Thank you and please keep on reading. I am doing a yin/yang balancing act with these articles as well; trying to find the balance between being too long or too short :) My thought was a sequential series of articles around 800-1,000 words each that then get flushed out with comments/discussions. I may adjust that along the way as I try to go with the flow.
Excellent article and will be tuning in throughout this series. What, if any, suggestions do you have for the individual practitioner? What should WE be doing, boot on the ground to grow awareness from the bottom up?
Thank you so much for following and your feedback. I had a feeling that doing this series would produce good questions I would need to address and you just did that with the first comment! I will offer a short answer now but keep checking in because I will eventually do a post addressing your question or figure out how to offer more detailed advice and materials individuals can use.
For now - I have found that even our patients that think we are good Acupuncturists don’t really understand all we can do for them so educating your patients (your warm market, as they say) is usually the most productive way to generate more treatments. Reminding them that acupuncture works by helping our self-healing resources to be more effective means it can be useful in most all health conditions. Train your patients to always check with you about any condition they or their friends and family might have so you can then tell them if they are a good candidate for your services. You should start this training from the first visit/consultation but keep reminding them after that.
Of course, you can follow the same strategy for all your public outreach - your website, ads, public speaking, etc.- “Acupuncture helps the body to better heal itself”. I will have more on that theme in the next article. The ANF will be producing a series of 2 minute videos that will stress the research on acupuncture that we will make available for practitioners to use. We should start to release those in in the 5-6 weeks.
Lastly (for now), I would encourage everyone to lobby their professional association or any “acu-organization” to follow this series and work with the ANF in producing a public education campaign that the boots on the ground Acupuncturists can then use in their own practice. That is what this series is all about. Thanks again and stay tuned.
Well said Matthew - as always. This absolutely mirrors our situation in the UK. I founded a college here in 2011 and since being first fully accredited by the British Acupuncture Accreditation Board, the number of such courses in the UK has gone from 14 down to 5. At the same time, there has been an explosion of 'short courses' popping up. I spoke about my fears for our profession at a debate at our conference last year; the rush to the lowest common demoninator of 'dry needling' is of course completely natural in the world we live in, sadly. But it breaks my heart as we drive our students hard to be the very best they can be, then they graduate and find 12 other people in their area offering 'acupuncture', from beauticians to physios to whoever, happily practising entirely outside of their limited scope and even selling their services in specialisms such as fertility.
Thank you, Julie. For those who may not be aware - in the U.K. anyone can practice acupuncture with no training or exam needed so they have an even steeper hill to climb in branding those with the fuller training and exams as the experts. As this series goes on, I think you will find ideas that could apply in the U.K.
In my third article (in 2 weeks), I will bring up the insane problems with acupuncture research that is holding acupuncture back especially in your NHS and similar health insurance systems but even that is just the tip of the iceberg of what could be done.
Thank you for taking on this issue. I had heard that the profession and schools were struggling but when I look at my practice we are thriving. My wife and I have a practice in Northern California since 2007 and we see 130+ patients a week. I work 4 days a week and my wife 3 days a week. I treat a lot of veterans and workers compensation. My wife does a lot of women’s health. It is a very good balance. Here are some keys to our success: Set up an office, hire a front office person to answer the phone etc, do good work and stay in that location. You have to run your practice like all other professional medical offices. Learn how to bill from someone like Mori West. You must learn and embrace the business side. Only do managed care like ASH if you’re starting out. Do not settle for less. All of our patients get a combination of acupuncture and body work and they always leave the clinic feeling better. We do not do marketing or networking. We teach and promote a lot of self care. Find a simple way to explain acupuncture to your patients. Keep it simple, like “acupuncture is like pressing the GFI switch of the body or injured muscle….” I think one of the reasons the profession is struggling is not lack of patient education but that new acupuncturist not committing time and effort to creating a business model for long term growth. Working part time or for a chiropractor…. is not sustainable long term. The Acupuncture profession will not grow and stand on it’s own if individual practitioners do not put in place the successful practices of other medical professionals.
Hi. I think some of the comments here come from a perspective of those who have more support than the many who have not. I will not say privileged, because I find that word triggering for me and imagine it is for others when we think about the work we put into things. But we just don’t all start our practices at the same baseline coming out of school.
