“Sliding Scale is Political. It is not a bargain.”

For the past 14 years, we have hashed and rehashed the core, the heart, one of the main tenets of Heart & Hands and the Community Acupuncture model : our Sliding Scale.

“if it is inaccessible to the poor, it is neither radical nor revolutionary”
~Jonathon Herrera Soto

This statement, “Sliding Scale is Political. It is not a bargain.” is from a wonderful post by @nonnormativebodyclub, Asher Freeman – a trans personal trainer who has committed their work to smashing racist, fatphobic, cisnormative and ableist myths about our bodies. Asher is definitely our kind of people :)

Heart & Hands exists because we are working class practitioners who are committed to building and maintaining a grassroots, inclusive practice for the segment of the community that does not have a ton of expendable income or extended benefits. Hence, they often do not have access to holistic and traditional health care because of the lack of affordable and inclusive practice models. Our practice exists to serve working class people, because we ourselves, are working class people.

Our current $30-60 sliding scale is nested within the infrastructure of another indispensable system within our practice, our Invisible Receptionist (IR), which serves as an important tool to:

• Provides a tangible and material way to educate our client base about financial privilege using Wort & Cunning Apothecary’s brilliant Green Bottle Model of sliding scale.

The average going rate for a single acupuncture session in the Greater Victoria Area will run you $95 – 120. But at Heart & Hands, if you crunch the numbers, at 4 clients/hour, depending on where clients pay along our $30 – 60 sliding scale, we are making between $120 – $240/hour when our schedule is fully booked. And what’s more, many of these clients would otherwise be priced out by the usual private practice rates and wouldn’t be getting acupuncture as often as they need, if at all.

To be clear, our particular sliding scale is specifically compatible with the high volume nature of our Community Acupuncture practice. Not many modalities can effectively provide rapid action, culturally traditional, customized care quite like Community Acupuncture. And our scale is not arbitrary – we have done the math as well as creating the systems and physical set-up necessary to run our little practice like a well-oiled machine.

Furthermore, acupuncture is a dose dependent therapy and each of our acupunks will recommend a suggested treatment frequency. Our sliding scale, coupled with our increased appointment availability make it possible for clients to access treatment as often as needed not only to get well, but to STAY well….here at Heart & Hands, we love to remind our client base about the value and importance of maintenance ;)

Not unlike the very foundation of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Yin-Yang, our sliding scale is a dynamic balance of give and take, mutual aid and community care. We have put a lot of thought and planning behind our rates because ultimately, what we charge should also provide our hardworking practitioners a living wage all while being accessible to as many people as we can reach.

Our sliding scale is an open-ended invitation of mutual trust, personal autonomy and socioeconomic justice. We hope that being able to choose what you can afford will help to challenge the stigma of your worth being tied to your income and what you deserve. We are but working class peasants, so our strength lies in our relationships. While social inequality continues to grow, all we have is each other, so we want to build alternative economies, support anti-capitalist liberation and foster abundance despite it all.