Acupuncture In The West

Many people, including myself, remember that when James Reston was in China in 1971 and he had to have emergency surgery, acupuncture was used as the anesthetic.

He wrote about it in The New York Times and we became aware of acupuncture as something newly-found in our western world.

Well, it turns out that the first practitioner in this country was a Philadelphia physician, Franklin Bache, and this was back in 1825! Bache published a study in a prestigious medical journal about treating a dozen prisoners suffering from chronic pain, neuralgia, rheumatism and other disorders.

The first report in Europe was even earlier. In 1683, Dr. Willem Ten Rhijne, who worked for the Dutch East India Company wrote a 20-page essay titled “De Acupunctura.”

So…start thinking about how long we’ve actually known about the value and importance of acupuncture instead of considering it as something newly rediscovered.