Needling To Get To The Point Podcast

Dr. Tia Trivisonno is a naturopathic physician and licensed acupuncturist who has been in practice for 15 years in Long Island, NY, a state where ND licensing still hasn't passed. She surfs and rides a cherry red Harley Sportster, both beautiful tools in what she calls the "Treasure Chest." Tia has figured out how to use that Treasure Chest and self-discovery to keep the lights on. This isn't thro...

Zachary Krebs came to acupuncture through love, a decade of Tai Chi, and a brain cyst that went undiagnosed by pretty much everyone he saw until he typed his symptoms into ChatGPT and got an answer in seconds. In this episode: what martial arts teaches you about the body that acupuncture school doesn't, what happened when he sat in a CEU class in severe neurological pain while practitioners took h...

On April 11, 2026, the Oregon Association of Acupuncturists and Education Task Force held our first community town hall on the proposed Oregon administrative rule revision that would create a state-regulated, competency-based alternative pathway to acupuncture licensure. If you couldn’t make it, here’s what we covered: * Why the RISE Rule and AHEAD Framework put virtually every ACAHM-accredited pr...

This is available as a Videocast on Substack with captions. Some interviews you schedule around convenience. This one we scheduled around continents. Sushila Gurung lives and works above the clinic she runs in Bajrabarahi, Nepal, which means that when we finally found a time that worked for both of us, it was late at night for me in Portland and early in the morning for her, with a wifi connection...

Felicía Desrosiers found acupuncture in Quito, Ecuador in the year 2000. She went on to attend POCA Tech in Portland, teach there, and found North Portland Community Acupuncture, a pop-up clinic in a bar that she made feel sacred every single day she opened it. She is now in Madrid, Spain, doing it all over again. In this episode: why she thinks acupuncture is an adaptogen for the medicine and for...

Danielle Reghi graduated from OCOM with $220,000 in student loan debt: a number she didn't borrow, but accumulated through compounding interest nobody explained to her. In 2021 she filed a Borrower's Defense application. Four and a half years later, she received full discharge of every loan under her name. In this episode, Danielle, owner of Zen Space Acupuncture in Portland and current president...

Matthew Bauer has been practicing acupuncture in Southern California since 1986. In this episode: why acupuncture research keeps underestimating the medicine, and what a debt-ridden new grad can actually do with that information, the four cornerstones of this profession and how they failed each other, and what it means when a patient says I wish I'd have known. Also: Making Acupuncture Pay . A goo...

Bex sits down with Debbie Yu , Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine, owner of Little Si clinic in North Bend, WA, former Bastyr faculty, and creator of the Doggy Oracle Card deck . They met in Nepal in 2015 doing rural primary care through the Acupuncture Relief Project — and a lot of what shaped both of them about this medicine happened there. In this episode: the real numbers behind...

Kelly Ilseman has spent four years as the unpaid Research Committee Chair for the Oregon Acupuncture Association, doing the behind-the-scenes work that keeps our profession moving. We talk about what it takes to get insurance coverage, how to translate between East Asian medicine and biomedical language, and what integration into hospitals and the VA actually requires of us. Plus: the OAA is looki...

Terry owns Eagle Cap Wellness in Enterprise, Oregon, a small town in the Wallowa Mountains near the Idaho border. She graduated from OCOM in 2013, went straight to Nepal with the Acupuncture Relief Project , got certified in Sports Medicine Acupuncture , and then in 2022 made what she calls an impulsive but necessary leap: moving from inner southeast Portland to a town where her old neighborhood p...