridge when I’m not looking, in trade for acupuncture.
July 29, 2008
I have just returned from a workshop on Community Acupuncture put on by a group called “Working Class Acupuncture” in Portland, Oregon.
I have been toying with the idea of low-cost group treatments for some time now, and this workshop has convinced me that Community Acupuncture is the way to go. In August I will start offering group treatments at the Two Rivers Clinic in Thetford Center, Vermont for a sliding scale of $15-40 per treatment (you decide where you fit on the scale). For an appointment, call 802-785-2503, or email me through the contact page.
If we look at the Sustainable Medicine Manifesto, Community Acupuncture is a good example of sustainable medicine in many ways:
1. It is financially affordable, for both clients and practitioners, making acupuncture available to all who need it, rather than limiting it to those who can afford it.
2. It is non-toxic, to clients and to the earth, creating less waste per treatment than a single can of soda.
3. It is slow medicine—clients are allowed to relax and stay for as long as they like.
4. It builds and restores community connections by encouraging people to relax in a meditative environment with their neighbors.
5. It is pattern-based and proactive—treating the underlying cause of the illness based on whole body diagnosis.
6. The only thing sterile about Community Acupuncture are the needles. Community Acupuncture creates a healthy fertile environment in which people can grow and change.
April 28, 2008
Julian Winston, (1941-2005) was one of our best scholars and historians of Homeopathy. His article about homeopathy in the treatment of epidemics has been widely republished. I include it here as it is becoming more relevant each year as global warming and antibiotic-resistant bacteria create new generations of epidemic illness that standard pharmaceutical medicine is unprepared for.
Homeopathy, on the other hand, is far more flexible than pharmaceutical medicine, and is routinely used to treat epidemics in India and other countries.
Some History of the Treatment of Epidemics with Homeopathy
by Julian Winston
From its earliest days, homeopathy has been able to treat epidemic diseases with a substantial rate of success, when compared to conventional treatments. It was these successes that placed the practice of homeopathy so firmly in the consciousness of people world-wide. (more…)
April 16, 2008
This very important collaborative statement was written in February 2002 by the Science and Environmental Health Network. I first found it soon after writing the Sustainable Medicine Manifesto, and was amazed and delighted to find that I was in such good company.
Ecological Medicine: A Call for Inquiry and Action
Ecological Medicine is a new field of inquiry and action to reconcile the care and health of ecosystems, populations, communities, and individuals.
The health of Earth’s ecosystem is the foundation of all health. Human impact in the form of population pressure, resource abuse, economic self-interest, and inappropriate technologies is rapidly degrading the environment. This impact, in turn, is creating new patterns of human and ecosystem poverty and disease. The tension among ecosystem health, public health, and individual health is reaching a breaking point at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century.
Public health measures, education, and medical advances have significantly reduced death and disease in many parts of the world, but some advances come at considerable cost, and the benefits are not equally distributed. (more…)
By Ted Schettler, MD MPH
Medical advances have resulted in substantial decreases in morbidity and mortality in many parts of the world. Some of these advances come at considerable economic as well as environmental costs, and benefits are not equally distributed. Now medicine and public health struggle to address the changing patterns of disease resulting both from a rapidly changing and degraded earth and from the ways people live on it. (more…)
This article, (originally published in 1998) by Randy Peyser, highlights the work of Joel Kreisburg, founder of Teleosis, another organization that focuses on ecologically sustainable medicine.
What’s Turning America’s Doctors Green?
The Case for Ecologically Sustainable Medicine
From community-based Earth Day events, to magazines on sustainability and “green” conferences, the environmental movement has inspired some to work tirelessly toward saving the planet, and motivated others to at least toss the right container in the correct recycling bin for garbage pick up every week. However, in spite of our collective efforts, both large and small, there is still one area of environmental awareness in which, even after twenty years of educating ourselves, we are sorely missing the mark.
According to Dr. Joel Kreisberg DC, an adjunct faculty member at JFK University, members of the ‘green community,’ and the community-at-large, have entirely neglected the area of ‘green medicine.’ (more…)
In this systems model of homeopathy, each person or organism contains patterned information about all the other organisms in the larger system of the universe. Theoretically, a healthy person should be able to draw on resources from any other substance at an appropriate time, and move fluidly through life using different energy patterns as they are needed—both in the outer world, and in the inner workings of the body itself. When cleaning one’s house, a person draws on mineral energy to create structure and order out of chaos, putting thing in their proper place, and lining things up into neat and predictable rows. In the human body, minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and silica create structure in forming bones, teeth, nails, and hair. Other minerals function to break down and rearrange other structures, form bonds, and convert energy into matter, and matter into energy.
When attacked by an assailant, that same person should draw on animal energy for survival—to run away quickly, hide, or fight back. (more…)
This article first appeared in The American Acupuncturist, Volume XXIII, Winter 2000. I am reprinting it here because Cuba is a country we will wish we had studied closer as we enter the post-peak-oil era. Cuba has already been through the changes we are just barely starting to feel the effects of, and their solutions were far more brave and creative than most other countries who have found themselves suddenly lacking resources.
Despite huge shortages in medical supplies due to the U.S. embargo, Cuba has one of the most advanced medical systems in Latin America-and a strong commitment to providing free medical care not just to its own people, but to poverty stricken areas around the world.
In recent years, a second revolution has taken root in the fertile soil of the first: “Natural and Traditional Medicine”-from acupuncture to homeopathy to music therapy-is now offered in clinics and hospitals alongside conventional therapies, and Cuban patients pay the same amount for open heart surgery as they do for an acupuncture treatment: absolutely nothing. I traveled to Cuba in November, 1999 to research this phenomenon, and returned with a great love for this small country. (more…)