The real fact is 针麻 lack of consistency. Sometimes it works.

The real fact is 针麻 lack of consistency. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it helps to reduce the use of general anesthesia. Sometimes it actually increase the use of general anesthesia. A newer study even shows that anesthesia may weaken acupuncture's effectiveness. That may explain some of the conflicting data regarding the efficiency of acupuncture in the perioperative clinical setting. That fact is traditional chinese medicine community as a whole never endorse acupuncture as a replacement for conventional anesthesia. Beside, the author play down the side effect of conventional anesthesia. If anesthesia is so safe, why they still keep doing study on the effeness of acupuncture in the perioperative clinical setting. We don't do research again and again just to prove something not working. That fact is they try to find a way to reduce the use of conventional anesthesia. And at least acupuncture is one of the research area.

Acupuncture is just one of the many treatment methods under traditional chinese medicine. Generally, traditional chinese medical doctor use acupuncture as a complementary treatment. Because they know it's limitation. But acupuncture is still new to the western world. And people in the western world don't know it's limitation and put too much expectation on it. They try to use acupuncture for too many things, and sometimes even use it in a wrong way. If acupuncture is used improperly, it still may hurt human body.

Finally, one interesting fact though, chinese doctors immigrant to north american. Those traditional chinese medical doctors can still pratice traditional chinese meddicine for living. Those western medicine doctors have to either give up their profession or go back to school starting from beginning. You can image how hard it would be for them. I truly hope the author is a surgeon now as he was in China or at least he is working his way up.