I have a sort of funny relationship with acupuncture: This strange and ancient Oriental art burst upon the American consciousness just about Inc same time that I entered the field of health journalism. Infact, if memory serves, the very first article on health that I wrote was on the subject of acupuncture. I titled it “Acupuncture?” By that, I meant to convey the idea that using the body as a pincushion to achieve healing was almost incomprehensible. But I concluded the article with a challenge to the medical profession to take an honest look at acupuncture to see if there was really something to it. The mere fact that Western doctors can’t “understand” acupuncture, I charged, was no good reason not to give it a fair trial.
To be perfectly honest, I never expected that a fair trial would be given. Much less did I suspect what has actually occurred.

Why acupuncture caught on so fast among American doctors, I can’t say, except to suggest that perhaps there is something about inserting needles into a patient that makes a doctor feel “right at home.” In any case, when I wrote that first article, my research was based almost entirely on some rather hard-to-get books and a few accounts in relatively obscure journals. I was able to locate only two physicians who were practicing acupuncture in the United States, and one of them consented to be interviewed only if we agreed not to mention his name.

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