making a living

[Guest guest]

>Still, it would probably be to the advantage of the schools if they could

actually help us find work...

 

Since most licensed acupuncturists/herbalists are in private practice,

opportunities for 'placement' are few--as yet. Perhaps you also mean looking

at population and that sort of thing.

 

I think it would be great if, in high school, students were offered a course

designed to help them discover where their strongest talents and abilities

lie, including personality and emotional factors. I have a master's degree

in music and I've studied a bunch of things of interest to me. At this point

I've made peace with having 'wasted' my time and money on endeavors not

directly applicable to my career. There are many times, however, when I

thought a little testing, guided self-reflection and career research in high

school or even as an undergraduate would have gone a long way to land me

sooner in a field where I would have eventually flourished.

 

What's unusual about our profession is people practice it in such different

ways and at such different levels--some people feel qualified and are

financially successful with little education. Others feel unless they learn

Chinese and study daily they aren't fit to practice. I don't see a consensus

on what 'qualified' means in our field. That's an environment that I find

difficult to practice in so despite many other ways that it works for me, I

think if I'd researched the profession more thoroughly in advance and found

this out (it would have been hard) I might not have entered the field.

 

I agree with the notion that our profession has a self-esteem problem but I

think it's because I can't esteem myself if I don't know who I am--meaning,

there's not enough unification or an organizing principle to define the

profession. We can be pluralistic but I don't think we even agree it's ok to

be pluralistic. And pluralistic within what framework?

 

I think it's important to somehow embrace the prevailing cultural paradigms

in our work. If we eschew scientific or reductionistic ways of looking at

health the field won't evolve with the culture. We can transcend the limits

of those ways by including them not shunning them. Medical systems reflect

their culture. Our culture and our medical systems seem chaotic now. I'm

guessing after a while, things will settle out and there will be a more

integral approach to health and healing that we can't conceive of now.

 

Marian