We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Hopi Wilder a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hopi , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Is there a heartwarming story from your career that you look back on?

My first story involves a young woman who had come to me after being in a terrible car accident. I was working in a small town in Northern California and there were other practitioners she could have chosen from, but for some reason she came to see me for acupuncture and she was deathly afraid of needles. I’m a pretty gentle person, so a I coaxed her down on the table and got her to start belly breathing. She was so terrified, however, that I was only able to place one tiny pin in her body. Then she cried for the rest of the hour while I held her hand. I left the room defeated. thinking that I had done nothing for her and wasted both of our time. A few months later, however, I got a call from her saying, “I don’t know what you did, but my pain is gone.” I was floored! This is not what I was taught would happen in acupuncture school.

The next story took place thirteen years into my career and in a ranching community of about a thousand people in the mountains of Eastern Oregon. I’d moved there for love and ended up being many of the people’s primary care physician. Although we had a small local clinic, people would drive six hours to Portland to get something serious, like a root canal done. I had one such cowboy in my clinic who had been getting good results for low back pain. One time, however, he showed up with excruciating pain in a tooth. He was waiting a week or so to get into see a dentist. So,I rolled up my sleeves and put a tack in a point in the ear called dental analgesia. To my surprise, his cavity pain completely vanished. Not only that, but even during and after drilling and filling the tooth, he had no pain. He refused all pain medications and kept showing the befuddled staff at the dental office his ear tack.

I think one is drafted into this kind of work because you really have to have an ability to suspend disbelief. Sometimes just being in a safe space can hit the “re-set” button and help a person shake off bad health. I have a lot retired patients who want to remain athletic. I also have a lot female college atheletes, people who work really physically demanding jobs and people with scar tissue from injuries or surgeries that is preventing them from healing. It’s great to see the turn around. And some times it involves big changes that the patient, including leaving bad jobs and marriages. I always tell my patients that I am more of a coach or a cheerleader supporting them in their journey to good health. That said, I do some doctoring also: trying to help people improve their diets, prescribing supplements, recommending stretches and prescribing individualized herbal teas that are part of an over 5,000 year old tradition.

I believe that acupuncture and herbal healing were once a type of medicine that was practiced all over the world. There was a mummy of a 5,000 year old cave man named Otzi found in the Alps between Austria and Italy. He was about forty-five, which was old back then, and he had acupuncture points tattooed all over his body. When his skeleton was x-rayed it was discovered that he had degenerating discs in his spine and knee joints. And that is what the tattooed acupuncture points were for!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a second generation health care practitioner and I grew up on a homestead with fruit trees and chickens in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. My mom was one of the first people to go to herbal medicine school and massage school in California. She went on to become a Physician’s Assistant and worked for 25 years in the Emergency Room in Oroville, California, but her heart was always in wholistic medicine.

I had been working for four years as an acupressure therapist and sports masseuse in Aspen, Colorado and came home for a visit. My thumbs hurt and I’d injured my shoulder snowboarding. That’s when my mom took me to the East-West Health Center in Chico, California and I met my primary mentor of my career. Michael Turk, L.Ac. was a cross between a father and a professor of wizardry to me from the year 2000 up until last year when he passed away. He called his craft orthopedic acupuncture also known as Ashi (that’s it!) acupuncture. It’s a palpation based style of acupuncture that is extremely effective for pain relief.

Turk was an acupuncture cowboy. He broke a lot of the so-called rules that we were taught in school and empowered his students to look for the root of the problem. He started out his career doing Electronics in the Navy, then he became a massage therapist in the ’70s and finally an acupuncturist. He showed me the ropes of how to be a doctor of an ancient healing art form, how to connect your heart with your patients and how to be brave and meticulous with my treatments. I’m extremely grateful for all his wonderful classes and inspirational words. He truly embodied the principles of Jesus and was legendary during his time for his miraculously treatments that took completely wrecked, medicated lives and gave them a new start.

So after my mom introduced me to Turk in 2001, he fixed my shoulder and gave me a job at his clinic. I simply didn’t return to Aspen. He then convinced me that I could pull off acupuncture school which at that time was 100K and a four year program. Over the next six years I continued to do massage while slowly working on my masters degree. I went back full time in Boulder, Colorado and graduated in 2010. Afterwards, I practiced in my hometown of Oroville, California for four years until I met my husband and moved to his hometown in Halfway, Oregon. We are now happily situated in Reno, Nevada and he works for Tesla. I’m hoping this is the last practice I start and I ride it out to retirement.

