Politics Stressing You Out? Alternative Medicine is Ready to Help (Again) – WNYC

Vanessa Donald, a 83-year old patient, is receiving acupuncture from Jomo Alakoye-Simmons in his Harlem clinic. (Mary Wang )

Politically-induced stress. That term and variations of it turn up a lot these days, especially in the treatment rooms of the city's acupuncturists and herbalists.

Vanessa Nisperos, a 38-year-old social worker from Brooklyn, said the presidential election triggered many symptoms of distress.

"I found myself having repetitive thoughts and this overwhelming sense of dread," Nisperos said. "It didnt even dawn on me that I was physically experiencing symptoms of shock and traumatic stress.

She sought treatment at Third Root, a holistic health care center in Flatbush, Brooklyn that caters to low income patients and those who feel excluded from mainstream health care.

Jomo Alakoye-Simmons, an acupuncturist at Third Root,said in the months since the elections, he's been seeing all kinds of patients report politically-induced stress, and some of their symptoms are severe.

There was a lot of fear brought up in the LGBTQ community," he said. "Suicide was a serious concern. And then you had folks who were just depressed, not eating anymore and experienced paranoia.

Long before the presidential election, alternative medicine has filled the gaps of mainstream health care for people who feel excluded from it. When Alakoye-Simmons isn't working in Brooklyn, the Harlem resident runsthe Harlem Village Community Acupuncture Healing Center. He said his own neighborhood has long had to rely on self-organized forms of health care.

I grew up in this community seeing the Koch years, the drug epidemic, and the massive neglect that has been going on for decades, he said.

His clinic treats many black patients from the neighborhood, including 83-year-old Virginia Donald. She gets acupuncture for her allergies and asthma, a disease that has takena bigger toll on black communities.

"When I was born, we didnt have a whole lot of doctors to treat black people," Donald said. "And when you did, they didnt care if you died or not."

When Donald started her acupuncture treatments 40 years ago, she visited a Harlem practice that was one of the many community health care centers shaped by the Black Panthers' health activism.

Sociologist Alondra Nelson said the Black Panthers, working together with other activist groups, including the Young Lords, set up community health care centers as a response to a long history of segregation in health institutions. According to Nelson, who authored "Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination," these clinics covered the communities of color that mainstream health care didn't reach.

"This network of clinics was a retort to the state and the emergence of an unwieldy and unsuccessful HMO and private health insurance network," she said. "This didnt provide full access to poor people, and if it did, it often provided them with substandard care."

The Panthers visited China in the 1970s, where they were influenced by the Communist Partys model for health care. The state's program used traditional and cheap methods like acupuncture and tui na massage to treat its poor, rural population. The Panthers translated those principlesinto their own clinics, including the Lincoln Detox Center, which battled the addiction epidemic in the Bronx.

Julia Bennett, acupuncturist and co-owner of Third Root, was trained at Lincoln Detox. She said her practice was shaped by that experience.

"It was in an outpatient building right next to the projects," she described. "People addicted to substance would come in andsit in these wonderful lounge chairs.There were volunteers who would put the needles in, and the patients would just relax.

Though the Lincoln Detox Center shutteredin the late 1970s, Nelson said its history is still relevant today.

What the Panther example offers us is that people cant live without care," she said. "With their backs against the wall, they will draw their resources together to provide health care to local communities.

With the uncertain fate of Obamacare and the ongoingshift in national policies in general its clear some New Yorkers are feeling anxious enough to look beyond the medical establishment. For them, holistic health care isnt a luxury; it's a necessity.

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Politics Stressing You Out? Alternative Medicine is Ready to Help (Again) - WNYC