I remember well 6-7 years ago a student-intern came on my shift in the fall. He already had one summer quarter of treating patients under his belt. He said something that has stuck with me to this day: “I know it doesn’t work when we simply use the point combinations we learned in class and put needles in those points. I want to learn a different way.”
What he was saying was that there is more to acupuncture than simply putting needles in acupoints. There is nothing wrong at all with those point formulas we learn in our education; I completely support learning them. If you inspect them from a theoretical standpoint, you will see that they were arrived at through one or another of our key theories: yin-yang, five-phases, san jiao, and so on. But what this student noticed quickly was that patient complaints did not suddenly remit simply by needling these points. There is more to it.
