Many people ask why they shouldn’t go to an MD for acupuncture if they can find it. Isn’t that the best of both worlds?
Acupuncture needles in hypodermic needle.
Simple answer: most MDs aren’t appropriately trained. They may do some simple neuromodulation with needles (which real acupuncturists are also trained to do,) but they never learn the diagnosis that is the genius of Chinese medicine.
Chinese medicine has featured an almost obsessive attention to cataloging the clinical treatment of patients for thousands of years. We can go back to doctors Zhang Zhong Jing or Sun Si Miao and read their prescriptions and exactly what patterns of diagnosis they apply to. Having been cured myself of a nasty case of cellulitis with a 1500 year old formula (after my MD missed the problem) I have great respect for the classical formulas. These things are never studied in a 100-300 hour video course that a medical doctor (and in some states a Chiropractor or Podiatrist) will take to call himself a “Medical Acupuncturist.”
A real, Licensed Acupuncturist, will have 3000-4000 hours of training in Oriental Medicine, including a few years of clinical internships, national board certification from the NCCAOM, a certificate of Clean Needle Technique, and continuing education requirements. Compared to a 200 hour videocourse, with no clinical trials or continuing education, you can see that a typical MD acupuncturist really doesn’t compare in training.
Why is this important? Well pneumothorax, where the lungs are punctured by a needle almost never happens with Licensed Acupuncturists. We spend years studying the depth and needling angle of some 400 points on the body (in addition to tendinomuscular channels which cover most of the rest of the area.) The cases that have occurred over the last 10 years have disproportionately come from MDs or other professionals poorly trained in medical acupuncture.
In New York State, only Licensed Acupuncturists and MDs can qualify to practice acupuncture. You may hear a Chiropractor say that they are doing acupuncture with a piezoelectric or pressure device. It is quite different, and they don’t usually have the background (or the legal right to say they practice acupuncture.) NADA detox specialists can use five specific ear points only in a certified detoxification program, but may not practice elsewhere or needle any other places. Their training is 2 weeks long, with another two weeks or so of supervised practice. The ear has branches to all the major nerves, but there is little chance of doing damage with the five point protocol. The same points, as well as hundreds of others can be used by real acupuncturists.
Podiatrists have tried to get permission to do acupuncture from the knees down, but New York State decided to protect citizens from this expansion of the law. The problem is that local needling around a sprained ankle, say, can stimulate areas all over the body. Kidney-adrenal points are found around the inner ankle and gallbladder points around the outer ankle. In between are channels going to the stomach, liver, urinary bladder and spleen-pancreas. One leg point below the knee is used for frozen shoulder. Do you want those points stimulated inadvertently? Besides a real acupuncturist would use a combination of local and distal points, possibly including wrist and ear points to deal with a leg problem, and those would not be available to a podiatrist.
Acupuncture is a specialty that takes many years to study appropriately. I have met medical doctors, chiropractors and even a podiatrist who went for the full four year training and are excellent acupuncturists. (Incidentally they say that very little is duplicated from their prior training.)
Look for the title, “Licensed Acupuncturist,” ask how many years training in acupuncture the practitioner has, how much continuing education they have taken in the subject and what boards they have passed. This is not rude and most acupuncturists will be happy to answer. Your health is too important to be left to hobbyist acupuncturists.
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