On Oct. 1, 2007, the Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (ACAOM) released for public comment the first draft of proposed First-Professional Doctoral Accreditation Standards, which were developed by the ACAOM Doctoral Task Force.
Individuals and groups must submit those comments no later than Dec. 15, 2007, by visiting the following link: www.acaom.info. Individuals will be able to review the standards and submit commentary, or indicate that they are in support of the standards as written.
After the Doctoral Task Force reviews the feedback from the first draft, it will make appropriate revisions, as necessary. A second draft will be available for comments and input at a later date. The ACAOM's goal is to conclude this work by the summer of 2008.
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.