New Practitioners Getting the Point of Acupuncture : Number of Schools Is Growing in U.S. Despite Controversial Technique’s Limitations

A few children of the raucous and turbulent ‘60s and early ‘70s have found careers at last.

As acupuncturists.

After nearly two decades of wandering the more conventional side of the American job market--armed with that former ticket to success, a college degree--a handful of dreamers and yearners celebrated a new beginning last week when they received diplomas in an ancient and controversial Chinese art--inserting fine needles in the body to treat disease and relieve pain.

To Regain Idealism

As part of the first graduating class of the Emperor’s College of Traditional Oriental Medicine in Santa Monica, these students said they had turned to an Asian import to regain both the idealism and activism of their younger days.

And as freshly minted acupuncturists who had finished 2 1/2 years of study, they joined a small but growing band of practitioners of an exotic branch of medicine. In fact, the country seems to be in the middle of another surge of interest in acupuncture, similar to--but quieter than--the one following the rapprochement of the United States and China in the early ‘70s when Richard Nixon was President.

Schools have sprung up around the country. State legislatures have been lobbied to set standards and regulate acupuncture to give the profession the same aura of respectability enjoyed by other health-care professions. And in California at least, acupuncturists have organized a trade association to represent them and lobby for common interests.

But those who graduated a few days ago weren’t interested in being part of a wave. They were celebrating the fact that they had finally meshed their inner visions with the practical business of earning a living.

(Acupuncture is a blend of Oriental philosophy and needle craft. Its origins are thought to date back 4,000 to 5,000 years. The theory--shared by Chinese, Korean and Japanese practitioners but disputed by many Western doctors--is that very fine needles--often thinner than a human hair--inserted into the body can regulate the flow of energy along the body’s “meridians” or pathways, thereby easing or eliminating pain and, possibly, disease.)

One of those receiving a diploma from Emperor’s was Gregory Boyle, 37, who said he graduated from Georgia Tech in 1970 with a degree in industrial management.

“I have been one of those knock-around guys ever since I went to college 20 years ago,” the North Hollywood resident said, listing truck driving, working in a food cooperative, waiting tables and “minor acting” as ways he has kept bread on his table.

Standing in a patch of afternoon sunlight and wearing a sky blue cap and gown, Boyle looked around at his classmates and said, “Most of us in the class are in our mid to late 30s and we were all wandering around looking for something. We’re the ones from a great, idealistic generation who didn’t find a slot.”

Loisanne Keller, who chairs the 2-year-old, 250-member California Acupuncture Alliance, based in Los Angeles, said the graduates of Emperor’s College are not the only ones heeding this particular call of the Orient.

Many Non-Asian Converts

“More and more people in this country who are not Asian are becoming acupuncturists, either because they’ve been helped by it or because they don’t like Western medicine,” said Keller, a former intensive care nurse who said she regained the use of a hand through acupuncture. When she first became interested in acupuncture about seven years ago, Keller said there were only three schools in the country. Now there are about 25.

Indeed, well over half of the 39 graduates appeared to fit Keller’s description, as did their surnames--Chappell, Kerr, King, Morris, Osborn, MacGregor, Penner, Todd and Warfield. The impression was confirmed by the college’s dean, Mohammad Mosleh, a native of Iran with a doctorate in business administration, who said that 90% of the school’s more than 400 students are “Americans.” The school was founded in late 1984 by Bong Dai Kim, a Korean. Kim has lived in this country for 14 years. Kim said he founded the school partly to teach Americans such as his students an Oriental perspective on health and life style.

Thirty-four-year-old Bryan Featherstone of Venice, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology from the University of Cincinnati, said he was first attracted to acupuncture as a treatment for “post-concussion headaches and neck and back disorders.” His exposure to acupuncture as a patient led him to become a student “because I felt that I wanted to do something to help other people as well as myself. I felt that I could do that in ways besides the traditional Western ways and in ways suited to my character.”

Meanwhile, Diane Sandler, 38, who lives on a boat in Redondo Beach harbor, said she considered acupuncture her second career. Since she graduated from the Boston Conservatory of Music with a Master of Fine Arts degree in dance in 1971, she’s worked mainly in that field, she said, adding that she didn’t plan to become an acupuncturist even after she enrolled in the college.

Led by Experience

“I had a lot of experiences in my life that just led me here (to acupuncture),” Sandler said. “I didn’t make a decision to go into acupuncture. I told myself if I didn’t flunk out it was a sign from above,” she said.

Whether the graduates of Emperor’s College find a Shangri-La in their new profession, remains to be seen, of course. What is clear is that they are moving into a field that has become more organized and regulated during the 1980s.

At the beginning of the decade, only three or four states had laws covering the testing and licensing of acupuncturists, according to Steve Finando, chairman of the National Commission for the Certification of Acupuncturists, based in Manhasset, N.Y. That number has risen to about 20 now, he said, adding that one reason is the national commission’s work in standardizing examinations around the country. “States were loath to create an acupuncture exam” because in many places legislatures did not have the knowledge to draft such a law, he said.

