Acupuncture in California: How it Began
Excerpted from "California Gets the Point," by Colin Elbasani
For full text go to: http://www.acupunctureamerica.com/acupuncture_history_california.html

Geographically, California is the last stop in the continental United States before Asia. It is not surprising, then, that the medicine, philosophy, and other aspects of Asian culture constitute such a prominent part of the California experience.. . .

Acupuncture Enters the American Mainstream
During the Cultural Revolution under Mao Tse Tung in the 1960s, diplomatic, cultural, and scientific relations between China and the United States relations were all but cut off completely.  . . The two decades of Chinese isolation from the West only increased American curiosity about all things Asian. Acupuncture, a mysterious healing art that was that bore no relation whatsoever to Western medicine, piqued the curiosity of Americans. . .Many Americans, especially in academia, were revisiting the exoticness of ... Chinese... medicine. . .

In the Bay Area, the San Francisco-based Women for International Understanding, the Asian Art Commission of San Francisco, and local 771 of the American Federation of Teachers, with the support of the California Federation of Teachers State Council in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, rushed to organize large group trips. . .

In 1971, the New York Times reporter James Reston's article, "Now, About My Operation in Peking," marked a turning point in the acceptance of Chinese medicine in America. . . Reston's personal experience as a patient of acupuncture anesthesia made him living, Western proof to physicians and the American public that acupuncture might be more than propaganda and hype. . .

It is [therefore] in the context of pain management that acupuncture came to be introduced to mainstream medicine in the United States. . .Thomas C. Elmendorf, President-elect of the California Medical Association, experimented with acupuncture treatment [with] Drs. B. C. Pien, of San Francisco, and Leung Kok-Yuen, a pain specialist . . . at a meeting of the San Francisco Medical Society on May 9, 1972. As soon as the treatment was finished, Elmendorf rose to his feet and declared "there's no question there is considerable relief of pain in my hip – the pain that I had when I came in is essentially and literally gone." The treatment was repeated a month later by the same doctors at the California State Capitol building in front of an audience of curious legislators.

Approving Acupuncture Research in California
On August 14, 1972, the state legislature passed Assembly Bill 1500 in a 57-0 vote in the assembly and a 35-0 vote in the Senate. It authorized unlicensed practitioners to practice acupuncture under the direct supervision of a licensed physician in an approved medical school in California. . . The bill also required medical schools that conducted research on acupuncture to report their research findings to the legislature annually. . .

In this initial period of regulation, concerned legislators and medical professionals called for a period of restriction and research to safeguard an eager public . . . The California Medical Association and the California Department of Consumer Affairs responded . . . with demands that the state legislature pass some sort of regulation. . . At a hearing on acupuncture in the California State Assembly, legislators expressed concern that laypeople might pick up a book and attempt to practice on themselves. . . Acupuncture. . . has no more business being practiced in the back room of a bookstore by amateurs than does a coat hanger abortion.

Apart from the immediate need to protect the general public from the potential side effects of acupuncture, there was also a need to integrate Chinese medicine into the existing public health model. Members of the acupuncture research project at UCLA maintained in a written statement to the California State Legislature that lifting the restrictions on acupuncture would be premature, as certain measures would have to be taken to ensure that legalization would result in the formation of a safe and ultimately legitimate profession. . . that would guarantee acupuncturists as much independence and autonomy from the established medical community as possible. They argued, "licensed acupuncturists should operate their own offices, carry their own malpractice insurance, etc., thus allowing them a certain degree of autonomy from other medical practitioners."

In 1975, legislators deliberated over a new bill that was to have profound impact on acupuncturists. Senate Bill 86 was to move acupuncture from being an experimental procedure performed behind the walls of universities back to private practices. It called for the creation of a governor-appointed, seven-member Acupuncture Advisory Committee, consisting of five non-physicians with at least ten years' experience in acupuncture and two physicians with at least two years' experience in acupuncture to assist the California Board of Medical Examiners.

Legislation that followed between 1978 and 1998 . . . reversed many of the initial restrictions placed on acupuncturist, including the requirement of a Western diagnosis and doctor's referral. . . . S.B. 1106, passed in 1978 . . . added four public members to the acupuncture board, . . . authorized the board of Medical Quality Assurance to approve apprenticeship programs for acupuncturists . . ., established standards for continuing education for acupuncturists,. . . It deleted the "grandfather" provision, which allowed a certificate to be issued to anyone who had performed acupuncture for five years. Finally, it required acupuncturists to post their certificates in each location of practice and specified the fee for a duplicate certificate.

A.B. 1391, which passed 74-25 in the legislature in 1979, repealed that part of SB86 that required a prior diagnosis or referral from a physician, surgeon, chiropractor, dentist, or podiatrist and the requirement that acupuncturists report back to the referring doctor.   In 1980, A.B. 3040 replaced the Acupuncture Advisory Committee with an Acupuncture Examining Committee, and expanded the scope of practice to include electroacupuncture, herbal remedies and dietary supplements, Oriental massage, and other traditional Chinese therapies. . . Finally, in 1998, S.B. 1980 and S.B. 1981 removed the Acupuncture Committee from Medical Board jurisdiction, renaming it the California Acupuncture Board. . . acupuncture was put on a track which led to it becoming fully integrated into mainstream medical practice.