The National Oriental Medicine Accreditation Agency (NOMAA) has submitted a petition to the U.S. Secretary of Education requesting that it be recognized as a national programmatic accreditation agency. Should NOMAA's petition be granted, it would join the Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine as the only national accrediting agencies for acupuncture and Oriental medicine programs recognized by the Department of Education.
NOMAA was created in 1999 as an offshoot of an ad-hoc advisory committee that was responsible for establishing the National Board of Acupuncture Orthopedics. In May 2002, it was converted to a nonprofit public corporation aimed at increasing the quality of education at schools of acupuncture and Oriental medicine.
The NOMAA Doctor of Oriental Medicine (OMD) program consists of a 4,000-hour core curriculum, including 2,500 hours of didactic biomedicine, Oriental medical science, and clinical medicine, and a 1,500-hour clinical clerkship. The curriculum requirements are based on degree programs offered at Oriental medicine schools in China, with consideration given to curricula from professional schools in South Korea.
To date, NOMAA has received endorsements from the Council of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Associations and the Council on Oriental Medicine Education. It has also received applications from several institutions interested in offering doctoral programs in acupuncture and Oriental medicine. In May 2005, it granted conditional accreditation to South Baylo University's doctoral program.
For more information, visit NOMAA's Web site at www.nomaa.org.
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.