Call to include acupuncture in health system

By Our Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, NOV. 26. Participants at a seminar have urged the Government of India to introduce legislation for a resourceful adoption of acupuncture in the existing health care delivery system.

Urging policy-makers to undertake a comprehensive evaluation study of the ancient system of healing with needles in comparison with other branches of medicine, the speakers felt that the strength of acupuncture was its cost-effectiveness, non- involvement of medicines and absence of side-effects.

The seminar, was held with the support of the Indo-China Friendship Association.

Making a case for integration of acupuncture with other systems of medicine currently in practice in the country, Dr. Debasis Bakshi, secretary of the Calcutta-based Indian Research Institute for Integrated Medicine (IRIIM) felt that acupuncture, in combination with moxibustion, had the potential to appreciably lower the cost of mass health care by at least 25 per cent. Integration of acupuncture would also help achieve self- sufficiency in the national health care delivery system once it was recognised among traditional branches of medicine.

Evolving a holistic package of affordable health care was extremely relevant in a country where over 50 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line and where 75 per cent of the common morbidity was directly or indirectly linked to malnutrition, according to Dr. Bakshi. He pointed out that available drug supplies sufficed for only around 20 per cent of the sick population. While roughly 5 per cent of the people could afford to procure health care, only 15 per cent could access it through other means leaving a formidable 80 per cent without access to any form of hospital services, he said.

According to Dr. Bakshi, such a move would also be in keeping with the spirit of the National Health Policy Document which laid emphasis on a meaningful integration of indigenous/traditional branches of medicine with modern medicine so that the deficiencies of one could be supplemented by the other.

Though several major hospitals in the country had set up acupuncture units and various associations were striving to promote it as an effective alternative medicine, the benefits of the ancient system was beyond mass health care. This was due to the lack of concerted efforts to propagate it as a valid therapeutic system among policy-makers, practitioners and the general public.

This is when the World Health Organisation has upheld acupuncture as safe and efficacious and most Western countries had recognised the healing potential of acupuncture and resourcefully adopted the system not only into their health programmes but research initiatives.

It has also been scientifically established that by applying fine needles to acupoints in the body, the practitioner can do a range of functions from regularising heart beat rates, blood pressure, augmenting the engulfing capacity of white blood cells to raising the titre of immune serum.

The findings of one study on the correlation between acupoints in the body and the corresponding brain cortices using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, resolves to an extent, the lack of quantitative depth in ancient literature on acupuncture.

The findings of the study, published in the National Academy of Sciences journal, represent the major first step toward understanding oriental acupuncture in relationship to brain function, which has been largely ignored in classical oriental medicine probably because the intricacies of the brain were too complex for ancient observers to understand.

The study also seeks to re-examine the relationship between the "brain" and the "organs" in a new light. In oriental medicine, there had been little effort to demonstrate with any conviction the connection between the brain and the various disorders of the human body. This study had focussed on establishing linkage between vision and the visual cortex by trying to match needle intervention with the outcomes mapped on the MRI.

The authors, while finding it difficult to believe that acupuncture treats disorders and diseases by direct control of organs or organ-related ailments, state that it is possible that the oriental branch of medicine first stimulated or activated the corresponding brain cortex via the central nervous system, thereby controlling the chemical or hormone release to the diseases or disordered organs for healing.

Importantly, the study has noted that data demonstrated that both the static and dynamic activation of the visual cortex by acupoint stimulation were consistent with visual light stimulation observed in magnetic resonance imaging.

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Section  : Southern States
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