A student stands over a patient, needle poised. They have a “perfect” prescription: a textbook combination of points harvested from a lecture slide on chronic lower back pain. But as the needle meets the skin, the student hesitates - the symptom of a quiet habit that has taken hold of our profession. We routinely say we “prescribe” points. It sounds efficient. It echoes the authority of biomedical culture and fits neatly into the insurance field. But vocabulary is never neutral; repeated long enough, it dictates behavior.
Amelie de Mahy, LAc
Amelie de Mahy is an American acupuncturist, who spent the last two years studying Chinese medicine in Taipei, Taiwan. She recently returned from India, where she did medical work with the Tibetan religious community of Northern India. She is a graduate of the Academy of Oriental Medicine at Austin.