“Breathe in and out.”
Those are the instructions from Amy Landolt as the licensed acupuncturist inserts five small orange needles into the upper part of a person’s ear at the Fleetwood-Jourdain Center in Evanston.
One needle is for stress, another puts the body at rest and a third is used to heal internal organs and process fear, she explains. A fourth needle is inserted for irritability and the fifth one is for “letting go of things that no longer serve you,” she says.
Acupuncture has been used for centuries in China. A new generation is finding this holistic approach can help some people stay sober.
“This is very effective for people struggling with substance misuse,” Landolt says. “And if you’ve ever given up anything like sugar or caffeine, you get irritable, you’re agitated, you have problems sleeping, you have headaches. So these needles put your body in balance, so those withdrawal symptoms aren’t as bad.”
The treatment, known as the “five-needle protocol” or auricular acupuncture, is used to help curb cravings for people dealing with substance abuse. The Black Panthers and Young Lords political organizations adopted the practice decades ago, and advocates now are calling for its expanded use as a tool for community groups.
In Illinois, only licensed acupuncturists can perform the treatment, but advocates like Landolt and other health care workers who help treat drug addictions want to change that.
A recent measure introduced in the Illinois General Assembly that would’ve widely increased the practice appears to be dead but will be reintroduced, says bill sponsor state Rep. Lilian Jiménez, who represents the West Side.
“We call it the people’s treatment,” says Franzcine Caldwell, a longtime auricular acupuncture practitioner in Chicago. “It’s a treatment for the people, by the people.”
Origins in community activism
The treatment dates back to the 1970s to Hsiang-Lai Wen, a neurosurgeon in Hong Kong, who at the time found a connection between inserting needles in the ear to stem withdrawal symptoms for people who had been using opium.
The treatment was adopted at the Lincoln Hospital in New York City, where the Young Lords and Black Panthers pushed for the creation of a detox program. The Young Lords occupied and essentially took over the hospital in the 1970s to demand more health care services for the community.
Caldwell learned about the five-needle protocol in the 1970s while working at a treatment clinic in Chicago. Doctors from the Lincoln Hospital visited, and she later traveled there to meet other practitioners. To her, it felt like the treatment was a miracle after seeing so many people struggle with addiction.
“It really wasn’t a miracle, but it was the body getting treated for the disease that people had,” says Caldwell, who trains others to do the treatment as part of a 70-hour curriculum through the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association. “We were actually treating the people and not the disease. The people got well and they quit using; a lot of their lives changed.”
Landolt practices the five-needle system at the Fleetwood-Jourdain Center in Evanston. She tries to incorporate the spirit of how the Black Panthers and the Young Lords used the treatment, which lasts 25 to 40 minutes, by also creating a space where people can share information about community actions and events.
“The group supports each other and what they’re going through,” she says. “So we’ve had people who lost children, one of the person’s sons was murdered. Everyone has different things going on, and the group supports each other, brings food to each other.”
Bruce King, 72, of Evanston, has been part of the group for about three years. He had been getting the treatment for about six months when he learned it also helps reduce cravings for substance abuse.
“It does work because for the six months that I’ve been here, I’ve noticed and the struggle wasn’t as hard,” King says, adding he’s battled cocaine addiction for years.
He sits quietly and sometimes closes his eyes as Landolt places the acupuncture needles in his ears. It puts him at ease, he says.
“Your inability to manage the stress in your life, that’s really what addictions stem from, that inability to manage the stresses in your life,” he says. “And then you have to develop tools to do that.”
Questions about who could deliver treatment
The question over who should be allowed to perform the treatment was at the center of a recent bill in the General Assembly. The measure would have allowed people who aren’t licensed acupuncturists to apply the therapy. These people would undergo training to do auricular acupuncture, though they still would be prohibited from doing acupuncture in other parts of the body.
The Illinois Society of Acupuncturists, which opposed the bill, in a statement said the training that would have allowed people to perform the five-needle protocol isn’t equivalent to the level of training from a specialist.
“True health care equity is not achieved by cutting corners or diluting professional qualifications — it is achieved by ensuring that every patient, regardless of background, receives the same high standard of care. Lowering these standards in the name of access benefits no one; rather, it risks further marginalizing the very communities this bill claims to serve,” the group said.
Jiménez says the bill won’t advance during this legislative session, but she is requesting a hearing and will push to bring the bill back during the next session. She is working with a coalition of workers in the mental health and harm reduction fields.
“We try to keep that memory alive and the spirit alive in so many different ways in this community, especially in Humboldt Park,” Jiménez says, about the Young Lords. “I felt very connected to it right away.”
The Young Lords and Black Panthers worked to find ways to deal with generational trauma, she says. “So many of us are trying to learn and kind of break away from the negative aspects but also still hold onto our culture.”
Diane McKenzie, a nurse practitioner and advocate of the treatment, says she envisions people being trained so they can work with patients in spaces like community centers and churches. She says it can also be useful for people with high-stress jobs, such as first responders.
“What they found when they put this in programs, that people were able to sleep, they were able to rest, and it decreased cravings,” McKenzie says.
Max Byrne, 23, of Evanston, considered going through training to become a practitioner if the law changed. He joined the Evanston group in January after a friend told him about it.
“After seeing the benefits for my mental health and coming here, I have a lot of hope that this could be used to help people in crisis, like, perhaps, with physical issues and also with mental issues,” Byrne says. “I think something like this could really go a long way for helping people or to keep people a little bit more stable so it doesn’t come to the point of crisis.”
Byrne lives with chronic pain and almost immediately started to notice differences in his health.
“I was shocked at how much that was able to do for me,” Byrne says. “I take both prescription pain medication and also over-the-counter [medication], but since I’ve started this treatment, I’ve been able to significantly reduce the pain medications.”