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Alternative Health News
Understanding the Changes of ICD10
Recently, I have been receiving inquiries about the new codes for ICD10. When do they begin and how much of a change will they be?
News in Brief
Protecting Our Nation's Heroes From Back Pain; Texas Chiropractic College Partners With PA University; AECC Student Awarded Scholarship by FICS; Palmer Toys for Tots Drive: Nearly $2,000 in Donations; New Career Path for Foot Levelers' Jamie Greenawalt; ChiroTouch: $25,000 to FCP; New Face at CLA.
The Big C: What Are You Doing About It?
It is the rare to meet a person these days that doesn't have a concern about cancer. Between the constant headlines, to pink ribbons on everything from planes to phones, to hearing that Aunt Stacy was just diagnosed, it is impossible to not be aware of cancer's presence.
Using the Channel Systems of Acupuncture to Unravel the Mysteries of Disease Progression
Wind is a philosophical representation of change in the Chinese classics. It is also acknowledged as the root of all physiological disturbance. It is stated in chapter 3 of the Su Wen that wind is "the cause of hundreds of diseases."
The Integrated Components of Stability
Use of the term stability is widespread across the physical and rehabilitative medicine disciplines. Stability is generally referenced as a positive outcome we are looking to achieve in order to help alleviate our patient's presenting complaint.
CCE Recognition Extended for Only One Year
A storm has been brewing over the Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE) for more than two years. It began in mid-2009 when the CCE released the first draft of its Accreditation Standards.
Professionalism, Education and Turf Wars
Most professions have discourse about the "professional." Professions define themselves in part by excluding others. I would like to briefly explore professionalism in Chinese medicine.
Some Inflammatory Remarks About Manipulation
There is an anonymous quote which reads, "An archer cannot hit the bullseye if he doesn't know where the target is." In the case of some of chiropractic's detractors, that seems to have been the case when it comes to vertebral arteries.

The Magic of Microcurrent
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, I found this definition of the word magic: an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source.
How Chinese Medicine Can Save Western Medicine
Our country is struggling to reduce the cost of healthcare while simultaneously improving its quality and accessibility. I see a partial solution: use Chinese medicine in Western healthcare settings.
Helping Pregnant Patients With Their Pain: Using the Fascial System as our Guide
Pregnant women are frequently at a loss for answers with respect to pain associated with their growing abdomen.
A Fresh Look at the Meric System and Modern Neuroscience
The use of manipulation in the management of biomechanical disorders of the spine may now be regarded as a mainstream approach across health care.
Public Health & Gerontology Groups Support CAM
Two large professional groups recently held annual meetings that featured a number of presentations about acupuncture and CAM topics.
We Get Letters & E-Mail
Foundation Ad Rejected by Medical Journals: No Surprise; Why Am I Still Struggling? Let's Use Wikipedia to Our Advantage.
From a Different Playbook
Just to be clear, the above is not the beginning of my article. On the contrary, it is the beginning of "Seven Ways to Boost Your Income with Medical Activities," an article written for medical doctors that was posted in early December 2011 on Medscape.com.
The One-Sport Syndrome
I recall that as a kid, I participated in sports based on the season. In spring and summer, it was baseball and basketball; in fall, it was football; and in winter, it was ice hockey.
Herbs: Revitalizing in Spring to Maintain Youthful Vitality
Spring is the time to revitalize and get moving, but also a time to improve our immune systems so that we can avoid wind-caused health conditions that often proliferate during this season.
OIG Reveals Audit Targets for 2012
Each year, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) releases its annual Work Plan for the fiscal year, which details new and ongoing reviews that will be conducted in federal programs such as Medicare.
Dr. Shi Xue-Min and the Xing Nao Kai Qiao Legacy
To the acupuncture community, Dr. Shi Xue-Min is known as a distinguished acupuncturist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a supervisor of doctoral candidates in China.
Balance Strategies to Improve Health
You already know how complicated the process of human balance is; but are you aware of the simple tools many providers are using to improve their patients' balance?
The Problem With Statistics
I'm not sure when I began to mistrust statistics; I think it was in college in the late "'60s."
Do Dietary Supplements Really Increase Mortality?
In an article scheduled to appear in the Feb. 26 issue of DC, I provide the raw data on cardiovascular protection with statin use in the JUPITER trial.
Speaking in Code
At this point, I am certain everyone is aware of the CPT codes for billing acupuncture. However, there have been some recent cases where it is clear that not everyone is following the clear-cut rules on how to define and use these codes.
Managing Sesamoid Injuries
The word sesamoid is Latin for "sesame seed." These small bones are located inside specific tendons, where they improve mechanical efficiency by pulling the tendon farther away from the joint's axis of motion.
AAAOM Postpones Annual Membership Conference, Leadership Meeting To Be Held
The decision by AAAOM to postpone its annual membership conference for one year was a difficult one.
The Heart /Kidney Connection
Are you treating health conditions related to or affected by love? This past November I taught at the Pacific Symposium, a large educational conference put on for our industry by the Pacific College in San Diego, Calif.
Chiropractors Storm the Capital
On Oct. 29, 2011, a rare early winter snowstorm struck the East Coast of the U.S., blanketing the nation's capital in white. In Washington, D.C., it was the heaviest October snowstorm in history.
Recent Report Highlights Growing Dangers of Anti-Inflammatory Medications
In the Sept. 27, 2011 posting of the Biomedical Central Journal: Family Practice, R.J. Adams and colleagues commented on concerns raised by the common prescribing of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications.

