I'm a faculty member at several acupuncture schools, and am on the board of many acupuncture organizations in California. I've taught hundreds of acupuncture students in the course of my career.
That said, I'm going to steal an idea that Don Petersen had in our sister publication, Dynamic Chiropractic, a few months ago. Recently, he wrote an editorial piece asking for members of the chiropractic profession to sally forth and be his "chiropractic advisors." It sounded like a good idea, and so, I'm asking the acupuncture profession to do the same. Simply put, I would like to know if you would be willing to be my "acupuncture advisors." I know how busy you are, so I would make sure to respect your time; chances are, I'd probably consult with you no more than six or eight times a year - and even then, it would almost always be by e-mail.
The experiences you have as a licensed acupuncturist, seeing patients and making the benefits of our medicine known throughout your community, are quite important to us. You can provide us with additional insight on how Acupuncture Today can best serve our profession, and in turn, help you best serve your patients. Your feedback will help point Acupuncture Today in the direction you think it should go, as we look to utilize AT, AcupunctureToday.com and our online newsletter (and any other great ideas you come up with) in ways that will best benefit the profession.
Our ultimate goal is to meet your needs in the areas where we can make a difference. Understanding your needs and how best to meet them is almost impossible unless we hear from you directly. You know what is most important to you. We want to hear what you have to say.
As you already know, this article is being read by more than 20,000 licensed acupuncturists, vendors, students and other health care providers who practice acupuncture. That's a pretty big audience, and it takes a pretty sophisticated communications system to get in touch with all of them. The good thing is, such as system is already in place - e-mail, which allows us to get in touch virtually any time, from virtually anywhere. That's one of the reasons I'd like my advisors to speak with me by e-mail. It also ensures that only the acupuncturists who want to be my advisors are contacted.
Over the past five years, we've collected the e-mail addresses of hundreds - even thousands - of licensed acupuncturists. Later this month (probably the second week of February), we will send an e-mail to our prospective acupuncture advisors to find out how many of you would like to participate. To keep your time commitment at a minimum, this e-mail will include a link to a form, which will give you the ability to provide short responses to questions, or to just click on your choice from a list of possible answers. It will rarely require more than three or four minutes of your time.
You can confirm if you want to be (or remain) one of my advisors with each advisory e-mail. If you do, simply provide your opinion on the topics included in the e-mail. If at any time you no longer want to be an advisor, there will always be an opt-out feature that you can use to tell us.
If you would like to be one of my advisors, would you please send me an e-mail letting me know that you would be willing to share your opinion with me? You can e-mail me at the following address, which we've set up specifically for this purpose:
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Please know that your personal opinions will not be published or shared outside of our company. It is our intention to better understand your needs and what issues we should be involved with and/or encourage others to pursue in order to help meet those needs.
Thank you so much for considering being my acupuncture advisor. Your thoughts are very important. They will help shape what we do, what we support, and where we focus our efforts for you, your practice and our profession.
Click here for more information about Marilyn Allen, Editor-at-Large.