A student stands over a patient, needle poised. They have a “perfect” prescription: a textbook combination of points harvested from a lecture slide on chronic lower back pain. But as the needle meets the skin, the student hesitates - the symptom of a quiet habit that has taken hold of our profession. We routinely say we “prescribe” points. It sounds efficient. It echoes the authority of biomedical culture and fits neatly into the insurance field. But vocabulary is never neutral; repeated long enough, it dictates behavior.
Rosaleen Ostrick, LAc, MPH, MA, MATCM, Dipl. OM
Rosaleen Ostrick holds master’s degrees in public health (epidemiology), organizational management and acupuncture / traditional Chinese medicine. She teaches biomedical acupuncture research to students in the Master of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine and DAOM programs at Yo San University (Los Angeles). She served as Administrative Director of Retina Clinical Research at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA for 20 years, during which time she was responsible for regulatory, operations and budgeting/fiscal oversight of more than 70 ophthalmological clinical trials funded by NIH, nonprofits and industry. She is also an acupuncturist.