Acupuncturists

Russell Brown, L.Ac, MTOM, founder & owner

After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in journalism, I came home to Los Angeles and enjoyed a career in feature film development. We made some fun movies—like the near-Academy Award-nominated The Fast and the Furious films, Not Another Teen Movie, and Cruel Intentions—and some terrible ones for which I secretly fear I may someday be karmically punished.

I was at breakfast one morning in 2002 when I eavesdropped on a conversation at the table next to me where a young woman was talking about how she was about to start school to become an acupuncturist. I’m generally not a risk-taker and never had acupuncture before or even considered it, but something sparked in me. I enrolled at Emperor’s College of Traditional Chinese Medicine the next day, quit my job, graduated summa cum laude with a Master’s degree in TCM, and was licensed by the California State Board of Acupuncture soon after.*

I have a fairly different attitude about Chinese medicine than many of my peers. I’m not a hippie and I never was. I don’t own billowy yoga pants. I’ve never heard a Caucasian person say namaste without sounding at least a little bit deranged. And I understand that many of the more typical “love and light” trappings of acupuncture might make some people uncomfortable as patients. That said, I absolutely believe in the power of this ancient medicine.

We are emerging from an insane couple of years. I think we are all still unconsciously interacting from a place of deep, quiet existential terror; still tense, unsorted, secretly overwhelmed, and complicated by the uncertainty of what comes next. There has to be some conscious work on each of our parts to bring ourselves individually and collectively back down to a pre-pandemic threshold for stress.

A new chapter is beginning, and I want you to feel that the world can still be a safe, generous place and that your body can still be a strong, secure home to your spirit.  I am so honored to be an acupuncturist right now because I really believe acupuncture is uniquely suited to help with both–and to honor the pain of the last years and the precarity of moving forward. 

And even if it's not acupuncture, I hope you are finding some way to make space for softness and delicateness in a world that can feel relentlessly and increasingly hard; and to really consider what it means to be "well" as we move into the next chapter. If you think you might need help with that and not just run back to how things were, please reach out.

I treat everything, but areas I treat most include emotional disorders, pain, stress-related conditions, sports injury, and contemporary existential crises.

Appointments available Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday

*It’s worth noting that people love this story because it reads like a wish-fulfillment fantasy of magical transformation from corporate job to “benevolent healer” that we believe will be the antidote for our struggle with capitalism, and though that is partly true, the greater truth is that it’s just a different way of struggling with capitalism. There is no antidote of which I am yet aware.