Acupuncture is a Chinese medical procedure using needles to penetrate at any of 409 points (361 meridian points and 48 extra points) more than 360 points in the human body. It is used to relieve pain and to treat many other illnesses.
Reports Alien Sheng, Acupuncture was brought with Chinese immigrants into the West to work on railroads and in the fields. The increase of using acupuncture in the United States began with a State visit to China by Richard Nixon in the 1970's. During this visit, a member of the U.S. delegation was given an emergency appendectomy. The only anesthesia that was used was acupuncture. The President was duly impressed and when he returned to the US, he called for further study of the procedure.
In 1994, the Washington Post was reporting that almost 15 million Americans had tried acupuncture, almost 6% of the total population. In 1995, The United States Federal Drug Administration classified acupuncture needles as medical instruments. In 1997 when the National Institute of Health issued a report titled, "Acupuncture: The NIH Consensus Statement." This report stated that acupuncture was indeed very useful in the treatment of certain conditions. It also stated that the side effects of acupuncture were less adverse than those resulting from either surgery or drugs. The report further encouraged Insurance Companies to give full coverage to acupuncture treatments for certain conditions. This was a major endorsement of the procedure. Some Medical schools including UCLA have begun to offer acupuncture as part of the curriculum. (Source: Alien Sheng, American Chronicle, Apr 15, 2007).
The State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine released the standard methods for locating points (The Location of Acupoints. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1990). There are three methods: surface anatomical landmarks, bone proportional measurement, and finger measurement. Some charts of acupoints are given below as examples:
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Acupuncture needles dating from 4,000 years ago have been found in China. They were made of stone, bronze, gold, silver and steel today. Acupuncture was developed by the theory that special meridian points in the body connected to the internal organs and that vital qi, or air or energy flows along the meridian lines. Diseases are caused by interruption of qi, qi in its normal function is restored by acupuncture.
Everything living has qi which has to do with a number of phenomena. Qi promotes circulation and organ function. It is the source of all movement and energy. Dr. Charles Lo, an acupuncturer, said, it comes from three sources: your parents, from the absorption of food, and from breathing air. These combine to give us the energy to move and think. It is the term for air in Chinese, and it is actually a kind of universal, ethereal concept. Putting needles into the places stimulates response from various organs. It is used for curing arthritis, asthma, headaches and labor pains. According to Dr. Charles Lo, there is some evidence of how acupuncture pain relief works. "When the needles go into the muscle, it simulates certain nerve fibers, which send a signal to the spinal cord. In turn, the spinal cord releases endorphin chemicals to send a signal off to the thalamus and a couple of other areas in the brain. So there's definite mechanistic Western explanation of why acupuncture works for pain."
The Chinese treat every patient differently. There are no two disorders that are alike, and there are no two treatments that are alike. This is the beauty of Chinese medicine, Dr. Charles Lo said. Western medicine has a limited reality in the way it approaches problems. They look at things primarily from a purely chemical, mechanistic viewpoint of the body. They don't integrate the emotional aspects with the physical and spiritual aspects of a person Until Western medicine starts to deal with the energetic aspects of the human body, they are not going to make any progress. Dr. Lo also pointed out that asthma is treated as disease in Western medicine, whereas in Chinese medicine, asthma is a symptom of an organ misfunction. The organ misfunction may not necessarily be the lungs. To treat all patients with the same asthma medication is pretty simplistic. Headaches come from many different sources. One of them is fatigue. Another one is excessive stress. In Chinese medicine, where the unbalances are determined. Epilepsy is a classic energetic type of disorder. It can be improved with acupuncture.
A variation of acupuncture is acupressure, in which the practitioner uses manipulation rather than penetration to alleviate pain or other symptoms. In acupuncture, fingertips are used to press on the body.