How much memorization is really involved?

Memorization is real in this field, and if you're picturing thousands of standalone facts you have to hold in your head all at once, that's the part worth easing right away — the volume is genuine, but it's built into the curriculum in stages, not dropped on you in one term.

Here's what the school's own DAcHM/MAcHM catalog lays out (Five Branches University, checked 07/2026):

What softens this in practice: nothing arrives as an isolated list to drill. Points are learned alongside hands-on practicum in locating and needling them, and formulas are taught after you already know the single herbs and differential diagnosis that explain why a formula is built the way it is — so it becomes reasoning you can reconstruct, not just recall. The three-course structure for each subject also means you're absorbing a third of it at a time, one trimester at a time, not all 365 points or all 220 formulas in a single stretch.

If you're wondering whether your own memory is "good enough" for this — that's a very common quiet worry, and it's less about raw memorization talent than about the fact that clinical repetition (seeing points and formulas used on real patients in the teaching clinic) is what actually makes it stick, more than flashcards ever do.

Is it the sheer number of points and herbs that's on your mind, or more a question of whether you personally learn this way?