A New Perspective on Acupuncture
Although acupuncture theory is a fundamental part of the
Huangdi Neijing, the clinical application of the needle therapy in ancient
China was always a limited one. From early times there have been warnings that
acupuncture might do harm. In books like Zhang Zhongjing's Shanghanlun it plays
only a marginal role. Among the 400 emperors in Chinese history, acupuncture
was hardly ever applied. After Xu Dachun called acupuncture a "lost
tradition" in 1757, the abolition of acupuncture and moxibustion from the
Imperial Medical Academy in 1822 was a radical, but consequent act. When
traditional Chinese medicine was revived after 1954, the "New
Acupuncture" was completely different from what it had been in ancient
China. The conclusion, however, is a positive one: The best time acupuncture
ever had was not the Song dynasty or Yuan dynasty, but is now - and the future
of acupuncture does not lie in old scripts, but in ourselves.
Source: Lehmann H
Acupuncture in
ancient China: how important was it really? J Integr Med. 2013
Jan;11(1):45-53.
No comments:
Post a Comment