A Review EssayAcupuncture: Politics and Medicine

by Catherine L. Luh and David A. Wilson

Since the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, the Chinese have taken major steps toward
repudiating accepted ideas of the superiority of western
technology and the neutrality of science. In the West, the
development of science and medicine within the capitalist
system has led to the monopolization of science by elites. This
is not an automatic result of scientific and technological
advancement, as some western sociologists will have us believe.
Rather it results from capitalist relations of production. ¹ In
part, the Cultural Revolution was a great struggle to put
human needs in control of science and technology, including
medicine. The Chinese sought to tear down the system of
hierarchical relations which developed with industrialization in
the West and in the Soviet Union and which threatened to
overwhelm China's socialist experiment as well. This cultural
revolution promoted a political ideology in which acupuncture
and other forms of traditional medicine could be studied and
practiced as a science on par with western medicine because
they meet the needs of the people-the basis for medicine
within China's socialist context.

The experience of generations of practice has provided
the empirical evidence that patients benefit from acupuncture
treatment. What the Chinese choose to stress is not only the
scientific element but also the political aspect of acupuncture
study and treatment. The Chinese attribute the success of
acupuncture treatment to the practitioner's "earnest study of
Chairman Mao's philosophical works, his/her painstaking
efforts to remold both the objective and his/her own
subjective world, his/her proletarian sympathy with the
patients and his/her spirit of daring to practice." Politics, not
science, stands at the fore of Chinese materials on
acupuncture. And there is sound reason for the Chinese to
emphasize politics, not simply to explain the development of
the traditional acupuncture technique or the traditional
system out of which it developed, but to explain the use of
acupuncture as an integral part of their medical practice today.

The subtlety of this point is worth emphasizing. The
Chinese contention is not (as occasionally parodied in Western
media) that acupuncture's effectiveness in any particular
situation is determined by the doctor's or the patient's
familiarity with the writings of Mao. Rather, they correctly
argue that the decisions about the uses of acupuncture-how
to use it, when, by whom, and for whom-are political ones.

If one wishes to understand acupuncture, one might
begin with a look at history. There are a number of good,
readable introductory texts, including Felix Mann, Acupunc-
ture: The Ancient Chinese Art of Healing (London:
Heinemann and Company, 1971 ); Marc Duke, Acupuncture
(New York: Pyramid House, 1972 ); Yoshio Manaka and Ian A. Urquhart
, The Layman's Guide to Acupuncture (New York:
Weatherhill, 1972 ). These three books all give fairly detailed
explanations of the traditional medical system, but since their
primary source of information is the Huangdi Nei Jing Su Wen,
translated by Ilza Vieth as The Yellow Emperor's Classic of
Internal Medicine (Berkeley; University of California paper-
back edition, 1972 ), one may choose to start there.

The Yellow Emperor's Classic is the world's earliest
extant medical treatise. Theoretically composed by the Yellow
Emperor, it was most likely written during the Warring States
Period (481-221 B.C.). In this treatise, the science of
acupuncture is already thoroughly integrated into the context
of Taoist and Naturalist thought. Acupuncture points are
defined as holes for the passing in and out of the body of qi
(ch'i), the life force. These points connect to form lines or
meridians, and each meridian links specific organs with the
surface of the body. Qi and blood circulate through the body
along the meridians. Illness results when yin and yang the
manifestations of qi, are not in harmony in the body. The
imbalance may be throughout the entire body, within one
organ, or along one or more of the 12 meridians which
connect related acupuncture points.

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