Acupuncture

Alternative, complementary, and integrative healing are all part of a well-debated but poorly researched area of medicine. Doctors of the conventional American and European medical communities have been long prone to dismiss unconventional healing methods such as acupuncture, herbal supplements, and massage therapy as ineffective or outright crackpot methods of treating illness. The view of the medical community, however, seems to have little impact of the growing popularity of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) among patients. An increasing number of people in the United States and Europe have been turning to these treatments in addition to or instead of traditional Western medicine. The sheer popularity of CAM has forced the medical community to better examine the acceptance of CAM in medicine.

CAM encompasses a wide range of healing methods from acupuncture to massage therapy to herbal remedies such as St. John's Wort and Echinacea. Many of these remedies have been around for centuries. In the case of Acupuncture, there have been regulations on acupuncture in China and Japan for years. However, since many of these procedures have not been proven scientifically, western medicine had largely rejected the remedies as being effective forms of treatment. One professor of medicine at the Rabin Medical Center likened CAM to beliefs in magic and superstition that medicine relied on before modern scientific advances. "The deep model of Alternative medicine is anthropocentric magic. The explanations of the practitioners of alternate medicine are giving patients a set of magical rules to control the physical world, rules that have the human as the fulcrum."(1). In this article, he argues that alternative medicine is fraudulent, impossible to prove in clinical trials, and therefore, unacceptable even on the fringes of modern medicine.

Arguments to the contrary have grown increasingly louder as acupuncture, holistic therapies, and herbal remedies grow popular in the western markets. Most of these remedies and treatments have been around for centuries, so there must arguably be some healing properties to these treatments. People turn to CAM treatments when western medicine fails them. CAM provides people with more options and gives them hope for remedy. One argument for the acceptance of CAM is the Psychological impact it has on its patients. Herbal treatments and acupuncture give people hope for alleviation of their symptoms. One example of this can be seen at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. They provide their cancer patients acupuncture, massage therapy, yoga, and other CAM services in addition to their chemotherapy treatments. The theory behind these options focus on their patient’s emotional and physical well being beyond their illness. The chemotherapy treats the specific illness and the alternative healing takes care of the rest of the patient’s mind and body. This cooperation between CAM and Western medicine is known as integrated medicine. It marks the beginnings of cooperation between western and CAM medicine, even though the cancer patient is something of an extreme example.

Unfortunately, much of the CAM debate remains theoretical. As much as medical professors and practitioners enjoy arguing over the acceptability of Cam and integrated medicine, very little hard research had been done to test these theories until very recently. Members of the medical community both for and against CAM have argued that these healing methods do not need to be tested. It is practitioners argue that the consultation, a complex interplay between two people, is itself therapeutic, and it necessarily defies empiric understanding". This is, somewhat ironically the very problem that most practitioners of medicine have with CAM, if they have any issue with it at all. The medical community puts a great amount of weight on all things empirical. If a treatment is not a tangible theory, or a tangible theory that cannot be proven, that treatment is considered to be a failed hypothesis. Medical professionals therefore put more faith in conventional medicine.

This is not to say that there is no research being done on CAM and integrated medicines. Within in the past five years,