Practicing acupuncture in an in-patient setting: A phenomenological study.

摘要

Acupuncture is a licensed healthcare profession in the United States and a part of a long standing tradition in East-Asian medicine. Studies on the professionalization of acupuncture in America reveal two major tensions: first, acupuncturists argue whether standardization of the diverse acupuncture styles of practice, philosophical traditions, and language is a necessary step in the process of acupuncture professionalization; second, the profession is split on whether a fuller access to American mainstream healthcare requires that acupuncture education and practice be biomedicalized and acupuncturists made primary care providers. Little is known about how these tensions are experienced by acupuncturists who practice in in-patient settings.;This dissertation is a phenomenological inquiry into "living experience" of acupuncture Fellows at Beth Israel Medical Center, a tertiary teaching hospital in New York City. It presents and discusses a phenomenological description based on interviews with nine informants: five acupuncturists who provided care to hospital patients and interacted with physicians, nurses, and administrative staff; as well as three medical providers and one administrator who were interviewed to contextualize acupuncturists' expenence.;Three major clusters of themes emerged from the phenomenological analysis of the research data: (1) excitement about learning and practicing acupuncture in a hospital setting mixed with a frustration about organizational obstacles to effectively integrate acupuncture care; (2) attempts to preserve holism of East-Asian medicine in an acute care biomedical setting and to provide effective acupuncture treatments in the limited circumstances of a hospital; and (3) surprise about how little medical staff knows about East-Asian medicine, finding ways to demonstrate acupuncture effectiveness to medical staff, and reflections on the impact of acupuncture presence on the hospital's departments and individual caregivers.;This phenomenological inquiry is a point of departure for a broader range of qualitative and quantitative inquiries into the on-going process of acupuncture professionalization, future directions in acupuncture research, integration of acupuncture into the current healthcare system, and the impact of acupuncture profession on the delivery of healthcare in the United States.