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Acupuncture Hurricane Relief

By Cynthia Neipris, L.Ac.

Imagine losing your home. Now imagine you've also lost some of your family and friends. Your child's school and your place of worship are no longer standing. All around you the roads and what's left of the buildings are filled with debris. Electricity has not yet been fully restored. That's the current state in the New Orleans area after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through the lives of so many. Many survivors are beginning the road back to recovery with the help of Pacific College alumni and others who have been providing community style acupuncture as part of Hurricane Relief efforts in the Gulf, through groups like Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB), Community Re-education and Rebuilding through Education and Wellness (CRREW), and others.

How can acupuncture help? One tenet of Oriental medicine is that disease, including post-traumatic stress like that experienced by those in Louisiana, manifests in the body, the mind, and the spirit. Treatment must address a condition in all of these manifestations. While citizens throughout the U.S. have stepped up to help provide food, housing, and traditional medical care, something more is necessary for healing. Acupuncture treatment is one way for people to find feelings of wellbeing and the sense of inner peace that is an important part of healing after traumatic experiences.

Both patients and medical providers are becoming more aware that acupuncture and Oriental medicine can treat mental health conditions. Post-traumatic stress often involves anxiety and depression, both of which can be successfully addressed by acupuncture and Oriental medicine. Acupuncture relaxes the sympathetic nervous system (the body's fight or flight response) and releases endorphins, the body's natural "feel good" chemicals, which can also be released by exercise, resulting in what long distance runners may experience as "runners high." Acupuncture can also treat high blood pressure, headaches, insomnia, digestive complaints, fatigue, and other symptoms that may accompany post-traumatic stress. Studies and clinical trials using acupuncture for mental health conditions are ongoing throughout the world. German researchers concluded, "acupuncture leads to a significant clinical improvement as well as a remarkable reduction in anxiety symptoms in patients with minor depression or with generalized anxiety disorders" in a study reviewed in the National Acupuncture Detox Association's July 2001 issue of Guidepoints. University of Arizona researchers concluded in a study of women with major depression, "acupuncture may prove as effective as psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy," the conventional Western interventions (Guidepoints, November 1999). It is easier to document the way a disaster affects the mind and the body than how it affects the spirit. Anyone who has experienced a loss and come back from it, that is most of us, can testify that the power of healing the spirit, while difficult to define, is profoundly important. In her "Power of Spirituality," F.L. Brisbane reminds us, "living a spiritual life is to experience serenity which overpowers fear and replaces it with faith...propels positive energy into positive results. Spirituality is a feeling, and is always personalized, never duplicated, and difficult to describe." The spirit can be the place where the body and the mind experience a co nnection to what is greater than us, from the love and support of those around us to the power of the natural universe -- the sun and moon and stars and their patterns. As acupuncture helps to heal the mind and the body, patients may experience a serenity that allows them to feel a sense of a greater connection and be a part of the journey of healing the spirit.

We appreciate the generosity of Acupuncturists Without Borders volunteers, licensed acupuncturists Diana Fried, Jordan Van Voast, Sue Larkin, and Graham Marks for allowing us to share the following inspiring excerpts from their Acupuncture Relief Journals that show how much of a difference acupuncture can make.

-- At 8:30 a.m., our small group of eight gathers in the mess tent and strategizes how to serve a dozen or more health clinics scattered around Greater New Orleans with just two cars and a handful of acupuncturists. So far, the response to our services has been one of profound gratitude: Grown men who have been working long hours in toxic clean up operations for too many days in a row show up with a blank look in their eyes and slumping heads. Women holding families together, cooking for relief camps, nurses listening all day to the tragic stories. People from all walks of life, living in unfamiliar surroundings. At first they are often curious. Acupuncture? That can help with stress? "Yes" we reply.

-- Word is spreading about the magic of acupuncture. A couple of sergeants in the National Guard who came for treatment at Tent City talked with their higher-ups and within a few days we have an invitation to treat enlisted service people at the Louisiana Air National Guard base in Belle Chasse, just south of New Orleans. We follow a Humvee from a neighboring tent city in Algiers out to the base.

