Williams will be experiencing a new treatment for her chronic back pain. Chiropractic medicine had failed her before, and her daily prescription drugs were worth neither the money nor the side effects they caused. When the doctor came into the room with a tray of thin, long needles, Mrs. Williams knew that her hematophobia would cause her no discomfort; these needles were not for drawing blood. Her back pain will be relieved through acupuncture, the 5000-year-old Chinese practice of treating pain through the balancing of energy channels. Since President Nixon's historical visit to China in 1972, a new wave of traditional Chinese medicine has swept through the United States and bonded with the Western approach to healing. Acupuncture, for example, has taken on many forms in America, and with continued research in the field, doctors have discovered many new uses for the Eastern remedy. With this renaissance comes the realization that acupuncture must really work, or why would it have been adopted within both Western and Eastern cultures to such a degree?The main difference between Eastern and Western acupuncture is the reason for inserting the needles. A traditional Chinese practitioner would place the needle at the "Ho-Ku" point in order to influence a meridian and the flow of chi. Practitioners of modern Western acupuncture would place the same needle in the same location, but would say that they were doing it to stimulate peripheral branches of the radial nerve in order to motivate the production of endorphins, the natural morphine-like substances produced in the brain that cause humans to feel less pain. The belief that life energy, called "chi," flows through the body via a series of energy pathways, called "meridians," did not mesh with the materialist doctrines of Western society, so more scientific explanations were devised. This new reasoning also made it easier for Chinese medical centers to be established, for any d...
