Bit of a surprise but it shouldn´t have been, I just didn´t stop to think. My application for part-time student loans for the studies (won´t cover it or even come near, just help with expenses) is likely to be turned down by the Swedish state. Great.
The university I´m going to is a university in London. The course, a Masters (in Swedish terms, Fil Mag). Everything is fully qualified, and it´s on a level that doesn´t exist anywhere in Scandinavia. But. Phoning the CSN – the department that oversees student loans – I learn that they will have to try the course, as no-one has applied for the Masters before.
They had applied for the Bachelor (in Swedish terms, Fil Kand), though, and been turned down.
The woman in Admissions at the university got pretty miffed when I told her this. ”How can they do that? We are a university, the course is fully recognized. It´s been run for years. It´s fully recognized for English student loans.”
”I know.”
”But how can they do that? It´s very strange.”
”Yes, I know. It´s Sweden. The misunderstandings from Western medicine are much stronger in place here.”
As they are. Sweden is still a backwater when it comes to investing in quality in acupuncture, or understanding what it actually can do for patients who are ill. We will look at this more in depth later, in a blogpost on training-levels for acupuncturists.
The training that qualifies you to be a member of the Swedish Acupuncturist Union isn´t long. They accept standards of 40-80 hours of training with a teacher a year, for three years, with webstudies filling the rest of the ”part-time” course. The more ”quality” trainings have a month in China, at a hospital where many Westerners walk around and think they have the same skill as the acupuncture doctors who had five to seven years full time at university, and then years of practice on top of that.
A new facet to the better is that now you also need to have ”Basic medicine”, a course that usually extends for one or two semester at university or an acupuncture school, and which covers basic anatomy, physiology, and some basic Western medical knowledge. Not much, but a good start.
The course I will attend is one third that material of the four years at university. One third, roughly the same material as nurses would do when it comes to discussing patient contact and care, and one third pure chinese medicine. I will then fill that in with lots of extra studies and lots of clinic time on the side. I hope I can persuade them to give money based on the Western medical part of the course, if nothing else.
There are no acupuncture degrees at university level in Sweden. None.
Should they give out student loans for studies in chinese medicine? Not if it is low quality, no. But one reason I went for this course was that it is a Master at university, something that doesn´t exist where I live. Giving out student loans to the shake-and-bake courses that are common might not be smart. It is very difficult to check their quality and consistency. But to deny it to established university degrees is a bit odd.
So...now they will be doing a check on the course, and I can kinda guess that they will say no. I will appeal, to get more information into the system if nothing else, but it´s unlikely they´ll say yes.
Silly me.
