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.
John Wheeler
John Wheeler is the Secretary of the British Acupuncture Council. He trained under Worsley at the College of Traditional Acupuncture in the late 1980s, and has been in practice in Windsor for the last 24 years. As well as being involved in several community organizations in his Oxfordshire village home, he is a blues guitarist and is learning the djembe (go look it up!). He has no spare time.