Acupuncture Board Angrily Needled Over Exams

His name, he announced, was Dave-- just Dave. “I may be angry,” he said, “but I’m not stupid.” In a voice as tight as his fist, he stood before the hearing board and told them, “I’m caught between being ashamed of you people and wanting to kill you.”

Dave got big applause.

At an extraordinary public hearing in Los Angeles on Thursday, members of a task force of the California Acupuncture Examining Committee, which tests and licenses would-be acupuncturists, got their ears burned.

More than 120 acupuncturists--including Dave--showed up to voice complaints and demand reform from a committee some perceive as aloof, politicized and “secretive,” even perhaps trying to keep people out of the profession.

They also criticized some testing procedures as “a lottery,” inconsistent, arbitrary, irrelevant, even deliberately deceptive. Two out of three acupuncturists who took the test, including some people who have practiced the craft elsewhere for years, failed it, and therefore cannot get a California license unless they take it again next fall and pass.

Andrew McCormick of Santa Cruz, an acupuncturist for four years in Boston and was president of the state acupuncture society there, failed part of the California test.

“Dave spoke for a lot of us who wouldn’t quite say it that way,” McCormick said. “I had to have a written statement (for the task force) so I wouldn’t blow my top . . . the practical (part of the) exam is just so unpredictable; some of the best students in California fail the practical.”

Acupuncture was an established Chinese medical method before Christ, but in the United States became something more than an ethnic curiosity only after President Richard Nixon’s China trip.

Alabama Gov. George Wallace has had acupuncture treatments. So has Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon, an arthritic British giraffe, a Los Angeles police dog and Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, since his recent stroke.

California was one of the earliest states to permit the practice of acupuncture, said Joel Edelman, one of the public members of the state committee, and now has about 2,500 licensed acupuncturists.

But many students, Anglo and Asian, who have studied three years or more--some of them going to China--say the testing committee’s irregular exams are keeping qualified people out.

“For me, it’s changed my whole career, failing this exam,” said Monica Falvey, a longtime registered nurse and midwife who studied in China after three years at an acupuncture college here.

“The blow to your self-esteem!” said Tracey Bailey of Manhattan Beach, who worked as a waitress to earn $18,000 for three years of acupuncture schooling, and now must keep waitressing because she did not pass the test.

Like most at the hearing, she agreed that strict standards are necessary, especially to keep the craft in high repute in the public’s eye.

“The written (exam) is a way of weeding out people who haven’t studied,” but she believes that some examiners may want “the practical (exam) as a way of keeping down the number of acupuncturists in the state.”

The most recent practical exam included requiring students to diagnose a patient by examining him or her but not asking any questions, identifying medicinal herbs on sight and placing 10 acupuncture needles correctly in 10 minutes.

‘A Game Show’

“It’s not going to make the profession any better if I can locate 10 points in 10 minutes,” testified Phyllis Lovell of Riverside, who passed the test. “You feel like you’re on a game show.”

To loud applause, Joseph P. Goodman of Lake Forest declared: “The exams I have taken are not consistent, very ambiguous, and are an insult to my college, my educational training, my teachers, my professors and my intelligence.”

In short, said a Los Angeles woman who asked that her name not be used--she is afraid of reprisals the next time she takes the test--”the exam asks us to perform in ways which no responsible acupuncturist would work.”

Committee member Leona Yeh, a Los Angeles-area acupuncturist, said afterward, “I can assure anyone the exam subcommittee will take this very seriously.”

It was the volume of written and telephone complaints that led to the unprecedented hearings, the first last month in San Francisco, where, Edelman said, the task force looking into possible testing reforms “got an earful.”

“We’re asking for complaints, feedback, ideas for improvement,” said Edelman, a veteran of state regulatory boards. He said many students evidently believe that “the committee is out to pass only a certain number of people or make entry into the profession more difficult.”

Mohamad Mosleh, dean of a local acupuncture college and president of the state acupuncture association, said that such a high failure rate among students of his school and others “has something to say about the examination. It’s not a very valid examination if most of the qualified graduates of the school cannot pass that exam.”

Part of the problem is “intrinsic,” an Eastern art being tested as a Western science, said Patricia Keenan of San Francisco, who passed the test and testified last month. “Chinese medicine isn’t a science, it’s an art.”

“Oriental medicine is like that,” agreed William Devine, chairman of the California Acupuncture Assn., who was at the hearing. “You could bring one patient in, five different practitioners could look at him and come up with five different diagnoses, and nobody’s wrong.”

Edelman agreed that the 11-member board has in some ways set itself up for criticism because, among other things, it does not disclose how its tests are drafted or graded.

Such secrecy “has made it very easy for the outside world to call into question what they’ve done,” he said.

ACUPUNCTURE: MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY

Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese method of relieving pain and treating a variety of disease by inserting needles into various parts of the body. According to Chinese philosophy, disease and pain occur because of an imbalance between two principle forces of nature called yin and yang. Acupuncture is believed to restore the balance.