This paper examines the Chinese healing process of acupuncture and the ways that it has become increasingly accepted by Western medicine, due in large measure to the opening up of diplomatic relations between China and the United States that resulted from President Richard M. Nixon's foreign relations efforts during the early 1970s and to evolutions in scientific thinking that have begun to encourage Western doctors to view the process seriously. Although acupuncture has been practiced in China for at least 4,000 years, and documented in written historical texts for 3,500 years, the process was virtually unknown to Western physicians until quite recently.
Western missionaries and Chinese immigrants first brought acupuncture to the United States, but it was considered to be an inexact, unscientific method of therapy by outsiders who were steeped in a scientific tradition that demanded methods that could be proved, verified, and systematically reproduced. Acupuncture, like all Chinese medicine and unlike Western medicine, is intimately connected to philosophy, claiming a direct relationship between inner spiritual balance and physical health. Western medicine has only recently begun to acknowledge the efficacy of seeking such a balance in maintaining healthy vigor. More recent discoveries of the existence of natural pain inhibitors such an enkephalins and endorphins have also provided possible explanations for acupuncture's claimed effectiveness as a surgical anesthetic that make the process more acceptable to the Western medical establishment.
The theory behind acupuncture is based on the Chinese concept of the chi, the individual's life force. The two extremes of the chi are the yin and the yang, which roughly correspond to the positive and negative, and to the male and the female. Good health requires a balanced chi, allowing both extremes to flow equally within the individual. Acupuncture posits the existence of mer...