MOCC Proposal: Dis-Organized Chaos

I’ve been criticizing the Maintenance of Core Competency (MOCC) proposal from the Federation of State Massage Therapy Boards since the moment it landed on my radar, and I haven’t changed my mind. I think it’s a terrible plan that doesn’t serve any good purpose other than increasing the coffers of the FSMTB. In its present form, it appears to be a blatant move to put the NCBTMB out of business.

What has been interesting to me is to see the way this thing has unfolded. Right off the bat, I had some criticism of the Task Force assembled by FSMTB that supposedly got this thing together. I say supposedly, because when I saw who was on it, my first thought was “No, they couldn’t possibly have supported that.”

So here we have Immediate Past President of AMTA, Glenath Moyle, whom I know personally and like a great deal. In spite of Moyle’s presence on the Task Force, the national office of AMTA only took a few days to come out with a statement shooting more than 20 holes in the MOCC proposal. In spite of the fact that the FSMTB chose Task Force members who were supposedly representatives of their respective organizations, that apparently didn’t work too well in this case.

AMTA has never allowed an individual officer to speak for the entire organization without their board’s approval; their blanket slam of the proposal seems to indicate that they never saw the proposal prior to publication, much less given the opportunity to sign off on it. I wholeheartedly support AMTA’s condemnation of this far-fetched plan, but I didn’t like to see Ms. Moyle in a position of looking like she had egg on her face. That could have been prevented if this process had been carried out in a more transparent manner.

Then we have Pete Whitridge and Cherie Sohnen-Moe, President and Board Member, respectively, of the Alliance for Massage Therapy Education. Since both of these leaders are well-known continuing education providers, and represent an organization that is largely composed of CE providers and massage schools that sponsor CE, I was shocked at their support of this plan. I felt at the time, and still feel, that if the membership of the AFMTE had been polled about this plan, the consensus would be a big fat NO.

The theory that this plan will not take away business from CE providers is BS of the highest order. Since the proposal calls for newly-created education modules that the FSMTB will put on their website to be the ONLY course work required for state license renewal – with all other CE related to “professional development” becoming optional – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. READ MORE...