A friend who is a gp said to me the other day that although she did believe in acupuncture, she couldn’t get her head around how it could possibly work. She also commented that the people I see should be described as ‘clients’ rather than ‘patients’. Clearly she wanted to strongly differentiate her own profession from my own. Surely being a healthcare practitioner would mean that the people I see can be termed as patients or does the treatment I deliver sit lower down in the pecking order? There was an obvious lack of respect of the merits of acupuncture purely based on her unfamiliarity of the Chinese Medicine system.

Having trained in Chemistry initially, I can unequivocally assure anyone that acupuncture has an extremely scientific basis. Just because the language used to describe organ systems is ancient and not what is used in conventional medicine, does not mean it holds any less truth or value.

Acupuncture is effective on children and animals so how can anyone possibly argue that this is due to any placebo? Those of you who have seen that BBC documentary that showed up brain activity on an MRI device on manipulation of an acupuncture point should be confident that there is indeed an effect on the central nervous system. How about the footage of the open heart surgery where acupuncture was used as the only anaesthetic? Here there was the advantages of: eliminating all the dangers of a conventional general anaesthetic; the patient recovery was reduced and it was much cheaper.

Do doctors really understand the complex chemical pathways that each prescribed drug has on the body? Is it so important to understand these processed down to the electron level to be satisfied that a medicine will work? Surely it’s more important to treat the person as a whole rather than to palm off some general type of drug hoping that it’ll elicit the desired effect?

I simply hope that I’ve given you something to think about and ask that you keep an open mind. Chinese medicine is steeped in thousands of years of observation and practice whereas conventional medicine has only been around for a couple of hundred. I am certainly not saying that we should choose one type of treatment completely in favour of another- why not combine both? Is my gp friend so arrogant to presume that western medicine holds all the answers?

In fact in China, where there a lot of technological advancements in science and medicine, the doctors still continue to couple both conventional medicine with Chinese medicine as patients have far better rates of recovery. There are even whole departments dedicated to massage and Qi Gong so that a patient may continue to maintain the state of their health when it’s improved.

I can’t help but feel that the Western world could learn a lot from my kinsmen- please keep an open mind.

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