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The following article was published in Your Health Magazine. Our mission is to empower people to live healthier.
Tareq Abedin, MD
What Acupuncture Taught Me About Medicine
Ashburn Sterling Internal Medicine & Pediatrics
. http://www.myhealthcare.org/

What Acupuncture Taught Me About Medicine

Acupuncture changed the way I practice traditional western medicine. My journey into acupuncture began a few weeks after my first successful treatment of my children's allergies with homeopathy. I was stunned with the success of the homeopathic treatment, and was intrigued by the invitation from Harvard University's school of medicine to take a yearlong class in traditional Chinese and Japanese acupuncture.

Although I took the class thinking it might help some patients with back and shoulder pain, I was stunned at how effectively it out performed standard medical therapies in diverse situations from the treatment of a child with Tourette's, to severe allergic hives and asthma that did not respond to previously prescribed steroids and inhalers. Two of the important lessons I learned were that I really did not know as much about medicine and healing as I thought that I did, and more importantly came the sobering realization that modern medicine has only scratched the surface of the secrets of the human body.

At the time I took the class I myself had a horrible tennis elbow. After one of the lectures I asked by instructor what is the acupuncture point that will best treat the tennis elbow. With a look of disdain on his face he answered the question. It took me a little bit of time to realize why he had reacted that way.

It was because he understood that I was completely missing the point of acupuncture and the eastern philosophy of healing. Although there is a specific point that will help my tennis elbow, using that point was NOT the way to holistically treat my problem. Instead he was trying to teach me to use acupuncture to balance the body, and once the body is balanced the body itself would take care of the problem. The specific point for treating the elbow was a secondary treatment, not the primary treatment.

After several months of the Harvard Medical Acupuncture class, it became a habit to treat the patient and not the problem first. It became so much of a habit that without realizing what I was doing, I was also practicing standard western medicine with the same mindset. I started treating the whole patient rather than treating a specific problem.

I spend most of my time now trying as hard as my patients will allow working on bringing the body into balance first and then allowing the human body to fix the particular problem. After all what medication can say that it works better than the human body to heal itself. Only after attempting to restore the body to a sense of balance do I entertain treating a problem directly.

In the end, even if I were to never again use an acupuncture needle, the experience as completely changed my medical practice, and my philosophy towards the healing arts.

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