Petition to the State Board of Acupuncture

Dear Acupuncture Patient,

Your practitioner and the Maryland Acupuncture Society ask you to sign this petition.

In a recent meeting, the State Acupuncture Board passed a motion to change the state law in Maryland to require all future Acupuncturists to take a strongly biased national exam in order to be granted a license.

This action is unfair and prejudicial for the following reasons:

1. The national exam they want to institute currently measures competency in one tradition of Acupuncture called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM); it does not reflect the tradition called 5-element Acupuncture or other acupuncture traditions. The majority of the Acupuncturists in Maryland, perhaps your own practitioner, practice 5-element Acupuncture. And so this exam is not appropriate to measure the education and competency of 5-element Acupuncturists, and should not be mandatory for practicing in our state.

1. The State Acupuncture Board claims that the national exam would be instituted for the safety of acupuncture patients. We find this claim to be false and misleading on two counts:

* The national exam does not measure or insure clinical skills; it only measures education of Acupuncture theory predominantly in one tradition

* There is absolutely no evidence of a public safety issue. In fact, in the past 15 years, there has never been a formal patient complaint concerning the level of training or clinical competency of any Licensed Acupuncturist in the state of Maryland.

2. If this exam is made a mandatory requirement for licensure, the largest College of Acupuncture in the State, which teaches the 5-element tradition, may be forced to change a significant portion of its curriculum to “teach for the exam”; thus sacrificing the level of education and training students would receive in the 5-element tradition.

3. Maryland is one of the few states in the nation that fosters a rich diversity of Acupuncture traditions. Since 1978, the law has recognized qualified practitioners of all traditions of Acupuncture equally. This diversity gives the public a wide-range of choices for the type of Acupuncture care that best serves them.

By mandating an exam measuring competency in a single tradition – TCM – the State Acupuncture Board is implying that TCM is superior to other traditions of acupuncture, clearly diminishing the credibility and value of 5-element and other traditions in the eyes of the public and the profession.

Please sign this petition, and join your practitioner and fellow patients across the state in fighting this unjust and unnecessary action by the State Board of Acupuncture.