Despite being a practice of medicine that is over 5000 years old, many doctors are still hesitant to recommend acupuncture to their patients. Unfortunately, many people who would likely benefit from the healing nature of acupuncture are driven away by the fact that doctors don’t endorse the practice.
While it is true that many professionals don’t recommend holistic medicinal methods, it certainly isn’t because they are dangerous in any way. Doctors make a living by running tests on patients, looking at data recorded in those tests, and making recommendations based on that data. Acupuncture therapists are able to simply listen to symptoms and discover underlying patterns in the health problem and address a patient’s ailments using time-tested methods without excessive testing. In this way, the two practices differ greatly.
Medical doctors, who typically rely heavily on scientific trials before recommending treatment, also have trouble suggesting acupuncture because it is extremely difficult to show its effectiveness in clinical trials. This is the single greatest reason doctors are hesitant to advocate acupuncture.
Nobody is wrong; acupuncturists and doctors simply follow a different set of rules.