Why Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine ?

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and conventional (modern) medicine have different strengths and independent approaches to understanding and explaining health and disease, and therefore, they have the potential to be complementary. They are not mutually exclusive.

Nobody will argue with the fact that in an emergent life-threatening situation, the best place to be is in a state-of-the-art American hospital. Conventional medicine excels at saving lives. In addition, conventional medicine is great in medical diagnoses, urgent care and surgeries or trauma care.

TCM excels at treating non life-threatening, sub-acute and chronic conditions. For people who suffer from chronic illness and pain, especially those with functional disorders traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture have advantages of less side effects, no addictive effects, more accessibility, and being able to promote the self-healing ability of your body.  If you have a health issue and you are concerned about the side-effects of drugs, Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture would be a very good option to look into. If the conventional medical therapies do not work for you, we might still be able to help you with Chinese herbal medicines and acupuncture. Therefore, in addition to consulting  your conventional medical doctors, you will benefit from seeing a TCM healthcare provider for a different but complementary approach to your health.

Dr. Margaret Chan, M.D. Director-General, World Health Organization, states that “traditional medicine (TM) is often seen as more accessible, more affordable, and more acceptable to people and can therefore also represent a tool to help achieve universal health coverage. It is commonly used in large parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For many millions of people, often living in rural areas within developing countries, herbal medicines, traditional treatments, and traditional practitioners are the main—and sometimes the only—source of health care. The affordability of most traditional medicines makes them all the more attractive at a time of soaring health care costs and widespread austerity. In wealthy countries, TM meets an additional set of needs. People increasingly seek natural products and want to have more control over their health. They turn to TM to relieve common symptoms, improve their quality of life, and protect against illness and diseases in a holistic, nonspecialized way.”

Patients who choose acupuncture and Chinese medicine want to have more natural treatments and have better control over their own health. They want to treat the underlying roots of a health issue while controlling or alleviating its symptoms to increase the ability to function and to bring the entire body back into balance.

Usually herbal medicines and acupuncture treatments are used in combination. Compared with conventional medicine, acupuncture and herbs are natural and safer. They can treat many conditions other medical therapies may not be able to help. They are not only good for treating the health problems, but also for maintaining good health and preventing illness.

Conventional medicine is based primarily on mechanics and laboratory experiments, while traditional Chinese medicine has been based primarily on the long time experience of clinical practice on the human body. The mechanisms of many treatments of Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture are not well understood, but their clinical efficacy has been proven by many clinical studies.

Reference:

Margaret Chan, M.D. Director-General, World Health Organization, Supporting the integration and modernization of traditional medicine, Science 19 December 2014: Vol. 346 no. 6216 p. 1569 DOI: 10.1126/science.346.6216.1569-d

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6216/1569.4.summary