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Massage Today
August, 2001, Vol. 01, Issue 08

Education and Training

By Keith Eric Grant, PhD, NCTMB

"There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it."

- Inventor Charles F. Kettering

I might as well admit it right up front: I'm averse to educational standards, at least as they are usually promoted.

In truth, I love teaching, I love furthering my own knowledge, and I encourage others to do likewise. My collection of reference books and videos continually strains my ability to store them. My aversion to such standards comes not from an antipathy toward learning, but from a feeling that they are more postural displays than genuine efforts to guide the content and timing of teaching and learning. In hearing statements about efforts to "professionalize" massage or about the massage profession "maturing," I understand promoting the requirement of more up-front hours of education as a sort of credentialing arms race with other professions.

What I find desperately lacking is discussion about matching training with the specific needs of application, and consideration of when, experience-wise, such training will be most effectively retained. What I also find lacking is a realization that learning is taking new forms in many technical domains, as the flux of newly generated information doubles every four to seven years. The implication of this knowledge explosion is that we must increasingly view learning as an ongoing, largely self-directed process whose measure is not what we know up front, but our skill at accessing resources and networks to learn what we need for immediate use. The challenge of practice lies not in amassing knowledge, but in winnowing the understanding we need from the total harvest of disciplinary knowledge.

In designing the length and content of massage programs, we need to differentiate between training and education. Ironically, perhaps the clearest differentiation of training and education in terms of goals, context, and methodology comes from the military venue:

Training is essentially a closed system. The trained individual is easily recognized as knowing the "right answers," doing things the "approved way," or arriving at the "school solution." Under these conditions, the products of each trainee in every situation can be expected to look the same. Education, in contrast, is an open system. Learning is continuous with no cap or ceiling on how well the graduate may be prepared to handle new responsibilities. Right answers and ways of doing things often do not exist in education--only better or worse ones.

This differentiation is further developed on a recent report on military training and education for the beginning of the 21st century:

Training is the process of teaching others specific skills to be performed under defined conditions. It focuses on the psychomotor domain of learning and on performing specified tasks in specified ways to a predetermined level or standard. ... Education, on the other hand, focuses on the intellectual or cognitive domain of learning. It is the process of preparing others to solve problems and deal with situations not yet known or defined. It is about learning how to learn and discovering what we do not know so that we may survive in the future.

If we want to create massage degree programs, we should not develop programs that are simply a prolongation of skill training. When we extend from massage training to massage education we should aim to produce graduates that not only can perform techniques, but who also can interface with other healthcare and social care needs. Graduates should have the vision and skills to develop and manage new programs, and the background to successfully write grants to fund their programs. In short, our program should address developing leaders for the social context of massage.

In contrast, I believe that massage training should be much more pragmatic and specific. We should approach training programs with the hard-eye to costs and benefits of a corporate training manager. Content of a training program should address skills applicable and demonstrably needed in the near future - a "just in time" approach to learning that reinforces training with immediate experience. Given the rate at which unused knowledge decays to oblivion in the human mind, training should be designed to be provided in a modular/incremental fashion. Hours of training should be defendable in terms of the hours required to convey and practice well-defined content appropriate to the trainee's near-future practice. Continuing education workshops should supply the ability to draw on a greater pool of clinical experience. In practice, much of what is offered falls far short of this objective. Our goal, rather than convincing practitioners that their continued learning depends on being force fed, should be to teach them the skills for awareness, observation, and self-directed learning. Practitioners who can teach themselves will still be interested in attending workshops of value to them. The motivation comes from encouragement, sharing, and following Joseph Campbell's notable advice: "follow your bliss".

Beyond what we learn in formal situations, there are numerous opportunities for self-directed continual learning. There are also opportunities to marshal our personal knowledge and skills to become a resource center. By sharing our experience and vision, we can lead without a formal portfolio. In Japan, there is the concept of a person of wisdom being a national living treasure. We can all aspire to be living treasures for our personal communities of co-learners.

In closing, I'll return to Charles Kettering for a forward-looking 1941 statement on the necessity of interspersing experience between increments of theory:

If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four-year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time, because there is no way to become a musician. Neither can we become engineers just by studying a textbook, because practical experience is needed to correlate the so-called theory with practice.

References

  1. See www.kettering.edu/ketternu/kettbio.htm for a brief biography on Kettering
  2. Kline, John A., 1985: "Education and Training Today: Some Differences," Air University Review, 36(2) 94-95. (www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1985/ jan-feb/kline.html)
  3. Sikes, Lt Col Carol S., Dr. Adelaide K. Cherry, Maj William E. Durall, Maj Michael R. Hargrove, Maj Kenneth R. Tingman, 1996: Brilliant Warrior: Information Technology Integration in Education and Training - A Research Paper Presented To Air Force 2025, (www.infowar.com/mil_c4i/vol1ch10.pdf)
Click here for more information about Keith Eric Grant, PhD, NCTMB.

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