acupuncture for all

Our local paper, The Reporter, gives notice this week that a new acupuncture clinic is celebrating their opening with free treatments on Saturday. Wish I knew more people here to pass the information to. It's called "We The People Community Acupuncture" (www.weacupuncture.com). But their website also connects with a larger network, whose goal it seems is to connect working people all over with the benefits of acupuncture (to which I for one can testify). That site is:
http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/
Here you can look up affordable treatments in your area (Portland, of course, has 7 locations!), and read some hopeful articles on making acupuncture, and "alternative" health care in general, available to all people. Here's an excerpt from one, titled "The Art of the Sliding Scale", by Lisa Rohleder. It's directed at holistic care givers, but it lifts my spirits for sure, to know that a conversation like this is actually going on out there:
"Recent estimates suggest a typical American CEO makes 475 times what a factory worker makes. What people are paid increasingly has no relationship to the usefulness of what they actually do. One of the most important jobs imaginable - caring for young children - is typically compensated at $6 to $10 an hour, without benefits. A sliding scale is not a form of charity. It's a way of acknowledging that life is not fair, and adjusting your business plan accordingly. For a business to be successful, it needs to be based in reality, not in wishful thinking...

The function of a sliding scale in the day-to-day operation of your business is not only to broaden your potential patient base by correcting for certain societal inequalities, but also to reduce stress for you and your patients by separating the issues of money and treatment.

Making such choices also points to an appealing aspect of social entrepreneurship, which is the power to respond to social problems by creating a kind of alternate universe - your own - which operates by different rules...Health care as a whole is deeply divided along class lines; my practice isn't. The best part of my day is looking around my clinic when it's full of people of all races, classes, backgrounds and ages, all at rest in a rich, shared stillness. Thanks to a sliding scale, I get to spend most of my time in a world where people get the care they need, regardless of how much money they have. And that, all by itself, is valuable to me."

A fine example, in my opinion, of building the new world in the shell of the old. And also of the kind of dialogue I admire the most: affirming the ideal, and inviting others to do so, saving the time that would be used on casting blame for creating more images of justice. I hold this woman and her efforts (at healing, and at conscience-raising) up to the Light.