The goal of any acupuncturist is to get you out of their clinic– and hopefully shouting from the rooftops about how your pain went away or that you haven’t slept this well since you were a teenager or one of the other 10,000 benefits of treatment. In order to get you out of our clinic and back into your life (and sending all your friends and family our way), we’ll ask you to commit to a consistent course of treatment for a specific length of time, and then we’ll re-evaluate along the way. You can expect a course of treatment to involve getting acupuncture once or twice a week, some lifestyle or movement coaching, and, when appropriate, a custom herbal prescription.

Consistency is Key

When people …

“When people come to us for help, they may not necessarily be their best selves, so how do we meet them where they are and do something that’s really with them, and not for them or in spite of them… that relationship is really a sacred one. I’m not doing anything for you, I’m just with you– I’ve had my own journey, and I can share with you my experience and I can share with you my experience with other people, and then together we get to figure out what works best for you.”

The “Reluctant” Healer

Before starting Acupuncture & Integrative Medicine school, Karen Villanueva was a nurse for over 20 years; she worked in the ER, ICU, prison system, and even at the ballpark. …

We recently had the chance to sit down with Licensed Acupuncturist, self-published author, and AIMC Masters & Doctoral graduate Kristen “tank” Conner and chat about their book, their experience as a two-time student at AIMC, and their unique style of practice. Tank uses they/them pronouns, which we will be using throughout this article.

Ehlers-Danlos & the Difficulty of Diagnosis

Tank had lived with a web of various symptoms and discomforts since early childhood before finally receiving a diagnosis in their mid-30s that brought it all together: Hypermobile Type Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS). They came to this self-diagnosis before any of their doctors were willing or able to recognize it, and, during their time at AIMC while studying to earn their Master’s degree, a doctor finally referred them …

Current Policies on Campus

Per CDHP guidance, as a healthcare facility, we will continue to require temperature checks and masking of vaccinated & unvaccinated patients and practitioners visiting our in-person clinic and inside our building generally. We don’t anticipate making any major changes to this policy before the start of the fall semester (see “Fall 2021 Policy” below).

Library Re-Opening
Message from the Library sent 6/21/2021

The AIMC Library is cautiously reopening on a limited basis. Le Jiang will be staffing the Library on Wednesday mornings from 9 AM to 12:30 PM starting June 23rd. We may add more hours in the weeks ahead, depending on staffing availability and demand.

There is a pass system to limit capacity for the time being and those passes are found outside …

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” -Maya Angelou

Strategic Plan & Goals

As an institution, we have come together to further incorporate Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (JEDI) efforts into our long-term vision and goals. AIMC Berkeley supports the following vision:

To serve as a center for the promotion of health and wellness and care of the community through education, outreach, and patient care with focus on diverse patient populations including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and low-income individuals
To serve as a center for international collaboration in the development of acupuncture and integrative medicine

The third goal of our strategic plan, designed to help us meet our Mission & Vision, is to “promote institutional & community diversity by serving all members of …

“Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is intricated with gender, with the family, with notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body.[…]Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in finding ways of being queer.”
-Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet

East Asian Medicine as a liberation practice?

Acupuncturists are always fundamentally focused on the free flow of energy in the body– the “Qi”. You may have heard your acupuncturist talk about “Qi stagnation” as …

The ancient Chinese character for tea displays the radical for grasses on top, a pictogram of a mouth, and the radical for a tree1.

Believe it or not, in the Chinese Medicine conception of the seasons, we’re already in the beginning of summer! Spring’s bright yellow-green shoots have matured into full leaves and the era of flowers is giving way to a season of lush green (and yellow grasses, as is the case in California summers).

As the days get longer and hotter, and we full an internal pull toward more social and playtime and less sleep, it’s appropriate to make some changes that will protect our yin and body fluids so we can fully enjoy the warmth, abundant energy, and yang of summer. …

If you want to pursue a future in acupuncture and herbal medicine, going to the right school is the first step. To find out if AIMC is a good fit for you, take our quiz!

Learn the what, why, and how of period tracking with our student, Ally Magill. Ally recently presented a class on menstrual cycle tracking and the Chinese Medicine perspective on our Facebook live. Check out the presentation or read our blog for key takeaways!

Disparities in Healthcare

Of the many things brought to light during the Covid pandemic, U.S. healthcare disparities are among the most disheartening. The virus has made visible the vast inequities that plague our healthcare system, as well as the many other contributing factors that manifest in poor health outcomes that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Latino populations.

Racial and ethnic disparities in the healthcare setting gives rise to serious moral and ethical dilemmas – healthcare is simply not available equally to all segments of the population in the United States.

According to CDC data, Indigenous Americans have suffered the highest death rates from the pandemic with 1 out of every 390 people (total population) dying from Covid. One in 555 Black Americans have died, and 1 in 665 …