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.
Kathleen Lumiere, DAOM, LAc
Dr. Kathleen Lumiere is co-president of the Seattle Institute of East Asian Medicine, and an adjunct faculty member at Bastyr University, NESA, and other schools. She is the founding editor of Convergent Points: An East-West Case Report Journal; and co-chairs Practice-Based Research, a Society for Acupuncture Research special-interest group.