From Avi Magidoff:
There is a tremendous advantage in treating people in open spaces and with other people. I have noticed this through teaching and conducting grand rounds. Although I use the same techniques in my private practice as I do when I teach, patients always seem to respond better and faster when I treat them in a large room and in front of other people. I can only attribute this to the Qi being able to circulate: ideas are exchanged, inhibition is not encouraged, etc. In my experience when patients interact with each other (and other people) and share the healing process, they heal faster.
Miriam Lee, one of my mentors and one of the first practicing acupuncturists in the U.S., would treat in a one-bedroom basement apartment, with 9 beds separated only by curtains. Patients could hear every word exchanged in every interaction, and could literally touch the person on the other side of the curtain. Miriam would often ask people to walk out into the common space and see how their leg, shoulder, back pain (or whatever ailment they had) were doing as the needles were in them. This way everyone got to participate in everyone’s healing. It became a communal experience. At times Miriam would offer patients lunch. I am aware of not one of her students who has been able to achieve the results Miriam did, in spite of years of training and Miriam openly sharing her “secrets.”
There are some models of treating people in a community setting, primarily in detox clinics, but these models serve “specialised” populations. What about all the other people who would benefit from a community experience, from learning about healing through a collective experience, from mutual support, from the successes and failures of fellow patients, from the wisdom of others in general?
In fact we might argue that a specialised community clinic is not really a community clinic since it includes only small portions of the community. A true community is composed of the under-served and the over-served, the rich and the poor, those who are used to privatised medicine in luxurious settings, and those who have only been to Kaiser. And most importantly, the community is composed of people with many different kinds of health issues, severe, mild, chronic, acute, as well as people who are officially not sick but still seek healing on many levels.