March 23, 2026, marks two years since the passing of Laura Ellen Cooley, a health worker and acupuncturist who built a practice around providing free, mobile care for people often left out of the health care system. She died at age 67 from pancreatic cancer.
Laura lived in Orford, N.H., with her partner, Michael, a physician, and worked often in Vermont providing services to people with addiction, mental health issues, chronic pain and trauma.
She was born and raised in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, studied at Delaware County Community College and worked a range of jobs before turning to acupuncture after she found it eased years of chronic pain from a car accident. She completed an apprenticeship in acupuncture and herbal medicine in Austin, Texas, becoming licensed in 1991.
Laura spent more than two decades in Austin, maintaining a private practice and serving as director of acupuncture services at the Austin HIV Wellness Center, where she focused on what became her life’s work: providing free, walk-in, group-based care for underserved communities.
A central part of her work was a five-point ear acupuncture protocol she learned in the Bronx in the early 1990s, developed in the 1970s by activists and health workers to support people dealing with addiction and trauma. Over her career, she trained about 1,000 people to use the protocol, many of whom went on to offer it in treatment centers, drug courts, shelters and related programs.
In 2001, she met her partner, Michael, when he enrolled in one of her trainings and moved to New Hampshire, where she lived for two decades. Her teaching and organizing took her around the country, including work at Saint Vincent’s Medical Center in New York City after 9/11, with the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic after Hurricane Katrina, and in New Mexico and along the Gulf Coast after the 2010 oil spill. In Vermont, she worked with Another Way in Montpelier and Washington County Mental Health Services’ WellSpace program in Barre, among other sites.
She also worked to expand licensing laws to allow non-acupuncturists to practice the ear protocol, contributing to reforms in Vermont, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Rhode Island and Québec.
Laura was a creative and wide-ranging person. She produced a short documentary about ear acupuncture called “Unimagined Bridges”; explored music and dance; trained in body-centered psychotherapies; and was an avid reader with a deep, self-directed curiosity. She was known for being direct, energetic and unafraid to push against convention.
She died peacefully at the Jack Byrne Center for Hospice Care in Lebanon, N.H.