Tonic roots, healing needles

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Modernizing the practice

The tendency to discover new techniques and integrate them with ancient understanding continued until the nineteenth century, when the Opium War of 1840 turned China into a semicolonial society. As is so often the case, Western colonial powers derided traditional medicine as primitive and outdated. This continued until the middle of the twentieth century, when the Communist Party came to power. Although the Communists brought much turmoil to China, they also saw the need to promote traditional medicine to avoid dependence on the West. Thus, there was a great need for traditional practitioners because there were far too few Western-trained physicians to serve the huge population. It was during this period that the traditional physicians began to recover their lost reputations, and traditional medicine began its course of revival that continues today.

Western-trained physicians and scientists began to do research on acupuncture and herbal medicine in the 1930s, and a gradual integration of the Eastern and Western systems evolved. In 1945, an acupuncture clinic was opened in a Western hospital in China for the first time in history. Since then, traditional medicine and Western medicine have been practiced side by side in Chinese hospitals, sometimes by one physician trained in both fields. For example, a cancer patient might receive radiation or surgery to remove a tumor, but immediately afterward, the patient is sent to the herbal department to receive formulas to strengthen the immune system and normalize blood count. Acupuncture is often used during surgery in these hospitals to reduce the need for anesthesia.

Acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine in the United States

For more than 150 years, acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine have been quietly practiced in Asian communities in the United States. The practices remained “underground” as an isolated cultural phenomenon until 1971, when interest was sparked by the experience of The New York Times reporter James Reston. His acupuncture treatments for postoperative pain after an emergency appendectomy in China led him to write an article in which he stated, “I have seen the past, and it works.”

At the time that Reston’s article appeared, no state had any legislation regarding acupuncture. By 1976, eight states had legalized acupuncture and six schools had been established. Today, there are more than sixty schools, and thirty-eight states have licensing laws that regulate acupuncturists.

The Food and Drug Administration estimates that between 8 million and 12 million Americans receive acupuncture each year and that its popularity continues to increase as more people hear of its effectiveness. Acupuncture has been endorsed by the American Osteopathic Association, the American Chiropractic Association, and the American Veterinary Medical Association. It has been incorporated into the substance-abuse treatment programs of numerous U.S. hospitals and is considered so effective that drug offenders in some areas, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County, have a choice of receiving acupuncture or going to jail. Gradually, hospitals and conventional medical practices are adding acupuncturists to their staffs as the demand for acupuncture grows. Insurance companies such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield are also increasingly providing coverage for acupuncture, and some policies will cover the cost of herbal medicines.

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