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.
Deb Boehme, PhD, DOM, LPCC
Deb Boehme has been a doctor of Oriental medicine since 2004 and works in an East/West integrative pain and rehabilitation clinic in Albuquerque, N.M. The clinic offers acupuncture, acupressure, physical therapy, prolotherapy, homeopathic injections and blood morphology testing. She is also an EMT Intermediate.