Nicholas Zimet, L.Ac Acupuncture

An Acupuncture Clinic Open for All

Photo by Bruce Silcox

For seven years, Nicholas Zimet has been operating his acupuncture clinic at the corner of 4th Ave and Lake Street. During this time, Nicholas and his team have focused on providing relief from pain, anxiety, and women’s health issues. They have found success in helping patients with chronic and difficult-to-treat conditions that have not been resolved with medicine alone.

Nicholas Zimet, L.Ac. Acupuncture was awarded a grant from the Lake Street Council’s Healthy Lake Street fund to continue their work in supporting the community’s health and well-being. The acupuncture clinic plans to use the funding to pay for suppliers, interpreters, and to help offset the financial damages caused by Covid-19 and the civil uprising. 

Below is the entirety of our interview with Nicholas Zimet.

What makes your clinic special?

Our clientele are primarily New Americans, with the majority coming from the Hmong, Somali, and Hispanic communities. We pride ourselves on being open to providing culturally sensitive and informed care to everyone from BIPOC to LGBTQ communities and beyond! We work with the majority of state health insurance plans and can connect patients to interpreters so that we are able to best perform care.

What keeps you loyal to Lake Street?

We want to be located amongst the communities we serve and I love the diversity and vibrancy of the area. We want to participate in growing the Lake Street corridor for all small businesses to create more prosperity and stability for the people who live and work here. I see a lot of good things on the horizon but we have to work together to reach it!

“It is difficult in the time of COVID to meet our neighbors in the community, and we would welcome folks to come by anytime and introduce themselves so that we can stop being strangers!”

Nicolas Zimet, owner and Acupuncturist at Nicholas Zimet, L.Ac. Acupuncture

How has Covid-19 affected your clinic’s services to the community?

As we are an in-person healthcare clinic, COVID has had a major impact on how we are able to care for our patients and provide services. We have had to develop plans to keep our staff and community safe and change the way we interact with patients every day. This required reducing our capacity and spending a lot of time on safety measures every day. With these changes and the worries of the community over COVID, we have seen a dramatic decrease in the number of patients we treat and it has been a difficult financial year for us and other clinics in the area.

What happened to the clinic during the civil uprising? 

Our office building was vandalized, robbed, and individuals attempted to burn it down but fortunately, the fire was contained and extinguished! For months we did not have a normal entrance as all the glass on the first floor had been shattered and had to be boarded over. In that time, we lost patients who were upset to come to the area and it has been heartbreaking to rebuild.

How can the community support you?

The best way to support us right now is to help connect us with your family and friends that would benefit from acupuncture! It is hard being a small clinic to get the word out that we are here, we can help, and we can probably accept your insurance to do so! Word-of-mouth referrals really help small clinics like us thrive so please spread the word!

What does a healthy Lake Street look like to you?

A healthy Lake Street is one in which we are all able to feel safe and optimistic. A healthy Lake Street would have thriving businesses and living space in the places that have still not recovered, some sitting vacant or abandoned all this time later! I want to see people taking pride in where they live and work!

What do you hope for the future of your clinic?

We hope to continue to grow into a more community role where we can better connect with other local doctors so that businesses along Lake Street are able to more effectively refer to one another for the community patients to be seen by their own community here! Ideally, we would keep growing and be able to hire additional staff to further the diversity we represent.