If we want people who want acupuncture to receive it from an Acupuncturist, acupuncture education deserves our attention.
There aren’t good statistics on how many Acupuncturists or acupuncture students there are in the US. But those handy maps printed in Acupuncture Today can give us some idea. The December 2013 issue (with an article on AT’s unprecedented growth) showed 24,342 Acupuncturist and 3,124 student issues mailed. In December 2015 – 24,231 Acupuncturist and 2,624 student issues mailed. That’s not growth. The 2014 NCCAOM Annual Report (the most recent available) also reveals – we are not a growing profession.
There is a lot of churn in Acupuncture education — schools close, schools open, programs merge, new degree programs are established. New Gainful employment rules adopted in late 2014 may well contribute to that churn. They require for-profit schools (about 50% of acupuncture programs) to provide at least some debt and jobs data to prospective students.
Small class sizes can skew the data. Still, check out these reports (selected because they came up first in Google): Emperors, ACAOM (the school not the agency), Arizona School of AOM, Midwest, AIAM, and Colorado School of TCM.
Only two schools reported job placement, at 50% and 67%. Median loan amount (omitting a 1.5 million figure given by Midwest that must be a mistake) ranged from 17K to 72K. A real eye opener was the percentage of students completing the program in the expected time frame. The average across all 6 programs was 55%. Omit the 100% reported by Arizona, currently on probation with ACAOM (the agency), and it’s 46%.
It’s not encouraging. Add student uncertainty that the degree they obtain will enable them to practice and it is no surprise our profession isn’t growing.
Imagine if we could tell prospective practitioners – “A Master’s Degree in Acupuncture from any ACAOM accredited program will fulfill the educational requirements to practice in any state.”
I may not love the ACAOM standards but I’ll accept them to help the profession. Is there a downside to offset the upside?
NGAOM you have a stated goal of establishing uniform standards, yet are fighting to keep California schools out of the ACAOM system. Please explain.
We had some significant losses in Acupuncture education in 2015.
Spring brought news that Dianne Connolly and Bob and Susan Duggan would no longer teach or be part of the program at MUIH (which Bob and Dianne founded in 1974 as The Maryland College of Chinese Acupuncture). Bob and Dianne are part of the foundation of this medicine in the US. They profoundly influenced my acupuncture journey and it is a significant loss that they won’t be part of every MUIH student’s education. I am glad they are continuing to teach and share their wisdom in other settings.
Bob Duggan played an integral role in establishing acupuncture standards, credentials, agencies, and commissions. His goal in so doing was to enable this safe and effective medicine to be legally available to more people. He shared in a personal communication his ambivalence at how things turned out – that though his work enabled so many people to be healers and to be healed, “If I had real courage I’d have gone to jail and insisted this was the people’s medicine and we shouldn’t allow it to be professionalized.”
2015 closed with another loss, the death of Dr. Richard Teh-Fu Tan. Dr. Tan was an excellent teacher, deeply committed to teaching. Directly, and through his students, he eased the suffering of countless patients. Dr. Tan made no secret of his doubts about the caliber of acupuncture education most of his students received in their degree programs. Many seminar attendees reported learning more about effective acupuncture in four days with Dr. Tan than in four years of acupuncture school.
Attention must be paid.