Transcript of interview with Dr. Fiona Kelley by Lisa Gioia-Acres, March 21, 2009

An Interview with Fiona Kelley An Oral History Conducted by Lisa Gioia-Acres Heart to Heart Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ©Heart to Heart Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2009 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV - University Libraries Directory: Claytee D. White Editor: Gloria Homol Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Emily Powers, Lisa Gioria-Acres, Claytee D. White ii These recorded interviews and transcripts have been made possible through the generosity of Dr. Harold Boyer and the Boyer Foundation. The Oral History Research Center enabled students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. Participants in the Heart to Heart Oral History Project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea of researching early health care in Las Vegas the opportunity to flourish. All transcripts received minimal editing that included the elimination of fragments, false starts and repetitions in order to enhance the researcher's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases, photographic images accompany the collection and have been included in the bound edition of the interview. Claytee D. White, Project Director Director, Oral History Research Center University of Nevada Las Vegas - University Libraries iii Table of Contents Fiona Kelley born in Connecticut; parents were both teachers; childhood summers spent traveling in Europe; attended Greenwich Academy in Connecticut; went to Bard College in New York; majored in dance with minor in art history; danced professionally in Acapulco and California; danced in Hallelujah Hollywood at MGM in Las Vegas; came to Las Vegas in 1978; transitioned into production work; earned national certification in massage; invited to visit China (1996) 1-5 Toured Chinese hospital that treated AIDS with acupuncture and herbs; decided to learn acupuncture; applied and accepted at Southwest Acupuncture College in Santa Fe, NM; divorced and moved back to Las Vegas (2001); learned anatomy and physiology from Dr. Fred Jackson; explanation of the 10 modalities of Oriental medicine; taught anatomy and physiology labs in Las Vegas; mention of Dr. Sharon Roth and Dr. Farolyn Sweeney, licensed in 2001 along with Fiona; description of post-graduate studies 6-10 Memory of first acupuncture patient; listing of conditions treated in Las Vegas; addressing differences between Oriental and Western medicine; discussion on why Las Vegas is good place to practice acupuncture; comments on herbal medicines 11-15 Comments on continuing education; mention of conflict between herbal medicines and Western medical treatments; differences in time spent with patients (comparing Oriental and Western doctors); brief discussion of financial compensation; comments on treating mothers-to-be, earaches, anxiety, depression; number of acupuncturists practicing in Nevada; brief history of the "original preventative medicine" 16-21 iv Preface Dr. Fiona Kelley was born and raised in Connecticut. Her parents were both teachers (though her mother quit teaching to raise their two daughters), and Fiona recalls the European vacations the family took every summer, exploring castles and enjoying picnic lunches. Fiona was educated at Greenwich Academy in Connecticut and Bard College (dance major with art history minor) in New York. She mentions dancing in Acapulco and California and then auditioning and being hired as a cover dancer for Hallelujah Hollywood! at the MGM in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, she had also become licensed in massage and states that as she was making the transition from dancing to production of dance, she and her husband were invited to China. While in China, Dr. Kelley recalls visiting a hospital which specialized in the treatment of AIDS through acupuncture. This led to a decision to leam Oriental medicine, which she pursued once she returned to the United States. She shares many details of her studies in New Mexico and Las Vegas, the licensing requirements for Nevada, and continuing education studies. Dr. Kelley lists some of the conditions for which she treats patients in Las Vegas and explains why Nevada is such a good place to practice acupuncture and herbal medicine. She also compares the differences between Oriental and Western medicines, and believes that the two very different styles are becoming more compatible. v 1 This is Lisa Gioia-Acres. Today is March 21st, 2009. I'm here to conduct an oral history interview for the Heart to Heart oral history project for UNLV's Oral History Research Center. And I am here today with Dr. Fiona Kelley. And what is the name of your organization here? Wuxin? Wuxin Healing Arts. Wuxin Healing Arts. And we're here on East Flamingo in Las Vegas. Hello, Dr. Kelley. Nice to meet you. Hello. All right. I'm very fascinated with this branch of medicine. So I'm really excited about doing this interview with you. But before we get started about your education and experience, I'd like to talk about your early life. So tell me where you came from. Maybe talk a little bit about mom and dad and what your interests were when you were a little kid. Well, I was born in Connecticut. My father was a teacher. And my mother was — she had been a teacher. She