Legal & Ethical Essentials in Acupuncture: Informed Consent, Boundaries, and Clinical Risk in Today’s Practice

Dao Dan Pai Qigong exercises are a series of standing exercises that harmonize and balance the major energy channels of the body. This series of exercises was first taught in the West by Taoist Master Share K. Lew, a Taoist monk from the Yellow Dragon Temple in the Lo Fo Shan mountains of Guangzhou, China. It integrates movement with breath and posture to activate and balance qi flow.

Dr. Citkovitz will discuss why and how microsystems are particularly useful in today's clinical practice and introduce the microsystems she uses the most in both private and large-scale community acupuncture work.  Included will be specialized use of the Large Intestine channel on the hand and a brief overview of the Zhu scalp acupuncture system for clinical use and home self-care for strikingly effective results.

Sensitive patients often have serious and conflicting symptoms that can make differential diagnosis difficult, from non-healing sores and vomiting blood to seasonal mania. Navigating interactions with sensitive patients with extreme symptoms can be challenging. They may also respond poorly to acupuncture and herbal remedies, which can prevent or derail forward progress in treatment. With a less-is-more approach, JulieAnn Nugent-Head shares cases studies that illustrate how to identify HSPs (highly sensitive people), design acupuncture and bodywork treatments for them, and prescribe herbs and supplements including clinical gems. She also covers classical formulas that use a Shanghan Lun approach and the do's and don'ts of achieving success.

Whether you're an experienced herbalist, or a novice looking to do more than acupuncture for your physical injury patients, this talk can give you the confidence to speedily prescribe simple formulas to accelerate healing. Discover how to quickly differentiate between constitutional temperature and injury temperature, whether to break or consolidate blood, and whether qi needs to be excited or settled to do so. Sound complicated? It's not! Step through a simple, walk-through, flow-chart process to assess and quickly prescribe simple formulas on the fly for your patients. These combinations work better than NSAIDs, speed the healing process, and get your patients actively involved in their own recovery.

Dao Dan Pai Qigong exercises are a series of standing exercises that harmonize and balance the major energy channels of the body. This series of exercises was first taught in the West by Taoist Master Share K. Lew, a Taoist monk from the Yellow Dragon Temple in the Lo Fo Shan mountains of Guangzhou, China. It integrates movement with breath and posture to activate and balance qi flow.

The shen, which resides in the heart, is seen primarily in the eyes, and is related to our ability to be fully conscious, think clearly, and understand our emotions. We need a healthy body for shen to reside comfortably. This class will explore the five spirits and the areas of the face related to imbalance in spirit, where we can discern depression, anxiety, mania, addiction, and obsessive thinking. We will look at the meaning of color changes in these areas and where on the face we can perceive the potential for future issues. We will also discuss spirit and ghost points that can be used to treat these conditions and specific point combinations for treating the various mental illnesses and for healing fragmented spirits.

This course, which fulfills 3 hours of California’s required Law and Ethics continuing education (Category 1), explores the real-world applications of legal and ethical standards in acupuncture practice. Topics the expert panel from the AAC will cover include informed consent, documentation, compliance tips, and professional boundaries. Using malpractice case studies and current regulatory guidance, attendees will learn how to reduce risk and strengthen patient trust.

Dr. Citkovitz will teach the rapid, effective approach to patient assessment and treatment that she uses in private and large-scale community acupuncture work. Once medical red flags are cleared, a majority of patients can be effectively assessed and needled in minutes, without a table, using a combination of three simple protocols and two microsystems. In microsystem triage, students go beyond red flags to determine which auricular and scalp approaches will make the most change for a given patient. Key auricular protocols will be introduced, along with the patient populations in which Dr. Citkovitz uses them, including Boccino protocol for patients with elevated blood glucose, modified NADA, and Battlefield systems. Dr. Citkovitz will demonstrate and supervise practice on the Zhu scalp acupuncture system for musculoskeletal and visceral pain and dysfunction, including the spine, shoulder, hip, head, and upper/middle/lower burner.

Sun Simiao, a 7th-century scholar-clinician and alchemist, introduced the concept of odd points, or Ashi points: locations of dysfunction that are not located on official channel pathways. Ashi points can be identified by visual observation and skilled palpation and are crucial in addressing treatment of musculoskeletal injuries. In this lecture, JulieAnn Nugent-Head will introduce the pathology that creates Ashi points, outline the steps necessary to locate them, and demonstrate acupuncture and bodywork techniques to resolve them.

Treating cysts and fibroids effectively means achieving clarity about why they manifested. Learning to ’see’ the qi and blood of our patients means knowing how to tailor treatment to each patient, then create a cohesive acupuncture and herbal formula strategy to effectively dissolve their cysts or fibroids. This lecture covers the understanding of cysts and fibroids from both Western and Chinese medical perspectives and the most common patterns we will see. Formulas and treatment protocols taken from Andrew's years of clinical experience in China and the West will be included.