For me, I have a modest cash practice, solo practitioner, and over 14 years of practice I’ve always made enough to get by and now at 40-50 patients a week and with front desk help, I feel I make a comfortable living doing what I love. Am I rich? Nope. But enough to live the life I want having raised 2 kids and living in a small, very rural region. I can say 100% I could not have done it without the moral and financial support of my husband who also works full time. If I had been a single parent or had other less fortunate circumstances, every choice I’ve made, including quitting my tenured teaching job to go into $100k school debt to go to acupuncture school would have been different. I don’t believe I had the business savvy-ness to have been successful in a high overhead, busy city. I bumbled my way learning how to run a business. School most certainly did not prepare me for that. And the typical resources like SCORE or the Small Business Association consultants have zero clue about acupuncture businesses (ask me how I know!) and were very little help. So some of the commenters are not wrong - it is totally dependent on the practitioners ability to commit to learning business skills and put in the sweat. However, what Matt is saying is also a vital key - it’s not a contest as to which mistake or piece is the most important - it’s that all the pieces actually need to be present for a vital industry. Vital individual practices are wonderful, but tend to be a little myopic on their own circumstance. The bigger picture becomes obvious when looking at the statistics and crumbling of schools.
“Most” surviving practices are great….because they survived and figured it out. And they tend to be the Acupuncturists with time and attention to give to the organizations when they are not angry and refuse to get involved because they disagree with their state association activities. When I was on New York’s association board, I was dealing with all the acupuncturists who were making it - I was the country bumpkin who was small peanuts in the group. What I found though was that the successful were really more the exception. And we sat in our glass towers of leadership with specific missions to accomplish something - a bill, protect against PTs, etc. and the rest of acupuncturists in the state really got not much from us in terms of real communication, outreach or listening to their needs. And then we’d lament about lack of membership. Not 1 state actually represents or captures membership from more than 10% of its practitioner base…let that sink in. The state associations really have no clue as to the lived experience of 90% of acupuncturists in the US.
90% of acupuncturists might likely say yes, we need more public education. We are acupuncturists - we are not marketing specialists, accountants, insurance experts, etc. we don’t have the referral connections.
Hit the publish button before ready - universe’s shepherd hook for me not getting to my point, lol. My point is yes, I think our leadership organizations have missed the vital piece of public education Matt is presenting.🙃
Hi Michelle - Thanks for your really comprehensive comments. A few things to unpack there. I plan to write about the ASA and overall about the sorry state of our professional membership organizations and I will use some of what you just said because you offered an important insight.
Those associations' leadership is often dominated by the few that are more successful than the many but that does not mean they end up helping the many to be successful! Many of those "successful" leadership are ones that had a lot of support, maybe taught at our schools so had income other than their practices, or landed some of the rare "acu-jobs".
Another aspect of your comment is something I have seen and that is those practicing in more rural areas often seem to be able to build steady practices if they have enough support to give them time. I think in closer-knit communities, the good news spreads faster than in big cities and often the competition is less.
One thing our membership associations could do is to build think tanks of those who built successful practices of all types - rural, big city, hospital jobs, etc., to research the common trends and share those with their members and overall profession. They could also hold think tanks to hear about the struggles of those not making it.
I will be offering other ideas for what those membership associations could do to help the 90% where they need it most and build their membership. Thanks again for your insights!
Hi John - thank you for your comments. I ran a full time practice as a solo practitioner for 36 years and was able to support a family of 4 with the practice as the sole source of support. I agree with everything you are saying about how to run a practice. I wrote a lot about all you discussed in my book Making Acupuncture Pay. Making it as easy as possible for people to access your services is key - keeping regular hours, affordable fees, accepting insurance (in the beginning for the learning curve, then you may opt out later), a LOT of teaching self care and explaining that acupuncture works by helping us squeeze more out of our own resources.
However, although people like you (and your wife) and me prove you can build a successful and sustainable practice without the profession taking on public education - we are the exceptions, not the rule. Yes, too many come out of our schools with no clue about how to grind it out, but the lack of public understanding makes that grind WAY harder than it need be. If people really understood what acupuncture can do for them, the work would be much easier. That is the subject of next week's article. I hope you will give it a look as well as those to follow. This series will eventually go into some pretty deep waters.
