Tallahassee Veterans Acupuncture Project
Composition IV (Battle),
Wassily Kandinsky
There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
We are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
--Spirits in the Material World, The Police
Relax, said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!
--Hotel California, The Eagles
I can feel your anger...
it gives you focus, it makes you stronger!
--Chancellor Palpatine, Star Wars
______________
The clinic focuses on reducing anxiety and irritability and seeks to "alleviate hyper-vigilance, flashbacks and nightmares." Their flier says, "The National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) developed a simple five point treatment using acupuncture needles to the ear for drug addiction. It has since been found that this same group of points can be used for PTSD. . ."
Ranger kindly invited me, and the clinicians, Anna Lee and Rachel Kelley, were kind enough to treat me as a fellow traveler. I reckoned I should qualify under duress via fraternization.
Several needles are painlessly placed in each ear, and the client sits back in quietude for 30-40 minutes, focusing on peaceful thoughts.
Lisa counted it a success, as a muscle spasm between her shoulder blades disappeared at some point during the treatment and she came out of it feeling greatly refreshed. For her, it was a wholly satisfying experience.
Ranger, OTOH, did not appear to receive noticeable benefit, but we are told the results of the treatments are cumulative. His acupuncturist told him that she noted he was hostile, and with barely veiled pride he asked how she knew. She said she had read it in the comments at RAW. She also told him that he would probably live a long life, at which he seemed not so much thrilled as at the idea that his anger was recognized.
After yours truly suggested that angry was no way to go through his anticipated long life, Ranger became agitated and the practitioner intervened, saying that it was, indeed, one way to go through life. That seemed sensible to all, and the total undoing of the serenity was avoided.
As an aside: Do not be troubled that Ranger might keel over of hypertension. Despite his anger, he has an amazingly low resting heart rate and blood pressure. Perhaps this is because he so effectively dispels it onto his environment.
If you have such a program in your area, we encourage you to avail yourself of this helpful healing modality. (For those local, the Tallahassee clinic is held Tuesday evenings at 7 p.m.) There is no discomfort, and anything that may help one avoid becoming hostage to Big Pharma is worth a try.
As they used to say on the old Hee-Haw, with feeling: Tallahassee Veterans Acupuncture Project: Sa - lute (or in Slovakian, salutovat.)
Labels: acupuncture for PTSD, anna lee, rachel kelley, tallahassee veterans acupuncture project, TVAP
posted by Lisa at 5:21 PM
9 Comments:
once, desperate for even a chance for a relief from chronic pain, i went into chinatown and sought out a highly recommended accupuncturist and herb doctor.
he did that whole rigamarole sticking needles all over the fucking place, concocted a mixture of noxious looking twigs and stuff, gave explicit directions (which i followed exactly, included to the precise water temperature and length of steeping)
that stuff didn't taste any better than it smelled or looked but i choked it down on schedule for a week.
my shit still hurted me bad.
folks accupuncture works for swear by it. i gave it an honest try, with everything but that whole "you gotta believe" part.
MB,
"i gave it an honest try, with everything but that whole 'you gotta believe' part"
Your pain results from a profound wound. Perhaps the best acupuncture might do is to mitigate such things, and perhaps there is a large measure of belief involved. That may be true with much of medicine. I'm with good old Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and believe there is a lot to be said for right intention. But that's not gonna erase the pain of having one's iliac crest shot off.
We tend to get better results when we trust and have faith in the ability of or doctors. Your exotic acupuncture experience probably felt like so much hocus-pocus. Me, I'm looking for small gains, and my relaxation was palpable. Was it the needles, or my expectation? Who's to say?
But every little gain is positive, IMHO.
First off, I think it's great that someone wants to help with whatever they can offer, I think it's a beautiful sentiment
...but the needles?
{{{{{{{{{{{{shudder}}}}}}}}}}
Why does it have to be needles!
I hate needles.
I hate the thought of needles.
I hate those damnable Navy dweebs at USMCRD-SD who saw me in the line up turn pale at the sight of the trays of needles.
"Hey guys, we got a live one here. Don't move private. Seriously, don't move. This needle here will cut'cha. Don't move...because it's going to go in nice and slow."
The bastards!
Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about all those...(^*&^&^*%&* needles...oh G-d!
to quote my brilliant new doctor daughter when she was discussing the effects of some of our traditional ceremonies with docs who were denigrating them as "psychosomatic:"
you know what you call somebody who has experienced a psychosomatic cure? (wait two beats)
healthy.
i am not denigrating accupuncture in the slightest. it merely failed with me (as have most all treatments).
there is even some buzz in the medical community that the old school docs who did bleeding might not have been totally superstitious quacks. sometimes with blood borne viruses or infections a change out and reduction in main supply of blood can give the immune system a leg up to fight more effectively.
i'm glad the VA is exploring more treatments. i'd be gladder if they could be counted on to do shit like sterilize the colonoscopes between treatments, but fuckitinabuckit, take your progress where you finds it.
if they start waving their hands around and talking about auras and shit, there will be sudden, and ruthless violence.
Sheerah,
Sorry. we all have our spiders in the closet, as it were :)
MB,
Remember, the VA is not sponsoring this -- these are private practitioners volunteering their time.
You're right: leeches, bleeding and many older methods are proving to have some merit (as long as they didn't bleed you dry!) Basically, the body has an impulse to heal, and if we remove the impediments, it often does just that, to the best of its ability.
Hypochondriacs are a whole other world, so the joke is a good one (deserving of a rim shot!)
As an aside, is your daughter familiar with the Feldenkrais method, and if so, what does she think of it?
"She said she had read it in the comments at RAW."
Dang, they sure do indepth patient medical histories there.
p.s. to MB,
I do hope you take my Ramtha quotes with a grain of salt. Though endlessly fascinated by the New Agers, I am a fairly independent thinker. Doesn't mean I won't be highly allusive. . .
I meant to get back to this post sooner but that's life.
Anyhow I wanted to say that my mother had acupuncture therapy back in the 80;s for arthritis. And got more relief from it then from the years of useless 'painkiller' drugs. Given that I can't really buy the psychosomatic angle. The important thing to remember is that the internal body is NOT mechanical. It runs on chemical and electrical impulses. Maybe I'm way off base here but my understanding is that acupuncture actually works similar to the less effective drugs in that it alters the bodies chemical, electrical signals either to block pain or to stimulate the bodies own healing processes.
Or to put it another way - something that has gotten such outstanding rave reviews for thousands and thousands of years must have something going for it!
Terrible,
I'm glad it helped your mom, Terrible. Yes, it is supposed to facilitate energy transmission through the body's "meridians". I do feel we get blocked sometimes, so why not try every healing modality, right?
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