-- The Rainbow Family encampment has invited Acupuncturists Without Borders to offer acupuncture. On the edge of the French Quarter, the free kitchen draws a mixture of free spirits, college students on semester break, long time activists, residents, and others who defy easy categorization. S is a jewelry maker and nearby resident. During her first treatment under the awning in the center of the park, her needles had been in place for about three minutes when I noticed a steady river of tears flowing down both cheeks. Another man was also silently weeping. When the Qi flows, the heart mind sometimes releases deep burdens of trauma, grief and stuck life energy. A few days later, I returned to "Rainbow Park" as I had begun to call it. S was just leaving and she stopped me. I barely recognized her. She was beaming and joyful whereas before she was glum and looked as if she were carrying a pile of skeletons on her back. "Are you giving treatments today?" Yes, I replied. "Well then, I'll just turn right around and be your first customer, okay?" Sure, that's why we're here. She tells me how the other man who had been crying in the group was now able to sleep at night for the first time since the hurricanes. It is a story I've been hearing - in one version or another - quite a bit lately

-- The National Guardsmen sit quietly in a curved row of chairs - just a hint of a circle to emphasize our mutual interdependence in the web of life, as well as nature's fundamental.

Design. Five acupuncture needles in each ear balance the Qi. As the minutes pass, there is a palpable shift in the energy of the tent, a kind of smoothness and serenity in the air. After thirty or forty minutes, we begin to remove the needles. The men thank us and ask when we will be back. We hope to return in two days.

-- We have been going out to communities with Common Ground. They are doing amazing work. We treat every day at their clinic, and then we go with their mobile unit to other areas. Their volunteers from all over the country are doing the really hard gritty work of cleanup, as well as staffing a clinic and food distribution center. Nurses and doctors have flown in from all over the world, and they are putting it all together without any federal, state, or city help. They are very enthusiastic to have acupuncture as part of the clinic. Because of good weather and limited space, we set up chairs out on the sidewalk and begin treating. We treat the doctors and nurses also, many of who have been here for 5-6 weeks. One of the nurses, with tears in her eyes, told me how much she appreciates acupuncture being a part of the clinic. She says not only can she see the difference in the patients, but also that the treatments have given the staff the energy to keep going. It is gratifying to experience acupuncture in this social context and discover that it can be so portable, flexible, useful, and community based.

-- This is the hardest day. We go on a mobile clinic to the lower ninth ward. The lower ninth ward where the levee broke, which was almost completely underwater. After the waters receded, what was left was an ashen landscape of debris and shattered homes. It is hopelessly devastated, silent, a ruin. Some streets are still blocked off by the army because bodies are still being discovered in the wreckage of homes. We set up at the Red Cross tent and offer treatment. A woman sits down for treatment. She brought her grown kids back to see the house they grew up in because she knew it would be the last time. She relaxes into the treatment and at the end asks me, "Where in New Orleans are you from?" I tell her I am from western New York State. She is shocked and asks "Why are you here in this place?" I say, "To try to help" and she starts crying. I start crying too. The flies are everywhere and the odors are intense. We are all silent in the car as we drive through the neighborhood streets that are acces sible. Later that evening I call my wife, and when I hear her voice I start weeping. The grief and the loss of these people just wells up in my heart.

-- The scope of this disaster impacts everyone residents, evacuees, and responders. In the past weeks, AWB has treated surviving citizens of New Orleans, National Guardsmen, workers and officials for FEMA and the Red Cross, police officers, utility workers, contractors, and Food Kitchen and health clinic volunteers, as well as AWB team members.

-- There are so many stories to write and each one touches my heart. The first Sunday I worked with a 97-year-old woman whose face was a mess. I am sure her jaw was broken. She was so brave and sweet. She let me put the needles in without even a flicker. There were no words exchanged only eye contact. At the end when I took out the needles, she took hold of my hand and squeezed my hand and smiled at me. I worked with some of the poorest people in the United States, and I worked on some of the very influential people in the United States. The emotions were the same grief, worry, fear, devastation, etc. The stories are endless, and I truly appreciate having our community to tell them to.

