Did you know that acupuncture therapy is one of the oldest medical treatments still in practice? In fact, it originated in China more than 2,500 years ago and is still widely practiced today.
The earliest mention of acupuncture therapy can be found in Huang Di’s “Nei Jing” or “Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine,” which is a text that dates all the way back to around 300 BCE. It describes various diseases, their origins, and descriptions of acupuncture points.
Hundreds of years later in 260 AD, Huang-Fu Mi, a well known physician of the times, compiled a 12 volume text called the “Zhen Jiu Yi Jing” or the “Comprehensive Manual of Acupuncture and Moxibustion,” which described the many different acu-points and explained how deeply to put each needle into the points. The teachings laid out by the “Zhen Jiu Yi Jing” are still used in modern acupuncture therapy.
Although the West had been introduced to acupuncture therapy by the 19th century, the practice didn’t catch on in the United States until the 1970s when former President Richard Nixon made a trip to China. The first known mention of acupuncture therapy in the United States was in a 1971 New York Times article by James Reston that described how it had helped relieve his post-surgery pain.
Now, four decades later, it’s used extensively throughout the United States. An acupuncture clinic’s mind and body medicine can help alleviate the symptoms of such diseases as headaches, lower back pain, menstrual cramps, migraines, and more. It can even help lessen the extreme symptoms cancer patients face when undergoing chemotherapy. If you’re suffering from any of these conditions, you should consider getting acupuncture therapy to help ease your symptoms.
If you have any questions about acupuncture therapy, feel free to visit the website of a center for mind body medicine or ask in the comments.