had been an art teacher. And she basically raised us. So she was a housewife. Then the nice thing about having teachers for parents is they have the summer off. So one of the best things I think about growing up was that I got to travel in the summers a lot with my parents. And starting with when I was about ten or 11 we started going to Europe in the summers. So I got to see not very much of the United States at all but a great deal of Europe over the years. And that was a fabulous education in not only art and art history and architecture but also culture and foods and the fact that there were lots of ways to do things that weren't necessarily American. How old were you when you first went to Europe? Eleven. Wow. Do you have brothers and sisters? I have one older sister. She is also a teacher. A family of teachers, actually. She teaches at MIT. And you grew up your whole childhood in Connecticut? Well, not counting the summers, yes. Except for the summers. What's one of your memories of going to Europe? Well, the four of us, my sister and I and my parents, would travel around in a little VW. It didn't matter what country we were in: we would explore castles. And they'd already mapped where we 2 were going to go. We had an itinerary. But often we would get to the town or the city or the village and go through the castle and then we'd go and have a picnic lunch and then more castle or whatever. But I remember an awful lot of picnics in cow fields and along streambeds in different places. Every morning we'd go and get our supplies. You know, we'd get a baguette, some ham, cheese, oranges, chocolate and a couple of bottles of water and that was it. It was a great life. Fascinating. When was the last time you went to Europe? I have to think for a moment. It's probably been two or three years. I went to England a couple of years ago with my sister. We went to England and Spain to see family. Wow. Do you have any idea what it was that caused your parents to do such an unconventional summer vacation? They liked to travel. They loved to travel. My father spent a great deal of time in Europe. And my mother absolutely loved it. So it was a great way to bring up kids. Do you speak a different language? I used to be better at French. Years later I picked up some Portuguese, some Italian and some Spanish and Japanese. But I don't claim to be fluent in any of those. You got a little exposure, though. And where did you go to high school? I went to the Greenwich Academy in Connecticut, which was then a girls' school. We wore a little green uniform every day. My father, as I said, was a teacher. He taught at the academy. So I was a faculty child. Did you at any point in your life decide or think that you might want to be a teacher and follow in your parents' footsteps? That got scotched when I was about 18 and I had to teach for a summer because what I wanted to do had fallen through. So I got myself a job teaching dance for the summer. And I absolutely loathed it and realized I didn't want to teach. However, years later I did teach here at CCSN, but that was a whole different — Experience. Very different. So you're 18 and out of high school maybe and — I was in college and I was home for the summer. 3 And what was your college degree? What program were you in? I went to Bard College, which is in upstate New York. It was a satellite of Columbia University I believe. And I majored in dance with a minor in art history. You thought maybe you were going to be a dancer? Oh, I had every intention of being a professional dancer. And then what happened? I became a professional dancer. For how long? That's actually how I ended up coming to Vegas. But, yes, I was a starving dancer and choreographer and, you know, looking for my big break. I was floundering around in California when I got an offer that brought me to Vegas. It was a strange set of circumstances. Let's talk about it if you don't mind. Some of it I think is old hat and probably has no relation at this at all. But I got a job dancing in Mexico. And I was — how old was I? I was 23. I had never actually been in a nightclub before. Never had. And I was in Los Angeles when this guy came up to me after a class and said would you like a job in Acapulco? And I was basically at that point looking around for Allen Funt thinking I was being set up for some gigantic joke. He was looking for a replacement dancer for this job in Acapulco, so I went down there. It was not the happiest of experiences. But the girls came from Las Vegas. We had a reunion a couple of months later and the reunion was to coincide with the auditions for MGM, which at that time had a show called Hallelujah Hollywood. We all auditioned as part of the fun of the weekend and two of us got it. Two of the other girls got into the Lido show, so we all settled here. So you came to Las Vegas in what year? 1978. And you danced for? I danced for Hallelujah Hollywood as a cover dancer. What was that experience like? It was a blast. It was really nice to be paid to dance. But it was on a different scale. And it was what I used to joke to my parents was "That's Entertainment, Part Four." Do you remember the 4 "That's Entertainment" movies? Uh-huh. So we did a Fred and Ginger number. We did a Judy Garland number. There was a number from "Pirates of the Caribbean." And so it was the musicals. Do