BRATTLEBORO — After recently celebrating a third anniversary, plans are underway to expand classes offered by Confluence Acupuncture.
“It’s all going well,” said Stefan Grace, owner of Confluence Acupuncture.
Grace enjoys helping people realize the possibility of traditional Chinese medicine for health care. Now, he wants the public classes to be a bigger part of what he offers and provides to the community. He plans to put more focus on running physical culture classes, such as Qigong.
Acupuncture and herbal treatments will still be offered in the clinic on Technology Drive.
Qigong is similar to physical therapy, Grace said. He teaches therapeutic exercises to help people with problems they’re working on in the lobby of the clinic weekday mornings.
His plan is to expand those offerings to weekends and nights in a larger space outside of the clinic. He said he will have classes targeted at different skill levels.
Getting people to the classes on a weekday is difficult. Having other options will make it easier to accommodate people’s work schedules, Grace said.
“Everyone is really into it when they come in and do it,” he said, and group classes foster “more of a sense of community.”
Grace also has been teaching a manual therapy, known as Tuina, out of his office. He practices it in his clinical work.
In the coming year, Grace plans to offer more classes about Tuina and in a more organized fashion. Students “can come for a few consecutive weekends to learn a larger body of work,” he said. He described the previous classes being “pretty low key and generally by word of mouth.”
Tuina is “a big part of what I do to get clinical results,” Grace said.
“I want to open these classes up to not just specialists like professionals like myself but laypeople who are interested in learning these things,” he said.
His goal is to give people the tools to help themselves and the people around them so they don’t necessarily need to come in for treatment.
Unable to see anywhere nearby to get Tuina training, Grace said, “there’s a gap there that could be filled.”
With the acupuncture clinic, Grace said he’s “really happy with the receptivity that I’ve gotten from the locale, both with herbs and acupuncture.”
“I’m happy with the level of busy-iness I’ve achieved and the openness of community members,” he said.
For information on classes and the clinic, visit confluenceacupuncture.com.
