Acupuncture Rising V

Acupuncture Rising: From Acupuncture Anesthesia to Assisted-IVF, Part 2

By Changzhen Gong, PhD

Acupuncture's cultural and historical roots go back to the emergence of Chinese civilization. For more than 2,000 years, acupuncture needling has been continuously practiced on the largest population in the world.

As a system of medical treatment, acupuncture's prevalence and robustness are continuously demonstrated by strong public demand, growing scientific evidence, and vast institutional support. Over the last thirty-odd years, students, scholars, researchers and practitioners of acupuncture and Chinese medicine in the United States have witnessed a swift rise in popular acceptance of acupuncture therapy, hand-in-hand with the profession's steady advancement.

Although the increasing momentum of acupuncture acceptance and awareness in the West is based on a solid foundation of daily work and practice by tens of thousands of practitioners around the world, the acupuncture profession has also been shaped by a succession of historical landmark events. In this article, I attempt to trace the trajectory of acupuncture's development as a global medicine by focusing on the following years: 1958, 1971, 1987, 1997, and 2002. These dates denote significant turning points in terms of forming institutional establishments, pioneering new fields of research, and expanding the presence of acupuncture/Chinese medicine throughout the world.
1997: NIH Consensus
Complementary and alternative medicine achieved substantial forward momentum in the United States during the 1990's. As a modality of complementary and alternative medicine, acupuncture was especially prominent, eliciting an increasing number of clinical trials and mechanism research studies. In November 1997, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a conference on acupuncture. This conference was the first of its kind concerning a modality of complementary and alternative medicine. The conference intended to provide health care providers, patients, and the general public with an accurate assessment of the use and effectiveness of acupuncture for a variety of conditions. Participants included a non-federal, non-advocate, 12-member panel representing the following constituencies: acupuncture, pain medicine, psychology, psychiatry, physical medicine and rehabilitation, drug rehabilitation, family practice, internal medicine, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, physiology, biophysics, and the public. In addition, 25 experts from these same fields presented data to the panel and a conference audience of 1,200.
As part of the NIH acupuncture conference, acupuncture-related literature was researched through Medline. An extensive bibliography of references was provided to the panel and the conference audience by experts, with abstracts and relevant citations from the literature. Scientific evidence was given precedence over clinical anecdotal experience. The panel responded to predefined questions, developing their conclusions based on scientific evidence presented both in the open forum and in the scientific literature. The panel drafted a statement, which was read aloud in its entirety, then circulated in written form to the experts and the audience for comment. The panel resolved conflicting opinions and recommendations, releasing a revised statement at the end of the conference. The panel finalized its revisions after the conference. The draft statement was made publicly available on the World Wide Web immediately following its release at the conference, and was updated with the panel's final revisions.
The NIH consensus conference on acupuncture reached the following conclusion: Acupuncture as a therapeutic intervention is widely practiced in the United States. While there have been many studies of its potential usefulness, many of these studies provide equivocal results because of design, sample size, and other factors. The issue is further complicated by inherent difficulties in the use of appropriate controls, such as placebos and sham acupuncture groups. However, promising results have emerged, for example, showing efficacy of acupuncture in adult postoperative and chemotherapy nausea and vomiting and in postoperative dental pain. There are other situations such as addiction, stroke rehabilitation, headache, menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, fibromyalgia, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, low back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and asthma, in which acupuncture may be useful as an adjunct treatment or an acceptable alternative or be included in a comprehensive management program. Further research is likely to uncover additional areas where acupuncture interventions will be useful¹.
Following the NIH conference, acupuncture became a hot topic in the booming field of complementary and alternative medicine. Acupuncture images appeared repeatedly on the covers of the mainstream news media, and an article, "Acupuncture Works," was published in Time magazine on November 7, 1997.
The milestone NIH conference and the increasing prevalence of acupuncture in the 1990's brought acupuncture to the attention of the American Medical Association, which advised its members to look at acupuncture and complementary medicine seriously. To stimulate scientific and professional inquiry, the AMA suggested designating an entire issue of the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) to acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, moxibustion, and other modalities of complementary medicine^2,3,4. JAMA complied, dedicating its November 11, 1998 issue to alternative medicine.

This is published in Acupuncture Today.