Craig Maginness

Faculty Member @Colorado Chinese Medicine University

Denver, CO, US

CCMU (formerly CSTCM) is one of the foremost and well established schools teaching traditional Chinese medicine in the United States. The school offers both doctoral and masters programs with focuses on acupuncture, herbal medicine, as well as other treatment modalities. I am teaching their clinical business management course. It is my understanding that I am the first person to teach this course who is not a licensed acupuncturist or TCM practitioner. I\'d like to think that this is a bold step forward for the school in trying to assure that its students not only have the medical and professional skills to practice Chinese medicine, but also have the business acumen to in fact launch successful, sustainable and rewarding practices. This ancient and powerful medicine happens to be a field in which there are not a lot of large employers waiting to hire new practitioners upon graduation, so the reality is that the majority of graduates will wind up starting and running their own practice, i.e. their own small business, whether that\'s what they intended to be doing or not. Like most small businesses, the majority of TCM practices fail in a matter of a few years. For the most part, this is not because the individuals lack the professional or practice skills and knowledge, but because no one ever taught them the realities about how a business creates and delivers value to its clients. Given that teaching business to non-businesspeople is one of my specialties, I am hopeful of greatly increasing the odds that the graduates of CCMU will be among the practitioners who defy the odds and create practices that continue to deliver the benefits of this important mode of healing and health care well into the future.