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Acupuncture

LET S BEGIN AT the beginning of our original alphabetical list: acupressure and acupuncture. Acupressure is acupuncture done with manual pressure instead of needles. Acupuncture is such a cornerstone of alternative care that it deserves a special look. So what is acupuncture, where does it come from, and what does it do?

Acupuncture advocates point to a Chinese tradition of healing going back thousands of years. The late Robert Imrie DVM, along with Wally Sampson DVM, David Ramey DVM, and Paul Ruell PhD (a historian of Chinese medicine) give a different timeline on the emergence of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine.

They report that the earliest known Chinese veterinary piece, Qinan Yaoshu, dating from the sixth century, does not mention acupuncture, while existing works on human medicine do refer to qi. (Qi can be defined as an invisible life force believed by practitioners to exist.) The first works mentioning acupuncture date from the fifth or eighth century, although these maybe referencing Huangdi neijing, which might date from 200 RC. Needling, meaningto bleed a patient, is first mentioned in the 1608 work Yuan Heng liaomaji, but that text has nothing like the modern understanding of specific meridians targeted by fine needles. (Meridians can be defined as channels along which practitioners believe qi flows.) In fact, in the 1800s, both China and Japan banned acupuncture as they tried to adopt modern medicine. With the rise of the Maoist government and China’s purging of all things foreign, the term traditional Chinese medicine was first heard in the west. A Frenchman, Georges Soulié de Morant wrote Chinese Acupuncture

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