(Light guitar music)
Hello, my name is James Robson and I'm the
Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard
Asia Center. I'd like to welcome you to the
Asia Center's Research Talk series, which
is part of a new series of virtual programming
at the Asia Center. The research talks are
aimed at showcasing some of the fascinating
research that is being done on various facets
of Asia by Harvard students, Graduate Students,
Faculty, Asia Center Affiliates, and other
specialists. We very much hope you enjoy learning
from these talks.
(Light guitar music)
Did you know that Black revolutionaries in
the 1970s used acupuncture? The stories before
us are unexpected and little known stories
of American history and acupuncture. In many
ways, unexpected connections is the story
of acupuncture.
The conventional history of acupuncture in
the United States starts in July 1971, with
NY Times reporter James Reston’s trip to
China where he wrote about his experience
with acupuncture. He was part of a team to
prepare for President Richard Nixon’s trip
to China in 1972. Reston fell ill with appendicitis
and underwent surgery and his post-operative
pain was managed by an acupuncturist. His
article would cause a frenzy of interest in
acupuncture in the United States.
But the stories before us have nothing to
do with Reston, and they actually begin in
parallel. We have Dr. Tolbert Small in Oakland,
CA, and Dr. Mutulu Shakur at the Lincoln Detox
Center in New York City. And what makes these
stories even more surprising is the fact that
Drs. Small and Shakur didn’t know each other
in the 70s. And yet there is a fundamental
similarity: against the backdrop of medical
discrimination, these stories are about people
fighting against a healthcare system that
didn’t serve them, by using what I’m calling
toolkit care, a self-assembled, essential
mobile, community care in response to dire
situations. It’s similar to first aid, but
it has more of a do-it-yourself spirit and
what’s included in the toolkit is decided
upon by the people themselves. In this case,
Drs. Small and Shakur sought out a variety
resources, and included, of all things, acupuncture
into their toolkit.
- “Recording with Dr. Small” –
Hello?
Hi.
Hi Dr. Small!
This is the first time that I talked to Dr.
Small, and I spoke to him about his interest
in acupuncture.
- “Recording” –
You learned about acupuncture on your trip
to China, right, in 1972?
Yeah, we were actually in Shanghai. Dr. Wu,
who was an acupuncturist, gave us a couple
lectures on acupuncture. When I came back,
I basically did all the acupuncture points
on myself. It was actually illegal in the
state of California, so I used to, I used
to have a card that said Tolbert Small, research
acupuncturist. And I used to house calls all
over West Oakland and North Oakland doing
acupuncture on people.
Dr. Small has been in Oakland for the past
half century serving his community as a physician
and acupuncturist where he’s affectionately
known as the People’s Doctor. He graduated
from the Wayne State Medical School in Detroit
in 1968, before he left for Oakland for residency.
In 1970, Dr. Small became a physician for
the Black Panther Party, a civil rights group
centered on self-defense, and he treated members
such as Bobby Seale or affiliates such as
Angela Davis. However, Dr. Small never became
a formal member of the party because he disagreed
with some of their stances and believed that
he can best help by focusing on medicine.
He directed the George Jackson Medical Clinic,
one of the Panther Party’s many medical
clinics that offered free healthcare, and
he also co-directed the National Sickle Cell
Anemia Project that educated and screened
for the disease in Black communities around
the country.
In November 1971, Panther leader Huey Newton
traveled to China, and on that trip, he asked
premier Zhou Enlai if he could organize a
following trip for community members. For
some context, the Panther Party was hugely
inspired by Mao Zedong, and sold many copies
of the little red book, a collection of Mao’s
writings to earn revenue. Mao had also declared
his support of the Black community in America
in 1963. However, his intentions have been
debated – did he support the cause or was
he trying to undermine American power?
Either way, Newton was given the green light
to organize a group of 20 people. Dr. Small
was on this trip in March 1972. And the composition
of the group was fascinating. So half of them
were not “special,” and not members of
the Panther Party, and included nurses, lawyers,
and chaplains. Dr. Small was considered to
be part of this group, and he was the only
doctor. The other half of the group were formal
Panther Party members.
- Dr. Small reading from journal –
That was Dr. Small reading from his journal
on the first day of travel. American officials
made it difficult for them and they had to
detour many times before they got to China.
Over the course of the seven-weeks, they travelled
all over, visiting cultural sites and factories,
learning about the revolutionary processes
happening in China. They also witnessed acupuncture
anesthesia, and visited rural health clinics,
where they watched barefoot doctors in action.