John. I agree with you wholeheartedly because you wrote everything I would have about this issue including the dynamics of working with your spouse.
I disagree with Matthew that the primary problem causing the failures in our profession are lack of patient education resulting in a lack of demand. There are a ton of people talking and recommending acupuncture. Patients and medical professionals have seen the benefits and wholeheartedly refer to acupuncturists. This was not the case in 1996 but since 2006 it has been. The internet and social media has exploded this referral base.
Most of my patients are direct referrals from other patients. ALL of the others are people who have read or seen others talking about how acupuncture helped them.
We could never run a coordinated press campaign that was that effective.
And since people are very suspicious of media campaigns they trust the word of mouth over the Big Pharma ads. Another win for our demand side.
On the contrary I believe after 30 years of practice that the failure of individual acupuncture practices is solely the doing or lack of doing of the practitioner. Just browse thru the questions On Facebook Acupuncturists pages. It’s Embarrassing how many ask fearful questions about conditions and situations that are basic acupuncture knowledge. Is that the fault of the schools? Or is this profession codling students instead of demand higher quality.
I seriously believe we need a mandatory residency or apprenticeship program. All other serious professions (MD, ARNP, Psych, etc) require this. (Except Chiros and that’s another quality of care story…)
On the point of education, the failure of the acupuncture schools in the US is caused by one factor…. Greed. Tuition rates skyrocketed fed by US fed student loan debacle allowing massive increase in loan maximums. Colleges followed with higher tuition and stagnating quality.
This combined with the lack of useful practice building training and lack of support for new graduates. Failing clinics then publicized their problems and blaming it on the expense of building a practice rather than on their own fears. This lead to less supply and less practitioners out in public to care for and amply the demand by the public.
Thank you for having the courage to start this serious dialogue. I look forward to hearing and seeing concrete action on fixing this problem.
Hey William - thank you for your comments. A big hope of mine with this series of articles is to spur serious conversation. Of course that will not mean we all agree on every point. I hope you will keep reading these posts. I think you will see what I am stressing here about the failure to address demand by not undertaking serious public outreach is different than you seem to be imagining.
Staring with the forth article, I will more fully outline what I mean about how we could have and still could do public outreach. You will see that I strongly believe that the greatest potential asset this profession has is the gratitude of the people we have helped.
You mention the value of patient word of mouth and the comparative ineffectiveness of coordinated press campaigns. The campaigns I have long advocated are primarily about coordinating patient word of mouth! We should have been building megaphones to amplify and target the patient word of mouth to make it more effective rather than waiting 20-30 years for social media to evolve. Everything you are saying about patient word of mouth could have been 100 times stronger if we would have been greasing those wheels. We still need to do this.
For example, the ANF tried to produce a feature length documentary showing acupuncture being used in mainstream settings helping people in serious need. We were only able to raise the funds to tell one story - of children with brain cancer being helped by an Acupuncturist in a leading children's hospital. We called this "Getting to the Point". This is an example of the sort of way to amplify the truth of what acupuncture is doing and could be doing. Not slick advertising but getting creative in patients telling their true stories. Here is a link if you have not seen the documentary:
As for the schools and ill prepared graduates, I agree there are significant problems there. But, you see - those problems are the very sorts of issues that should have been called out by our professional associations decades ago. In addition to doing public education, those professional membership associations should have been putting pressure on the schools to better inform students and prospective students about the realities of post graduation and licensing.
I'm getting ahead of myself here and that's OK. I plan to address all of these concerns with the help of people like you. It will probably take a dozen articles or more before we cover enough to really start to get down to the nitty-gritty. I want this to be a truly constructive series, offering tangible solutions. This needs to be respectful but will also need to maybe pick some scabs along the way.
Thank you for the further info about your process here. I very much agree with you and appreciate you leading on this idea.
What do you think about encouraging residencies/apprenticeships? I know it couldn’t be mandated without major problems such as not enough clinics to enlist post grads.
However it could/should be done by the professional associations as they benefit directly by connecting new practitioners with experienced ones.
