The Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE) has announced that the final version of its 2012 Accreditation Standards: Principles, Processes & Requirements for Accreditation were approved by unanimous vote at the council's January 2011 meeting and will take effect in January 2012.

According to the council, only "minor" revisions were made to the draft standards released for stakeholder comment. A Feb. 24 press release stated that the 2012 Standards will be distributed to all CCE-accredited programs and that a comparative analysis of the draft and final versions will be posted online (The final approved version of the Standards is already available at www.cce-usa.org.)

The CCE release does not go into details of the new Standards, including whether any or all of the proposed revisions that stirred debate within chiropractic circles were retained. As readers will recall, the draft document added the words "or their equivalent" to discussion of Doctor of Chiropractic degree programs, which some speculate would open the door to allowing Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine degree programs; deleted all reference to the word subluxation, long regarded as an essential component of chiropractic education, training and practice; and deleting the phrase "without the use of drugs or surgery," a particularly controversial suggestion considering recent efforts in New Mexico and elsewhere to expand chiropractic scope of practice to include limited prescriptive rights.

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