How Different is the Western Medical Acupuncture?

There are quite a few differences between the Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Medical Acupuncture.

According to history, the Classical Chinese Acupuncture is based on Taoist thought and naturalism. This is being practiced in China for over thousand years.

Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM is a later version of herbal and acupuncture medicine. The Cultural Revolution period saw the revival of herbal medicine and acupuncture. These were then re-established by Mao Zedong and are actually the present form which is integrated with the Western concepts of medicine.

The modern form of this ancient practice of acupuncture is used in a lot of hospitals especially in Korea, Japan and some parts of Europe.

Medical acupuncture on the other hand is the contemporary form of this procedure which was developed by doctors in the United States and Great Britain.

Though the basic concept is from the traditional acupuncture, the modern medical acupuncture is quite different in various ways. While Classical acupuncture is based on procedures which are in use for over thousands of years, the Western medical acupuncture does not heed the traditional theories and concepts.

Classical acupuncture purely goes by observations and techniques which are traditional whereas the Western medical acupuncture derives its concepts from anatomy and physiology.

The terms used for describing classical acupuncture is the ‘Taoist Metaphor’ and languages used on a daily basis whereas the Western medical acupuncture uses terms based on biomedicine.

Apart from these theoretical differences, there are certain practical differences too. Traditional acupuncturists treat for symptoms as a whole and work on the overall energy imbalance in the body. They thus insert several needles in the patients and leave them inserted for at least twenty minutes or even longer.

Western medical acupuncturists on the other hand use far lesser needles and go in for very brief insertions for maybe two to three minutes.

This may be due to the fact that Medical acupuncture is carried out amidst a busy and bustling practice and the practitioner finds little or no time to spend on elaborate insertions with a lot of needles. So the procedure is reduced to a single needle therapy fine tuned to maximum efficiency.

One advantage of this situation is that this makes Medical acupuncture easy to learn than the traditional acupuncture and is more easily practiced by doctors, osteopaths, chiropractors, podiatrists, and other health practitioners. These people also do not see this procedure as something different. Rather they view this as an extension of what they are already doing.