you still dance? No, I don't. So what happened? What caused you to stop dancing? I decided I wanted to learn to do something else because I looked at the older dancers who were jaded and they didn't seem like very happy people anymore. So I told myself in my early 30s that I would find something else to do so that I wouldn't get to be bitter. I had the good fortune enough dancing with a couple of people who would sometimes reminisce about how wonderful it was in the old days back in 1968 when they worked for — and they would name a choreographer. I always had the sense that their life was much better then and they were just sort of hanging on. And I thought that I needed to move forward and keep on challenging myself. So when I was 32 I started making a transition into production work as a production coordinator and a production assistant. Production assistant is the bottom. You're like a gofer. I did commercials and film jobs where I was on a crew and sort of, you know, the nice person who runs and gets all the stuff that you need. And that was here in Vegas? Uh-huh. And I did that for a little while and started augmenting that with work as a stagehand. So when there wasn't film work, there was stage work. When there was stage work, there was no film work. Somehow I was always working. And that gradually transitioned to the point where I realized that tech people got paid a lot more than people like directors and also that I really didn't want to be a film producer. I had no interest in doing that. So I ended up working through Local 720 as a stagehand. Before we go into the next step, what was your impression of Vegas? Why did you stay if you were no longer a dancer? Because there's a lot of work here in the entertainment business. There were films. There were commercials. There were little, tiny TV shoots. And I wasn't quite sure where this was going to 5 land, but I figured it was all interesting and it was all new. When I decided to leave dancing, there weren t a lot of opportunities. If you still had good legs, which we all did, then you could do cocktails or you could do real estate because you were used to doing very long hours or you could get married and have a baby. And I wasn't interested in any of those particularly. So I sort of struck out on my own. There were a few people who had been dancers who became stagehands, not a lot. And occasionally I ran into people that I had worked with that had been on the crew when I was in a show somewhere. Sometimes that was very nice and sometimes it was, oh, you're just a dancer; you're not really very good at being a stagehand. But it all comes back in the end. It doesn't matter. So tell me what took place, then. You're a little dissatisfied with the work that you're doing and you decided to maybe make another change. I always knew that I didn't want to be a stagehand for life, but it seemed like a good place to rest until I figured out what I wanted to do. I really wanted to feel passionate, like the way I felt about dancing. I was working as a spotlight operator at the Excalibur when my then husband and I went to China. I was invited because I am nationally certified in massage, which is something I had picked up along the way. Who invited you to go to China? I am trying to remember the name of the organization. They were the traditional Chinese medicine international something-something institute. And they would put out invitations to everybody who was nationally certified. And they offered programs in Olympic sports medicine, Tui Na o r Qigong. Tui Na i s p e d i a t r i c massage. Qigong i s a c t u a l l y t h e b a s i s o f T a i C h i . S o l thought I would begin at the foundation. So I took Qigong. And my husband decided he wanted to come along for the fun of it. So I did this program for medical Qigong. It was in a hospital. What year was that? I am trying to remember. It's been a long time. I think that was 1996. The hospital gave us a tour of their facility. They did acupuncture and herbs, and I remember that they were treating something I was very, very interested in. My best friend had just died of AIDS. And they were treating AIDS by tonefying (sic) the immune system. These people were not doing drug cocktails, but they were going back home and having real lives. And that was not happening very much in 6 the United States at that time. So I went home and had a long talk with myself about whether I was willing to go back to college in my 40s. There were going to be a lot of hoops to jump through and was I up for it? And the thing that was larger than "was I up for it?" was could I live with myself if I didn't try? And that answer was very clear. Okay. Before that little break, we were talking about whether you could live with yourself if you did not go. One of my questions is: What are the hoops that you would have to go through? Some premed and then acupuncture school, which is a four-year program. Is that here in Las Vegas? No. No. I had bought a book in preparation for this trip about traditional Chinese medicine. And in the back of it was a list of every certified school I think in the United States and possibly in England, too. A year or two later my husband wanted to move out of Las Vegas, specifically to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I discovered that there were two colleges in