Acupuncture

Acupuncture

Acupuncture was an ancient Chinese healing art that involves the insertion of needles into specific points of the body. It has a long history, and thus carries a huge culture component. In China, acupuncture is not merely seen as a medical treatment but rather a cultural heritage, a reflection of the intelligence of the Chinese civilization. People in China focus more on its culture content than on its clinical efficiency. In the U.S, because of acupuncture's long history, strange procedure and mysterious culture content, it gains much attention from popular media and scholarship. However, when it became an alternative treatment in American, people here focus much on its clinical efficiency and biomedical mechanism, but usually ignored its culture component. This blog post aims to analysis the effects of culture component of acupuncture on the popular media treatment and scholarly treatment in China.

This might be a surprising fact to most of the American that acupuncture is not a popular treatment in China. The percentage of population in China who has acupuncture treatment would be far less than that of the population in the U.S. "According to the 2007 National Health Interview Survey, an estimated 3.1 million U.S. adults and 150,000 children had used acupuncture in the previous year" (NIHCP, 2007). Some of the acupuncturists even came to the U.S for a better career. Because of its lack of attention, acupuncture is now facing a major crisis of development. There was not much media coverage on acupuncture in the last few years. Popular media focus much on the culture content of acupuncture. For example, most of the popular media covered the news that acupuncture was announced as one of the World Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNISCO. Some media covered the fierce disputes between China and Korea on the issue of the origin and the standardization of acupuncture. The types of news that appear the most in Chinese media were about acupuncture's development in western countries. It's seem paradoxical to me that Chinese popular media cares so much on how the world evaluate about acupuncture, but ignores the fact that the influence of acupuncture in China is gradually disappearing.

When it comes to the scholarly treatment of acupuncture in China, I think the scholars should take responsibility for acupuncture's situation. Most of the scholars lack the courage of challenging acupuncture. I have to admit that acupuncture has strong culture background. It was imbedded in a traditional Chinese medicine theoretical framework that related to the balance of yin-yang and Daoism, which are all considered as the culture treasure in China. It will be difficult for Chinese scholar to challenge them. However, when scholars all over the world are trying to figure out the biochemical mechanism