We ARE the Bar

NBC reports from studies that acupuncture works for various pain conditions. Cool. They also report that about 3 million Americans get acupuncture every year. So….we know that Community Acupuncture clinics did over 750,000 treatments last year and probably over 850,000 treatments if we counted all CA treatments. So how big of a percentage of total acupuncture treatments are CA treatments? Hard to tell. Treatments aren’t patients and you have to figure out the number of return visits and divide accordingly to get a fair correspondence. That would put CA as doing somewhere between (my estimation) between 3-6% of all acupuncture treatments. That figure though includes an unknown number of treatments done by non-L.Ac’s: MDs, DOs, NDs, Chiros, ADS’s, PT’s (those wonderful dry needlers!). We have no idea of the percentage of acupuncture treatments done by L.Acs-or at any rate I have never seen it broken down that way. Safe to say though that non-LAcs do a substantial proportion of all acupuncture treatments-and thus out of the number of treatments done by LAcs the CA treatments are substantially higher than 3-6%. I’d say over 10%, easy. And that was from only 176 CA clinics, which again is not the total number of CA clinics.

Folks we don’t lower the bar of the value of Acupuncture in this country: we ARE the bar. Not only is the future of Acupuncture in this country is Community Acupuncture, the present is as well.

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/48978753#48978753

Author: Skip Van Meter

Skip is Lead Acupuncturist and Co-Founder of <a href="https://www.workingclassacupuncture.org/" target="_blank">Working Class Acupuncture</a> in Portland, Oregon. With the earlier part of his life spent acquiring knowledge about geology, urban planning and teaching high school, he has now been an acupuncturist for 19 years, using about a 1,750,000 needles poking his patients. He likes all things soccer, has three fabulous sons, the best wife in the world, and a great dog and two cool cats.