Good hands on training is the key, no doubt. Just how to get there is a whole other issue. One thing I would love to see brought together is a series of discussions with those who have actually made a living off their practices - not part timers or those that made a run for a few years then sold and cashed out.
I sometimes teach practice building and use the analogy of the difference between martial artists like Bruce Lee and Jet Li. Bruce Lee fought in the streets of Hong Kong and even when he was making movies, he was being challenged by serious martial artists he sometimes could not avoid so had to fight them - for real. I read an interview with Jet Li and he said he had never been in a real fight in his life. Martial arts was like gymnastics or dance to him. I want to see a series of meetings with street fighter Acupuncturists not the dojo stars. I bet you if you get groups like that together in the right format, you will find a lot of agreement on what it really takes to make a living in this field.
Thanks for your work on exploring these issues in the profession. I am both enjoying learning more about the profession but also disappointed that the acupuncture profession has made so many avoidable mistakes to market itself and explain to the general public how acupuncture can help them.
Thank you, Theodore. Please feel free to add your insights to any of my articles. As for the mistakes in not educating the public goes - it seems so simple: people don't use acupuncture to any degree like they could because they don't understand it. They don't understand it because we never made a concerted effort to educate them about it. Then we lament that we are not respected and appreciated. It makes no sense.
I've been trying for 35 years. I am only trying again because I wonder if the current "existential threat" aka "acupocalypse" may finally get people to be ready to do something so outside the box and radical as actually trying to help people understand what acupuncture can do for them.
I'd love to help - I sent you a message on FB. I think there's a lot we can do with the right group.
For example - why couldn't we raise money for something like a Superbowl commercial. Lindsey Vonn, Zion Williamson, Harry Kane all posted about using acupuncture just within the past month. Acupuncture Works. Clips of them getting treatment and then back to performing.
Thank you and please keep on reading. I am doing a yin/yang balancing act with these articles as well; trying to find the balance between being too long or too short :) My thought was a sequential series of articles around 800-1,000 words each that then get flushed out with comments/discussions. I may adjust that along the way as I try to go with the flow.
Excellent article and will be tuning in throughout this series. What, if any, suggestions do you have for the individual practitioner? What should WE be doing, boot on the ground to grow awareness from the bottom up?
Thank you so much for following and your feedback. I had a feeling that doing this series would produce good questions I would need to address and you just did that with the first comment! I will offer a short answer now but keep checking in because I will eventually do a post addressing your question or figure out how to offer more detailed advice and materials individuals can use.
For now - I have found that even our patients that think we are good Acupuncturists don’t really understand all we can do for them so educating your patients (your warm market, as they say) is usually the most productive way to generate more treatments. Reminding them that acupuncture works by helping our self-healing resources to be more effective means it can be useful in most all health conditions. Train your patients to always check with you about any condition they or their friends and family might have so you can then tell them if they are a good candidate for your services. You should start this training from the first visit/consultation but keep reminding them after that.
Of course, you can follow the same strategy for all your public outreach - your website, ads, public speaking, etc.- “Acupuncture helps the body to better heal itself”. I will have more on that theme in the next article. The ANF will be producing a series of 2 minute videos that will stress the research on acupuncture that we will make available for practitioners to use. We should start to release those in in the 5-6 weeks.
Lastly (for now), I would encourage everyone to lobby their professional association or any “acu-organization” to follow this series and work with the ANF in producing a public education campaign that the boots on the ground Acupuncturists can then use in their own practice. That is what this series is all about. Thanks again and stay tuned.
Thank you for this detailed explanation. Some of these, I'm already putting into practice and I can (and will) improve with others. Much appreciation!
Well said Matthew - as always. This absolutely mirrors our situation in the UK. I founded a college here in 2011 and since being first fully accredited by the British Acupuncture Accreditation Board, the number of such courses in the UK has gone from 14 down to 5. At the same time, there has been an explosion of 'short courses' popping up. I spoke about my fears for our profession at a debate at our conference last year; the rush to the lowest common demoninator of 'dry needling' is of course completely natural in the world we live in, sadly. But it breaks my heart as we drive our students hard to be the very best they can be, then they graduate and find 12 other people in their area offering 'acupuncture', from beauticians to physios to whoever, happily practising entirely outside of their limited scope and even selling their services in specialisms such as fertility.
