Training In Acupuncture - Our Courses
AOM’s course in Acupuncture aims at satisfying the highest educational standards set by the main European Professional Organisations. Our mission is to prepare our students to understand thoroughly the medical corpus of Chinese Medicine, by covering both classical and modern approaches, with an emphasis on the prevention and treatment of disease.
What Do we offer?
Undergraduate foundation course in Acupuncture
AOM offers a 3 year + long undergraduate level course in Acupuncture, with 350 hours of training (between theory, practice and Western Medicine) per year plus an additional 400 hours hands-on clinical practical a t the end of the course. This level is well above the minimum education standards at undergraduate level suggested by the main European Associations.
It is very common these days to see institutions offering short hand-on acupuncture courses of a few hundred hours. The claim behind this is that the theoretical and clinical Foundation of Chinese Medicine, of which acupuncture is one of the clinical ‘tools’, cannot be easily translated into the language and understanding of Modern Medicine. On the grounds of this conviction, and taking into account the fact that an array of clinical trials demonstrates its beneficial effect on a variety of diseases, it has become more and more usual to take the ‘tool’ out of the context in which it was originally rooted and that informed its use.
One of the problems stemming from this position is that the aim of modern acupuncture has become that of addressing the disease and not its ‘root’. In Chinese Medicine, this approach would have been called: treating what appears but not what stands at its origin. In this course we will be learning how physiology works and how all diseases are a deviation from it brought about some aetiological factors, i.e. climates, emotions, and lifestyle. We will also learn how to understand the pathological mechanisms, how to organise a case history and how to design an acupuncture treatment. Our fine ratio between theory and practice ensures that all students understand practically whatever they are taught. The clinical results obtained by working with real patients during the 400 hours of our clinical training, happening the end of the 3 years, will be the reward for our students’ effort.
To allow the learning to happen in depth, we teach modern acupuncture (the minimum requirement of all Chinese Medicine providers worldwide), and we also look at this information critically through the lenses of the ancient and classical scholars.
Short postgraduate courses
It goes without saying that the real learning happens when, after having become familiar with the basics, a professional starts going into the depth of the subject. It is normal that many questions arise once the new professional enters the clinic and becomes solely responsible for the people knocking at his/her doorstep. For some, the questions are more theoretical, and are born from the desire of understanding the theory in greater depth, whereas for others they are more practical and stem from the difficulty of obtaining the desired results.
This short courses cater for both. They provide the former professional of acupuncture with information regarding the clinical approach of various ancient and classical schools of Chinese medicine i.e. the Stomach and Spleen school. They provide the latter by teaching advanced needle manipulation skills, advanced diagnosis especially with regards to pulse reading and general diagnostic skills.
Practice & skills
These are short practical seminars that allow the professional of acupuncture to give some form of ‘specialised’ treatment i.e. aesthetic acupuncture. When needles are not involved we offer this courses also to non- professionals or to practitioner qualified in other some form of complementary therapy.
This short courses can also cater for not professionals wanting to know more about the cultural medium in which Acupuncture was born. These courses can cover ‘philosophy’, ‘internal and external alchemy’, ‘the physiology of the human being from the perspective of acupuncture’ and much more.
Should you not see here a course you are interested in, please inform us and we shall do our best to set it up. Be advised that we need 10-12 students to set up a course.
Long postgraduate course
Besides acupuncture, Chinese Medicine makes use of some other main clinical tools. They are: Chinese Medicine Pharmacology, Chinese Medicine Nutrition, Tuina body work, and Qigong.
Although elements of all of them are taught in the ‘Undergraduate Foundation Course in Acupuncture’, AOM also offers a 2 year long training at Postgraduate level 1. in Chinese Pharmacology and 2. in Tuina, designed for professionals who have already taken and complete the “Undergraduate Foundation course in Acupuncture”.
Chinese medicine pharmacology involves the thorough study of single herbs and minerals (for ecological reasons we do not teach animal products) and of classical combination formula. This course also provides an insight into the main schools of Chinese pharmacology i.e. the ‘Shang Han Lun’, the ‘School of Spleen and Stomach’, the ‘Fire spirit School’ , the ‘Nourish the yin School’ and others.
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