So barefoot doctors were laypeople trained
to provide basic Western and Chinese medicine
to rural areas and it was a large national
movement led by the Maoist government. There
were over 1 million barefoot doctors each
of whom carried their own medical bags as
they treated underserved communities– this
is was the inspiration for the delegate’s
toolkit care.
David Levinson, on the left, was 19 years
old when he went on the trip. And he was one
of the few formal white members of the Party.
Here, he tells me how the barefoot doctors
inspired the delegation.
- David Levinson speaking –
You know, we were coming from a very, very
enthusiastic young revolutionary idea ourselves,
and going to what we felt was a very enthusiastic
young [idea] on a mass grand scale. And one
of the things they were doing was this incredible
revolution in healthcare, or so it seemed.
And developing a healthcare system which was
committed to providing for poor people, and
the barefoot whole doctor idea, a lot of it
involves acupuncture. In fact, some of us
started buying some Chinese acupuncture needles
and started messing around with each other,
not knowing what we were doing. And the Chinese
saw us doing that, so they actually provided
us with some formal teaching.
Upon returning home, Dr. Small taught himself
acupuncture, and here are some of the patient
he’s treated. In 1974, he published two
papers on acupuncture, doing a literature
review on acupuncture anesthesia and looking
at the neurophysiological basis for acupuncture.
In 1980, he opened up a private practice – the
Harriet Tubman Medical Clinic, which was in
operation for over thirty years until 2016.
Today, he works for other healthcare centers.
Inspired by the barefoot doctors, and ever
since he’s picked up acupuncture in 1972,
Dr. Small has integrated it with Western medicine
in his metaphorical and literal toolkit he
brings with him as he cares for and serves
his community.
- Dr. Small reciting his poem-
Our second story is on the East Coast, with
Dr. Mutulu Shakur. Dr. Shakur was a formal
member of the Republic of New Afrika, a Black
nationalist organization, and he was an affiliate
of the Panther Party. He was also the step-father
of rapper, Tupac Shakur.
So this is the Lincoln Detox poster from 1975.
Let’s break it down.
Here, it says the “Lincoln Detox People’s
Program,” which referred to the detox clinic
at the Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx.
The 1970s South Bronx was battling with an
intense heroin epidemic, and the Lincoln hospital
was a site of medical discrimination, with
many patients dying due to negligence. The
Panther Party and the Young Lords, another
revolutionary group, decided to take over
the hospital in November 1970 and reform it.
Next, we have these skulls which represented
the oppressive forces in the community, like
Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical company, the USA
FBI, as well as the CIA. If you look at the
bill of the hats, from left to right, it says
methadone kills, drugs kill, heroin kills.
One of the main goals of the Lincoln Detox
center was to educate its community on heroin
and methadone addiction. They believed that
their community was under a chemical warfare
attack and supposedly helpful interventions
such as methadone maintenance were only binding
them to another harmful substance. At the
bottom, it says “we will fight heroin and
methadone addiction by any means necessary,”
and the main means by which they did so, and
the most effective intervention they kept
in their toolkit, was acupuncture.
Dr. Shakur first heard about acupuncture through
his friend and fellow activist Yuri Kochiyama
in 1970, and he read about ear acupuncture
for withdrawal symptoms in articles about
a Bangkok doctor and a Hong Kong doctor named
HL Wen. This is what Dr. Shakur has to say
about the early days.
- Video of Dr. Shakur –
Oh, from 1971 to 72, approximately, before
we even got needles, people would come up
to the Bronx, dopefiends, hardened dope victims.
We would massage their ears and massage their
hands, and their legs. And we would stand
there with our fingers in their ears or in
the different points, we would do deep breathing,
they would fall right asleep. And just relax,
and the next day, they would be back for that
treatment. And we were detoxifying people
off of heroin, cocaine, and methadone with
acupressure and lot of love, lot of commitment
to it. And it was some of the most rewarding
times of our lives, you know. It was just
great, it was just great, it was spirited.
And, we then began to get the needles and
learn needle insertion and how to deal with
various symptoms.
The Lincoln Detox team eventually went up
to the Montreal Institute of Traditional Chinese
Medicine and Dr. Shakur received an acupuncture
doctorate degree here in 1976.