Thank you, Julie. For those who may not be aware - in the U.K. anyone can practice acupuncture with no training or exam needed so they have an even steeper hill to climb in branding those with the fuller training and exams as the experts. As this series goes on, I think you will find ideas that could apply in the U.K.
In my third article (in 2 weeks), I will bring up the insane problems with acupuncture research that is holding acupuncture back especially in your NHS and similar health insurance systems but even that is just the tip of the iceberg of what could be done.
Indeed, the 'experts' in acupuncture are seen as medical professionals who have done a short course.
Excellent, and as you know, being a research geek myself, I will look forward to that!
Thank you for taking on this issue. I had heard that the profession and schools were struggling but when I look at my practice we are thriving. My wife and I have a practice in Northern California since 2007 and we see 130+ patients a week. I work 4 days a week and my wife 3 days a week. I treat a lot of veterans and workers compensation. My wife does a lot of women’s health. It is a very good balance. Here are some keys to our success: Set up an office, hire a front office person to answer the phone etc, do good work and stay in that location. You have to run your practice like all other professional medical offices. Learn how to bill from someone like Mori West. You must learn and embrace the business side. Only do managed care like ASH if you’re starting out. Do not settle for less. All of our patients get a combination of acupuncture and body work and they always leave the clinic feeling better. We do not do marketing or networking. We teach and promote a lot of self care. Find a simple way to explain acupuncture to your patients. Keep it simple, like “acupuncture is like pressing the GFI switch of the body or injured muscle….” I think one of the reasons the profession is struggling is not lack of patient education but that new acupuncturist not committing time and effort to creating a business model for long term growth. Working part time or for a chiropractor…. is not sustainable long term. The Acupuncture profession will not grow and stand on it’s own if individual practitioners do not put in place the successful practices of other medical professionals.
Hi. I think some of the comments here come from a perspective of those who have more support than the many who have not. I will not say privileged, because I find that word triggering for me and imagine it is for others when we think about the work we put into things. But we just don’t all start our practices at the same baseline coming out of school.
For me, I have a modest cash practice, solo practitioner, and over 14 years of practice I’ve always made enough to get by and now at 40-50 patients a week and with front desk help, I feel I make a comfortable living doing what I love. Am I rich? Nope. But enough to live the life I want having raised 2 kids and living in a small, very rural region. I can say 100% I could not have done it without the moral and financial support of my husband who also works full time. If I had been a single parent or had other less fortunate circumstances, every choice I’ve made, including quitting my tenured teaching job to go into $100k school debt to go to acupuncture school would have been different. I don’t believe I had the business savvy-ness to have been successful in a high overhead, busy city. I bumbled my way learning how to run a business. School most certainly did not prepare me for that. And the typical resources like SCORE or the Small Business Association consultants have zero clue about acupuncture businesses (ask me how I know!) and were very little help. So some of the commenters are not wrong - it is totally dependent on the practitioners ability to commit to learning business skills and put in the sweat. However, what Matt is saying is also a vital key - it’s not a contest as to which mistake or piece is the most important - it’s that all the pieces actually need to be present for a vital industry. Vital individual practices are wonderful, but tend to be a little myopic on their own circumstance. The bigger picture becomes obvious when looking at the statistics and crumbling of schools.
“Most” surviving practices are great….because they survived and figured it out. And they tend to be the Acupuncturists with time and attention to give to the organizations when they are not angry and refuse to get involved because they disagree with their state association activities. When I was on New York’s association board, I was dealing with all the acupuncturists who were making it - I was the country bumpkin who was small peanuts in the group. What I found though was that the successful were really more the exception. And we sat in our glass towers of leadership with specific missions to accomplish something - a bill, protect against PTs, etc. and the rest of acupuncturists in the state really got not much from us in terms of real communication, outreach or listening to their needs. And then we’d lament about lack of membership. Not 1 state actually represents or captures membership from more than 10% of its practitioner base…let that sink in. The state associations really have no clue as to the lived experience of 90% of acupuncturists in the US.
