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Acupuncture : a comprehensive text

Acupuncture: A Comprehensive Text provides a translation of a Chinese medical text compiled by the Shanghai College of Traditional Medicine in 1974, entitled Chen Chiu Hsueh. This work is itself an integration and extensive revision of four individual volumes previously issued under the same title, and it reflects the changing concerns and advances of the preceding ten-year period, including an expansion of the treatment section to include more psychosomatic and psychological disorders. A further revision appeared in 1975 with the same title, and all three works remain widely available. Unlike Needham's Celestial Lancets and Porkert's Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine, two major studies that explore the conceptual and theoretical foundations of traditional Chinese medicine, this compendium emphasizes therapeutics. Yin-yang concepts and phase energetics, the focus of previous works, are dismissed as irrelevant, the products of mechanistic thought. Instead the text provides a comprehensive overview of essential tract and point theory, as modified by contemporary experience, together with a complete description of all the known acupuncture points and a survey of the basic modes of treatment. Intended for the physician, it may well be considered the working equivalent of The Merck Manual. The translators have provided a succinct but thorough introduction to the essential concepts of traditional Chinese medicine for those unfamiliar with the field, while the authors have divided the subject matter into four main sections: channel theory, point theory, techniques, and therapy. The first section on channel theory discusses the theoretical basis for the linkage of acupuncture points by the tract network and explores some of the possible explanations for the therapeutic effectiveness of acupuncture and moxibustion treatments. Although references to classical texts substantiate the recognition of certain principles or effects, the focus always remains empirical findings, such as the principle of action at a distance, without any recourse to phase energetics or yin-yang concepts. (However, the traditional concept of the relationships and interactions of the body's components remains important to any understanding of therapeutic procedures.)