How does acupuncture work ?  What is it doing ?  These are the questions that I asked when first introduced to Oriental Medicine and  now answer every day as an acupuncturist. Those of us who practice acupuncture in the West have done a disservice to the medicine by only giving the simplistic explanation of “moving Qi,” and then defining Qi as “energy” that travels through invisible “meridians.” Being a skeptic comes naturally to me. I have an inquisitive mind that is not easily dissuaded by simple esoteric explanations OR reductionist Western scientific rationalizations.  However I have found truth in both Western scientific and Eastern philosophical reasonings.  True to my integrative approach of taking the best of eastern medicine and accentuating with the best of western medicine,  I discovered that the poetry of Oriental medicine can not singularly be explained by Daoist philosophy or Western diagnostic imaging.  Instead Oriental medicine is better served by looking at it from both points of view to find the synthesis where they both meet. (more…)