I wanted to write a brief post about what acupuncture is today and how it became what it is. This is going to be part of a larger conversation that I’ll inevitably be having regarding the many styles of acupuncture. This all mostly comes in light of me having all these ideas for posts, but feeling like some background was necessary (for instance, why and how I chose Pacific College was based a lot on what they teach and how they teach it, which needs context).

Before I start I just wanted to say that anyone interested in understanding how Chinese medicine works, or learning more about the history should definitely consider reading The Web that has no Weaver. Ted Kaptchuck does a much better job than I will.

Chinese medicine is well over 2,00o years old. How old exactly or where or how it started no one knows; there are bunch of theories and some are rather far fetched, ultimately what matters is that we have a tremendous amount of wisdom and an incredibly powerful method for healing.

What we do know is what Chinese medicine looks like today, and we have a reasonably good idea as to how it came to look this way. In 1911 the Chinese government banned its own traditional medicine as part of its effort to modernize. They really wanted get rid of the old mythical or folklorish superstitious nonsense. But, in the 1950’s the nation faced a healthcare crisis (hmmm…that sounds familiar) and needed a cost-effective way to treat the masses. The government realized that their own traditional medicine could potentially be the solution (hmmm…) and also felt like it could serve as a way of instilling national pride. So the government collected many of the best physicians and compiled what is now known as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

There are other styles out there and I think it’s probably helpful to know as a patient or a student the different types of acupuncture out there and what you’ll be getting; not that one necessarily works better than the other, but they are different styles and therefore will feel different and may be more or less effective for you as an individual and may mesh better (or worse) with your personality. At some point I’d like to go a little more in depth into the similarities and differences, but for now an example: Japanese acupuncture uses less needles, the needles are thinner than TCM needles generally are, and tends to use less points which mostly fall on the arms and legs. If you’re afraid of needles, or are really averse to feeling anything, this might be something to look for.

I still don’t  know everything about any of the methods (that’s why I’m in school…), but I felt like I got a deep enough understanding of most of the styles out there that so that I was able to feel which style would match with me as a practitioner (I’m obviously still exploring and learning and fortunately don’t have to make any final decisions about styles until my 3rd semester). As of now, I plan on studying Classical Chinese medicine, a term I’ll explain soon enough…

(P.S. To anyone out there who has a good link to any online decent summaries of Chinese medical History, let me know so that I can post it here. I’m obviously not going to rewrite any of the books, but want to provide at least some resources to people visiting this blog on the blog itself and would love to provide links to other resources)