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Why Acupuncture?
Acupuncture: Holistic, Inexpensive, Effective, and Individually-Tailored
Many people have heard of acupuncture today, and more and more have tried it and are convinced of its effectiveness in treating innumerable conditions. Actually, acupuncture is a healthcare modality that is particularly relevant for the modern world. Unlike conventional Western medicine, which is inherently reductionistic and has become more and more profit-driven and impersonal over the past century, acupuncture is holistic, inexpensive, and individually-tailored. This makes it an excellent complement to the healthcare model of conventional Western medicine, as it serves us well when the latter fails.
Western Medicine's Weakness is Acupuncture's Strength
Western medicine is called “reductionistic” because it relies on theories about the way the body works that break the body’s functions up (reducing them) into smaller and smaller pieces. This can be a very powerful way to approach scientific research, but in medicine it often puts the cart before the horse. We understand one very small part well, but not how it connects with the whole body. For instance, a drug that is known to rectify a certain imbalance in hormones ends up causing multiple side effects, including cancer. This is exactly what HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) was discovered to do. In order to treat hot flashes, the standard Western medical treatment for Menopausal Syndrome (HRT) raised women’s risk of premature death. (There’s an old saying: “The operation was a success, but unfortunately, the patient died.”) This reductionistic approach is built-in to how biomedical science is practiced, and is both its strength (for instance, brain surgery that saves lives or drugs that treat type I diabetics who would have died very young in past centuries) and its weakness, as we have seen.
The Art of Acupuncture: Detecting Holistic Patterns
Acupuncture is based on holistic principles that allow treatments to be individually-tailored. Acupuncturists look at the whole person when diagnosing and treating illness, not just parts. Your headache may be due to stress, while your friend’s headache may be due to catching a chill this morning while walking her dog in the cold. They are fundamentally different headaches (even though they both may be felt on the frontal part of the head) – and they should thus be treated differently. Furthermore, I may know that you respond very well to needling on the hand yangming channel and it greatly helps relieve your headaches because you have a slightly yang deficient and damp constitution, while in your friend’s case, the same points – although in general indicated for externally contracted cold headaches – will only exacerbate the problem, as she is severely blood and yin deficient in constitution. These individual differences can be appreciated because we see a person and their symptoms as part of a holistic pattern. This pattern requires experience and practice to differentiate – which is the real art of acupuncture.
Acupuncture—the Low Cost Alternative
Acupuncture – compared to surgery (as well as many drug therapies) – is quite inexpensive. Surgeries routinely cost thousands of dollars, and don’t always solve the problem they were intended to. In addition, because of the damage they can cause the body, they often produce side-effects. Acupuncture is much less invasive, essentially side-effect free, and is not an irreversible procedure. In addition, it often works! Because of these factors, it makes sense in those conditions where surgery is elective or not immediately necessary to try acupuncture first. It may be the only treatment you need. And, if so, this will save you both from the expense and the potential for complications of surgery.
Summary
As we can see, acupuncture has many advantages over conventional Western medicine. Because of these, more and more people are turning to acupuncture for their healthcare needs. To learn a little more about what exactly acupuncture is, see: What is Acupuncture?, and What to Expect from an Acupuncture Treatment, or come visit me at my clinic.
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Acupuncture Treatment: Part of Chinese Medicine
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