Welcome to our Bedford New Hampshire location, Perfect Point Acupuncture. Though this office is a new location, we have a story which led us to this place and today I was going to share some of that.
One thing is that we have been at acupuncture for quite awhile, graduating from the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine in 2013. Sarah and I met at school, and the rest is history. We never intended to stay in the Pacific NorthWest as amazing as it was. After a lot of fuss and soul searching, we landed upon a clinic “for sale” in a small New York Village, Alfred. And that is where we went, sight unseen, after a couple of friendly chats on the phone.
The retiring acupuncturist at the time had a best friend, who had an old farmhouse we could stay in. So, that very first day as we drove our 2004 Ford Focus and 2000 Beetle after a long cross country trip, we found the farmhouse. It had one bed, which was nice, and nothing else. but 200 beautiful acres. The man showed us the fireplace (he made it himself) and asked if I knew how to chop firewood, which I did not. He left, and we were on our own!
What a wonderful winter it was, brutally cold and desolate, but one of my personal best and happiest times. We had the most amazing open house for our clinic which was right in the village of Alfred, dozens of well wishers showed up to see the new people and say goodbye to the retiring acupuncturist Graham. We were full of herbal ideas and enthusiasm, and that quickly got tempered by the realities of life. And by the second month we were there, we were expecting a family!
I most likely will write quite a lot about Alfred and our time there. We lived there for 4 years and had our two children there. It is one of my favorite places, but we did sense that it was not our forever place, or maybe not the right place at the shifting times of our lives.
Clinically, I feel it is great to share about Alfred, because I feel we learned a great, great deal about life and clinic in that place. It was truly being thrust right into a monumentally amazing place, with a great number of difficult, challenging and interesting cases. Alfred is very remote, a rural place. There are few doctors, few dentists, few jobs, it’s a small village teetering on the edge of Appalachia. So, I think we really honed our skills there, made plenty of mistakes, and got better at what we do. It was there that I got fed up with the standard glass cups you can buy online and developed the handmade cups we use to this day.
After our time in Alfred, we side stepped an hour and a half north to the outskirts of Buffalo and worked there for 5 additional years. We got much busier and more detailed in our work. We had probably the biggest herbal pharmacy in Western New York. We customize our herbal formulas, everything quite specific for the case that walks in the door. The kids were getting a little bit bigger, starting school, and we felt the calling to make a big, bold move. Buffalo was great, enjoyable for me, and we visited Alfred quite a bit. It was interesting to be there for the recent Buffalo Bills football runs – that’s one thing that unites that community. But we were already visiting New Hampshire, multiple times throughout the pandemic and just before, to plot and plan maybe one more move, to here.
I suppose it is in our nature to be a bit peripatetic, but the world is a wonderful place in my opinion, full of interesting places and people. So, after another period of – like many years before just out of school in Seattle – fussing and soul searching, we came to New Hampshire in early 2023. Like before, full of zest, enthusiasm, toting along our young but growing family. Here we find the absolute friendliest people we have met, with jaw dropping nature everywhere I turn. It’s already been an eye opening experience, as we open from scratch a new clinic, which is something in ten years of practice we never had to do. But, stress and joy as it has been, what a great choice, a perfect choice. Thank you for your interest!