-- I remember a woman coming to the supply facility of Common Ground, and her asking me what I was doing. I told her I was offering folks acupuncture to help with stress, relaxation and some of the effect of trauma. She had not slept in 3 weeks, and she was concerned that her blood pressure was so high. I invited her to sit down and try and let me insert needles in her ears. She was so scared. I promised her I would insert one needle at a time and would stop at any point it became too much. Within minutes she was fast asleep. I stood next to her and watched her sleep for the next 45 minutes. She felt great after, and thanked me.

The acupuncturists who have shared their journal excerpts are volunteers for Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB), a team of acupuncturists from around the U.S. providing acupuncture relief in community settings to those suffering from the devastating effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. AWB's mission also includes creating long-term acupuncture relief training programs for communities worldwide (where the situation allows) that have experienced war, conflict or disaster.

CRREW, an organization formed by Pacific College, New York alumni Wendy Henry and Marcella Robinson in response to 9/11, was on the scene early in the aftermath of the hurricanes in the Gulf. CRREW members' experiences after 9/11, and their relationships with the New York City firefighters who traveled to New Orleans to help with the relief efforts, was instrumental in gaining the trust of firefighters and emergency rescue workers in the Gulf. As part of its commitment to outreach, Pacific College of Oriental Medicine has been an active organizational liaison for groups like AWB, getting the word out to alumni, other colleges, and national acupuncture and Oriental medicine organizations.

Most of the acupuncture relief efforts in the Gulf have utilized community style acupuncture. Community style acupuncture is quite practical in terms of ease and cost effectiveness, which makes it ideal in areas where there has been conflict or disaster. Where patients are gathered in a group, an acupuncturist, or a team of acupuncturists can treat them all together in the same space, whether it is at a health clinic, a detox facility, a food distribution center, or a public park.

The community setting is empowering for patients. It lends a sense of control to the patient, which is not always present in the traditional doctor-patient interaction. That sense of control can be even more useful in circumstances when patients have no sense of control in the many other areas of their lives, which have been devastated. They outnumber the practitioner. They can see how the treatment affects others before receiving it themselves. After losing friends and family members, it can be helpful when those who are left can stay together during the treatment that some or all of them are receiving. Being treated with a group combats a sense of isolation, which is often a feature of the grieving that follows any large trauma. Especially when a trauma is community-wide, there's a sense of comfort when the healing also includes a feeling of community. There's a feeling that what we can't do alone, we can do together.

The effects of acupuncture when done in a group setting can be even more powerful than when done in an individual treatment room. Dr. Frank Lipman, one of the foremost practitioners of integrative medicine in the U.S., and author of the book Total Renewal, says, "Our bodies contain an autonomic mechanism to mimic or unite with a pulse greater than our own - speeding up or slowing down to sync up with a stronger external rhythm. This concept is called entrainment. Think of the feeling you get chanting in a group, or at a concert where the musician has you spellbound. We entrain to the rhythms around us all the time ... try counting your heart rate or your breaths when you're in traffic or around noisy machinery. Later count them while in tranquil surroundings."

Community style acupuncture was popularized in the U.S. by use in drug detoxification settings, pioneered by Pacific College advisory board member Michael O. Smith, founder of NADA, the National Acupuncture Detox Association, at the Lincoln Hospital Recovery Center in New York. Most of the community style treatments being used by Acupuncturists for Hurricane Relief are based on NADA protocol in which patients are treated with five needles in each ear. This protocol is a tried and true treatment for trauma of any sort. For more information about NADA, check www.acudetox.com

Volunteers and donations are still needed for continuing work in the Gulf. For more information about volunteering, donations of funds or supplies, or to be added to the email list to receive updates about ongoing relief work in Louisiana, go to www.acuwithoutborders.com

Cynthia Neipris, L.Ac.is currently the Coordinator of Community Education and Outreach for Pacific College of Oriental Medicine's New York campus. A National Diplomate of Oriental Medicine, Cynthia is licensed as an acupuncturist in New York and California, and is an AcuDetox Specialist, certified by the National Acupuncture Detox Association. Sources: Guide to AcuDetox Research, J & M Reports, L.L.C. The Power of Spirituality, F.L. Brisbane, Ph. D. Acupuncturists Without Borders -- Volunteer Journals Breathe Magazine.