Acupuncturists should be doctors!? Right? It sounds like a good idea on the surface. The intention certainly seems noble – more training, better interface between acupuncture and the western bio-medical community, and ultimately, benefit to the health care consumer by mainstreaming acupuncture. However, when examined, these promises aren’t realistic. Medical education is ridiculously expensive already and this will add another year to an already questionably long 3 year program. At that point, it will cost $100,000 over four years to train an acupuncturist to place hair thin sterile needles superficially into people’s skin. Many acupuncturists think a one year program would be sufficient to be competent and safe. The real mastery comes with years of practice, but this need not take place during lengthy academic programs, and in fact, academia may be a less effective environment for this anyways.
The concept of a “First Professional Doctorate” (FPD) is also being advanced as a means for acupuncture to gain parity with doctors in the health care world. We’d have greater hospital privileges and so forth. There are many problems with this argument. An extra year of bio-medical training will not put us on the same knowledge level of doctors. Even if acupuncturists did have greater hospital privileges, would that be a good thing. Is joining the current bloated medical system dominated by corporations beholden to shareholders (not caregivers making decisions about what is best for patients)…is that something we should aspire to?
Who benefits from this proposal before the ACAOM (Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine)? Not acupuncturists certainly – another year of school debt to be paid of, and no additional training in actually learning how to survive as an acupuncturist. The profession has a frighteningly high attrition rate that the acu-bureaucrats seem uninterested in discussing. Not the public. If the costs of education continue to skyrocket, those costs are inevitably passed on to consumers, making it very difficult for practitioners to set affordable fee scales such as in clinics like CommuniChi. The only ones that I can see that benefit from this proposal are school owners and acupuncture bureaucrats who gain their revenue from tuition, association dues, and so forth.
Please come in to CommuniChi to sign our petition opposing the FPD before January 15 (come get a treatment while you are at it – make an appointment.) Or, if you wish, you can email the ACAOM directly with your comments. Email your comments to: coordinator@acaom.org. The most effective comments will be those that indicate what category of stakeholder you represent (patient, practitioner, student, prospective student, AOM educator, etc), your organizational affiliations, if any, and a BRIEF statement of your reason for opposing the standards. (Feel free to cut and paste anything I’ve written).
For more information, visit the CAN blog.
In health,
Jordan
Tags: acupuncture, affordable acupuncture, communichi, community, Community Acupuncture, first professional doctorate, FPD, healthcare, seattle