Meet the Former Photo Editor Who Quit Her Job and Became One of New York’s Best Acupuncturists
Rachel Smith has the most soothing voice I have ever heard. It’s like listening to a babbling brook of manuka honey. Even over the phone, she instills a sense of tranquility — which explains why acupuncture, a practice that revolves around balance and calm, is something that flowed naturally into her life.
“I used to be a photographer and photo editor, until one day I realized corporate America wasn’t for me,” she tells me in a voice as soft as shearling. “I had met with an energy healer when I was trying to figure out where to go next in life. She just handed me an address and said, ‘Go here.’ It was the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in Manhattan. I walked out of the elevator not knowing exactly where I was going, and within 20 minutes I had signed up for a master’s program in acupuncture. It was instantaneous.”
She now practices just outside Buffalo in a little town so quaint they may or may not require a hand-stitched quilt upon entry. RVs pepper the road, and you get the vague sense that there’s a city, somewhere, that is not here. Behind a wall lined with Chinese herbs and tinctures, magic is happening.
Acupuncture, Smith says, is a creative practice. Unlike some Western approaches to remedy, typical Chinese acupuncture is a more individualized process. It usually begins with a candid conversation between Rachel and her patient, in which symptoms are dissected in the context of one’s emotional life. She checks your pulses and looks at your tongue. (According to Chinese medicine, the tongue can reveal a lot about what’s going on in your body.) Then the needles.
“I take a lot of time to talk to my patients when they first come in,”
Smith says. “We talk about everything. To me, healing is about
connecting the dots.”
“You have energy channels in the body, and each channel corresponds with an organ. When the energy doesn’t flow properly, it manifests as disease. Acupuncture is about balancing the energy.” She’s the first to cite a lack of studies proving the efficacy of acupuncture and grounds her practice in a mix of Taoist philosophy and physics. “Atoms are made up of energy, which makes up the universe. The body is a mini universe. This is about balancing it.”
Founded on the philosophy that the body is an interconnected network of energy channels, acupuncture is an ancient Eastern practice that seeks to regulate these channels using the placement of tiny, painless needles.
A version of this article originally appeared in the February 2018 issue of Allure. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.
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