Why I'm a Doctor of East Asian Medicine, Not a "Doctor of Acupuncture"

My actual degree title is a Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine — DAcCHM, if you want the letters. But when I introduce myself, that's not what I say. I say I'm a doctor of East Asian Medicine.

Patients sometimes notice the mismatch and ask about it. Isn't that just a longer way of saying the same thing? It isn't, and the difference is worth explaining — not as a technicality, but because it's a small example of something much bigger that affects how this whole field of medicine gets seen, regulated, and paid for.

The Test That Reveals the Problem

Try this test on any primary care physician: imagine calling your family doctor a "doctor of laboratory testing and pharmaceutical prescribing."

It wouldn't be inaccurate. Ordering labs and writing prescriptions are two of the most common things a primary care physician does, day in and day out. But it would sound absurd, and everyone would immediately understand why — it defines an entire medicine by two of its tools, instead of by the medicine itself. So we don't do that. We say "family medicine physician." We name the profession after the medicine, not the techniques inside it.

What a Doctor of East Asian Medicine Actually Means

Acupuncture and herbal medicine are modalities — specific tools, not the medicine itself. What actually defines East Asian Medicine is a diagnostic system: a way of reading the body's signs and symptoms as an interconnected whole, rather than as isolated complaints, to identify patterns that explain why a person is unwell, not just where. Treatment follows from that diagnosis, drawing on a full toolkit that includes acupuncture and herbs alongside cupping, moxibustion, and dietary and lifestyle guidance, applied according to an individualized clinical strategy that shifts as the patient does. The diagnostic process is the medicine. Acupuncture, herbs, and everything else are simply how that diagnosis gets acted on.

A title built from two of its tools — "doctor of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine" — does exactly what "doctor of laboratory testing and pharmaceutical prescribing" would do to a physician. It makes a coherent medicine sound like a menu of procedures. It's technically accurate and still manages to describe the wrong thing.

This Isn't an Accident

I don't think this happened by chance, and I don't think it's unique to how I was credentialed.

In the United States, this field built its legal and professional identity technique by technique. State licensure laws, going back to the 1970s, were largely built around a single question: does this specific technique — acupuncture — work, and how do we regulate it? Not: is this a complete medical system that deserves recognition alongside conventional medicine? That's a fundamentally different starting point, and it's why the credential most of us carry is named after a technique and an adjacent modality, rather than after the medicine we actually practice.

That question carried its own bias, too — not every technique got evaluated the same way, or with the same nuance some of them actually require. "Does it work" was mostly answered using a research tool, the randomized controlled trial, built around standardized, single-variable interventions — a pill at a fixed dose is a reasonable thing to test that way. An individualized, multi-modal system, where the treatment itself changes from one visit to the next based on how a person responds, is a much harder fit for that same tool. So even the question that ended up defining this field legally was asked and answered using a yardstick that wasn't really built to measure what it was measuring. More on that later in this series.

Conventional medicine didn't get named this way. Nobody licenses "the practice of auscultation" or "the practice of prescription writing" as a stand-alone profession — those are folded into a recognized medicine with its own name. East Asian Medicine, in the US regulatory picture, never fully got that treatment. It's part of a larger pattern in how this country has decided which systems of medicine count as "real medicine" and which get fragmented into a list of licensed techniques — something I'll get into more in the next post in this series.

Why the Words Matter

This isn't just a matter of pride in a title. Names shape how something gets treated.

A field that sounds like a bundle of procedures gets billed like one — piece by piece, technique by technique, rather than as the clinical decision-making and diagnostic work that actually drives the treatment plan. It gets discussed by medical boards and insurers as a set of isolated interventions to be individually justified, rather than as a coherent system of care. And it gets understood by patients, sometimes, as "the thing where you get needles" rather than what it actually is: a complete diagnostic and treatment approach that acupuncture happens to be one visible part of.

This Isn't Only History

It would be easy to read all of this as a story about the past — a bias baked into licensure law decades ago that this series keeps circling back to. It isn't only that. The same underlying instinct — deciding, by law, who is and isn't allowed to use the word "doctor" — is playing out again right now, just aimed in a different direction.

In 2025, California's SB 1451 reinforced an existing state restriction barring nurse practitioners from using the title "doctor" or "Dr." in clinical settings, even when they hold an earned Doctor of Nursing Practice degree. Three nurse practitioners sued over the restriction, arguing it violated their right to truthfully describe their own credentials. A federal court disagreed, ruling in September 2025 that the title is inherently misleading to patients regardless of whether it's accurate, and pointing to survey data suggesting a large share of patients already confuse nurse practitioners with physicians. That ruling is currently on appeal.

It's worth sitting with the shape of that case for a second, because it's almost a mirror image of the one this post opened with. My own field can only use the title "doctor" in some states, even for practitioners holding the exact same doctoral degree. Nurse practitioners, who similarly hold real doctoral degrees, earned that title and are now being told, by law, that they can't use it either. Different direction, same underlying question: who gets to decide what "doctor" is allowed to mean, and for whom. That question was never fully settled by history. It's still being litigated, this year, in real courtrooms — which is worth knowing, because it means the bias this series keeps tracing isn't a closed chapter. It's a live one.

Even This Title Isn't Where I'd Stop

Here's the honest complication, worth naming before this post ends: "doctor of East Asian Medicine" isn't actually the title I'd design if I were starting from scratch either.

It's more accurate than what's on my diploma, for all the reasons above. But it still puts me inside one fixed box — a whole paradigm, named as a single package. In practice, medicine doesn't stay inside its box that neatly. I'd like to be able to order labs and run diagnostic ultrasound in my own practice — tools most people associate with conventional medicine — not because I want to become something else, but because they'd make me more useful to the patients already in front of me. But I can't just go and take a few classes on those specific things to become competent in them. The only path available is an entirely separate degree, from the ground up. I already have the medical literacy and the clinical foundations that degree would spend years re-teaching me — I'd be relearning a great deal I already know how to do well, at a cost that's tremendous for a handful of specific, added skills. A title, however accurate, still describes a fixed package. It doesn't leave much room for a practitioner who's genuinely competent across more than one.

I don't think the fix is a better title. I think it's a different idea of what a professional title is even supposed to certify in the first place — something closer to a base credential plus a set of verified, stackable competencies a provider can add over time, rather than one all-or-nothing identity a person is sorted into for their professional life and mostly stuck with. What that could actually look like, and why I think it solves this problem more completely than any renaming ever could, is where this series ends up. More on that later.

What Actually Happens in the Room

When a patient sits down with me, what's happening isn't "acupuncture." It's a diagnosis — built from pulse, tongue, history, and pattern. I also take blood pressure, pulse oximetry, and the same basic vitals any provider would check. Integrating conventional and East Asian diagnostic tools isn't an either-or for me — it's just good practice. From there comes an individualized plan that might include acupuncture, might include herbs, might include both, and is adjusted over time based on how the person responds. That's not a technique. That's a medicine practicing the way medicine practices: assess, diagnose, treat, reassess.

Calling myself a doctor of East Asian Medicine isn't a rebrand. It's just an accurate description of what's actually happening across the table from you. And getting that description right turns out to matter for a lot more than semantics — which is where this series is headed next.

This is Part 1 of a series on medicine, hierarchy, and East Asian Medicine's place in it.

Next: How One Medicine Became "The" Medicine — And Everything Else Became "Alternative"