Turning Point Acupuncture

Michael Barr MS, L.Ac., Dipl. C.H.

Mike found acupuncture and Chinese Medicine after a 20-year career in allopathic medicine seeking to improve care of his senior parents and their friends. As a member of the Comprehensive HIV Care Center of St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, he witnessed first-hand both the life-saving potential (of) as well as the incentives to over-prescribe powerful and pricey pharmaceuticals. His SVH team's research has been published in major medical journals and presented at conferences in six of the seven continents.  As an activist and community organizer, he has been arrested in protests at the White House, the FDA, the NIH, New York´s City Hall, and at a kiss-in on Broadway and 99th Street. In 2005, inspired by the writings of Marcia Angell (former NEJM editor and Harvard professor of medicine) and Merrill Goozner (former director of the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest), he founded a non-profit watch dog group which advocated for greater transparency in the flow of money between drug companies and doctors and disease advocacy groups. After two years overseeing HIV clinics and lay caregiver education programs in Uganda, Zambia and Malawi for two Los Angeles-based AIDS foundations, he returned to the U.S. to study Chinese medicine.  More recently he has authored and presented Oriental medicine research as a member of the Society for Acupuncture Research, and he is a peer reviewer for the acupuncture journals The American Acupuncturist and  Meridians. He studied Oriental medicine at Samra and Dongguk universities in Los Angeles and at Pacific College  in New York.