Center for Chinese Medicine

Here are two examples of how medical science is viewing acupuncture favorably.

1) The World Health Organization considers acupuncture to have been ‘proved’ effective in the treatment of a long list of conditions such as knee pain, depression, morning sickness, rheumatoid arthritis, tennis elbow, dysentery and high blood pressure. It also has an even longer list of conditions for which the therapeutic effect of  acupuncture have been shown, but with ‘further proof needed’, such as bronchial asthma, Bell’s palsy, premenstrual syndrome, ulcerative colitis, recurrent urinary tract infection, herpes zoster and cardiac neurosis.

2) A recent British Medical Acupuncture Society report said; “Current research shows that acupuncture can affect most of the body’s systems – the nervous system, muscle tone, hormone production, circulation, and allergic responses, as well as the respiratory, digestive, urinary and reproductive systems.” What connects these diverse aspects of the body’s health and how can acupuncture play a role in healing these conditions?

To understand how acupuncture works, we have to think about health in a way that goes beyond the usual ‘one drug treats one disease’ approach. Whatever particular disease we are suffering, we all have an innate ability to recover from that disease in time, depending on the severity of the disease and the state of our health. Whatever specific modern medicines we may take to cope with a disease – for example a pain killer to lessen the severity of headaches – the individual still needs to draw upon their own healing abilities to fully recover from any disease.

One of the problems with scientific control trials into the effectiveness of acupuncture is that they reduce acupuncture to a simplistic set of needling protocols, completely ignoring the tradition’s core belief in each treatment being tailored skillfully to fit each individual. It’s a wonder that the trials so often produce positive results given these restrictions.

Most people, including doctors, will acknowledge that everyone responds differently to ill health and to the same medicine, depending on an almost limitless set of variables. Traditional Chinese Medicine simply takes this fact as a starting point and seeks to find what is unique about the individual sufferer’s situation and to act accordingly. This approach is in direct contrast to modern medical theory, which seeks to find an active agent (like a pain killer) that will be prescribed identically to as wide a population as possible.

For this reason there is a fundamental gulf of understanding between modern medicine and ancient medicine that cannot be bridged by scientific trials as the trials are biased towards a worldview that has its own shortcomings. Whilst there is a natural desire to be able to say ‘acupuncture treats knee pain effectively’, it would be more honest for an acupuncturist to say something like ‘our understanding leads us to believe that there are many different kinds of knee pain, most of which we are confident that we can treat effectively’.

To take this principle to its logical conclusion, the real question would end up being ‘will acupuncture treat my knee pain?’

And to answer that question in the most informed way possible, the acupuncturist must try to understand the nature and history of your knee pain, the overall state of your health within which your knee exists, and both the potential for you to avoid further aggravating factors in future and your ability to afford sufficient treatment for your particular knee problem at present (see our affordable acupuncture system).

Ross campbell 2008

Essays by Ross and James