Traeger, Ecological Acupuncturist

Traeger Stertzbach, Ecological Acupuncturist.

I met Traeger at my first Aikido class in Prescott. He is a student of Sensei Bob Ward, who I had met at the sundance and who graciously allowed me to train in his dojo while I was in Prescott. When I found out that Traeger also does acupuncture I thought he might be a great subject for my blog, so I went to visit his practice which is located in the space owned by the Shanti Wellness Project, a not for profit Organization which provided low cost Wholistic Health care for Women in Yavapai county. More about Shanti in another post.

Traeger graduated last year from the 4 year program at the Oregon College of Oriental medicine. After finishing an undergraduate degree in natural history and ecology, he went to Portland planning to go to Naturopathic College but after talking with senior students at both colleges decided to go into Oriental medicine. At the time it seemed like a huge shift. But what he asked himself was whether he wanted to continue to operate in a Western scientific framework or if it was time to step outside of the box. The answer was Oriental Medicine.

“I graduated with an undergraduate degree in natural history and ecology from Prescott College in 1999. The same year that Shanti was finishing up her project. I graduated from Chinese Medicine school last September. When I came back to Prescott I was looking at partnering up with a chiropractor, or something like that. I was hoping to find someone to work with or learn from. I called everyone I knew and no one seemed to need a partner. The truth is in Arizona, if you partner with a chiropractor who is billing for your services it’s a bit tricky since acupuncturists are not allowed to bill for our services. I realized that I needed to just go for it and open my own practice. I found out that the Shanti Wellness Project was looking for practitioners through two friends who are acupuncturists. They work out of room 1 on Monday’s, Fridays and Saturdays. I called Sherry and arranged to see the space. When I came I felt that the energy here was great, so I put some paint on the walls and a rug on the floor and here I am.”

“The mission of the Shanti is something that I fully connect to and I have several related projects on the go. Jason and Laura, the two other acupuncturists, and I are discussing the possibility of a community based acupuncture clinic similar to the working class acupuncture project that they have in Portland, Oregon. You can think of it as a type of group acupuncture or network chiropractic. The practitioner sees each client individually to take the pulse and check the tongue and find out their chief complaint but instead of having one room, one client all the treatment is done in a room with several clients. The practitioner puts the needles in and goes on to the next person.. This allows the practitioner to charge $20-$35 per session making it feasible for people who do not have a lot of money to come in once or twice a week.” That way of practicing is much more similar to the way they treat patients in China.

I asked him if he saw OM as more of a spiritual path. His response was that he does but that this path is also helping him to be more grounded to the physical realm as his tendency is to think a lot and this is a very physical and very practical form of medicine. He uses a lot of shiatsu in his treatments. For him it is very important to be fully present with the patient and the real time changes that are going on during the treatment. “It is possible to get off into your head, but the hands-on work requires you to really pay attention.” he says. Traeger is a minimalist when it comes to point selection. His training is much like mine – use as few needles as possible. He explains this drawing on the imagery used in a lecture he once attended – the pond effect he calls it – the difference between the ripple effect after throwing one or two stones into a pond and throwing many stones into the same pond. He sees oriental medicine as a medicine that more in tune with the ecology of the human body than the reductionist approach of allopathic medicine.

Although he is a fairly new practitioner, he is drawn to meridian style acupuncture where he sees the channel as a whole. He loves to have 5 element acupuncture done to him, but on his patients he focuses on the entire meridian, or energy channel.

I asked Traeger to explain why he sees acupuncture as more like ecology, than reductionism. He takes me back to my undergrad ecology days, reminding me that the root of ecology is eco’ logos – the study of the family home, and that it focuses on looking at the organism in relation to the environment they are in and the greater system that surrounds them. He says that in oriental medicine we have to take into consideration the organism, their environment and factors in their day to day – that is ecology. In fact, oriental medicine stems from a real close observation of nature. He talks about the time when he was walking near a shipyard and noticed the variations in the river channels he immediately thought back to the he-sea points and the shu-transport points on the energy channels he had studied and realized that this was how the analogies were made, by observing these relationships in nature.

Traeger adds “After I finished my undergrad I left Prescott wondering how am I going to affect change in this environmental crisis? I am not an activist nor am I a policymaker. This seemed like a way to affect change at an individual and a community level. Not only can we use specific acupuncture points to affect the ecology of an individual but that individual is him or herself an acupuncture point in their community.”

One of the projects that Traeger is working on really integrates his ecology background with his love of oriental medicine. That is the herbothecary and teahouse he is working on creating with Margaret, the owner of Magpie, a local food coop and health food store. They plan to sell bulk teas and to serve teas in a traditional way.

“In relationship to my clients, I see myself as a guide or a listener. I really see them as the teachers. Everyone is just an incredible resource. I am getting a lot of difficult cases and they are teaching me how to practice this medicine. I feel fortunate that I have been able to help some of them make changes in their lives. I love to come to work to help people make changes in their lives.”