MARCOTTE ACUPUNCTURE $40-60 sliding scale 983 E Washington Ave El Cajon, CA 92020   619-822-1330

My Mission

My mission is to make acupuncture and Traditional Chinese medicine as affordable as possible to my community and myself. And make a living doing it. A Sliding Scale practice reflects this commitment. I offer a safe and welcoming space for all gender identities, races, sexual orientations, inclusive religious beliefs, socioeconomic classes, trauma survivors, and their supporters, caregivers and families.

What is a Sliding Scale?

A Sliding Scale is a price range from the lowest you can pay, to the highest, with ranges in between. Offering this kind of price structure acknowledges that not only do we have different income levels, but our income levels often change. Since Covid and this new life of inflation, I think, we all see how our incomes and ability to pay can and do fluctuate.

When you see a price range from $40-60 or $20-40, you are being asked to choose where along the scale you can afford to pay. I have no guidelines and I do not check your income.

I am not a nonprofit. And I do not receive grants or other financial assistance. It is your financial support that allows this solo micro-preneur to continue to care for your health and pay her bills. Thank You. Your referrals keep me in practice.

This is a cash practice

I specialize in treating chronic conditions that most often require a treatment plan of more than 1 treatment/wk to begin. I also treat many conditions that do not have physical pain as part of their presentation. And once people with chronic conditions have reached 70% or better improvement, they need regular maintenance if they want the holistic health improvement they've gained to continue. If you've ever had chiropractic care, you understand.

However, American insurance rarely pays for more than 1 treatment/wk. It ONLY covers complaints of physical pain. And most acupuncture coverage only pays for 12 treatments/yr. If I treated only what insurance covers, not only would most people think acupuncture only treats pain, but if they had other chronic conditions, they might not ever receive enough treatment to truly help them. And many will walk away thinking acupuncture should help completely and quickly, or it doesn't work. When in fact, even acute conditions, which need frequent treatment for only a short time, are the only ones that even partially fit the insurance treatment model. 

A cash practice allows me to treat you the way this medicine was designed to work. A way that will help you get real, and lasting results.

I specialize in helping people suffering from chronic conditions and healing from emotional trauma

A chronic condition is any health complaint, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual, that has lasted for at least 3 months. In our medicine we recognize the 4 levels of health- physical, mental, emotional and spiritual- are interacting all the time and often affect each other. Now more than ever, because of all the recent financial and emotional stress we've been through the last few years and are still experiencing, many of us are seeing very directly how our thoughts and especially our emotions affect our health. Our medicine understands these connections intimately. And teaching you and your body how to become more aware of our thoughts, care for our feelings and nurture a healthy spiritual connection is our specialty. 

We can heal with acupuncture and TCM alone or get more in-depth with mindfulness work. And if we are aware and/or recovering from unhealthy relationship patterns we can dive more deeply into healing them with focusing on where we need the most help. If it's our thoughts and how we communicate with ourselves and others that we need to work on we can focus on Compassionate Communication. If we are feeling emotionally overwhelmed such that we are noticing our need to control is rising or we are having a really hard time saying no, we can focus on Healthy Boundary Development. If we're looking for a more holistic approach to a combination of issues, we can use Holistic Health Education to create a treatment plan. And we can use Qi Gong for all things physical, to help us cultivate calm, healing and flexibility. If we are feeling disconnected from life and hurting spiritually, concentrating on developing a mindfulness practice and using qi gong is a very effective path to begin to walk.

Long term health and healing is a partnership, at its onset, between our minds and our bodies. Becoming aware of and listening to what our bodies are sharing with us is the first step on a healing path. 

I am trained, licensed and experienced not only in acupuncture, but in a wide array of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Holistic Health modalities including herbal treatment, eastern and western nutrition and supplements, qi gong, and mindfulness practice. Over the last 8 years I have been deepening my knowledge and practice of Healthy Boundary Development and NonViolent Communication through an eastern holistic health framework. I am an L.Ac, licensed by the California State Board of Acupuncture, hold a Master of Science in Traditional Oriental Medicine (MSTOM) from Pacific College of Oriental Medicine and a BA from Smith College.

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