Education Overview - Our Courses

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.