90% of acupuncturists might likely say yes, we need more public education. We are acupuncturists - we are not marketing specialists, accountants, insurance experts, etc. we don’t have the referral connections.
Hit the publish button before ready - universe’s shepherd hook for me not getting to my point, lol. My point is yes, I think our leadership organizations have missed the vital piece of public education Matt is presenting.🙃
Hi Michelle - Thanks for your really comprehensive comments. A few things to unpack there. I plan to write about the ASA and overall about the sorry state of our professional membership organizations and I will use some of what you just said because you offered an important insight.
Those associations' leadership is often dominated by the few that are more successful than the many but that does not mean they end up helping the many to be successful! Many of those "successful" leadership are ones that had a lot of support, maybe taught at our schools so had income other than their practices, or landed some of the rare "acu-jobs".
Another aspect of your comment is something I have seen and that is those practicing in more rural areas often seem to be able to build steady practices if they have enough support to give them time. I think in closer-knit communities, the good news spreads faster than in big cities and often the competition is less.
One thing our membership associations could do is to build think tanks of those who built successful practices of all types - rural, big city, hospital jobs, etc., to research the common trends and share those with their members and overall profession. They could also hold think tanks to hear about the struggles of those not making it.
I will be offering other ideas for what those membership associations could do to help the 90% where they need it most and build their membership. Thanks again for your insights!
Hi John - thank you for your comments. I ran a full time practice as a solo practitioner for 36 years and was able to support a family of 4 with the practice as the sole source of support. I agree with everything you are saying about how to run a practice. I wrote a lot about all you discussed in my book Making Acupuncture Pay. Making it as easy as possible for people to access your services is key - keeping regular hours, affordable fees, accepting insurance (in the beginning for the learning curve, then you may opt out later), a LOT of teaching self care and explaining that acupuncture works by helping us squeeze more out of our own resources.
However, although people like you (and your wife) and me prove you can build a successful and sustainable practice without the profession taking on public education - we are the exceptions, not the rule. Yes, too many come out of our schools with no clue about how to grind it out, but the lack of public understanding makes that grind WAY harder than it need be. If people really understood what acupuncture can do for them, the work would be much easier. That is the subject of next week's article. I hope you will give it a look as well as those to follow. This series will eventually go into some pretty deep waters.
John. I agree with you wholeheartedly because you wrote everything I would have about this issue including the dynamics of working with your spouse.
I disagree with Matthew that the primary problem causing the failures in our profession are lack of patient education resulting in a lack of demand. There are a ton of people talking and recommending acupuncture. Patients and medical professionals have seen the benefits and wholeheartedly refer to acupuncturists. This was not the case in 1996 but since 2006 it has been. The internet and social media has exploded this referral base.
Most of my patients are direct referrals from other patients. ALL of the others are people who have read or seen others talking about how acupuncture helped them.
We could never run a coordinated press campaign that was that effective.
And since people are very suspicious of media campaigns they trust the word of mouth over the Big Pharma ads. Another win for our demand side.
On the contrary I believe after 30 years of practice that the failure of individual acupuncture practices is solely the doing or lack of doing of the practitioner. Just browse thru the questions On Facebook Acupuncturists pages. It’s Embarrassing how many ask fearful questions about conditions and situations that are basic acupuncture knowledge. Is that the fault of the schools? Or is this profession codling students instead of demand higher quality.
I seriously believe we need a mandatory residency or apprenticeship program. All other serious professions (MD, ARNP, Psych, etc) require this. (Except Chiros and that’s another quality of care story…)
On the point of education, the failure of the acupuncture schools in the US is caused by one factor…. Greed. Tuition rates skyrocketed fed by US fed student loan debacle allowing massive increase in loan maximums. Colleges followed with higher tuition and stagnating quality.
This combined with the lack of useful practice building training and lack of support for new graduates. Failing clinics then publicized their problems and blaming it on the expense of building a practice rather than on their own fears. This lead to less supply and less practitioners out in public to care for and amply the demand by the public.
Thank you for having the courage to start this serious dialogue. I look forward to hearing and seeing concrete action on fixing this problem.
