It’s great to hear that you are well and truly on the road back to health.

When you find out I’d love to hear what the future holds for you. One the healing is over the adventure begins.

Wishing you joy and love in the journey and hoping to hear more from you. Evan

Last year at this time my body was shutting down with allergies and metabolic problems, and every month I was getting worse instead of better. I really was dying. I found a great acupuncturist, and over the course of the past year we’ve resurrected my left hand pulses. I’m still relatively weak in some ways, but things are constantly improving rather than deteriorating - I can be with other people, eat things I couldn’t for years, even take a course! It’s very exciting, and I’m wondering what the future holds for the first time in a long time.

Thanks for your reply. I think I understand where you’re coming from. I absolutely agree that the way that education is delivered in most colleges is terrible. My program is trying desperately to move away from that model, but still has the institutional shackles in place in some areas of the curriculum. I have a 10 year old daughter, and have done a lot of reading and studying on educational models so I absolutely agree with your assertions.

My only concern would be to make sure rigor in studying the Classics and allowing the time to help people deepen their personal cultivation remain an integral part of any curriculum. Also, while I think that some of the basic theory in Chinese medicine is certainly easy to assimilate because it comes from basic human experience, some of the higher level theories are a little more difficult to get a grasp of. Maybe what I’m trying to get at is while the basics of our medicine are ultimately simple, true mastery of the ins and outs of the medicine take a lot of time, concentration and ultimately hard work.

I do think that it makes some sense to let the first level of the education be basic, just making people competent - I do think that the educational institutions should be responsible for giving people the tools to be not just practiitoners, but scholars. If they want to pick up those tools, fine. If not, fine.

Thanks, again, for your post.

Eric

Thanks. I hope you’re enjoying massage. I find it great to deliver - it can help me feel better as well as the client.

If you’d be happy to say I’d like to hear more about how acupuncture saved your life.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. It helps keep me motivated to post.

Evan

Thanks very much for your considered reply.

Let me be very clear. I think it is possible for us to quickly and easily train practitioners who are better than those who now graduate.

This is because the existing educational practice is simply lousy. This is what I am challenging. I think we can train students to be far better practitioers on graduation, and in a way that they find more enjoyable.

Ask yourself how much attention goes to educational practice at the colleges you know and know of. How many of them are actively seeking to making learning more enjoyable and easy. How much instruction were you given in how to memorise (it seems the teachers don’t care doesn’t it. Ie. where is the heart? Where is the compassion that softens rigid adherence to bureaucratic rules? Where is the attempt to engage the students vision? Where is the instruction on the connection between serenity and learning? Where is the link with our vocation? Where is the instruction to discard what is of no use (perhaps challenge is disliked?). Believe me I could go on (I guess you don’t doubt this).

My belief is that as people know the theory (ie. experience in their own body) they will have great understanding. And this is easy to obtain in TCM the main theory refers to experience (except in particularly wretched translations). There are few concepts (about 40) and while their combination is subtle and manifold this need not lead to impenetrability or difficulty.

People learn matters of very great complexity at four years of age (eg English and Mandarin). Adults stop doing this because they are taught differently - boring yourself rigid is rewarded instead of getting feedback on an issue of immediate concern for instance. People love to learn and do it naturally. That it is hard it something we have learned from our experience of schooling. (If we love children and dislike child abuse, how come the schools are the way they are?)

Many a business school has better educational practice than health colleges. I find this situation appalling, scandalous and outrageous.

As you can see this is something I feel passionately about - and am in the process of seeing what I can do about it.

I am happy to point you to much literature on educational practice - this isn’t just my ranting there are decades of research on this. A very great introduction is Eric Sotto’s When Teaching Becomes Learning (available on Amazon still I think).

I am convinced that with a little more attention to educational pracitice we can graduate more students in less time who are better. I have no interest in compromising standards of practice, what I want to do is raise the standards of education vastly.

I hope this long reply addresses your concerns. I’m very keen to discuss this more if you wish to. I think it is an issue that is most important.

Where I must diverge from your well stated opinion is in the ease of training. Memorizing acupuncture points and learning a few tried and true point prescriptions may be, as you say, easy. It may be able to be learned in a series of weekends, sure. Acupuncturists trained in this way may be functional from the perspective of alleviating symptoms in some cases. But I think that someone would have to be naturally talented to become a great physician using this model.

For most of the history of Chinese medicine, people apprenticed for years and years to become competent and this is only after having been immersed in the culture that spawned it for their entire lives. For most Westerners, who aren’t immediately familiar with the basic philosophical concepts behind the medicine, it will take considerably longer than a few years to gain any kind of mastery.

Let me emphasize - I think that people can become competent acupuncturists in a 3-4 year program if they study DILIGENTLY and have some natural resonance with the medicine. I think learning herbs and formulas will add considerably more time to the course of study and I think to gain any level of mastery will take many years of practice beyond that.

I worry about shortening programs too much and/or making the information too simplified for ease of consumption - efforts to do this have degraded the medicine in a number of ways, in my opinion.

I’m glad to have found your blog - keep writing!

Eric
http://deepesthealth.com