Room for Controversy

Despite the recent trend of legalization and regulation, Finando said there’s still room for controversy over acupuncture as Westerners become more familiar with the full implications of Oriental medicine. Specifically, Finando said he is worried about the use of herbs by acupuncturists as supplementary treatments. While herbal treatments are currently allowed under California law, Finando said that these treatments are possible targets of further regulation because many of these herbs may someday be classified as drugs.

Meanwhile, the California Acupuncture Alliance’s Keller said that her group is working to impose stricter advertising standards on acupuncturists. Overblown or misleading claims for acupuncture continue to be a problem, she said.

California leads the nation in both acupuncturists and acupuncture schools. Since legislation governing acupuncture was adopted 10 years ago, the state has issued 2,800 acupuncture licenses, said Jon Diamond, executive officer of the state’s Acupuncture Examining Committee. (In 1983, about 1,400 licenses had been issued.)

Diamond said, however, that the number of practicing acupuncturists in the state is perhaps only 1,500, due to people moving out of state, leaving practice and other reasons. Diamond added that California has 15 of the country’s 25 acupuncture schools. (By one count nine of these schools with about 750 students are in Los Angeles County.)

Diamond said he had no reason to doubt the claim by Emperor’s College that it is the country’s largest, but noted that the committee doesn’t keep track of school enrollments, or the financial success or failure of the state’s acupuncturists.

Although no statistics apparently exist on acupuncturists’ income, Keller said her impression is that most practitioners earn a good living, charging $35 to $50 per office visit. Keller and others said that many insurance companies and health care programs, including Medi-Cal, now reimburse for acupuncture treatments. But the cost of training, averaging about $14,000, means most students have to hold down a job, attending school evenings and weekends, she added.

Schools such as Emperor’s College and acupuncturists are subject to state regulation, Diamond said. To take the two-part written and practical state licensing examination, a would-be acupuncturist must graduate from a state-approved school. Course work must include a smattering of Western education in anatomy and physiology as well as instruction by state-licensed acupuncturists, Diamond explained.

“Legally they (acupuncturists) can treat any condition or disease but they cannot claim to cure the disease,” Diamond said. But he added that acupuncturists are required by law to refer patients to physicians for any condition in which “immediate medical care is needed.”

David E. Bresler, a Santa Monica psychologist and acupuncturist who served as a consultant on the drafting of state acupuncture law and worked in acupuncture research at UCLA, said that acupuncturists, with their training in anatomy and physiology, are more strictly regulated than other “ancillary” health care providers such as naturopaths, hypnotherapists and nutritionists. But despite their legal right to treat “everything from cancer of the liver to heart disease,” Bresler believes that acupuncture treatments should be limited to stress, headaches, arthritis, neuralgia and other complaints of chronic or acute pain.

Even in limited applications, there are still lots of doubts about the 4,000-year-old craft in this country.

Although he personally thinks acupuncture has some merit, Charles Haun, an anatomist at the USC medical school, said, “The great majority of MDs still regard it with a high degree of skepticism. . . . It just doesn’t make sense in terms of their training.”

When it last took a stand on the issue in 1981, the American Medical Assn. classified acupuncture as an “experimental” technique that “should be conducted only in research settings,” a spokesperson said.

Dr. Ronald Katz, chairman of the anesthesiology department at UCLA’s medical school and author of an early paper on acupuncture, said initial claims for acupuncture often were exaggerated. “We know it’s not a cure-all for everything under the sun,” Katz said, adding that acupuncture has “essentially been abandoned in this country for anesthesia.” In the early 1970s acupuncture was widely touted as a substitute for anesthetics, largely because of publicity about surgery in China in which acupuncture was used as a total or partial substitute for pain-killers. In recent years use of acupuncture as a substitute for anesthesia has been on the decline in China, Katz said, noting that acupuncture was never used in more than 5% to 10% of surgical cases there.

Nonetheless, Katz said, acupuncture is “very effective in treating chronic pain and acute pain.” Just as the most effective doctor often is the one most sensitive to patients, so too with acupuncturists, Katz said. “The best acupuncturists with the best cure rates also turn out to be the most caring, feeling people,” he said.

And patients sometimes will go to an acupuncturist even though they don’t believe acupuncture will work.

For instance, Jonathan Schwartz, a Marina del Rey attorney, was not a true believer until he kicked cigarettes with the help of Leona Yeh, an acupuncturist with offices in Beverly Hills and Torrance. Yeh put needles in one of Schwartz’s ears for a week and he could push on the device whenever the nicotine urge struck.

“I’m not really the kind of person who puts much credence in fads, which is what I thought acupuncture was,” Schwartz said. “You know, (I thought it was) another Southern California health concept--mashed yeast or sprouts and stuff like that. But it worked for me and the evidence of my own experience is pretty convincing for me.” However, his wife’s attempt to stop smoking with the help of acupuncture failed, he said.

In the rough and tumble of the distant past, skepticism about acupuncture probably was rife, too. An article on the origins of acupuncture in Spirit, the Emperor’s College newspaper, reported that around 3000 BC acupuncture was more correctly called acubludgeon.

The article said, “Warriors began to notice that after being knocked about, some of their chronic symptoms disappeared. From this observation, battlefield physicians began to develop a technique of striking or piercing the body to relieve and cure symptoms. The stones and arrows used were the first tools of acupuncture.”