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Dr. Yennie (left) receives award from
Dr. Mason Shen (right) on behalf of
the acupuncturists of California. |
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Richard Yennie, DC, Dipl. Ac. (NCCAOM) was one of the first non-Asians in the modern era to bring acupuncture to the United States and the first to combine acupuncture and chiropractic in a healing arts practice. Dr. Yennie has included acupuncture as a central part of his chiropractic practice in Kansas City for more than half a century and has taught it to tens of thousands of chiropractors. When he began, acupuncture in North America was hidden in backrooms in the Asian-American communities of large cities, principally New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now, it is well on the way to becoming an integral part of American culture and mainstream health care.
Pioneers combine deep commitment to a vision with great strength of character. Some catalyze the breakthrough stages of a major change. Others organize, develop and nurture new approaches after the initial breakthrough has occurred. But the rarest of all are those who spearhead the initial breakthrough and then labor for decades so that the seeds of a great change can reach fruition. Richard Yennie is among this rarest breed of pioneer.
His journey began in Japan in 1949, when he served in the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps as a translator and interpreter at the war crimes trials after World War II. His plans to return home and practice law took an abrupt U-turn when a major back injury, unsuccessfully treated for weeks by conventional means at a military hospital, was resolved in one visit to a master Japanese acupuncturist. From that point on, Yennie followed a single-minded path of learning, practice and teaching. He has studied with the great Japanese, Chinese, Korean and European acupuncture practitioners of our time and then unstintingly transmitted their knowledge and wisdom to generations of American health practitioners. His fluency in Japanese and conversational Chinese enabled him to learn directly from Asian practitioners and primary source texts, and his Midwestern roots gave him the tools to convey these concepts and practices across cultural divides once seen as insurmountable.
Dr. Yennie is a 1953 graduate of Cleveland Chiropractic College – Kansas City and has been in private practice since that time. He attended the Tai Chung Medical School in Taipei, Taiwan (leading to an acupuncture diplomate) and a preceptorship at the Kyoto Pain Control Institute, under Kunzo Nagayama, MD.
He has served on the faculty of Waseda Acupuncture College in Tokyo, Japan; as Dean of Academic Affairs at Kansas College of Chinese Medicine in Wichita, Kansas; and as chairman of the consulting group for the Hope Institute of Chinese Medicine in Beijing, China. He was the first non-Chinese to serve on the Board of Directors of the China Medical Association Acupuncture Research Committee (Taipei, Taiwan), serving as its Deputy Director, and was the first president of the American Chiropractic Association’s College of Chiropractic Acupuncture.
Dr. Yennie’s greatest legacy, aside from the thousands of chiropractors whose lives and practices have been immeasurably enriched by his teaching, and the thousands of patients he has helped, is the Acupuncture Society of America (ASA), which he founded in 1968. The ASA provides post-graduate acupuncture certification courses, taught by Dr. Yennie and an international faculty. He has also been a postgraduate faculty member at various chiropractic colleges, which have co-sponsored his 300-hour certification courses in acupuncture. For many years, Dr. Yennie has also led tours to China and Japan where his students can combine sightseeing with observing acupuncture being practiced in the lands of its origin.
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