MattGulbransen's blog

A few months back I was asked by Lisa to give a "guest lecture" for the CA class at OCOM.  Recently, in forums Tatyana brought up the fact that she was going to start teaching a class, asking for experiences/advice from people who had done it.  I was going to just post there, but I feel like there could be a lot of input from the Bloggosphere, so I'm making this my post. 

Also, a lot of this stuff has relavence not just for students, but fresh out acupunks and people who still might be curious as to "what's this CA stuff all about anyway?".  In lots of ways these are some fundamental issues that we all have to deal with in the "deprogramming" from school's standard "Private Practice" model to the Commmunity Acupuncture model.  

So, as a typical community acupunk, I get each issue of Acupuncture Today, but I rarely ever read the thing. More so than most mainstream magazines, this "publication" strikes me as a rather transparent vehicle for vendors and other monied interests to have a forum to push their agendas. This comes with an air of legitimacy, very thin air, in the form of "articles". (It's all about these great articles, man!) However, here's an article that caught my eye:

Acupuncture No Longer Golden in California?

My road towards becoming a full-time CA practitioner has been long and bumpy, but here I am, and as a few posts have indicated, lots of people are in a place I can definitely relate to.

First off, I think people need to not be so hard on themselves, this is really difficult to get, it seems to me, especially if you haven't been in practice a long time, or even if you have and just haven't been that busy. There are a couple of different obstacles to overcome before you're really comfortable with seeing 40+ patients a week. One of them is timing.