Advocates for acupuncture in the West want to see appropriate provision, as would be indicated by the evidence to date. In the East, provision is much more universal, and recent large-scale observational research hints at the potential for a major impact on public health. But even here, in the home of acupuncture, it is only used by a minority of the population.
This presentation will present the relationship between the Western and traditional East Asian perspectives and illustrate how they can learn and develop from each other. It will describe how the successful reductionist approach in modern science risks missing some of the pearls hidden within the esoteric traditions, but also how it can help us develop optimal protocols that can be incorporated within industrialized medicine.
We all need to work together so that therapeutic approaches that are derived from the mechanistic evaluation of acupuncture traditions are not divorced from those traditions and subsequently mislabelled as modern novel interventions.
The biggest challenge for traditional practice is how to shed those elements that must be wrong, and still preserve the therapeutic essence of the practice, whilst making the most of the breakthroughs of reductionist science.
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