Santa Fe. The International Institute of Chinese Medicine was run by a Chinese couple. And Southwest Acupuncture College was run by an American couple who had been in the Peace Corps. It turns out she speaks five languages fluently. I interviewed at both, but I only applied to Southwest Acupuncture College and I got in. What kind of work did your husband do? He was a stagehand. Okay. Go ahead. I realized that if we moved to Santa Fe I wasn't going to be able to make a living doing what I had been doing before. There is the Santa Fe Opera, but it's seasonal. There isn't enough work to keep you working year-round. And I thought that if I went to acupuncture school I would make new friends interested in something that I was interested in and then I would do that and I'd have a new interest and new friends and I'd feel really good about it. Santa Fe at that time had a population of about 67,000. And it had about 268 acupuncturists. This is not a good ratio. Many of those acupuncturists were waiting tables two days a week to pay the bills. And I quickly realized that I was not going to want to stay in Santa 7 Fe. But I didn't know what was going to happen. Several things happened. I got divorced and I got through acupuncture school. And about the time that I was going to be finishing up school Nevada opened its doors for the first time in a long time. And my friends here said come back. There was a whole new set of hoops to jump through. And I just did them one after the other until I had gotten through the whole list. Well, talk to me a little bit about going to school. What was the experience like for you? As an older student what were some of the things that you had to learn? I always thought I was going to be the oldest one there and I never was. It was a surprise, a pleasant surprise. I did about a year and a half at CCSN. I took anatomy and physiology and biology so that I would have those already on my transcript and I wouldn't have to take them in acupuncture college because the course load is very heavy. You can do it as a four-year program in which case you're doing at least 15 credits a semester, or you can do the accelerated program and do it in three years in which case you're doing at least 20 credits a semester. When I walked in, the academic dean talked me into starting with a three-year. You can always go down to the four-year program if it's too heavy. So I did. And by the second year — and it's a trimester program. It's pretty much you get a month off in August, but you don't get the summers off. So you have winter semester, spring semester and summer semester. And the summer is more condensed just as it is here. So you've got the same amount of material, but fewer weeks to get it done. What was your question about this? Well, was it — how challenging was it? Very, but it was also fun. Having by then done CCSN I had gotten used to studying again. And that was at first very, very scary going back to college and hitting the books and trying to remember how to do homework. And I was blessed with a very, very good teacher who ~ And this was here? That was here. What's the name of the teacher? Do you recall? Dr. Fred Jackson. We are still friends. He was in the biology department and taught anatomy and physiology, which is a two-part course. You do the lecture and you also do a lab. So I got 8 probably a better background than if I had just done anatomy a year or two later without the labs, without the much more detailed understanding. So I felt very blessed with that. That was great. Southwest Acupuncture College was a great deal of fun, but there's also stress because you re in school. There's no slacking off. The people who go to acupuncture school are very motivated, very motivated. We had I think 24 people in our class, which was one of the larger classes they had had. It was a mix of men and women, I think more women than men, but no biggie. And it was new. And my teachers were great. It was a fabulous school. It has been described as the Ivy League of acupuncture schools. Let me ask a question. When you were taking your anatomy and physiology here, did you already know that you were going to do acupuncture? Yes. What's the difference, if any, between Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture, or do they go hand in hand? Chinese herbal medicine is about herbs. Acupuncture is about needles going into the body. So what made you decide which way to go? It's not quite a correct question. There are ten different modalities to Oriental medicine and acupuncture is one of them. Chinese herbs is one of them. Oriental massage is one of them. Qigong is one of them. Nutrition is one of them. Feng shui is one of them. Meditation is one of them. And if I have to rack my brains, I'll probably come up with the rest. But these are all branches of Chinese medicine. The most famous, of course, to Americans would be acupuncture because it's the weirdest thing that people can imagine. How can you put needles in the body, stimulate something you can't see and make somebody better? So the Chinese have this term, which is chi. The Japanese call it chi. The Koreans I think also pronounce it chi (pronounced key). But chi is vital energy and chi travels in blood. So a lot of what we're doing is needles into specific anatomical locations, which we call acupuncture points, to stimulate