Acupuncture in Western Health Care
May 24 -- When you're in pain, the prospect of having someone stick needles into your body may not seem like the greatest of ideas. Yet most of the more than five million Americans who visit acupuncturists each year are doing just that.
Increasingly, research experience is showing Western practitioners that when it comes to certain conditions, acupuncture can be just as effective as conventional treatments like medications.
"It's not so much that acupuncture is used in every instance to eliminate drugs. It may be used to reduce reliance on drug therapy as a way to deal with symptoms," says James Dowden, executive administrator at the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, a professional society of physicians who are trained to practice acupuncture and seek to incorporate it into their practice. "It becomes an alternative way to address a chronic condition."
Acupuncture has been used for thousands of years by Chinese practitioners for a wide array of ailments, but it is only recently that it has moved from the fringe of Western medicine.
A critical moment came in 1975, when New York Times reporter James Reston wrote about his experiences with acupuncture to relieve pain following an appendectomy in China. "That really started to open the gates for the first time to the West considering acupuncture as anything other than something bizarre and off the beaten path," says Dr. James Dillard, assistant clinical professor, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.
The first license was granted to an acupuncturist in the United States the next year. Yet until 1995, the Food and Drug Administration officially considered acupuncture needles to be experimental medical instruments.
Further strides were made in moving acupuncture towards the center of heath care in 1997, when the National Institutes of Health released a consensus statement on acupuncture in which a 20-member panel endorsed its use for pain and nausea and suggested it may be helpful in other conditions.
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