Western Medicine and Acupuncture

I am a Licensed acupuncturist who studied herbs and acupuncture and I’m an RN. I work part time as a clinical nursing instructor in an AD program at a community college and part time at my community acupuncture clinic. Since I graduated from nursing school in 1969 I have worked in clinics, ICUs, general hospital floors and spent 6 ½ years as a family nurse practitioner in a community clinic. I currently take students to an acute mental health ward on Monday and a combination ICU/cardiac step down unit on Wednesday. The rest of the week I work in my acupuncture clinic.

People ask me how I can work in both types of medicine. They ask me if I get confused going back and forth. They ask me if I don’t think acupuncture is better because it’s natural. My answer to all this is that I am very clear what both types of medicine have to offer as I have seen the strengths and weaknesses of both. I am also clear on the theoretical underpinnings of both medicines and I don’t confuse the two. I have seen conditions that I don’t think acupuncture practiced in an out patient setting could fix that western medicine has corrected. And I have seen pain that an MD said would not go away and the person must live with, go away with an adequate course of acupuncture. It’s a matter of knowing which medicine to use when. And often, using them together is synergistic. People can sometimes lower their med use, therefore the side effects, with acupuncture.

Last year on an acute mental health ward in a local community hospital, the nursing students and I watched a woman recover from profound post partum depression with a course of ECT (electroshock therapy). She was so depressed when admitted that she wasn’t paying any attention to her newborn, her other children or her husband. She nearly was successful at an overdose. Upon admission to the ward she barely talked with anyone, didn’t eat and didn’t take care of herself at all. She wouldn’t promise that she would not try to kill herself. The doctors started her on medication and ECT. Each week the students saw her improve. By the end of their 6-week stay on the ward, the students said they couldn’t tell her from one of them. She was acting like anyone of their friends. There were no traces of the depression left. She remembered all about it and could talk about it. She was very grateful to be alive, to be feeling well and looked forward to going home. The new group of students that came the next week didn’t believe me when I told her story. They said, “She’s so normal.” This is not an isolated case. There’s no way out patient acupuncture, even every day, would have been adequate for this woman, in my experience. This is a condition we are required by law – and ethically– to refer emergently should someone like this show up in our clinic and Western medicine was very effective.

Let me add that I have read Peter Breggin and articles written by patients who have had ECT and consider it barbaric. I have also seen quite a few people benefit from it and who say they are grateful to have had it.

On a typical Wednesday, the students and I will help take care of people in varying stages of recovering from coronary bypass surgery. A commonl scenario is that a middle aged man with known coronary artery disease has had more frequent chest pain recently, went to the MD in the clinic, was sent to the hospital for an angiogram and is kept in the hospital for surgery. Sometimes they go from the angiogram to the OR and sometimes the person can wait until the next day. If intervention doesn’t happen soon, the man will have a heart attack. A more emergent scenario is that the man has crushing chest pain, is sweaty all over and dizzy and thinks he is going to die. That man goes from the ER to the angiography suite to the OR if other interventions aren’t indicated.

The patients go directly from the OR to our floor. In OR his heart was stopped, blood circulation diverted to a heart lung machine and when the bypasses are completed, his heart is restarted and the blood goes from the heart lung machine to his body again.

A team of nurses on our floor, each with their own task to do, hook up the monitors for heart rhythm, blood pressure & central venous pressure, sort out the IV tubing, hook up the chest tubes, take the vital signs, and get report from the anesthesiologist about how the surgery went, what medications are in the IVs to normalize blood pressure, heart rhythm and blood glucose. The respiratory therapist hooks the breathing tube to the ventilator. The primary nurse caring for the patient stays in the room monitoring heart rhythm, giving pain meds and sedation, changing the rate of the meds for blood pressure and helping the patient wake up. Usually within 4 hours of surgery, the patient is awake and the breathing tube is taken out. They are out of bed a few hours later to a chair. The next morning, most if not all of the IV medications are stopped and the patient is walking to the chair for meals. The next day cardiac rehab is working with the patient to walk the halls and they go home 3-4 days after the surgery with open coronary arteries.

This, again, is a case that we are required by law – and ethics – to refer. Perhaps an experienced acupuncturist in China could manage a case like this but my Chinese teachers told me that acute coronary syndrome in China is managed in a hospital by Western medicine and an herbalist with IV herbal formulas. She said they had less heart arrythmias with the combined treatment. Most of us here practice in out patient clinics and could not effectively manage this type of case.

These cases are dramatic. I could recount much more mundane ones. My point is, both types of medicine are useful in certain situations and the other might not cut it. Both medicines also deserve respect. As the usefulness of frequent acupuncture is becoming more widely known, that is happening.