Alumni Profile: Acufinder.com Partners with Acupuncture.com

Acufinder.com, the leading online acupuncturist directory founded by Pacific College of Oriental Medicine graduate, Diane Joswick, was made the exclusive directory of acupuncturists for Acupuncture.com in February 2004. Acupunc-ture.com is the most popular and well-known acupuncture-related site on the web, receiving over 120,000 visitors and 4.5 million hits a month.

"The partnership between our two organizations means exponential growth and improvements for both sites," said Joswick, licensed acupuncturist and president of Acufinder.com. "The leading acupuncturist directory joining with the most visited acupuncture site in the world just makes sense."

Acufinder.com receives over 82,000 unique visitors monthly and features a directory of approximately 12,000 licensed acupuncturists in the United States alone. Due to its partnership with Acupuncture.com, Acufinder.com expects traffic to increase by over 50 percent.

Joswick founded the online acupuncturist directory in October of 2000 because of the growing amount of calls she kept receiving at her private practice asking for referrals.

"I was amazed at how many calls I received from people looking for acupuncturists in other cities and states that provided specific services or types of acupuncture," Joswick said. "I realized there was a definite need for one source where people could search for a practitioner by specialties as well as location."

After running the newfound web site from her clinic at the Return to Health Acupuncture Center in Del Mar, California for several years, Joswick eventually sold her practice in 2003 to concentrate solely on the rapidly growing success of Acufinder.com.

However, Joswick is still able to stay in the practice by running Acufinder.com's "Ask the Acupuncturist" section, which receives between 80 and 100 email queries per day.

Though the "Ask the Acupuncturist" section certainly receives a lot of visitor attention, Acufinder.com also boasts many other features that have helped it attract so many visitors. Browsers can search for an acupuncturist by type of acupuncture, area of expertise, languages spoken and location, while the search results will tell you the distance to each practitioner, show a photograph of the acupuncturist along with an extensive bio, and allow you to print out directions to the office. The Learning Center also features articles about how acupuncture works and how it can treat various conditions.

"Our goal is to provide the public with the most relevant and useful information about acupuncture and Oriental Medicine," Joswick said. "Acufinder.com is committed to the advancement of acupuncture and Oriental medicine in the Western community."