Acu. | Issue #33 | Winter 2021
Practice
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Growing the acupuncture research skills base Karen Charlesworth writes about the aim of the Northern College of Acupuncture, where she is research director, to help acupuncturists to upskill in research
Karen Charlesworth Member: North Yorkshire The late, great Professor Hugh MacPherson – globally renowned for his work in acupuncture research – believed that high-quality evidence was one of the most important ways that traditional acupuncture could claim acceptance in mainstream healthcare. ‘Whatever the sceptics say, it’s widely accepted that traditional acupuncture is a very effective form of medicine for a lot of different conditions,’ he said in an interview in 2016. ‘And it's research that’s done that. It’s shaken up a lot of assumptions and prejudices, created a lot of opportunities, and it’s given us a credibility that we didn’t previously have.’ But Hugh was also the first to point out that it’s not easy for acupuncturists to do research: ‘In general, people come into acupuncture to do acupuncture, not necessarily to ask questions about how it works and what it’s good at treating,’ he said. ‘And if they do want to ask those questions, it’s a difficult journey. It’s hard for them to gain the research skills they need, and compared with conventional medicine it’s also hard to come by funding for research into acupuncture, certainly in the UK.’ If acupuncture was taught more in universities, he believed, there would be more accessible pathways to skills and funding, ‘and that would give us a good research skills base in the profession, which would in turn contribute to a strong evidence base and increase acupuncture’s credibility.’ In 1988, Hugh co-founded the Northern College of Acupuncture (NCA) in his adopted home city of York – to train acupuncture practitioners, of course, but also to provide more of those accessible pathways to research skills, and so to build the evidence base. Fast-forward 30-odd years and I’ve become the college’s current research director. I’m proud to say that we’re still turning out cohorts of students who are true to Hugh’s original vision of ‘the research-literate practitioner’. That means a practitioner who’s not
only equipped to understand and critique the evidence base, but also has the skills to actually carry out their own research. My job is basically to get as many people as possible excited about acupuncture research, and to contribute to a vibrant, diverse and reflexively critical research culture at the College and in our professions. It can be a challenge because research scares some people, while others don’t see it as relevant – and lots of our students start out convinced that they’ll never understand the maths! But it’s a point of honour for us that almost everyone who graduates from NCA carries away not only a sound understanding of p-values and confidence intervals – but also, much more importantly, an enthusiasm about what research can achieve for the profession, plus the skills to contribute to the evidence base if they choose. In 2022, NCA will mark its 34th year as an acupuncture educator – and our research programme has never been stronger. We invite all acupuncturists and Chinese herbal medicine practitioners to engage with those parts of our research programme that inspire them. Summaries of our student/staff research and our annual Hugh MacPherson Memorial Lecture are freely available to all, while our annual research conference is now online so we can make it available to a wider audience. Our college principal, Richard Blackwell, comments: ‘By making a broad programme of events and engagement widely available to practitioners, we hope to contribute to the richness of research activity within our professions, and to grow the evidence base.’
If you’ve got a good idea…
Getting people excited about acupuncture research doesn’t just mean the NCA’s own students and alumni. As an educational charity, one of the college’s objectives is ‘to provide
The late Professor Hugh MacPherson, NCA co-founder and leading acupuncture researcher: more than 30 years later, NCA courses are still organised around Hugh’s concept of ‘the researchliterate practitioner’
for, promote and engage in research into the science and art of traditional Chinese medicine’. The College has just launched its Research Support scheme, which we ultimately hope to make available to non-NCA researchers as well as our own graduates. The aim is to provide support for would-be researchers to design and carry out a high-quality project that reaches scientifically robust conclusions, and then to support its publication. The scheme covers supervision, mentoring, use of software and secure data storage, ethics review and the opportunity to apply for the college’s separate Support for Publication scheme. Candidates discuss their idea with a panel of NCA research staff, and submit a proposal setting out the key parameters of their project. For practitioners who want to engage in research but don’t know where or how to go about it, it’s a great starting point.