Here is a page from the newspaper of the White
Lightning, a group of White revolutionaries
in the South Bronx. Here we see a discussion
of how acupuncture could eliminate the use
of methadone. And a patient named Delfina
speaks about how her acupuncture treatment
was so good she didn’t need her methadone.
Deflina was one of thousands of patients that
visited the Lincoln Detox program. The team,
however, not only treated people but also
trained anyone who was interested in learning
acupuncture and incorporating it in their
own toolkits. And the Lincoln collective paired
this training with political education and
developed what they called
a “barefoot doctor cadre.”
- Dr. Shakur speaking –
Lincoln Detox certainly faced its challenges.
Dr. Richard Taft, shown here, a Western physician
who used his credentials to support the center,
was found dead in October 1974, and his death
was declared a heroin overdose, though he
had no record of using drugs. It is strongly
believed that he was murdered to discredit
the program. The program continued to face
resistance, and in November 1978, the center
was closed by a task force of 200 police officers
and the state claimed that the program was
“badly mismanaged, committing fraud, and
using high questionable treatment methods
that included the radical indoctrination of
patients.” More than seventy supporters
protested the closure of the clinic that day,
believing that it was being framed.
Dr. Shakur was forced to leave, but he went
on to create the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture
and the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association
of North America in 1978. These organizations
trained roughly a hundred people in acupuncture,
many of whom were also political activists.
However, in 1982 Shakur went underground.
He was federally indicted under the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organization laws which
alleged that the team acted as a criminal
enterprise that robbed armored trucks for
funding. One of the incidences was the 1981
Brinks Robbery. The allegations against Dr.
Shakur are complicated, and have been linked
to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program,
otherwise known as COINTELPRO. Dr. Shakur
was arrested on February 12, 1986 and has
been jailed ever since. Though mandatory parole
regulations meant he was supposed to be released
in 2016, he has repeatedly been denied parole.
He was recently diagnosed with cancer in 2019.
A few of the original Lincoln Detox team members
relocated the program, but now the clinic
focused solely on acupuncture treatment and
training. In 1985, then director Michael Smith
formalized the National Auricular Detoxification
Association, or also known as NADA. A particular
five-point ear acupuncture protocol, known
as the NADA protocol, was also formalized,
and it is used for drug detoxification, general
anxiety, pain and stress relief. This treatment
has expanded worldwide, with estimates of
over 25,000 practitioners. These photos are
from Sue Cox, an acupuncturist who spent time
at Lincoln in the early 90s and has worked
to bring acupuncture to 128 of the 150 prisons
in the United Kingdom. I will cover these
stories in my next video and explore specifically
what makes ear acupuncture so suitable for
these practitioners and their toolkit.
I began this video with a question mark and
it represents the unexpected connection between
Black revolutionaries and acupuncture. Yet,
I hope this brief overview has shown how these
stories make sense. In a fraught sociopolitical
and medical context, it makes sense that people
would seek alternative measures. This gives
us a nuanced definition of integrative medicine.
Integrative medicine is not just about the
integration of different medical practices,
but also about the integration of medical
with social practices. For Drs. Small and
Shakur, that social practice was one of serving
the people, body and soul. Acupuncture fit
their local medical and social needs and was
part of their DIY metaphorical and literal
toolkit which they used to serve their community.
But their local needs were not necessarily
the same. Though I put these stories under
the same title, they are in fact different.
Oakland and South Bronx were different. Dr.
Small and Dr. Shakur were different. Though
both were associated with the Panther Party,
Dr. Small never formally joined the Party,
and Dr. Shakur was instead a formal member
of the Republic of New Afrika. Their toolkits
were different. Dr. Small was first a Western
doctor, who was inspired to use acupuncture.
Though Dr. Shakur received support from Western
doctors, he himself practiced Chinese medicine,
and its difference from biomedicine was politically
important. He used acupuncture in a much more
explicitly political way, and he combined
it with political education. Both were of
course influenced by the barefoot doctors
movement, but the legacies of Mao on their
lives are not so straightforward. These differences
and nuances matter because they prevent us
from painting entire groups of people as the
same.
But of course, there are fundamental connections.
They ask us, who has the right to heal? What
is medicine and for whom does it serve? And
they tell us that healing comes in all forms
and is meant to serve all patients. And so
to the question that always gets asked, does
acupuncture work? Well, I think we can ask
the thousands and thousands of people that
Drs. Small and Shakur have helped and continue
to help.
- Dr. Small reciting his poem--
(Light guitar playing)
