Who Should Go to Acupuncture School?

reporting live from admissions season at POCA Tech

Art by A. Cohen

Admissions are officially open at POCA Tech (hi, prospective students!¹) so I thought it’d be worth digging into the question: who should go to acupuncture school, and more specifically, who should go to community acupuncture school?

POCA Tech by and large doesn’t do marketing. Students have joked about how hard it was for them to find the school. One Cohort 9 student commented that it was like locating a speakeasy: go to a certain corner of the internet, turn right and down a flight of stairs, you’ll see a door with no signage. Knock three times and maybe someone will open it; if they do, they’ll give you a hard time about whether you really want to come in. (A few years back, a prospective student wrote: I find it unfortunate that your institution spends so much effort in discouraging potential applicants.)

We’ve gotten a little easier to find these days (the beautiful visible classroom helps) and slightly less discouraging, but it’s still worth thinking about POCA Tech as its own little (alternate) universe that you can’t get into without a considerable amount of intention. Without asking: What exactly am I getting myself into?

And more importantly: What do I need?

I presume it’s pretty clear to anybody who reads this Substack or who’s familiar with POCA Tech that we’re not trying to get acupuncture, or acupuncturists, into the Healthcare Industrial Complex. Our school is part of the Educational Industrial Complex only to the extent required for our students to qualify for licensure.² So if you hope to get an acupuncture job in a hospital with an upper middle class salary and great benefits, we’re not for you. (Also, check that hope.) If what you need is to be part of the mainstream, don’t knock on our door because our door doesn’t open onto that world —it opens onto a different one.

POCA Tech is part of a long tradition of people organizing autonomously, outside of the mainstream, to create resources for their communities that nobody from the mainstream is going to just give them (no matter how nicely they ask).³ We have an alternate universe because we made one. We get to live in it because we tend and maintain it. It’s based on small business, so there’s a lot of uncertainty to tolerate. Is that the kind of world you’re looking for? Is getting (and staying) outside of the mainstream something that you need to do, for your own reasons?⁴

Art by A. Cohen

Last module, a student asked me what community acupuncture gave me — what exactly I got out of it and why it was the right choice for me. I could say a lot about that (I have said a lot about that), but if I had to sum it up more concisely I’d say it gave me a location. A point in space to occupy that was real, and clear, and mine. A location that was, to quote another POCA Tech student, specific, fearless, positive.

See also: I once was lost but now I’m found, etc.

Subscriber Jamie Greenhut left a comment on a prior post that I’ve been thinking about:

I find that releasing “woo” and the esotericism of acupuncture comes with a surprising amount of guilt. The upper class, spiritually awakened acupuncturist is one that most people are aware of. It’s the one that shows up in social media feeds, teaches you about the five elements, and guides you through “shadow work”. It’s the one that capitalism seduces you with — sell yourself, people want YOU. People want an enlightened immortal, someone entrusted with “ancient wisdom”. That’s who you have to be in order to succeed. I thought this was true for so long, until I let go of the fabricated notion of who I had to be and simply practiced acupuncture as my authentic self.

Acupuncture schools are definitely selling an identity, a way of being — not exactly outside the mainstream but maybe above it? An identity based on conventional success through conventional measures of status and income, but also being enlightened and spiritual enough to guide other people through “shadow work”. I shuddered when I read that, for a couple of reasons: 1) boundary issues, so many boundary issues! What exactly do we mean by shadow work, and what part of an acupuncture school curriculum prepares you to do that ethically? It seems like just asking for trouble; and 2) speaking of trouble: my own shadow. It has teeth as long as your arm. Surviving it has been a full time job. And I’m not even unusual, plenty of people have that kind of shadow and it’s not something that an acupuncturist should blithely take on with some moxa and a few choice quotes from the Tao Te Ching.

Taking a position of being above the mainstream was obviously not going to work for someone like me. I needed to get out, period. What passes for a normal job in late stage capitalism wasn’t going to help with the urgent project of not getting eaten by my shadow. But I also needed to not get lost, or get too detached. I needed to engage with society in a positive, constructive way and I really needed to do something that wouldn’t make me bitter or cynical. So I had to find a very specific location, from which I could engage very intentionally.

Art by A. Cohen

That location turned out to be community acupuncture. Even the hard parts of sustaining a little alternate universe — dealing with money and bureaucracy and people and boundaries — were good for me; they helped me grow up.

Last night I was talking to a POCA Tech student who’s doing their rotation at WCA’s front desk. I asked them how it was going and they said, oh I love it, I love these people, I love the community vibe. I said yeah, one thing it’s hard to convey until you experience it, is how working with WCA patients is not like working with “the general public”. I mean, they’re ordinary people from all walks of life — but they’re uncommonly sweet. Of course sometimes people are cranky or irritable because they’re in pain and every so often we get somebody who’s not a good fit, but the predominant vibe is lovely. This is why we’re able to have reception volunteers (thank you, reception volunteers!) because being at the desk is rewarding.

A lot of people who receive community acupuncture and also those of us who work in community acupuncture clinics (including reception volunteers) are refugees from somewhere else, somewhere harsher. Doing the work to maintain our little alternate universe (although it’s a lot) always feels worth doing, no matter what else is happening around us. The work itself keeps us from getting lost. As my poet friend Lisa Baird⁵ put it: this job helps me remember that people are good.

Getting back to the question of who should go to acupuncture school (outside of POCA Tech) my answer is still: nobody who needs student loans to do it.

A number of people, including me, thought that the Democrats in the Biden administration might destroy the acupuncture education industry via Gainful Employment Regulations and Financial Value Transparency — basically making it difficult for schools with terrible debt to income ratios, like acupuncture and naturopathic schools, to access federal student loans. Ironically, though, I think the Republicans might be the ones to deliver the killing blow. It’s not just the current administration with its goal of dismantling the Department of Education (I don’t understand how that would work and I don’t think anybody else does either) — it’s that Republicans have opposed student debt relief in all forms basically forever, and if they get their way, some long-delayed natural consequences are going to arrive.

For decades, acupuncture schools have been reassuring prospective students that although the education is expensive and their loan burden will be high, programs like Income Based Repayment ensure that there won’t be immediate consequences if you can’t earn enough to pay back your loans. The Republicans would prefer that all of those relief programs disappear immediately. This means that an acupuncture graduate with a $250,000 loan balance (not uncommon) at an 8% interest rate will owe $3000 a month regardless of what they earn. Income Based Repayment and similar programs have made it possible for acupuncture graduates — and the profession itself — to avoid immediate economic crises resulting from the prevailing tuition rates. If those programs go away, the default rate on acupuncture student loans is going to skyrocket.

POCA Tech’s little alternate universe is looking better and better to me, and this seems like a good time to thank all our donors and volunteers who make it possible for us to run a school without student loans. It takes a lot of people working together to keep this particular door open for students who want to walk through it. Acupuncture education increasingly looks like a resource that nobody from the mainstream is going to just give us if we ask nicely; it’s up to us to organize ourselves to make it happen.

1. We have nine new applicants so far who’ve sent in materials, not counting the nine who deferred from Cohort 11. Not all of those people will follow through of course, but if you’re thinking of applying please do it soon, because we can only take about eighteen people total, and admissions are rolling.

2. Which represents quite a lot of effort, see also: How to Make an Acupuncture School

3. POCA Tech is part of a tradition of organizing autonomously to use acupuncture specifically to meet community needs. You can read about that tradition in Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation and Love by Rachel Pagones. (We ask prospective students to read it as part of the application process.)

4. See also, Why Nurses Love Community Acupuncture by Jen Kehl.

5. Her second book just came out, I bet you’d like it.