Acupuncture: Alternative No Longer? A Q&A on This Growing Healthcare Option

Cramps. Night-sweats. Migraines.

These problems have one thing in common for Americans: they are increasingly treated with acupuncture.

Pacific College of Oriental Medicine is one of the largest Chinese medicine programs in the country. The 23-year old school has campuses in New York, Chicago, and San Diego. Campus’ clinics were recognized with the “Traditional Chinese Medicine World” Best in the West award for three years. The college also has off-site clinics in hospitals and treatment centers throughout the New York area. Pacific’s staff and students use acupuncture, herb, and massage to treat patient issues ranging from cancer and AIDS to drug addiction.

In the main office at 915 Broadway, graduate and students clinicians usually see more than 600 patients per week. There are 450 students learning the principles and practice of acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and massage. Only 50 of these students study massage alone. With enrollment growing, the college is currently expanding and building more classrooms.

After Sept. 11, 2001, students furthered their outreach by performing acupuncture and massage on both rescue workers and rescue dogs. “We gave the dogs acupressure massage,” explains Cynthia Neipris, the Director of Outreach and Community Education. “That kind of environment was incredibly hard on all the rescue workers, but the dogs can’t deal with the stress in many of the ways we can.” We sat down to discuss the college, oriental medicine, and her own involvement with the disciplines taught here.

Have you noticed any changes in your practice during the recession or the current uncertainty with debate over the healthcare reform bill?

In the recession, our patients have actually increased, which is kind of remarkable. We can’t be sure, but we’re guessing people can’t afford other healthcare now. With no insurance, for example, people don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket. We think people also are looking for more natural methods in everything, from cooking to medicine, that are more self-sufficient. In acupuncture, you can learn techniques to use yourself, and the body heals itself with the help of the practitioner.

You mentioned that this can be a lifestyle change—are more people then willing to undertake a dramatic change like that?

I think people are more willing to make those lifestyle changes because these days they’re being forced to in other areas of their lives. Also, the spread of information about alternative medicine helps. Developments in Western medicine too—it’s a time when a lot of things we had before no longer seem to work the way we thought. In medicine, that can mean side effects, or becoming bacterially resistant from taking antibiotics. As information spreads, people are looking for natural alternatives.

I know many use the treatments as supplements, but do treatments here present outright alternatives?

If I have a knee problem, I’d want to try acupuncture before I try expensive surgery or medicine that costs $86 dollars a bottle and that I have to keep taking for the indefinite future. The goal here is to help you not, for example, have migraines anymore. Rather than spend money on Imitrex all the time forever or until your migraines spontaneously go away.

The clinic also offers treatments to help people quite smoking—how does that work?

The acupuncture can help reduce cravings, releases endorphins when you’re going through the pains of withdrawal so you’re less likely to go back to smoking, and it can relax your sympathetic nervous system response. That’s the fight or flight reflex. The body tenses when you take away the smoking, the heart can beat faster or feel strained, too. The treatments help the body relax the body and mind. Plus, the acupuncture helps to detox the body of remaining traces of nicotine, which makes it easier to move on faster.

You used to have your own practice in Santa Monica—how do you feel working at the clinic and college here instead of your former practice in Southern California?

New York has a lot of stressed out people. And that’s what we do here. I think it’s even more rewarding to treat people here and bring them that sense of being calm and centered.

Do you take the herbs yourself?

Oh, yeah! I love them. They work.

For what?

That’s like asking what prescriptions are for: everything. Chinese herbal treatments tend to be known for the problems that Western medicine can’t or doesn’t effectively work on. Like pain, for example, or syndromes for which Western doctors have no names. You can treat it anyway. We look at patterns in the body and name that instead, treating the patient holistically, not just for the symptoms. But we can treat lots of things that Western medicine treats all the time, too. PMS and cramps, for example. People love those treatments. And menopause! I think I only had night sweats for one night.

You mentioned that your clinicians often try to teach skills that patients can use at home, like looking at your tongue. What does my tongue say?

Overall, it’s rather red. That’s good. Do you run warm a lot? There’s a darker red tip too. You have trouble sleeping, right? With the warmth, you should try to cool yourself to help you sleep better. We don’t sleep when hot. Not the reason for yours, but it can be a factor. So, as you do cooling activities, you could look in the mirror and see if it’s getting less red overall. Also, there’s scalloping around the edges, from your teeth. As we worry, the body closes up. You stress and worry too much. You’ll see it get better as you relax—say, on vacation.

The World Trade Center--Exploring the Site, and Myself

Ever since Sept.11, 2001, American flags have everywhere. We find them on cars, suit lapels, and innumerable ouvenirs that tourists buy when they visit New York City. But the flag seldom rarely affects me. I consider it an overused and sometimes exploited icon. Growing up in D.C., it was a cheap patriotic symbol exploited by politicians and lobbyists. Then I went on a tour of Ground Zero. And I have to say, I now see the flag has the potential to mean more to me.

