I realized that maybe I should write a bit more here about this blog and the information it will cover. Perhaps I should have written more in the header, but it would be too long. Never mind. We´ll do the show right here.
Chinese medicine is a huge field. It´s a medical science that has kept transferring and researching information for the past 2500 or so years. Very little of the full system is known in the West. Most of what has come to the West to date is best described by Ted Kaptchuk, author of the famous book Chinese medicine: the Web that has No Weaver. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chinese-Medicine-Web-That-Weaver/dp/071260281X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283853115&sr=1-2:
”What is known of Chinese medicine in the West is like an African villager coming to a Western hospital and getting a couple of boxes of aspirin to take back home. In the village, this will be a miraculous treatment, but they will also think that this is all that Western medicine is.”
Chinese medicine has flaws too, just like Western medicine has, but the huge lack of information about the complete system here in the West makes it difficult to form a true opinion about the treatments, and about the great help they are to patients.
I´ll go into it this subject piece by piece, and let the blog weave a tapestry as time goes by. Part of my idea with the blog is to spread clear information about chinese medicine today. I´ve lectured about it several times for doctors and nurses inside the NHS over the years, and I have discussed it with many western medical practitioners on levels all the way from orderly to nurse to doctor to admin staff.
Some of them have a very poor opinion of chinese medicine. I think it´s pretty much for two reasons: 1) many who do chinese medicine in the West have very brief training. If I were a doctor with 5-7 years of intense study at university level, I probably wouldn´t be impressed either. 2) the Western medical practitioners get very little information about what classical chinese medicine is and what it can do. Not that most of them go looking for it either; they have enough with their own studies. There are other reasons, but these two points are probably the biggest gaps. It would be good for many patients´ health if we had better bridges across the information divide.
The full Doctor of Acupuncture in China is five years, full time, at university. On top of that comes specialization (residency, ST in Swedish terms) and internship – usually another two years. Sometimes with another specialization on top of that.
In Sweden (population 9 million), there are about 50-60 individuals with this training. They are all Chinese.
In the West there are also acupuncturists without this training who have very high skill, sometimes equal to or more than a chinese doctor – but the majority in the West don´t. Western acupuncturists often also meet quite few patients a day, whereas a chinese doctor in a hospital in China will have a long waiting line outside and see at least 20-50 patients (occasionally towards 100) in one day. This means that the Western acupuncturist rarely gets the same skill at diagnosis as the China-based chinese doctor can. Lately, there has been a movement towards the chinese model in the West: Multi-bed acupuncture and Community Acupuncture, something we will talk more about later on in this blog.
As a patient, it is very difficult to have enough information to know the difference between aspirin (helped my back-ache now, acupuncture´s great!) and the chinese medicine quality level that equals Western medicine in a full Western hospital. Even low level acupunture will make a difference that can be huge for the individual, but high quality acupuncture can really transform someone´s health and life in depth for a long time. It can also affect some illnessess that Western medicine are stumped by right now.
A Doctor of Acupuncture (OMD) guarantees high quality in training time, but does it equal that this will be the the most skilled practitioner of chinese medicine? No. It can be a good starting point for comparison, but Chinese medicine depends much more on the individual practitioner and their energy and skill than does Western medicine in its current format. This is one reason the most skilled chinese medicine practitioners are known to have a long-time and stable practice of qigong and/or meditation in their life. We´ll look at this later in the blog.
Since the end of the ”Cultural Revolution” there has been an increasing mixing in of Western medicine into the OMD programs in China (xiyi, Western medicine; zhongyi, chinese medicine). Today, it probably equals a 50-50 mix, and the view on chinese medical diagnosis and thought is often filtered through Western medical views. Essentially, the old system of acupuncture, what I will call classical chinese medicine (CCM) in this blog, is slowly dying out in China too, even with the long training they get. The information itself is being lost. There are still practitioners of CCM in China: if you are lucky to find one, you have often found an ”old doctor”, a laoyisheng, a medical practitioner in their 60´s or above. Some of the old material made it to the West with refugees, which means that, in a nice little irony, some Western-trained acupuncturists actually know more about the really old system than a graduate of the OMD (Doctor of Oriental Medicine) course in China.
It´s a complex mix to keep track of. If you´re looking for really high quality acupuncture, spend some time looking and asking around. Ask how long people have trained, and where. How much actual study-time did that mean with teachers? Ask how much clinic time they had, and where. Did they work for a long time in a clinic or a long time in a hospital? (long time, not occasional lessons over one to three months). Once you find someone you think look good on paper, meet them. How does their overall energy seem? How do their eyes look? The state of the practitioner´s own health is very important in Chinese medicine. They would say that if you can´t take care of your own health well, how can you give advice on someone elses?
Almost all diploma courses in Sweden call themselves ”part time”, which in real life usually means 40-80 hours face-to-face with a teacher per year for three years. Then home studies and web studies during the rest.
Ask. If the acupuncturist doesn´t want to answer or gets annoyed about it, you have your answer already. It´s your health. As long as you are common sense polite and nice when asking, they should be open and tell you, and be able to give you clear answers.
