Remembering Laura Cooley L.Ac., One Year Later

Plus a 5NP 4 Oregon update

Laura in front of WCA Cully. Photo credit: NADA member Yaotunde Obiora

Longtime 5NP advocate and trainer Laura Cooley, L.Ac, passed away on March 23, 2024. I wrote this post last year and I’m re-publishing it because I’m thinking of her, especially in light of a year of 5NP advocacy in Oregon.

Laura was one of the Founding Subscribers of this newsletter and a generous supporter of POCA Tech. There’s nobody else like her — she was in a category all her own — and lots of people miss her, including me. If there’s anyone who lived the belief that acupuncture can change the world, it was Laura.

It was hard to find published photos of Laura. Self-promotion was not her thing.

Here are some highlights from her biography (she accomplished way more than I can fit into this newsletter):

Laura became an acupuncturist via a four-year apprenticeship in Austin, Texas. She was mentored by NADA founder Dr. Michael Smith for 15 years and she personally trained over 700 people in 5NP. When the Texas Medical Board tried to pass an Acupuncture Practice Act that would have excluded allied professionals from practicing 5NP, she sued them and won. After Hurricane Katrina, she worked with the Medical Board and local officials to pass an Acupuncture Practice Act that included the ability for non-acupuncturists to practice 5NP. Until then, acupuncturists in Louisiana practiced in the shadows or under the supervision of a physician. Additionally, Laura played a role in advocating for 5NP legislation in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Province of Quebec. You can read more on the POCA blog’s Tribute to Laura Cooley: the Johnny Appleseed of Ear Acupuncture in Louisiana.

She reached out all the time to all kinds of people working in public health. I was grateful to be one of them. She was generous with her time, energy and knowledge in a way that isn’t common among acupuncturists. You can hear Laura talk about New Hampshire’s 5NP law in this interview on New Hampshire Public Radio.

Elizabeth Ropp providing 5NP in New Hampshire

I met Laura in 2018 and I mostly had an email relationship with her, which was a unique experience. Some of her emails were pages long with no paragraph breaks, while others were just a couple of sentences — but I could always hear her voice. Here are some quotes, representing the range of things she wrote about, to give you a sense of what it was like to correspond with her.

Spoiler: it was fun. (Once she wrote just to announce that she was refusing to pay the NCCAOM as an act of civil disobedience.) Also, content warning for swearing. Laura had zero fucks to give and not much of a filter.

The number of acupuncturists I feel like I can rely on to not do and say stupid, profession destroying things seems to grow smaller by the day. I’ve done my best to support the ones that have some vision. Thanks for doing the same. Best of luck.

HI, I found this quote about licensing bullshit I had saved, I saved it because it was about licensing. “30 years ago 1 in 20 Americans in any profession had to get a license, now it’s 1 in 3………  REQUIREMENTS THAT DO NOT DO MUCH EXCEPT PROTECT THE CARTEL OF PEOPLE IN PLACE AND THAT HAS THE EFFECT OF EXCLUDING PEOPLE FROM RISING AND GETTING INTO THEIR OWN BUSINESS.” You never know when this might come in handy.

I don’t catch typos, etc so lots of my emails have a bunch of mistakes in them ( I was punched in the head for an hour when I was younger).  As a person with a robust trauma history for someone who didn’t grow up in a war zone, I can comprehend trauma’s many layers of impact.

The psychological violence hurled by acupuncturists towards other acupuncturists is stunning to outside professionals… our regulatory practices have harmed all of us.  The intentional parts of our policies are incredibly demoralizing. The unconscious motivations appear to be driving and really need some light. “Good people can do really bad things without conscience, using their peer group as their guide”, paraphrase of Bert Hellinger. The inability to examine our motivations and practices has taken us down the road to nowhere, as evidenced by the numbers leaving and not entering the acupuncture profession.

RE: DENMARK FYI. License is voluntary, anyone can get trained and do acupuncture. You can get a license if you qualify and want one, but dont have to. that! is the way it can be handled. Denmark has over 900 5NP programs, about 300 free or almost no cost. thats what can happen without strangulation and stagnation. Per capita, that would be about 214 5NP clinics in New Hampshire. We could definitely make a dent if we had 214 ear clinics in New Hampshire…

My work very much depends on being independent from many of the vocal players, and almost no one knows all that I have laid the groundwork for. I remain, as always, completely dedicated to POCA Tech’s mission, and remain committed to facilitating POCA Tech’s sustainability with a strong role in the US. 

Thanks for hanging in through all the grinds and challenges… I, for one, appreciate your dedication and perseverance as I know so well how hard it is.

oh, and great job you are doing educating. Keep the faith. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

I can’t quite believe I’m never going to get another all-caps screed from Laura. Or another unexpected pep talk. Or a surprise infusion of kindness and understanding, with a side of exasperated cursing about the acupuncture profession. I never knew what I was going to get when one of her emails landed in my inbox, but I always felt accompanied.

Some things that happened over the past year that I wish I could share with Laura, in no particular order:

This recent article about 5NP in Oregon. I think she would’ve been amused.

How happy I was to meet acudetox trainers Dolores Jimerson and Bob Storrer when they led a 5NP training for tribal alcohol and drug counselors in POCA Tech’s classroom.

That Elizabeth Ropp sent us Laura’s acupuncture sculpture, which is now gracing the POCA Tech student clinic and watching over sleeping patients.

That we’ve had a great experience collaborating with our own Medical Board in Oregon to legalize 5NP. She’d be amazed and appreciative, in the way that only someone who sued a Medical Board could be.

In general, I wish I could share the progress of our 5NP bill with Laura. I know she would have been delighted with the public hearing and especially with POCA Tech students needling the members of the House Committee on Behavioral Health and Health Care. She would’ve been sympathetic about a recent white-knuckle moment when we feared our bill might not make it past the first chamber deadline because some amendments regarding regulation weren’t complete — and she would’ve been relieved to hear that we DID make the deadline, so now HB 2143 is scheduled for a work session on April 1.

Once the bill passes out of committee (which we’re optimistic about) it’ll be voted on by the full House of Representatives. Then on to the Senate, to repeat the same process. The update is, we’re right on track and very grateful.

Most of all, though, I wish I could tell Laura that I appreciate her more than ever. Now that I’ve spent time advocating for 5NP, I have so much more perspective on how hard she had to work to accomplish what she did, and much more awareness of the invisible labor that goes into legislation and regulation. It’s true that almost nobody knows all that Laura laid the groundwork for — but so many of us are benefiting from it, and so many more stand to benefit in the future.

5NP 4 EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE

Art by A. Cohen

Big thanks to Elizabeth Ropp for help with the original newsletter, especially for the links and information about Laura’s biography. Stay tuned for more 5NP 4 OR updates.