On Oct. 28, 2009, I took the World Trade Center Tribute Center’s audio tour of the World Trade Center site. I went with 14 other students in my NYU journalism class. During our visit, I surveyed the ruins. There's no more debris. It's a huge constructive site filled cranes and workers in hard hats. At the same time, I was listening through my headset to the stories of survivors, officials, and the loved ones of some of the thousands lost piped into my ears.

After experiencing the fear and uncertainty of living in DC on Sept. 11, I often find myself resenting the invocation of that tragic day while I now live in New York. In classes, when a professor mentions the unique experiences of that day, they focus solely on New York, asking if anyone was in the city and what that was like. I feel a sense of almost as though my experience and the experience of my fellow DC residents is undermined and belittled in those conversations. A plane crashed there, too, I say to myself. And if passengers had not revolted and thwarted the plans of hijackers resulting in the Pennsylvania crash of Flight 93, there would have been more. Indeed, I remember the panic of attending school at a national religious landmark, the uncertain fear of what would be next. Because we all felt as though there was going to be a “next” and we knew it would be in the city where we lived—it would be in the Nation’s Capital.

I was not looking forward to it. With my perhaps unique perspective about discussing those events in Manhattan and with the fatigue many of my classmates feel for such discussion, I was not enthused. I was even less disposed to feel much.

On a red bridge overpass, looking down upon the massive pit where the towers once stood, the emptiness did not faze me. The size of the gaping construction site was notable, but not really memorable. It was the flag I spied on a forklift, flapping in the damp breeze and drizzle, standing out against the cool glass of the new tower that brought a chill over me. Flags adorned each crane, each forklift, each bulldozer, and the sight, on this grim day, over a spot of such suffering and bravery, made me gasp.

Traipsing through the marble halls of the World Financial Center, walking past Ann Taylor stores and various eateries along with the complex’s daily workers seemed wrong. The worlds of the past and the present merged as I spied men pacing and talking on BlackBerries while fighting my emotions at hearing Kate, a fireman’s widow, explain, “September 12th remains the worst day in my mind—on September 11th, I still had hope.”

These elements of the experience seemed to violate the sanctity of this living memorial of an audio tour. But it also seemed to fit in a strange, perhaps unintended way. From the form to the content of the tour, one message is abundantly clear: life goes on. It is never about forgetting. It is impossible to forget the voice of Lee Ielpi recounting the story of carrying his son Jonathan’s body out of the debris with fellow firefighters. I can't block out the emotion of volunteer docent Tracy Gazzani when she recalls the last morning she saw her son Terry, 24, an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald, whose remains have yet to be found.

“We are so blessed to live here,” reflected one neighborhood resident in the audio program. “We have experienced the most beautiful part of America.”

The flags here are not rested for the rain. They do not stay in on days like this. They keep upright, weathering the rain and wind. They go on.

I don’t recall ever crying on Sept. 11. After my parents arrived and ended the waiting game of being picked up from the school on lock-down, we went home and watched the news. Unable to take it for long, I baked cookies. I couldn’t tell you what kind if you put a gun to my head, but I know that I took to my kitchen and turned on the oven. I got choked up. I got scared. I rued the uncertainty. But I never cried.

Walking away from my two hours touring the site, listening to painfully real experiences, and speaking with Tracy, I understood what this mother meant, after she shared stories about her only child tragically torn away. “It gets different,” she said. “It doesn’t get better, it gets different.” Trekking through the Financial District in the cold, wind, and rain, I entered the subway weighing the morning’s events, turning Tracy’s words over in my mind. As soon as I arrived at the subway platform, I saw a homeless man asleep against the wall, clutching a backpack with a small American flag patch, and I silently shed tears as I waited for the train.

The Competitions We Can Actually Win

Convicts. Minors. People like me.

What do these individuals have in common? They are citizens of the United States who do not get full voting rights.

It is a fallacy that everyone in America has an equal vote. Growing up in DC, I was painfully aware of this fact with every election year. I do not get a real vote or real representation as a registered voter in the District of Columbia. I follow politics, relishing in electoral races with the zeal of a sports fan—too many of whom now appear to take more interest in the World Series than the competitions in which they can participate: the battles in our democracy. To me, the loud cheers and expressions of sorrow among baseball fans discussing the Yankees and the Phillies holds no interest. If anything, it really interrupts my ability to do things like my homework in an apartment of people who care. But on an election day like today, this rabid interest and the accompanying abysmal voter activity among those around me is appalling.

In DC, our license plates read “Taxation Without Representation”—plates with which Bill Clinton actually updated presidential vehicles, and which George Bush had removed. In school, I learned how lucky I was to have a vote as both women and Irish Catholics had been disenfranchised in this country. In my house, I was taught that voting was a moral responsibility with the power to voice my opinion of what was right and what would and should happen to my rights and my environment.

