Let’s Bring Health Care to the Patient: The Usage of Holistic Medicine as a Means of Revolutionary Care and Liberation in New York, 1969-1979

Anna C. Tran, Georgia Institute of Technology

Existing research discusses the Young Lords’ and Black Panther Party’s acupuncture center for heroin dependency in the Bronx. Yet there has been no research that puts this health movement in context with concurrent New York health movements to provide an overarching picture of transracial health solidarity in the 1970s. In this paper, I examine the Bronx’s Lincoln Detox Center, the Chinatown/Lower East Side free health fairs, and Chinese practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine to argue that these communities of color successfully made reforms to the New York healthcare system by practicing concepts of community care, cultural competency, political education, institution building, and patient autonomy. As I illustrate, by defining holistic medicine as encompassing these modalities along with its scientific context, these communities advanced possibilities for reimagining healthcare outside the Western medical context.

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 Presented in Session 22. Health, Medicine and Body