It truly pisses me off. It isn´t surprising that they didn´t approve the loans, but it does piss me off. There are no university degrees in acupuncture in Scandinavia. This way nothing changes: acupuncture keeps dying a slow death in Sweden and a lot of the West, and patients who could get help for so much that Western medicine is unable to treat them for would be able to get help from a higher level of quality and clinical skill. The utopia is of course the Chinese version: one hospital with two wings, one with qualified Western medicine, the other with qualified Chinese medicine. Now we have Western hospital with a small group of staff doing the very crudest acupuncture possible – the aspirin, of the tale I told earlier from Kaptchuk.
Or I could be an NHS midwife and become qualified to needle pregnant women after two weekends. In China, this terrifies doctors when you mention it. They often think you are kidding them and shake their heads. Surely the Westerner is joking? They do have a strange sense of humour... It is very specific which points you use when during a pregnancy, and during which trimesters. Using the wrong ones can cause a premature birth or problems for the mother and child. Not that this is stopping the midwives. I have talked to OR staff (surgery) who many times had recieved patients for sudden c-sections (kejsarnsnitt, in Swedish) and simply taped all the needles down to the side of the skin during the surgery, because the midwife never removed them. There are specific ways needles should be removed too, but Western acupuncture doesn´t know them and never asks.
CSN – the student loan department in Sweden – could of course not care less about the skill-level of acupuncture. But it would be nice if we lived in a world where they did.
Not much to do about the student loans. I will have to pay for the entire Masters myself, which will cost me a lot of money to get that quality.
Oh, and I will never do a free lecture for the NHS or Western staff again. I need to get my money back somehow.
