I love my job. I truly enjoy being an acupuncturist. One thing I am not a fan of is my title – acupuncturist. Not so much because it is wrong, I do insert needles into people, but rather that it is incomplete. More accurately I am a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as I practice a complete form of medicine, of which acupuncture is just one piece of the bigger picture. “Practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine” is a bit of a mouthful and takes up a lot of space on a business card, so I guess I’ll stick with acupuncturist for the time being.
So why split hairs about my title? A big reason is because a lot of people I meet are afraid of needles. Based on my title they think all I do is stick needles in patients. They don’t realize that I am also an herbalist (not all acupuncturists are) and that I have several other therapeutic techniques available to me that do not require the use of needles. The title also implies that I just perform a therapeutic technique. It ignores the fact that I am using thousands of years of knowledge to evaluate a patient’s health, plan appropriate treatment, and just as importantly, educate the patient on how they can make healthier decisions in day to day life. This last part is particularly important, because I believe education is the foundation of any healthcare especially any that purports to be preventative. It is also something that I think is often lacking in today’s conventional care.
Granted, I may be just as much to blame. I definitely use the title “acupuncturist” to refer to myself, and my business name has Acupuncture in it. I am also guilty of using acupuncture (the insertion of needles) and Acupuncture (in reference to Chinese medicine as a whole) interchangeably. The reality is that the American public has become familiar with the term “acupuncture” and has been quite intrigued by this ancient form of health care possibly because it seems so exotic. Herbalism does not seem to garner the same amount of interest, possibly because it is nothing new to us. And most patients undergoing care, regardless of what kind of doctor or practitioner they are seeing, are aware of all of the other processes occurring such as evaluation, diagnosis, planning of treatment. They just see the outcome of that process which is the therapy, be it acupuncture, Chiropractic adjustment, or the writing of a prescription.
So while I would prefer a title that more completely describes all that I do, feel free to continue calling me an acupuncturist. Or just call me Casey.
