Check out the recent article on Organizing Upgrade that discusses acupuncture's use as a Healing Justice tool. For me, this is how acupuncture really works.

In addition to being amazing for migraines, cramps, anxiety, depression, and the whole slew of symptoms and conditions identified by the World Health Organization, acupuncture is a modality that has the potential to be transformational in the lives of those who have access to it.

It is cost effective. It is safe. It can be done in groups, in community. It can bring people together for collective healing from trauma and violence. It can be a tool for making healing and health care accessible to everyone. When used in this way, not only can it be used for removing obstructions within the individual that cause discomfort and dis-ease; but it can be a tool for dissolving much larger social and political obstructions that reinforce injustice and inequality on local and systemic levels.

"If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, "Why don't they?" And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably toward change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can't say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art's sake doesn't really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and... alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest." -Audre Lorde