hometherapiesacupunctureis chinese medicine better?

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A real bone of contention, for some people. The fact of the matter is that they both have their strengths and their weaknesses. Western medicine is fantastic at saving lives. If your life is in danger this what you need to keep you alive, e.g. if you were hit by a bus, and seriously hurt, you would not need an acupuncturist to re-establish the balance of your body. You would need a lot of life supporting drugs and equipment, in fact there would be nothing I could do other than to try and keep you alive until the paramedics arrived, and this knowledge I have thanks to western science. Where this all falls apart is in the after care. Once you are out of danger there is little that can be done, or offered as far as western medicine goes. Taking the above scenario aftercare would usually consist of pain killing drugs and physio-therapy, the drugs would eventually take their toll and produce unwanted side effects e.g. stomach problems and possibly some damage to the viscera, and physio-therapy has it's benefits and limitations. This is where Chinese medicine comes into it's own. The after care that can be offered here is just as fantastic as western medicine is at saving lives. The beauty is Chinese Medicine focuses on the quality of someone's life, and not just whether they are alive or not. The aim of acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine is and always has been to enhance the quality of life.

In China, Western Medicine and Chinese Medicine work side by side. When you arrive at a hospital you meet with reception, where a decision is made as to whether you receive Traditional Chinese Medicine or receive Western Medical intervention. This system works remarkably well for the patient care system. This is because the medical establishment is not given the luxury of being able to bicker over who is the best, due to:

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• The Traditional Chinese medical doctor is greatly valued, for example, as is the senior consultant of the cardiac department. They are both seen as very useful assets to the medical system, one saving life from the brink of death and the other preventing a relapse and enhancing the quality of life for the patient after a particularly harrowing time. This means that they command the same amount of respect from one another, as well as from the public. Because an equal amount of respect is given and received the bickering stops, as one practitioner places his trust in the other. For one can do something for the patient the other is totally incapable of doing, and vice-versa.
• The fact that Chinese medicine was the mainstream healthcare system until the introduction of Western Medicine in 1920. This means the root and foundations of Chinese Medicine are still rock solid, and the traditional medical system is still as popular today as it was 3000-5000 years ago.

So the ideal situation is for the practitioners of both medical systems to work together. This has started to happen as some western medical practitioners are beginning to realise the benefits of Chinese Medicine, for conditions that they find particularly difficult to treat. There is however a long way to go before there is any unification, but the political parties still continue in their struggle for state registration, which is in parliament as you read this page. However state registration appears to take an immense amount of work, as the legal parties trawl through their mountain of paper work.

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