The letters after my name
You’ve probably seen it on a business card or a clinic wall: a string of letters after a practitioner’s name that mean nothing to you and, if we’re honest, aren’t explained particularly well by the profession itself. L.Ac. MSOM. Dipl. AHM. DACM. It looks like credibility. Mostly, it’s alphabet soup.
What the letters actually say
The confusion isn’t really about the letters themselves. It’s that three different kinds of authority hand out credentials, and they don’t map onto each other.
Your state gives you the right to practice, and the title itself varies by state. In Maine, that’s the L.Ac. (Licensed Acupuncturist), along with an add-on CMH (Custom-Made Herbal Formulation) license, which requires appropriate herbal training and permits compounding custom herbal formulas. Pennsylvania, where I’m also licensed, uses a two-tiered system, but to practice both acupuncture and herbal medicine there, the credential is L.OM. (Licensed Practitioner of Oriental Medicine). Same underlying training, different state, different letters. It’s granted by a state licensing board, not a school, and it’s what actually permits someone to put a needle in you, regardless of which title a given state happens to use.
A national board tells you someone passed standardized exams. NCBAHM certifies in three areas: Dipl. Ac.(Acupuncture), Dipl. C.H. (Chinese Herbology, herbs alone), and Dipl. AHM (Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine). Despite the name, Dipl. AHM actually requires passing three separate exams: acupuncture, herbal medicine, and Western biomedicine competencies. Most states require this national certification as a prerequisite for state licensure, so the two are linked, but they’re issued by entirely different organizations.
A school tells you what degree you earned. This is where most of the alphabet soup actually comes from:
- MSOM / MAOM. The master’s degree most practitioners of my generation earned. Three to four years covering acupuncture, herbal medicine, and supervised clinical training.
- DACM. The newer entry-level doctorate, now becoming the standard degree for incoming students, comparable to what happened with the DPT in physical therapy.
- DAOM. A different tier entirely: a post-graduate, advanced clinical doctorate requiring an existing master’s degree, roughly two additional years of study, and a research or specialization component. It’s the field’s most academically rigorous credential, and it isn’t part of the entry-level push.
- OMD. An older, less standardized title some practitioners carried before the field settled on DACM and DAOM as its two formal doctoral tiers.
A degree from a school says nothing about state licensure, and a state license doesn’t tell you which degree or national certification a practitioner holds. All three matter. They just answer different questions.
Confused yet? You’re not alone. Even people inside the profession mix these up, and it’s not exactly explained well to the public.
Why the profession is doctorate-minded right now
Acupuncture schools and national organizations have spent the last several years moving entry-level education toward the doctorate, the DACM specifically, echoing what happened earlier in physical therapy, pharmacy, and nursing. The case for it is real. A doctoral credential can open doors to hospital systems, insurance panels, and integrative medicine settings that have historically been harder for master’s-level practitioners to reach. For a new graduate building a career inside conventional healthcare, that matters. There’s also a parity argument: physical therapists, pharmacists, and nurse practitioners all hold doctorates now, and some in the field see this as catching up, not credential inflation.
The counterargument is about cost. Doctoral programs add years and tuition to an already expensive path into a profession that isn’t especially well paid, and critics ask whether that trade-off makes sense for the average new practitioner, as opposed to the specific practitioner trying to land a hospital-affiliated role.
It’s an active, sometimes contentious conversation inside the field right now, about cost, access, and what training should actually require. Reasonable practitioners land in different places on it, often depending on what kind of practice they’re trying to build. Worth separating from all of this: the DAOM, an advanced, optional credential for practitioners who want deeper specialization, isn’t part of this entry-level debate at all.
Where I land
I started practicing in 2001, when programs were just being elevated to the master’s level. When the entry-level doctorate track became available to me, I weighed the coursework against what my practice actually needed. Today I run a solo, cash-pay clinic in Maine. I’m not on an insurance panel or inside a hospital system, so the access argument for the doctorate doesn’t apply to where I am now, the way it would for a new graduate building that kind of career. I put that continuing-education time into treatment approaches and specialties I believe will best serve my patient population instead.
That’s my own reckoning, not a verdict on anyone else’s. A newer practitioner weighing hospital or insurance-based work might reasonably make the opposite call.
For what it’s worth: earlier in my career, I held Board-appointed Acupuncture Consult Staff status for over a decade at Jefferson Moss-Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia, working alongside patients with spinal cord and brain injuries. I held that role on an MSOM, no doctorate required. That doesn’t mean degree level is irrelevant everywhere, hospital credentialing varies by institution, but it tells you a master’s-level practitioner can land in that kind of setting under the right circumstances.
What actually matters when you’re choosing a practitioner
In twenty-five years, not one patient has asked about my credentials before asking whether I could help their shoulder, their fatigue, their nausea during chemo. What they’re actually judging is simpler than a title:
Does this person listen before they needle. Do they adjust the plan when something isn’t working. Am I actually getting better.
The letters are a reasonable proxy for baseline training and licensure. They aren’t a proxy for how much clinical experience a practitioner actually has, at any degree level. That comes through in conversation, not credentials, in how someone relates to your concerns. It’s where I’d point your attention instead, and it’s the same thing I try to bring to every first visit.
Letters aside, come with your questions. We’ll figure out what helps.
Sharon Sherman, MSOM, Dipl. AHM (NCBAHM), L.OM., L.Ac., has practiced East Asian Medicine since 2001, and at True to Life Wellness in Freeport, Maine since 2025.