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.
Structured water (H3O2) can be considered a fourth state of water between liquid and solid. It has the hexagonal structure of ice; however, missing a critical bond, it behaves more like a gel than a solid, but retains some of its crystalline structure.
In the past five years of my clinical practice, I have seen an astonishing upsurge in the chronic use of proton-pump inhibitor (PPI) medications for the gastrointestinal issue diagnosed by allopathic medicine as GERD. It is not uncommon to encounter patients taking these prescriptions for five-plus years.
Working with chronically ill patients entails acknowledging the reality that not all patients will survive their diagnosis. Chinese medicine and acupuncture play a crucial role in palliative and end-of-life care, addressing medication and disease side effects, alleviating pain associated with death, reducing anxiety and stress, and helping patients find peace during the dying process.
