A student stands over a patient, needle poised. They have a “perfect” prescription: a textbook combination of points harvested from a lecture slide on chronic lower back pain. But as the needle meets the skin, the student hesitates - the symptom of a quiet habit that has taken hold of our profession. We routinely say we “prescribe” points. It sounds efficient. It echoes the authority of biomedical culture and fits neatly into the insurance field. But vocabulary is never neutral; repeated long enough, it dictates behavior.
Soma Glick, DOM, LAc
Soma Glick has been practicing acupuncture and Chinese herbology for more than 20 years. She has been a professor at SWAC in Boulder since 1998 and started teaching weekend workshops on Treating Children with Oriental Medicine in 2003. She offered this course both in the U.S. and abroad, and also developed an intensive course training practitioners in pediatric and women's health and offering a free clinic to poor and disadvantaged women and children, while she lived on the island of Bali from 2005 to 2013. She has now relocated to Boulder, Colo., where she continues training students and practitioners and keeps a busy private practice. Visit http://somadevi.com/.