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If Acupuncture & Chinese Medicine is so good…. why Don’t The Chinese Use It?
Charles Buck
So asked a rather grumpy UK journalist in his headline for a lead national daily article a while ago.
News to me!
Two decades earlier I had completed a clinical internment in a Shanghai TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) hospital and they all seemed to be quite busy providing acupuncture and dispensing Chinese herb medicines to queues of patients.
But, maybe I am out of date, maybe I am indeed “a fossil” as my kids claim.
I decided to go on a fact-check mission…
I discovered that the Shanghai TCM hospital I worked at in 1990 had been demolished — and in its place the completely new modern hospital with outpatient departments and a 600 bed inpatient facility. To cope with the demand for this famous hospital a 720 bed sister hospital has also been built across the river in the Pudong area of Shanghai. Quite a few other hospitals and clinics also provide acupuncture and Chinese medicine in the city.
Casting my search more widely across the country I found that China’s health service included a total of around 4000 large TCM hospitals. These are staffed by doctors with a minimum of five years medical school training and are…
