CONGO DR: Traditional Chinese Acupuncture Loved In Congo

It's not common to see a traditional Chinese therapy being fleshed out on patients in Africa.

Performing the acupuncture is Huang Yue, one of two traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) doctors with the Chinese medical team in the Republic of Congo.

You could say he bears responsibility for saving lives in this underdeveloped country. He's also here to spread knowledge of the Oriental medical practice.

The doctors organized several free clinics right after their arrival last year and found that many local residents had neck and spine problems. But the hospital where they were based had no related treatment devices. So they decided to introduce them to acupuncture.

TCM is built on a foundation of more than 2,500 years of medical practice. It includes various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, exercise, and dietary therapy.

Acupuncture treatments used to be something new to the African continent. Now, an increasing number of African patients accept and receive traditional Chinese medical therapy. That highlights a new development in the over five-decade-long China-Africa medical cooperation.

Huang has helped more locals understand how traditional therapies work. He's happy to see that most people don't reject the approach.

Many locals go to China to study the practice of TCM. Huang said that’s a choice they made after having a deeper and better understanding of the medical system.

China sent its first medical team to Africa in 1963. Since then, it has sent medical teams to 45 African countries on over 20,000 trips. The teams have provided 220 million people with medical services. TCM treatment is becoming one of this team's distinguishing features.

Compared to Western medical therapies, the Chinese ones have their own advantages, especially in places where there aren't enough medicine or medical devices.

Wang Zhiyong, the head of the Chinese medical team in the Republic of Congo, said that one big advantage of TCM is that it is easy to perform, and it doesn't have high requirements for medical equipment. Take acupuncture and sticking-plaster, for example, which are cheap, and are easy to use.

Now a new hospital built by China has provided the medical team, local medical personnel, and local patients with a much better working and treatment environment.

That has attracted more people, which in turn gives TCM more opportunities to be understood and accepted by the local residents.

Huang Yue hopes acupuncture can serve as a stepping stone, a necessary first step to full recognition of TCM in Africa.

Acupuncture is a substantial part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Early acupuncture beliefs relied on concepts that are common in TCM, such as a life force energy called qi.

Qi was believed to flow from the body's primary organs or zang-fu organs to the superficial body tissues of the skin, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints, through channels called meridians.

Acupuncture points where needles are inserted are mainly but not always, found at locations along the meridians. Acupuncture points not found along a meridian are called extraordinary points and those with no designated site are called A-shi points.

In TCM, disease is generally perceived as a disharmony or imbalance in energies such as yin, yang, qi, xue, zang-fu, meridians, and of the interaction between the body and the environment. Therapy is based on which pattern of disharmony can be identified.

For example, some diseases are believed to be caused by meridians being invaded with an excess of wind, cold, and damp. In order to determine which pattern is at hand, practitioners examine things like the color and shape of the tongue, the relative strength of pulse-points, the smell of the breath, the quality of breathing, or the sound of the voice.

TCM and its concept of disease does not strongly differentiate between the cause and effect of symptoms.

Some modern practitioners support the use of acupuncture to treat pain, but have abandoned the use of qi, meridians, yin, yang and other energies based in mysticism as explanatory frameworks.

The use of qi as an explanatory framework has been decreasing in China, even as it becomes more prominent during discussions of acupuncture in the US.

Academic discussions of acupuncture still make reference to pseudoscientific concepts such as qi and meridians despite the lack of scientific evidence.

Many within the scientific community consider attempts to rationalize acupuncture in science to be quackery, pseudoscience and theatrical placebo. Academics Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry describe it as a borderlands science lying between science and pseudoscience.

Many acupuncturists attribute pain relief to the release of endorphins when needles penetrate, but no longer support the idea that acupuncture can affect a disease.

It is a generally held belief within the acupuncture community that acupuncture points and meridians structures are special conduits for electrical signals, but no research has established any consistent anatomical structure or function for either acupuncture points or meridians.

Human tests to determine whether electrical continuity was significantly different near meridians than other places in the body have been inconclusive.

Traditional Chinese medicine is a style of traditional medicine built on a foundation of more than 2,500 years of Chinese medical practice that includes various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage or tui na, exercise or qigong, and dietary therapy, but recently also influenced by modern Western medicine.

TCM is widely used in Greater China where it has long been the standard system of medicine, and is becoming increasingly popular and recognized worldwide where it is primarily approached as alternative medicine.



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