moving the chi through the body. Every baby acupuncture student wants to be the person who's going to figure out how the meridians correspond to the capillaries or the blood system or the nerve system and break the code. It is in the innocence of students that we all think that we're going to be the ones who are 9 going to do this because medicine has been going on for 4,000 years. And if there was a map, they'd have found it by now, believe me. But I had a lot of anatomy background from dancing. I had done graduate school for two years at Cal Arts in Valencia, California. And I had absolutely enjoyed anatomy and physiology, which was part of our curriculum then. And so anatomy is the structure, the naming of names, the lower border of the spinus process of T-5. Okay. Okay? The anterior superior whatever it is. It's all location. It's the naming of places. Physiology is the function. So anatomy is the names of the structures and physiology is how does it work? So anatomy and physiology is how does the human body work? Sometimes when patients say I hurt over here, I will make them very specifically say, okay, is it here or is it here? I'm trying to find out if it's on the edge of this muscle or if it's on the edge of this tissue. What is it? And I know my anatomy well. After I came back to Vegas, Dr. Jackson talked me into teaching one of the A and P labs for a while. And he said it'll be a good brush-up for you and they'll all become your patients. None of them became my patients. But it was fun. And it was a lot more fun teaching that time than it had been when I was 18. So take me back and explain what made you decide. Was it because of your interest in anatomy and physiology that you decided to go into acupuncture? No. No. Well, let's go back to the first Chinese hospital. They were reversing AIDS. Nothing in the United States was saying that they were doing that. And I had just lost my best friend. So I thought that I would learn acupuncture and maybe treat AIDS patients. But when you commit to acupuncture school, you commit to the whole ball of wax. You commit to learning first single herbs and then formulas, as well as acupuncture. Oh, so those ten components of Chinese medicine — You get it all. Okay. Very good. You get Chinese nutrition. You get Qigong. You get the whole thing. And you did this in three years? Uh-huh. 10 Very interesting. So you decided to come buck to Las Vegas. There was a need. I came back to Las Vegas. When I had first applied, the law for Nevada was that you had to practice under a Chinese doctor as an apprentice for two years even if you were a full DOM, doctor of Oriental medicine. By the time I actually got licensed that law had been changed and it was no longer necessary to do an apprenticeship. So I was pretty much on my own. So you didn't do an apprenticeship when you got here? No. When did you come back to Vegas? I came back to Vegas at the very end of 2001. And there are three of us who were licensed in 2001. We had all got — first, it was Dr. Sharon Roth, then Dr. Farolyn Sweeney and then me. We were the only three that got licensed that first year. And since then there have been more. There are now almost an equal number of American acupuncturists as those from China. Do you see a difference in approach between, say, an American and a Chinese acupuncture doctor? Yes, but I'm not sure if I can put my finger on it for you. As soon as I graduated I started a post­grad course for two years while I was setting up my practice. And I flew six times a year to study in New England with a wonderful teacher who helped me take what I had learned in the school and figure out how to actually apply it to the patients in front of me. When you are in acupuncture school, your first year you follow around a senior student in clinic. You don't do any needling. You don't know enough yet. But you get to observe. The beginning of your second year you start to treat. And you have a very, very big safety net underneath you. You have a supervisor who checks everything you do, checks the points that you pick and suggests possibly other points instead and checks your point location in that patient in the student clinic, okay? You have a lot of support and a very big safety net. And you need it. And you do student clinic for at least two years. So you do it your second year and your third year and your fourth year or however many years it takes you to get through school. If you do school on a part-time basis — there was one student I know who took - she had a child and dropped down to doing only one course at a time for a while. I think it took her like seven years to get through. But she loved the medicine. But, you know, when you have the baby 11 and you're nursing, it's hard to keep up on - Well, she's got that extra clinic time as well. Yeah. What was it like the first time you needled somebody? Is that the right term, anyhow? I still remember the very first patient I ever had. And it was very funny. I can't remember what he came in for. But we are trained to ask the ten questions, the classical ten questions. So we go through, you know, how's your sleep? How's your digestion? Muscles aches and pains? Period problems? You know, we have various categories. And you always say is there anything else? And he said to me can you help my golf game? And I thought about