2/15/2014
My First Year in Practice – Southern California edition
In this recording, I had the pleasure of interviewing three recently licensed Acupuncturists to discuss their experiences opening and managing their practices. These three were very generous in sharing the obstacles they had and still have to overcome and I think their candor and honesty will be very instructive to anyone entering the acupuncture profession. I especially hope this recording will find its way to many AOM students and those thinking of enrolling in AOM school as they need to hear the types of challenges that awaits them. We had a good mixture including a Community Acupuncturist who leased her own space and two others working out of Chiropractors’ offices although under different types of agreements. I am grateful to these three for sharing their stories and think listeners will find this a wonderful peek into the real world of starting a career as a Licensed Acupuncturist. I also hope to do more of these recordings. If anyone would like to participate or has any suggestions for future recordings, please contact me at info@makingacupuncturepay.mystagingwebsite.com or share your thoughts on the Forum section of this website (look for the thread “My First Year in Practice”) or on the Making Acupuncture Pay Facebook page. Thanks for listening. Matthew Bauer
My First Year In Practice: Interviews
SERVING THE UNDER SERVED INTERVIEW SERIES
The interview below completes the series of the three people I most wanted to interview – Michael Smith, Misha Cohen, and Lisa Rohleder. I am very grateful they took the time to speak with me and allow me to put our talk out in the WWW-Either. I most wanted to interview these three because they have all devoted themselves to treating patient populations that were being neglected by health care providers including most AOM practitioners. They also all built their knowledge by actually treating thousands of patients and then put this to the test and refined their knowledge even further by teaching others and seeing their protocols successfully duplicated again and again. In my own small way, that is what I am trying to do also – teach others what I have learned about how to be successful with their patients and their practices and test this by seeing if it can be duplicated by others. I hope you will find these interviews enlightening and inspiring as they show what can be done when one dedicates themselves to serving the underserved. Thank you – Matthew Bauer
09/10/13
In my third interview below, I had the honor of speaking with Dr. Michael Smith, best known as the founding Director of the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA). I suspect few of you reading this have a good understanding of the work Dr. Smith has done and is still doing and that is a shame. Through the efforts of Dr. Smith and the hard-working NADA people hundreds of thousands if not millions of people caught in the downward spiral of drug and alcohol addiction have and are being helped with the NADA treatment protocols. Many of those people were the least served in our society – the poor, the imprisoned, the homeless. Some of you may have some knowledge of this but what most don’t know is the great deal of experience Michael gained directing the Lincoln Center were they also treated people with acupuncture for general medicine problems – not just drug/alcohol addiction. Michael oversaw this clinic seeing 100 people a day for 15 years making it one of the busiest acupuncture clinics in the U.S. I have written a more extensive commentary about this interview as I wanted to give more history about Michael’s work and also to point-out some problems that still confront the U.S. AOM community today. This can be found in the Forum section of this site.
8/26/13
PLEASE NOTE THE AUDIO OF MY INTERVIEW WITH DR. COHEN IS NOT FUNCTIONAL AT THIS TIME. WE ARE TRYING TO CORRECT THIS. – Matthew
In this my second interview, I am so pleased to have as my guest Dr. Misha Cohen someone who has done a remarkable job in distinguishing herself on both a national and international level. Misha is not only widely regarded as the world’s leading authority on the use of Chinese medicine in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, she has also become a leading expert on Chinese medicine’s use in the numerous conditions that tend to accompany AIDS such as Hepatitis C and certain cancers. As you will hear in this interview, she had the opportunity to become such an expert because she and her colleagues were some of the very few healthcare providers of Eastern or Western medicine who would openly accept AIDS patients in the early days of that epidemic. We had some irritating technical difficulties during this recording and I apologize for that – I am still learning how to best use this medium. I am quite happy with the content, however, and hope listeners will find both useful information and inspiration in learning about one of AOM’s truly great pioneers. Misha will be offering a new training program for treating Hepatitis C but that is not quite ready to go just yet. Please check back for that information as I will post it here and on Facebook as soon as that is ready to go.
If you have not yet Liked us on Facebook, please consider doing so as that is the means by which I let people know of new developments and resources being offered here. I encourage people to share their thoughts and questions on Making Acupuncture Pay’s website Forum. I have started a thread there about these interviews. I hope you will find this interview interesting, helpful, and maybe even inspiring.
Thanks for visiting!
Matthew Bauer
PLEASE NOTE THE AUDIO OF MY INTERVIEW WITH DR. COHEN IS NOT FUNCTIONAL AT THIS TIME. WE ARE TRYING TO CORRECT THIS. – Matthew
7/26/13
In the link bellow you’ll find a 45 minute interview I did with Lisa Rohleder co-founder of the Community Acupuncture model/movement. Lisa and now many others involved with Community Acupuncture have made tremendous strides in building a thriving organization dedicated to making group-setting acupuncture affordable to all. As you will learn, Community Acupuncture is not only the fastest growing “practice model” involving acupuncture but their multi-stakeholder co-op organization is the fastest growing acupuncture organization in the U.S. and probably the West overall. This interview is the beginning of what I hope will be more to come with notable people in the Acupuncture/Chinese medicine field. If you have not yet Liked us on Facebook, please consider doing so as that is the means by which I let people know of new developments and resources being offered here. I encourage people to share their thoughts and questions on MakingAcupuncturePay’s website Forum. I have started a thread there about this interview and the efforts I plan moving forward. I hope you will find this interview interesting, helpful, and maybe even inspiring.
Thanks for visiting!
Matthew Bauer