Is Acupuncture Medicine Feasible for Your Problem?

Jonathan Clogstoun-Willmott

December 3, 2020

Chinese Acupuncture Medicine works a different way to Western Medicine. For a start it’s based on over 2500 years of experience with health traditions vastly different from ours in the West.

Chinese medicine theory is also quite different to that of western medicine. The way it treats people is also quite different, with treatments such as acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, herbs, tai chi and meditation.

In China and many other countries that owe their medicine to China, acupuncture is a vital tool for health.

When we use acupuncture to treat diseases in the West, before starting we diagnose each patient in terms of Chinese medicine. These terms are often what are called ‘syndromes‘ or based on knowledge of acupuncture channel theory.

We base the treatment on those syndromes, not on the name of the disease as Western medical literature describes it.

So traditional acupuncture doesn’t treat diseases with names as does a Western trained doctor. Take headache: it could be caused by a range of syndromes in Chinese medicine, and each would require a different treatment.

So just saying Chinese medicine can cure headaches is a nonsense. Actually, to be fair, your Western doctor would also take care to diagnose your headache and then design a treatment according to his diagnosis.

The philosophy behind Chinese acupuncture is what makes it different

The point is that the philosophy of Chinese Medicine is radically different to that of orthodox Western medicine. So treatment is given for entirely different reasons.

Down below you’ll find how acupuncture theory might explain a few Western-named disease conditions.

For example, my book “Yuck! Phlegm!” shows you how to apply the ideas in Chinese medicine to clear your phlegm.

Get past the lurid cover, and you’ll find which suggestions made on the internet for phlegm apply to you (and your phlegm) and which ones don’t – and why they don’t!

In each case the condition is given a range of possible diagnoses in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Of course in any individual case, the diagnosis might be one or more of the given descriptions in combination, or possibly another not described.

So whether acupuncture medicine can cure a disease with a Western name is a moot point. It depends on the underlying diagnosis and treatment.

Much more research may be needed before Western scientists are persuaded that a system which in their eyes is a pseudoscience can actually work! Not all the anecdotal evidence in the world is good enough for them.

Research

For a summary of research on various conditions, click on this list prepared by the British Acupuncture Council.

Chinese medicine embraced and benefited from the ideas of Western medicine almost immediately.

But Western medicine is extremely suspicious of Chinese medicine, preferring not to admit to using it until how it works is understood in scientific terms.

From this page you can reach a number of pages each on a different disease. They show how Chinese medicine might understand the condition and how acupuncture medicine could treat it.