A Day at the Clinic
Our clinic is staffed by two or three teachers, plus two to three students. Both the staff and the students rotate to different jobs. Our situation is such that our clinic has become not only a community medical resource, it is also a great teaching resource.
 We are treating 40 to 60 patients, 5 plus days a week, usually with 1/2 a day on Saturday.
Patients come to us for a variety of reasons: whole body pain, all joint discomfort, headaches, backaches, skin disorders, leprosy, polio, digestive disorders, years of diarrhea, learning disabilities, generations of malnutrition, menstrual disorders, impotence. Generally the cases are very chronic, and very different from what we see here in the western world, a challenge for acupuncture, yet being that we have constantly been here since 1993, the community has a very high level of trust towards us and our results continue to improve the human condition there. Acute and chronic conditions, that are brought to us through trust, that require western medical care are referred to the teaching hospital.  We are unfortunately understaffed, which results in patients waiting inordinately long times for their treatments, and between treatments, yet we all manage. We open the clinic at 8:30 am and close when all patients have been seen, usually between 2-4:30 pm. The clinic then becomes the classroom.
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School and Free Community Clinic in West Bengal, India
