The University of East-West Medicine in Sunnyvale, California is the latest school to gain full accreditation from the Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. The university was notified of the decision following a meeting of ACAOM officials in May 2005.
"It's a significant achievement for the school," said Jenty Hasan, a university spokesperson. "The students are very excited. It opens the door for students to all kinds of things."
The University of East-West Medicine was founded in 1997. Its acupuncture program first gained candidate status from ACAOM in 2003. Approximately 175 students are enrolled at the school, which confers a Master of Science in Traditional Chinese Medicine degree to graduates.
In related news, the acupuncture program at the University of Bridgeport in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was granted candidate status for a three-year period. In addition, the Academy of Oriental Medicine at Austin's program was reaccredited for the maximum five-year period, and the World Medicine Institute (formerly the Tai Hsuan Foundation) was reaccredited for four years.
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.