In each of my classes at NYU, the majority of students are from the tri-state area. These regions are the battlegrounds of critical elections for matters from gay rights to the authority of term limits to implications of presidential political capital. So, as a reporter and a child of DC, I informally polled my classes. My classmates are smart, engaged, and educated, I thought. It can’t be as bad as the poor showing I have seen walking into my building, which holds a polling station in the basement each election.

Not a single one told me they had voted or planned to do so in this election.

After the second class, I was confused. I was also indignant. But I wasn’t satisfied.

So, in a matter wholly questionable as a social scientist, I decided to consider a different sample. The Flatiron District at lunchtime seemed perfect. Individuals in the area often also work nearby, the polls will be easy to get to, and scoping out the polling booths will be easier as clearly people are getting there to vote. Yet logging on to the Community Board 5 website, the main page only told me about Yankees pep rally details from last week and bus route changes. I could not find information on voting. Once I did, the results were equally disparaging as the lack of publicity. In an hour on the street in front of the polling station, I counted a total of fifteen voters entering the building.

In DC, we do not have notable sports franchises—we have elections. Growing up in a politically active family, I followed elections with an enthusiasm that has yet to fully wear off. Eagerly poring over news and early polling data—back in the day when such figures were allowed—and relishing in the competition while anxiously rooting for my candidate, election days retain a tangible magic for me, a palpable, crackling air of power and possibility.

Sometimes, I am jaded. Sometimes, I am completely unphased by the political games and figured around which I grew up. But I am still susceptible to the excitement and anticipation of elections.

To me, that first Tuesday in November is my thrill in the democratic system.

Not to vote, I was taught, is morally reprehensible. I carry that belief with me still—and on this first Tuesday in November, it seems one of the hardest things about currently living in New York.

NYU Tragedy and the Politics of the Unknown

As a student at NYU, suicide is not a foreign occurrence. Some joke about the “Bobst Diving Team,” while others simply cannot discuss dorm windows without explaining that the school restricts access to air because officials fear students will all kill themselves.

I have never experienced the tragedy of knowing a student who committed suicide at NYU. I can only hope, from the depths of my heart, that I will never have to face that news. I am, however, a member of the University’s community, and I believe that the school as a whole feels each loss in various ways.

As a reporter, tackling death is one of the greatest hardships one can face, and covering suicide is even more difficult for the questions one must ask because the list of victims is not only the name echoed throughout your article, but each subject you interview. During my freshman year, I had to face this reality when contributing an article to an investigative series on the NYU Wellness Exchange, the mainstay of mental health services on campus. In 2007, the school community witnessed multiple suicides and at one point I was tasked with investigating whether students had reached out for help. I had to call and email Allan Oakley Hunter’s father in the wake of his son taking his own life.

I do not remember the content of my various contact with Mr. Hunter. What stands out most in my memory is sitting at my desk in an under-populated newsroom during my afternoon staff shift, rocking in an old rolling chair, and hating myself for the questions I had not even asked yet. My editor gave me a phone number and other contact information, and I dawdled and ultimately just idled in that chair, unsure how to do my job and, moreover, how to handle what doing my job meant.

I hate when people write about losses to which they are unconnected—it feels fake, self-gratifying, and self-important. I have no intention of writing such a piece. I cannot presume to know what the friends, family, or acquaintances of Andrew Williamson-Noble feel. According to Facebook, this latest student to end his life on campus lived in my residence hall. He wears a suit nicely in his profile picture. Yet while his features seem plausibly familiar in the abstract, I know little about him on a personal, immediate level.

Over the last two and a half years I have received emails from New York University president John Sexton regarding four suicides on campus. What I had failed to truly recognize until today’s notice, entitled “The Death of an NYU Student,” was the sense of panic and despair that results not from the news, but from the withholding of substantive information. I know the Wellness Center’s phone number—it’s emblazoned on innumerable items the school has thrust upon me at events since my orientation before school even started, they send me emails, and it is on campus phones all over downtown Manhattan. What I want—what I need desperately—to know in the wake of news of another student death is a name.

In the Bible, God grants Adam the power to name all the creatures of the Earth, giving him power over all other inhabitants of Eden. A name is power. In the wake of tragedy, a name makes the difference between an abstract sense of sorrow and the abject devastation of personal loss. In the hours between receiving confirmed news of a suicide at Bobst library this morning and the release of a name this afternoon, the anxiety and torment of not knowing which group you will fall into is terrible and, I think, wrong.

Upon hearing the news, I mentally ran through people I know well, scanning mental images of recent interactions for signs of depression or desperation. I ran through when I had seen them last, what I had heard of them most recently, trying to piece together the possibilities while incorporating what little I knew of the timeline. Without a name, you exist in a state of emotional freefall, able to sense that hollowness in the pit of your stomach that you feel on a rollercoaster, when you are out of control and have no idea what will happen next. But I like roller coasters. I have dragged friends and family members on roller coasters. This sensation and this painful, anxious uncertainty should not be imposed on others.

We should get a name.