During acupuncture school there wasn’t much emphasis on community acupuncture, so I knew very little about it. It wasn’t until I was 4 weeks away from the California Acupuncture Licensing Exam, completely fried and needing some acupuncture, that I stumbled upon community acupuncture at OAP. It was just down the street from my house, so I could justify an hour break from studying, and it was in my price range. What I enjoyed most about my first experience at OAP was how efficient and easy it was: in and out; I was treated and back to studying within an hour. It was exactly what I needed.
After one of my subsequent treatments I expressed my interest in community acupuncture, and one of the staff at OAP, I think it was Sarah, turned me onto POCA. Little did I know that there was a whole group of people who are all about community acupuncture. When I checked out the POCA website, I was thrilled to see an organization dedicated to this new interest of mine. In the POCA forums, I found a great community of people who share resources and experiences in the spirit of collective support.
However, community acupuncture is definitely very different from what I was taught in school, and I was apprehensive about having what it took to be a community acupuncturist. Fortunately, once I became a POCA member, I had access to POCA TV. POCA TV was helpful to me in the demonstration and teachings of how to be an excellent community acupuncturist. I watched just about every video they had online at the time. When I was finished, I felt like I had a good idea of what it took to be an acupunk (AKA: community acupuncturist) and a new sense of confidence in being one.
As a POCA member, I share with POCA the goal of making healthcare affordable and accessible. The community of POCA is working hard to make this agenda a possibility. I believe in the vision of recreating the definition of healthcare, one where profit is not the bottom line and patients are looked at as people instead of statistics. We have the ability to be a healthy society, but it takes community health care practitioners and organizations like POCA to make that available. I am proud to be a part of a movement to reshape the definition of health care and to make it available to populations that otherwise wouldn’t have access to it.