A Door is Closing in Front of You

A note to my colleagues

Hey all-

One month in on 2025 and it’s been a doozy! I wanted to say something as our new reality sets in–while there’s still a chance, before the madness becomes even more normalized:

I ranted a little bit about the RFK Jr. hearings on Instagram this week.

I try not to rant too much anymore–both because Instagram is an increasingly brain dead location for nuanced dialogue and also because no one really cares–but by some weird algorithmic fluke, my dumb account has a lot of our profession's eyes on it, so it seems a waste not to use it from time to time.

As it turned out, one of my patients–another Los Angeles acupuncturist, of whom I treat quite a few–had seen my rant right before she came in. She agreed Kennedy didn't come off great; that his numerous inconsistencies shot his credibility and his sudden anti-abortion turnabout is alarming, but concluded that overall she likes a lot of what he says. "He's really pro-alternative medicine," she said, adding that "you know both sides are really bad. The democrats aren't any better."

Nope. I'm not doing this. I'm all for being critical, but Biden’s head of the Dept. of Health and Human Services never declared on the record that pesticides cause children to become transgender.

We’re not doing this. It's one thing to argue politics with a regular patient but a colleague whose work I otherwise respect? Fresh hell.

Later, I was chatting with another colleague about how shocking it is to see so much ambivalence about the new political regime in our profession and she told me that she recently graduated from a doctoral program where 50% of her cohort were supportive of Trump.

I understand that not everyone is political–which I don’t think is necessarily true, but is a thing people say to excuse themselves from thinking about things they'd rather not–so let me be very clear about why this is self-destructively fraught:

Acupuncture's emergence in North America was neither politics nor some random coincidence.

What made acupuncture possible as a mainstream healing modality here was that after the second World War, the collective consciousness made a progressive and evolutionary leap forward and embraced pluralism.

Predominantly due to technological advancements, rising scientific process and new globalization, American intellect at large graduated past a pre-rational, egoic nationalist worldview to allow for different perspectives, from outside personal beliefs or societal norms, to simultaneously coexist.

The country embraced a newfound postmodern world-centrism that favored broad-mindedness and egalitarianism, which is what made cultural shifts like the civil rights movement and second wave feminism possible. Acupuncture's inclusion–and I use that word specifically–in the professional medical landscape of the 1970s was based on a developmental mind-frame of global awareness and intellectual openness that is now rapidly and artificially shutting, right before our eyes.

We are in the active throes of the return to primitive, pre-rational stages of consciousness.

Trump's whole thing is the valorization of the regressive "mythic-membership" stage, whose inherent “us versus them” mentality is also morally-absolutist, highly patriotic, patriarchal, militaristic, conformist, usually homophobic, and often sexist.

So many of RFK Jr.’s positions, including his outdated take on vaccines and autism and that Black people need different vaccines than White people–yeah, he said that too– are about relitigating settled science specifically to turn back time to less sophisticated and inclusive cognition and choke out the leading edge of progressive evolutionary thinking.

This is what I mean when I cheekily say that you can't simultaneously be a Republican and an acupuncturist: the worldview that Trump and his regime are promoting is entirely antithetical to the worldview that invited acupuncture in.

“Make America Great Again” is explicitly about regressing America to an anti-intellectual level of consciousness that preceded the inclusion of people, traditions and wisdom of other cultures. It’s the dream of a world that existed before 1960.

You are deluding yourself if you think the hand that turned the clock back on Roe V. Wade has nothing to do with you, and your profession.

You are deluding yourself if you think the MAGA vision for the country–which just eliminated all “cultural awareness months” within the government– will foster Traditional Chinese Medicine in any legitimate way.

You are an acupuncturist. You’re not a chiropractor. You’re not a nutritionist. Your chosen career is the result of world-centrism, of immigration, of inclusion¹. The core tenet of your medicine is a third person lens of critical thinking and integrated level of understanding, higher than power and capital. These are non-negotiables for people like us.

Clinging to some rumored kernel of an idea that "RFK Jr. is pro-alternative medicine" overlooks the racism and anti-empathy disgust at the heart of his administration and party's political doctrine, which panders to white supremacy at every opportunity, including co-signing the Proud Boys and the KKK.

Healthcare providers supporting a regime whose central selling point is "liberation from care"-- you can mock people with disabilities, rape women, arbitrarily dismantle medical research funding and information, gut food safety laws, and attack and destroy nature itself– requires such a willful suspension of reality and cognitive dissonance I cannot abide.

"Both sides are really bad"? Nope.

Let’s at least agree to the boundaries of our shared reality.

The world that invited acupuncture into it is coming to end. The door for the kind of care, education and beauty that we foster is closing, right in front of us. This is how professions die.

It’s on each of us now to scratch our fingers into the cracks and pry the door back open. It will be a Herculean effort in these coming years.

And this is my frustration with my colleagues who are cos-playing as dummy influencers, posing adorably and cooing relatably about “tummy aches” on Instagram Live, while forgetting that their actual job is to keep the door open.²

Stewarding Chinese medicine and instrumentalizing minority traditions while vilifying immigrants and endorsing staunch ethnocentric political legislation does not keep the door open.

Just like yammering about the divine feminine and embodying queenhood while supporting a president who was convicted of sexual abuse doesn’t keep it open, either.

Be “COVID truthers” if you want to. Be anti-abortion. Fine. Shill selenite wands, intention-setting ceremonies and slimming teas that give ya diarrhea, but don’t forget: our ultimate devotion is to defending an ethos and worldview that includes the very same pluralism, cross-cultural understanding, operational intellect and interconnectedness that Trump’s supporters purport to feel oppressed by. We can’t have it both ways.

We must defend it with a full throat. If not for our own integrity, than for the colleagues who paved the way for us, and the ones who may someday come after us. Fingers crossed.

1. And before anyone says something about "legal immigration" they believe is self-righteously clever, please keep in mind the wildly-racist Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed 75 years ago. The idea that the legality of immigration is absolute and governed by righteous morality is entirely ahistorical, please pick up a history book.

2. I’d also like to say, if I never get another chance, that I find it particularly crass that the strategy of Trumpy acupuncturists is to just go all-in on “luxury elitist wellness”–facials & fertility–banking on the hope that rich people will be the last holdouts in embracing other cultures, while their President refuses to raise minimum wage and chokeholds everyone else with divisiveness and ethnocentrism. I’m not saying its a bad strategy: it’s just a total betrayal of acupuncture itself, which was always intended to be an inexpensive, anti-capitalist working class medicine, not a totally spurious extravagance for millionaires.