Mindfulness in Motion: Discovering Vitality with Dr. Jacques MoraMarco and Dr. Yun Kim

Well, after decades in this field, talk about the changes that you've seen, good and bad, how Western culture embraces Eastern culture.

I

think that the evolution has been very positive, you know, from those early years.

Dr. Maura Marco has been there since the beginning in the 70s and my parents as well.

And, you know, back then, acupuncture and East Asian medicine was considered very alternative, was very considered counterculture.

And now we're at the VA.

The Department of Defense in the United States funds acupuncture research and projects and As I said, it's a mandated benefit for veterans.

And so the evolution has been tremendous.

There's so much good research out there.

In the early days, it was so cutting edge that organizations like the Black Panthers, they were one of the very first organizations that embraced this and actually had the very first awareness a research project at the Lincoln Hospital in New York.

And they used to use it for different drug addiction and as a support mechanism to get people off the drugs with this very specific acupuncture called auricular acupuncture that there's a specific points down in the ear.

So it was really very much, you know, not mainstream.

It was, they were radical.

And they were doing something that was beyond what was imagined at the time, something that was mainstream.

Yeah, that's very interesting history of East Asian medicine that many people don't know that the Black Panthers, they were really ahead of their time in bringing Eastern medicine into the United States.

They went to Montreal to train and they came back and they set up this whole detox center in the Bronx and and used acupuncture to heal and to bring wellness to Black and brown communities.