Community Acupuncture

Why ‘Community’ Acupuncture?

‘Community’ or ‘Multi-bed’ Acupuncture is a model of care, which looks to utilise the full potential of Acupuncture as a viable, mainstream treatment.Community Acupuncture involves treating patient together in the same (communal) space at the same time. Communal treatment maximises the therapist’s time and therefore provides a solution to the problem of cost effective treatment. It means patients can come and receive treatment with their friends and family if they wish and allows the effects of ‘communal healing’ to improve the power of treatment. Patients who attend community clinics often benefit from the sense of ‘community’ generated in multi bed clinics as well as benefiting from group and peer support.

Background of Community Acupuncture.

For many thousands of years, acupuncture has been a “people's medicine”: low-tech, inexpensive and easily available. This is because traditionally, in china, acupuncture is delivered on mass to multiple patients at the same time. More recently, when acupuncture was brought to western healthcare the concept of ‘multi-bed/ community’ treatments was lost and acupuncture became a high cost luxury treatment, making it inaccessible to the masses and preventing it from being integrated into mainstream healthcare. This problem was dealt with by

in Portland, Oregon, USA by the people at ‘Working Class Acupuncture’. Working Class Acupuncture is a clinic, which was set up to make acupuncture affordable to working class people using the multi-bed system. It has successfully broken down social and economic barriers to treatment and works hard to promote change in the US healthcare service by eliminating high treatment costs. This has lead to a network of over 150 clinics across the US who all provide ‘affordable’ and ‘accessible’ Acupuncture based on the ‘multi-bed’ concept. Thanks the work of the Association of Community and Multibed Acupuncture Clinics (ACMAC), this treatment approach has now spread throughout the UK. ACMAC have a Network of 70+ clinics registered in the UK, who provide affordable Acupuncture based on the multi-bed model.

“if you want to go fast, go alone,… if you want to go far, go together”- old african proverb