Acupuncture Continuing Education Online Courses

Educational opportunities in Chinese Medicine for acupuncture and herbal medicine exist for acupuncture professionals.  Online learning with open source solutions allows medical professionals to access data to better serve patients.  Acupuncturists in California (CA) need 50 units of continuing education credit every two years whereas the NCCAOM requires 60 units (PDAs) every 4 years for national diplomate certification.  Florida and Texas also require special continuing education credits for acupuncturists.  Providing these courses should ultimately lead to improved patient care.

Acupuncturists encounter several difficulties with acupuncture continuing education.  Firstly, location- many courses are not available in Iowa, Wyoming and other sparsely populated areas.  However, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, Austin, and Boston offer many courses.  Next, quality of courses is of issue.  Not all courses are clinically applicable to the acupuncturist.  For example,  an acupuncturist may already know the material or the material is not applicable  to a specific acupuncture practice.  Next, it can be costly to travel to a course.  Finally, topics of interest that meet an acupuncturist's needs may be hard to come by in remote areas.

Online education in the medical field has helped to raise the bar.  Approvals by the CA Acupuncture Board are easily regulated in that the materials are reviewed.  Live courses, however, may not meet with the same scrutiny.  Downloadable materials add search to the data and therefore are reference materials.  CE Broker approves courses for the Florida Board of Acupuncture which also has stringent standards for course approvals.