As we go to press, Acupuncture Today has learned that Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington, and the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine in Portland, are the first two colleges in the United States to receive approval to begin a clinical doctoral program in acupuncture and Oriental medicine. Both schools were notified in May that their doctoral programs had been approved by the Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.
"We are delighted to have been approved as one of the first two colleges in the U.S. to begin a clinical doctoral program in acupuncture and Oriental medicine," remarked Dr. Elizabeth Goldblatt, OCOM's president in a press release. Dr. Goldblatt added: "Our goal is to help strengthen the field of acupuncture and Oriental medicine in the U.S. by training educators, clinical researchers, clinic supervisors, scholars, and specialists." Interestingly enough, Dr. Goldblatt was part of a small group of educators who earlier this year voiced their opposition to Assembly Bill 1943, a proposed law that would have raised the amount of education and training hours for acupuncture students in California.
More details on this story will appear in an upcoming issue of Acupuncture Today.
Fertility acupuncture sometimes gets presented as a narrow protocol: a handful of reproductive points applied uniformly across patients. What this case reinforced for me: The most powerful work happens when we read the whole picture. The hormone data, the constitutional tendency, the sleep, the digestion, and the menstrual pattern, so we can treat the environment the ovaries live inside.
Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) affects more than 15% of the U.S. population but evades most practitioners’ radar. Just five years ago, it wasn’t even on my radar, despite already having 20 years of experience as a clinician at that time. The more I dug (similar to leaky gut and post-COVID syndrome), the more I found my patients were suffering from this disorder.
The motivation behind our practice of medicine is important, impacting not just our experience but also the experiences of those we treat. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspiration to help not just some, but all beings heal, has historically been an important part of the medical tradition. To explain this, we need to consider how medicine is interwoven with other social domains.