Matthew Bauer has been practicing acupuncture in Southern California since 1986. In this episode: why acupuncture research keeps underestimating the medicine, and what a debt-ridden new grad can actually do with that information, the four cornerstones of this profession and how they failed each other, and what it means when a patient says I wish I'd have known.

Also: Making Acupuncture Pay. A good read.

Bex sits down with Debbie Yu, Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine, owner of Little Si clinic in North Bend, WA, former Bastyr faculty, and creator of the Doggy Oracle Card deck. They met in Nepal in 2015 doing rural primary care through the Acupuncture Relief Project — and a lot of what shaped both of them about this medicine happened there.

In this episode: the real numbers behind Debbie's student debt ($70k for a doctorate she'd skip if she could do it over), why raising cash rates isn't as simple as it sounds when most of your patients are on insurance, the crossroads the profession is actually at, and what it felt like to finally, after twelve years, make a livable income.

Also: dogs as medicine. Seriously.

Honest, funny, and a little bittersweet. This one's for anyone who loves this medicine and is still figuring out how to make it work.

Kelly Ilseman has spent four years as the unpaid Research Committee Chair for the Oregon Acupuncture Association, doing the behind-the-scenes work that keeps our profession moving. We talk about what it takes to get insurance coverage, how to translate between East Asian medicine and biomedical language, and what integration into hospitals and the VA actually requires of us. Plus: the OAA is looking for someone to take over Kelly's role. Could that be you?

Terry owns Eagle Cap Wellness in Enterprise, Oregon, a small town in the Wallowa Mountains near the Idaho border. She graduated from OCOM in 2013, went straight to Nepal with the Acupuncture Relief Project, got certified in Sports Medicine Acupuncture, and then in 2022 made what she calls an impulsive but necessary leap: moving from inner southeast Portland to a town where her old neighborhood probably had more people than the entire county. She bought the supplies from the departing acupuncturist, stepped into the space, and started seeing patients within weeks.

What she didn’t anticipate was how much she didn’t know: that running a small business while carrying graduate school debt would make her nearly invisible to mortgage lenders. That she and her husband would end up living in a 24-foot travel trailer behind the clinic for eighteen months. That getting called for jury duty on a Thursday,her busiest day, would genuinely stress her out because there is no buffer, no FMLA, no unemployment. Just the constant low hum of what if.

And yet her practice is full. Her patients refer their neighbors. The physical therapist at the local hospital sends people her way. She is, by most measures, exactly what a rural community needs and can’t easily find.

This conversation covers what rural practice actually looks like on the ground: the seasonal rhythms of ranch life, the collaboration with PTs, the mortgage application that didn’t go through, and the gratitude list she and her husband keep on the wall of the clinic for the hard days. Also the deer that graze behind the building and the quail that live in the bush down the hill, because sometimes that’s what keeps you going.

Terry is clear-eyed about the fragility of all of it. She’s also clear that she loves this medicine, and that when a patient comes back saying they felt amazing, it still makes her squeal.