How Much Does an Acupuncturist Earn?

According to Payscale's Real-Time Salary Survey, www.payscale.com, the median yearly salary for acupuncturists in years 1-4 is $45,000. In the 5-19 year range, the mean of the medians is 55,000. The one group making a decent living is those with 20 or more years in practice. Since this group also spent next to nothing on their training, I am sure the profession looks good to them. These would include many of those who are most well-known in the field.

While the data does come from a small, self-selected group, this pay range is pretty similar to what I have heard anecdotally. For those unfamiliar with statistics terminology, median means there are an equal number of licensees making more and less than this figure. That means half make less, possibly much less. Mean averages tend to be much less meaningful when it comes to determining typical rates of earnings as mean averages can be highly skewed by idiosyncratic low and high rates.

According to payscale.com, acupuncturists fall into the following (Bureau of Labor Management) BLS category:

Health Diagnosing and Treating Practitioners, All Other

The following job description describes the common responsibilities
for this occupation.

Job Description:
All health diagnosing and treating practitioners not listed separately.

Similar Job Titles:
Corrective Therapist - Dermatologist - Eye Specialist - Gastroenterologist - Heart Specialist - Hematologist - Immunologist - Neonatologist - Ophthalmologist - Orthopedist - Otolaryngologist - Otorhinolaryngologist - Acupuncturist - Radiologist - Herbalist

According to the BLS, here are the median and mean salaries in this group. Keep in mind that the median salary includes those above and below the figure. Since most of the other professions listed all make very high salaries, one can assume that most acupuncturists as a
group fall below the median listed here (as the payscale.com data indicates). In addition, you can factor out those listed as working in hospitals and physician offices (the two largest groups). If you look closely at the statistics and add up the number and consider how many licensed acupuncturists there are in the US, it also appears that a significant number of licensees are not working as a practitioner at all. I would say up to 2/3, based upon these stats, assuming this category is most reflective of what most L.Ac. do— those who work in Offices of other health practitioners: 3,050. (I take this to mean that one works in a private practice other than as an MD, not that one works in someone else's practice.) There about 6,000 workers not accounted for in these stats, but they are all distributed through fields with less than 1000 workers each and they are not all L.Ac.s; this may include product reps, insurance adjustors, researchers, etc.) A lot of people may just keep up their licenses to legally treat friends and family. For example, I have a license, but earn no money as an L.Ac. nor will I declare that to be my profession on my tax return as of this tax year.

The upshot of all this: Despite the hype you hear from various vested interests, acupuncture is probably not a viable independent profession for the longterm. After 30 years, it is still only used by a very small % of the population, is generally disparaged in popular media as new-age voodoo, and the vast majority of those who use it are only seeking help for neuromuscular complaints. These is very little chance that TCM herbology will ever be widely accepted as a modality for internal medicine (since there will never be a large enough body of acceptable research in this area, polypharmacy is roundly rejected as unsafe and even unethical in most mainstream medical circles, etc.). Acupuncture's use as a physical therapy will likely be co-opted by mainstream MDs, DCs, and PTs. My point is not that chinese medicine has no place in modern healthcare. It does have usefulness and I still continue to use it personally for some ailments. My point is solely that if one has entered this field of study expecting to make a decent living as an independent practitioner, many, if not most, of you won't. You will hear a lot of shrill rebuttal to this contention, but ask yourself, "who is denying these facts and what vested interest do they represent"? As they say, follow the money.

If I was 24 again and thinking about going into herbal medicine, there is no way I would spend 100K to go to acupuncture school. I would become an unlicensed herbalist like Roger Wicke of RMHI. If I was into neuromuscular medicine, I would become a Physical Therapist or Chiropractor.

Use of CAM in the US

For some insight into the penetration of alternative medicine into the mainstream, consider this data. Despite the rhetoric, it appears that interest in actual medical practices (as opposed to prayer and massage) has plateaued or stalled at a fairly low level.