William Terrell, LAC. MSOM
Hey William - thank you for your comments. A big hope of mine with this series of articles is to spur serious conversation. Of course that will not mean we all agree on every point. I hope you will keep reading these posts. I think you will see what I am stressing here about the failure to address demand by not undertaking serious public outreach is different than you seem to be imagining.
Staring with the forth article, I will more fully outline what I mean about how we could have and still could do public outreach. You will see that I strongly believe that the greatest potential asset this profession has is the gratitude of the people we have helped.
You mention the value of patient word of mouth and the comparative ineffectiveness of coordinated press campaigns. The campaigns I have long advocated are primarily about coordinating patient word of mouth! We should have been building megaphones to amplify and target the patient word of mouth to make it more effective rather than waiting 20-30 years for social media to evolve. Everything you are saying about patient word of mouth could have been 100 times stronger if we would have been greasing those wheels. We still need to do this.
For example, the ANF tried to produce a feature length documentary showing acupuncture being used in mainstream settings helping people in serious need. We were only able to raise the funds to tell one story - of children with brain cancer being helped by an Acupuncturist in a leading children's hospital. We called this "Getting to the Point". This is an example of the sort of way to amplify the truth of what acupuncture is doing and could be doing. Not slick advertising but getting creative in patients telling their true stories. Here is a link if you have not seen the documentary:
https://acunow.org/documentary-getting-to-the-point/
Click on the Watch the Full Episode tab.
As for the schools and ill prepared graduates, I agree there are significant problems there. But, you see - those problems are the very sorts of issues that should have been called out by our professional associations decades ago. In addition to doing public education, those professional membership associations should have been putting pressure on the schools to better inform students and prospective students about the realities of post graduation and licensing.
I'm getting ahead of myself here and that's OK. I plan to address all of these concerns with the help of people like you. It will probably take a dozen articles or more before we cover enough to really start to get down to the nitty-gritty. I want this to be a truly constructive series, offering tangible solutions. This needs to be respectful but will also need to maybe pick some scabs along the way.
Thank you for the further info about your process here. I very much agree with you and appreciate you leading on this idea.
What do you think about encouraging residencies/apprenticeships? I know it couldn’t be mandated without major problems such as not enough clinics to enlist post grads.
However it could/should be done by the professional associations as they benefit directly by connecting new practitioners with experienced ones.
Good hands on training is the key, no doubt. Just how to get there is a whole other issue. One thing I would love to see brought together is a series of discussions with those who have actually made a living off their practices - not part timers or those that made a run for a few years then sold and cashed out.
I sometimes teach practice building and use the analogy of the difference between martial artists like Bruce Lee and Jet Li. Bruce Lee fought in the streets of Hong Kong and even when he was making movies, he was being challenged by serious martial artists he sometimes could not avoid so had to fight them - for real. I read an interview with Jet Li and he said he had never been in a real fight in his life. Martial arts was like gymnastics or dance to him. I want to see a series of meetings with street fighter Acupuncturists not the dojo stars. I bet you if you get groups like that together in the right format, you will find a lot of agreement on what it really takes to make a living in this field.
Thanks for your work on exploring these issues in the profession. I am both enjoying learning more about the profession but also disappointed that the acupuncture profession has made so many avoidable mistakes to market itself and explain to the general public how acupuncture can help them.
Thank you, Theodore. Please feel free to add your insights to any of my articles. As for the mistakes in not educating the public goes - it seems so simple: people don't use acupuncture to any degree like they could because they don't understand it. They don't understand it because we never made a concerted effort to educate them about it. Then we lament that we are not respected and appreciated. It makes no sense.
Well the way you said it makes total sense! But try telling that to the acupuncture profession...
I've been trying for 35 years. I am only trying again because I wonder if the current "existential threat" aka "acupocalypse" may finally get people to be ready to do something so outside the box and radical as actually trying to help people understand what acupuncture can do for them.
I'd love to help - I sent you a message on FB. I think there's a lot we can do with the right group.
For example - why couldn't we raise money for something like a Superbowl commercial. Lindsey Vonn, Zion Williamson, Harry Kane all posted about using acupuncture just within the past month. Acupuncture Works. Clips of them getting treatment and then back to performing.