Acupuncture or herbalism: Which one to use?

 Dear Hands,

When confronted with a diagnosis of disease, how would a practitioner choose to use acupuncture, herbs or both?

In other words what would cause him/her to choose a certain mode of healing.

Wayne

Dear Wayne,

Of course it all depends on the practitioners knowledge and experience!

In fact in China, you don't expect to find sombody who could do all these therapies all by one, I think Tutor may be one of the few who could do well both acupuncture and herbal medicines together.

Many or majority herbology practitioners won't do acupuncture well!!! Or to be worse, many of them even don't do acupuncture at all!!! Or to be even worse, some of them would even doubt the effect of acupuncture.

While on the other hand, many acupuncture practitioners won't do herbology well and some of them even cannot prescribe the herbal formulas!!!

In China, we have very clear or distinct division of specialty of traditional Chinese medicine in hospitals, so that's the reason why the doctors of TCM would prefer their own specialty.

Of course majority of them have a very good background of fundamental theories of TCM, so it's not difficult for them to change their specialties, when necessary.

M.H.