it for a minute and I said I'll see what I can do. Now, there is a set of points that helps when you are stressed and distracted. My father had been a golfer, so I knew that golf was all about focus. So I did those points to him. And the next week he comes back and my supervisor is standing there in the room. And he says whatever you did last time do it again; my golf game was better than it's ever been. And my supervisor goes, Fiona, step out of the room, please. And I'm like uh-oh. And she pulls me aside and she says what did you do? And I explained to her what my thinking was. And she said, oh, yeah, I could see — yeah, that would work. Okay, fine. And I went back in the room with the patient. But what it taught me was that you can use these points in so many different ways. Now, I have classical traditional Chinese medicine training. I also have training from American teachers. And possibly the way that I treat is different from somebody classically Chinese because of the teachers that I had or the teachers that they had. It doesn't mean I am better. No. But you learned from the Chinese and you learned from the American. And you kind of meshed it? It's a melting pot. But you can't put your finger on what the difference is, but — Well, there are many different approaches and also - how to explain this? China is such a large country. So up in the northwest is different than what they have in the south in terms of weather, W-E-A-T-H-E-R. So up in the west it's very dry and windy. And down in the south it's very 12 different and it s coastal. And then in the middle you have Yellow River and you've got lots of dampness and you have a great deal of malaria and dysentery. So when you leam these classical texts, there are whole books on nothing but malaria and dysentery. And you go, boy, they had a lot of malaria and dysentery. Now, do I see a lot of dysentery here? Not so much. It's a dry climate. But you will end up eventually finding things that you're really good at. Because of my dance background and because of my massage background, I am really good with a lot of tendon muscular problems. I'm very good with muscles. And that's what I was going to ask you. What do you see as prevalent in your practice? What do the patients coming in complain of? I get all kinds of stuff. I get the tendon muscular. I get stomachaches. I get diarrhea. I get ~ not me personally, the patients ~ digestive problems, fertility and infertility, reproductive disorders. Headaches is a big one. Anxiety and stress is a big one. Weight loss, stopping smoking — we see those perhaps more in the United States than in China. Oddly enough, more and more I'm seeing hair loss from the stress. Interesting. Yeah. So I get a huge variety. How about allergies? Allergies, flus, colds, runny noses, you name it, lung disorders of all kinds, everything from hay fever and rhinitis to, you know, a lot of stuff in the chest, serious bronchitis. What kind of treatment do you provide that is different from, say, regular Western medicine? The bottom line is that in its creation Western medicine treats the symptom. I'm going to preface this little paragraph by saying I like Western medicine for a number of things. They're fabulous for emergency medicine. I don't set broken bones. I don't do surgeries. Chinese medicine tries to figure out the difference between the branch and the root of the disease. So the presenting symptom might be hand tremors, but where does it come from and why and what is creating that pattern that is finally manifesting in something like Parkinson's with hand tremors? So Western medicine will give a drug that will try and stop the tremors, but it may not address the root of the Parkinson's. With that in mind, Chinese medicine takes a lot of patience. 13 Not patients, but — Patience, as in the ability to tough it out because if you have a pattern that you've had for 60 years, no matter how good you are at this medicine, it isn't ever a magic bullet and it may take some time to get the message down to the root in your body and clear that as well — we take care of the symptom first and then we try and get to the pattern. Chinese medicine is based on patterns and Western medicine is based on just the symptoms as they present. Where this gets very complicated is when you have senior citizens come in, as I had somebody last week come in, with a grocery bag of bottles of medication they were taking. And I had to go through it and figure out what they were and if anything was counteracting anything else. Generally now in America that role is the pharmacists or relative who then takes things to the pharmacists and says are these things safe together? Very interesting. Do you find resistance or are people in the United States or even in our local community becoming more open to — Much more open. And what do you attribute that to? I always laugh that for a medicine that is somewhere between four and 6,000 years old we're the latest hot thing. This medicine goes back not just centuries, but we have written books that are two to 3,000 years old that are translated that we still study. And in the books that we study in school it is referenced back to something that was written in 600. But the average layperson doesn't know that. No. But I had an interesting example of this last week. I am treating a couple, a husband an