 What's actually the training of a Chinese medicine doctor or an acupuncturist? Right? Before I saw a Chinese medicine doctor, I had no clue what their training was. Is it licensed? Do they even go to a medical school? Can they do a weekend seminar and be a licensed acupuncturist? I don't know. And I didn't know at the time. I was just going on a referral from someone who'd seen this doctor had gotten amazing results and then referred them that doctor to me. Now in this video I want to share what my training has been to do my doctorate in traditional or classical Chinese medicine. I'm Alex Hain, author of the book Master the Day and current doctoral student in traditional or classical Chinese medicine. So what is my particular training? Because worldwide it's very different from what it is in the United States. In addition, some schools are far easier than others. Now there is a national licensing board and we do have to pass board exams, multiple board exams. So that is a unifying factor. But the thing that I've learned seeing a lot of different practitioners from my own health issues is that the skill level of practitioners varies wildly in our field. And so it's really important to understand their training, their particular style and just going on a referral more than anything. Now the state I'm in in Oregon right now, acupuncture or licensed acupuncturists are one of the board licensed healthcare professionals along with medical doctors, DOs, physician assistants. So we are medically licensed and we have to be licensed. We can lose our license for improper practices. Now as far as the boards go, we have to take at least four medical boards to be licensed to legally be able to practice. Now those boards are typically an acupuncture board, which is going through all the process of acupuncture, making sure we're doing it safely, the proper prescriptions and points. We have an herbal formulas board and again, herbs can cause side effects and herbs need to be properly prescribed and they can interact with medications. So this is understanding all those complex interactions. We have a biomedicine board, so the biomedical board is a lot like what you learn in conventional medical school. We still do have to learn about necronology, hormones, the nervous system, all of this kind of stuff, anatomy, physiology, that you would in a conventional medical school. But because we have so much other information to learn, it's not as intense in that particular domain. And then finally, we have a foundations of Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine board, which is the basic concepts in our medicine. So like you, I'm way more concerned with whether they're clinical hours like how many hours do they spend with a patient or administering these herbal formulas to see the results. So typically, in our first year, we do a lot of the anatomy and the physical hands on stuff. Our courses are more geared towards anatomy for body workers as opposed to gross human anatomy in a cadaver lab, even though we do have cadaver lab classes that gross human anatomy where you break apart cadaver is more aligned with a surgery type specialization. It's a lot less useful for people that do body work like acupuncturists. In our second year clinically, we do an entire year of what's called observation shift where you spend four hours in our clinic. It's a student teaching clinic with patients where the resident, the leading physician does the whole intake and treatment of the patient and then four students observe and sit in on the entire treatment. During our third year, we do two four hour shifts per week in addition to possible what's called the TMT series, which can be two to four hours again per week with patients and learning the clinical aspects of the medicine. And by the last year, the fourth year, the intern year, the physician comes in, they do the intake on the patient, they tell the student what the treatment approach is going to be the acupuncture points and the formula and then the student does the entire treatment. So overall, we have 426 lab hours, which includes needling on classmates and our models. We have several hundred herbal formulas we've learned through two to three weekly exams and other quizzes. And overall, we spend a thousand and seventy four clinical hours, four hundred and twenty six lab hours and overall the hours end up looking like almost four thousand hours of education and two hundred sixty seven credits. So that's a lot. And I know that for me, my school, National University of Natural Medicine, I picked what was clearly the best university in the world for classical Chinese medicine, the most difficult and the most true to the Chinese medical roots. And I had the choice of going to China or any school in the US and I clearly chose what to me was the best for what I wanted and the most difficult. So I hope that helps provide a little bit of insight on what my training is or what is the training nationally of acupuncturists and people doing these interventions. Now before you go, I've actually included down below there, you can see in the box there's actually a free printout or a little resource guide on daily rituals and Chinese medicine to add 10 years to your life. So you can download that right there in the description box there below. It's the very first link and you'll also get a free beginner course on how to heal yourself with traditional or classical Chinese medicine. You can also grab my latest two videos right here and right here.