| After nine months and five full long days of meetings, the California Acupuncture Board's twenty-member Professional Competencies and Educational Outcomes Task Force, assigend to determine competencies and subject hours for acupuncture and oriental medicine education in California for the near future, caved in to the demands of some school representatives, and adopted a recommendation for hours that was less justified by reason than it was by emotional need and economic demand. |
| After the Task Force members determined that educational programs for the training of licensed acupuncturists should contain a minimum of 3,151 - 3,945 hours, two leaders of the school organizations (Tom Haines and Liza Goldblatt) suggested that they would prefer to end meaningful discussions rather then continue in good faith if their demands for lower standards were not met. Rather than have four of the seven schools represented at the meeting end discussions, a compromise was motioned by Raymond Victorio, and seconded by Lloyd Wright, to adopt 3,000 hours as the total, and to downwardly "adjust" over 2200 hours of the detalied classroom subject matter in order to match the new total. Discussion took place, a vote was called, and a nine-to-nine tie ensued, forcing Dr. Gary Klapman, the chair to cast the tie-breaking vote. |
| Yeas (10): Lloyd Wright, Raymond Victorio, Neal Miller, Shari Asplund, David Lee, Tom Haines, Ron Zaidman, Ted Priebe, Steven Given, Gary Klapman. |
| Nays (9): Andrew Cho, Brian Fennen, YiChun Hsieh, Lam Kong, Brian Loh, Liza Goldblatt, Kuk Yul Choi, Benjamin Dierauf, Ta Fang Chen. |
| A vote to adopt the originally discussed 3,151 - 3,945 hour curriclum was never taken. However, had it been allowed, an informal poll indicated that a 11-7 vote would have favored adopting the 3,151-3,945 hour recommendation, or a 3,550 hour standard and to allow the Acupuncture Board to utilize that information to make its own recommendation for change. Furthermore, the 3,151 - 3,945 range did not include an additional one hundred hours of subject matter that had been discussed and approved, but not included in the approved list of 3,151 - 3,945 hours. Those subject matters were re-inserted into the final subject matter recommendations after the 3,000 hours was voted on, but without allowing additional hours for them. Those additional 100 hours could have brought the original total to 3,251 - 4, 045 hours. The full Acupuncture Board will ultimately decide what to do with this information. |
| See the final outcome |