The First Hundred Treatments
2024 Edition
One of my favorite assignments for second year POCA Tech students is a reflection paper on their first hundred treatments in the student clinic. It’s like a snapshot of crossing a threshold. On one side, they’re acupuncture students; on the other, after giving a hundred treatments to the public, they’re fledgling acupunks. They’re still also students, of course, and they still have so much to learn, but there’s a crucial distinction that teachers can see and feel once they’re doing the thing. (See this post for a Cohort 9 student’s reflection paper.)
The first Cohort 10 intern to complete a hundred treatments, Theresa, accomplished it in about a month, due to being an Away Clinic student. POCA Tech has a handful of relationships with community acupuncture clinics outside of Portland that are aligned enough with us that they can serve as internship sites. For a variety of both bureaucratic and practical reasons, interns at Away Clinics have to start their internship in Portland and get a certain amount of clinical supervision here. Theresa commutes to POCA Tech from Iowa, and she’ll be doing most of her internship at Quad Cities Community Acupuncture with Jersey Rivers. Here’s her reflection paper on her first hundred treatments:
“When I was first told I needed to come to Portland for a solid month of student clinic shifts I panicked a little. As the time approached it felt increasingly like a good growth opportunity. Not unlike “studying abroad.” You may have seen the pictures, and read the travel guide, but nothing compares to the experience of full-immersion.
A classmate used the words “acu boot camp” to describe what I was going through, and that resonated. I would also add “intense emotional journey.” Every clinic shift was a learning environment like no other: unpredictable, forgiving, stimulating, and eye-opening.
I was crying and napping every day. Popcorn for dinner was a thing. I had no energy to do anything fun. There was so much to take in and digest. With the beginning of each new clinical approach, I was overwhelmed. In hindsight it felt a lot like a single failed attempt at impromptu speaking in high school.
Three weeks into my internship, I experienced a noticeable shift. I kind of felt like a different person. Was this my practitioner persona?? There’s no single thing that happened, but I believe the following factors contributed:
- Developing and practicing scripts.
- Surviving challenges and reflecting on them.
- Repetition, repetition, repetition.
- Surrendering to the flow of the clinic.
- Developing rapport with repeat patients.
- Embracing “good enough” and low-risk mistakes.
These all allowed me to feel prepared and confident, resulting in more energy for holding space. I am still tired at the end of a shift, but my tank is not empty.
It is hard to break the habit of an education where you thoroughly learn the material, then maybe do something with it. I am happy to report that I trust “the process”...finally! It’s the kind of knowing that can only come with doing.”
I love this paper because Theresa nailed one of the defining characteristics of POCA Tech: we don’t believe that students can learn the material BEFORE they do something with it, we think they learn BY doing something with it. Because that’s what it’s like once you’re an acupuncturist in practice. There is no BEFORE, there’s only learning by being in the endless timeless middle, where the learning never stops.
This is possible because acupuncture is so flexible and so forgiving, which is something else that POCA Tech interns encounter once they start designing their own treatments in clinic.
It reminds me of a quote by the poet Maggie Smith from her book Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change: “If you’re not careful, you can revise the life right out of a piece of writing. If you’re not careful, you can scrub all the weirdness and wildness right out of it. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can polish it dull.”
Trying to learn everything about acupuncture before you do anything with it is one way of polishing it dull. Treatments don’t benefit from overthinking them, so it’s best for students to just start doing them, even though they might be skeptical of their own efforts at first. Good acupuncture treatments are alive with weirdness and wildness (even when they’re given by brand new interns, and even when all you can see on the surface is patients napping peacefully in recliners). The first hundred treatments are all about beginning to make friends with the weirdness and the wildness.