From:

Barnes PM, Powell-Griner E, McFann K, Nahin RL. Complementary and alternative medicine use among adults: United States 2002. Advance Data from Vital and Health Statistics 2004 May 27;343:1-20.

Abstract
Objective—This report presents selected estimates of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use among U.S. adults, using data from the 2002 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Methods—Data for the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population were collected using computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI). This report is based on 31,044 interviews of adults age 18 years and over. Statistics shown in this report were age adjusted to the year 2000 U.S. standard population.
Results—Sixty-two percent of adults used some form of CAM therapy during the past 12 months when the definition of CAM therapy included prayer specifically for health reasons. When prayer specifically for health reasons was excluded from the definition, 36% of adults used some form of CAM therapy during the past 12 months. The 10 most commonly used CAM therapies during the past 12 months were use of prayer specifically for one’s own health (43.0%), prayer by others for one’s own health (24.4%), natural products (18.9%), deep breathing exercises (11.6%), participation in prayer group for one’s own health (9.6%), meditation (7.6%), chiropractic care (7.5%), yoga (5.1%), massage (5.0%), and diet-based therapies (3.5%).

You can read the details in the entire report. Note that acupuncture is not even on this list. At the time of the data collection, it had been used by about 1% of the population, that after two decades of practitioners marketing to their patients. Some groups are throwing around figures like 70% CAM usage in the US, but that is mostly prayer for oneself or others. BTW, Naturopathy had a .2% usage rate and ayurveda .1%. The largest subset was the use of herbs and other non-vitamin/mineral supplements. However,they are clearly not being purchased as a result of consultation with a licensed practitioner.

Here is a quote from David Eisenberg in a USA Today article that is about two years old:

"Overall use of alternative medicine has stayed about the same for 14 years, says panel member David Eisenberg of Harvard Medical School, who did the first large survey on the issue in 1990. But herbal product use jumped 50% from 1997 to 2002."

The quote above is from a 2005 study. Eisenberg is the author of the landmark study on CAM usage that result in the founding of the office of CAM within NIH. Yet despite 10 years of research since its founding to this article, there has been no change in total usage. One change is a big spike in herb purchases, but not from providers, rather from stores and the Internet. And this spike has taken income away from other usage during the same period. This means that there is a limited pool of people who use CAM and if they spend their money on one modality, they do not spend it on another. There is no more recent data on CAM usage in the US, so anyone who claims to be aware of more recent trends in the past five years that contradict this data should provide sources to back it up. This article suggests that CAM is sought out by certain personality types and this may be a primary driving factor. The only data I am aware of that seems to suggest increasing acupuncture use is an increase in the number of claims to insurance companies for this service in recent years. However, this may be misleading. Since more companies now offer limited coverage of acupuncture services, claims are bound to go up. This does not mean usage has increased, just that more practitioners are seeking third-party compensation for patients who used to pay out of pocket. It would also appear that while new patients explore acupuncture every year, just as many stop using it, thus maintaining the status quo.

Happy New Year - A Reprise

It must be the time of year that motivates these posts. I truly want peace on earth and goodwill between people. Thus, I feel compelled to point out that religious belief has a strong negative association with both of these goals. As Matthew Provonsha writes in Skeptic Magazine:

Whether religion leads directly to dysfunctionality, or religions merely flourish in dysfunctional societies, neither conclusion from this study flatters religion. The first tells us that religion is a hindrance to the development of moral character, and the second that religion hinders progress by distracting us from our troubles (with imaginary solutions to real problems). This study is complicated enough that I do not think that we can draw definitive negative conclusions about religion. But we can at least conclude, contrary to popular belief in this country, that it is not a given that religious societies are better, healthier, or more moral. What we can be clear about from this study is that highly religious societies can be dysfunctional, whereas by comparison secular societies in which evolution is largely accepted display real social cohesion and societal well-being.