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.
Bob Flaws, LAc, FNAAOM (USA), FRCHM (UK)
Bob Flaws received training at Shanghai College of Chinese Medicine in acupuncture, tuina and herbal medicine. He currently is the main editor and translator for Blue Poppy Press. He is also a founder, past president and Lifetime Fellow of the Acupuncture Association of Colorado, a founding member of the National Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Alliance, and a Fellow of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine in the UK. He has also served as the editor of the Colorado Acupuncturist and the Journal of the National Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. He is also a coauthor of an NIH-funded acupuncture research protocol on AIDS-related peripheral neuropathy, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).