Acupuncture is a very old form of medicine. While no one knows when it began, some estimates date its origins to roughly 3000 BCE – 5000 years ago – and some say even earlier. The question of where it originated also remains unanswered. While the practice of acupuncture is popularly accepted as a Chinese invention, the 1991 discovery of a 5000 year old mummy in the European Alps raises questions regarding acupuncture’s true origins. Preserved intact in the ice, this mummy was found to have tattoos and puncture-marks on his body that correspond with Chinese acupuncture points. Moreover, the specific combination of points found on the mummy’s body forms an easily recognizable treatment protocol that an acupuncturist might use to treat arthrosis of the spine, knees, and ankles – conditions the mummified man was known (by computer tomography) to have suffered.
While the mummy find suggests that acupuncture may not have originated in China, the current incarnation of the medicine is very much a Chinese tradition. The context of acupuncture: its philosophical, linguistic, cultural, and historical underpinnings, are entirely Chinese. The points have Chinese names and characters. The classical texts are Chinese. The historical greats of acupuncture were Chinese. The bulk of the known history of acupuncture is thoroughly entwined with Chinese culture. To call acupuncture anything other than a Chinese medicine may be technically accurate, but the convention of identifying acupuncture with China is fair enough to stand.
In early China, acupuncture arose not as a single system of medicine but as a group of separate and distinct lineages. These separate lineages developed their own specializations, approaches, and methods. Different regions, philosophies, traditions, events, and illnesses molded and shaped the practice of acupuncture into different forms. These sometimes diverged, paralleled, or converged with one another. Some traditions probably developed in isolation from the others while others overlapped and combined or excluded one another. This was classical acupuncture: a shifting and varied mosaic of specialties that flourished in China and neighboring regions for centuries.
Through thousands of years of history - times of peace and war, droughts, famines, times of plenty, changing philosophies and political climates - the practice of acupuncture itself enjoyed golden eras and suffered through low periods when the medicine degraded. The middle of the twentieth century found acupuncture in a low period. In a tumultuous 1950s China that was seeking to define itself and reconcile its ancient culture and it's modern direction, acupuncture underwent a drastic transformation. The government directed a group of acupuncturists to pick and choose and combine information from the many disparate lineages. The practice of acupuncture was thus standardized and combined with herbal medicine to create a single and unified Chinese medicine: one that could stand side by side with modern western medicine. The result of this synthesis was “traditional Chinese medicine” (TCM). In comparison with classical Chinese medicine, TCM’s systemized and simplified approach is easier to apply on a large scale and accessible to more people - an important consideration for a government that was seeking to provide health care for over 550 million people.
When acupuncture, as TCM, arrived in the west, it took hold and steadily gained in popularity. Here, approached by new minds with different worldviews, the medicine has enjoyed fresh interpretations. Interdisciplinary communication and modern technology have produced groundbreaking research in the fields of eastern and western medicine. Acupuncturists, chiropractors, physical therapists, orthopedists, and medical doctors have found common ground and crossovers between their respective fields. Modern insights and understandings of the human body, once impossible and unimaginable, have shed new light on the field of acupuncture.
Some of the most exciting and progressive developments in the field of acupuncture have occurred very recently and have involved the resurgence in the popularity of classical Chinese medicine (CCM). These older and more obscure early forms contain roots, nuances and subtleties that fill out and give body to the more streamlined TCM. As old information is unearthed and new information is revealed, strong parallels have emerged between the ancient and the modern.