For most of the 20th century, anyone in Ontario could call themselves an acupuncturist or a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner without any formal credential, training standard, or oversight body. That changed in the early 2000s, and I was fortunate to be part of the process that changed it. (For more background on my practice, see Who Is Sherman Lai?)
An unregulated profession
When I began practising in Guelph in 1986, TCM and acupuncture existed in a kind of professional grey area in Ontario. There was no licensing body, no defined scope of practice, and no consistent standard for training. That meant patients had no reliable way to distinguish a practitioner with years of clinical training from someone with a weekend course. It also meant the profession as a whole carried more skepticism than it should have — skepticism that, frankly, some practitioners earned. (More on Guelph's particular role in that history is in Traditional Chinese Medicine in Guelph: A Local History.)
Joining the advisory process
In 2003, the Ministry of Ontario Health invited practitioners, educators and stakeholders to help shape a regulatory framework for TCM and acupuncture. I served on that advisory committee through 2004, working alongside colleagues to define scope of practice, required training, and the standards a regulatory college would eventually enforce.
The work was slower and more procedural than clinical practice, but the goal was simple: patients deserve to know that the person inserting needles into their body, or prescribing an herbal formula, has met a verified standard of training and is accountable to a professional body if something goes wrong.
What changed for patients
Ontario's regulation of TCM and acupuncture, formalized in the years following, gave the province one of the more established frameworks in Canada. Practitioners are now required to meet defined education and competency standards and are accountable to the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario. For patients, that means a name and a licence number that can be checked before, not after, a first appointment.
Regulation doesn't resolve every debate about how TCM and Western medicine relate to each other — that conversation is ongoing, and a healthy one. But it does mean patients now have a baseline of accountability that didn't exist when I started practising nearly forty years ago. That, to me, was worth several years of committee meetings.