I provide acupuncture on glued fascia that has formed hard knots in the body preventing natural movement and flow of vital life force energy, blood, lymph, etc. My bread and butter is scar tissue in the neck, back, shoulder, knee and foot pain, but I also work on surgeries gone bad such as C-sections, hysterectomies, epidurals and breast implants that must be removed. I also love doing sports medicine acupuncture because it is so easy. These patients are usually already eating a pretty good diet and are so motivated to get back to health that they do the prescribed stretches and herbs to assist their healing.

I also do a lot of nutrition, food-based supplements and herbal medicine. These patients tend to be dealing with digestive issues, chronic fatigue, anxiety/depression and other symptoms that Western medicine doesn’t have many options for. Unfortunately, a growing number of my patients are dealing with fertility issues. There’s a number of environmental factors that is leading to this, yet I help them to get back to an ancestral diet. This form of eating was discovered by Weston A. Price in the 1930s. He traveled the world looking the whitest teeth, least cavities and widest palates in children. He started seeing patterns across cultures on the healthiest ways to eat. Despite the modern vegan craze, this was not what he found in his years of research. Women especially need fat soluble vitamins that you can only get from a diet that includes some animal protein. I coach my fertility patients to eat clean sourced sacred foods and drink herbal teas that have been used for millennia for fertility. It’s really rewarding when my patients send me their newborn pics!

What I am currently most excited about is that a little over a year ago, I took a seminar on acupuncture and photo-biomodulation. This is a fancy word for light therapy on the body. I currently use a few different frequencies: red light (620 nanometers), infra-red light (780 nanometers) and blue light (450 nanometers). I have a few different lasers I use in the clinic and then I provide medical grade LED devices for my patients to rent or buy. What is interesting is each light has its own personality. Red light is great for building collagen in the skin and surface pain. Infra-red cannot be seen with the human eye, yet it penetrates deep into injured muscles and relieves inflammation and pain. Blue light is like ice: it’s great for pain. I purchased top of the line machines and apply the light after every acupuncture treatment except when it is contraindicated at no extra cost.

What I am most proud of is that this last year I stepped away from an insurance based business model. Functional Medicine doctors have capitalized on this niche and I felt like I wanted out of a system that constantly judges you and tries to control your treatments. It freed up a lot of time that I spent hassling to get paid to simply devote to my patients. I provide a Super Bill, however, if a patient wants to seek reimbursement from their insurance company. I utilize a lot of modalities such as light therapy, herbal and dietary advice that are not reimbursable, yet are the cornerstones of healing. Acupuncture alone is a powerful modality, yet I don’t want to be confined to only doing that. I provide high quality wholistic health care with cutting edge technology.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

In my first year as an acupuncturist my father died. I moved home in 2011 because my brother called me and said that pops didn’t have long to live. Rudy had battled prostate cancer for fifteen years. He also lived in a house nestled up against a conventional orchard that sprayed chemicals that I later learned have been linked to prostate cancer. Rudy had a good diet, a loving family and a vibrant career in music and photography and he did not want to stop living.

I was fresh out of “medical school” with my Masters in Oriental Medicine and charged forward to “rescue him.” I soon learned that he wanted to do things his way, like most humans do. I had to come to terms with the fact that despite there being alternative cancer treatments (mainly located in Mexico) my dad wanted to do chemotherapy. Then I had to watch as he completely deteriorated and lost his health over the course of a year. I was furious with his oncologist who was making $10K per infusion and continued to give him chemo even after it was very obvious that it was not working. I was desperate to save his life but my only tools were simply complete surrender and loving my dad through it all. So I made a spreadsheet of his medication when he went into hospice. I spoon fed him ice cream and made sure he never ran out of morphine when the cancer metastasized into his spine.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I spend a lot of time with each of my patients and talk to them about their lives. Once we have report, I can sink deeper into their layers of injury. I always say that my hands are smarter than my head. Since I did massage for 15 years before becoming an acupuncturist, I have a lot of experience putting my hand on people. I think most people are really touch starved and it helps to calm their nerves, especially if they’ve never had acupuncture before. I create a culture of exchange with my patients as well. I do not lecture them, but rather make suggestions. And I learn a lot from my patients. It is always so rewarding to see people get better. I’m also not afraid to help them along to another practitioner that will help them. My reputation has grown as being a person that tackles difficult scar tissue and chronic pain that other doctors are not able to resolve.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wilderhealthacu.com
• Instagram: @wilder.health
• Facebook: Wilder Health Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine