Acupuncture

Transnational Translations of Chinese Medicine / Chronic Pain, Resistance, and Community Acupuncture for Decolonial Healing

Lou Chow

Acupuncture has long been a modality of healing for a multitude of people. Perceptions of acupuncture and its effectiveness vary across locations. Acupuncture lands differently across subjects due to processes of transnational cultural translation and knowledge production, in turn, I argue that acupuncture can be a site of revolutionary healing for racialized and gendered subjects in the West, yet simultaneously a point of contestation for Chinese subjects. Within ideologies of neoliberalism in the West, approaches to medicine and healing are situated with the belief of returning the subject to an ideal state of production. If a subject is unable to be productive, they are disregarded as disposable. In turn, experiences of chronic pain create continuous disruptions to one's ability to work, riffling Western modalities of healthcare and governmentality. I will explore how chronic pain can be a mode of capitalist resistance, and because acupuncture does not center on "fixing" a subject to return to a state of production, acupuncture likewise can function as a form of colonial resistance for minoritized subjects in the West. Furthermore, acupuncture resists colonialism through dreaming knowledge production and alternative care practices. I will be tracing the history and translations of acupuncture from China and how it has been translated to the US. I will then explore how chronic pain can function as a mode of capitalist resistance and how acupuncture can reveal embodied knowledge. Lastly, I will explore how Western revolutionaries have utilized the practice of acupuncture as a mode of accessible and decolonial healing for minoritized Western subjects. I use the work of Jason Jishun Hao, Grigory Chernyak, and Mei Zhan to make visible the history of acupuncture and entangle translational translations. I will then use the work of Pun Ngai and Robin Kelley to demonstrate how chronic pain and dreams function to produce knowledge for resistance, as well as the work of Xiaoping Li and Min Yee Lim to examine current explorations of acupuncture in China. Lastly, I will use the work of Rebecca Karl and Zena Sharman to illustrate how acupuncture has been utilized by revolutionaries in the West to provide their communities with an alternative mode of care. 

Acupuncture emerged in China over 3000 years ago. Its earliest documentation is in The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine dating back to 100 BCE. At this point Qi channels were established as the pathway system for vital energy to flow, informing the practice of acupuncture and the insertion points. Acupuncture first appeared in the West in 1680 by a European physician working for the East India Company, who witnessed the practice in Japan. The practice reached the US 300 years later when it was used on a US Press Corps member during an emergency appendectomy in Beijing. This sparked interest from US physicians to be utilized as analgesia during surgical procedures, however it was quickly written off (Hao, 1). Compared to Western biomedical science, acupuncture does not differentiate between physical, mental, and emotional elements. During the Cultural Revolution, the state and Mao Zedong promoted and encouraged acupuncture practices, framing them politically as an alternative to Western Biomedicine. In 1971, interest in acupuncture peaked in the US after Nixon received the treatment on his visit to China, subsequently sparking an increase in acupuncture studies in the US (Chernyak, 1).

Reston, James. Now, About My Operation in Peking. 1971. New York Times, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/07/26/issue.html.

While for Western subjects, acupuncture can be a sight of healing, acupuncture simultaneously has been a site of contestation for Chinese patients. Mei Zhan works to untangle how perceptions of acupuncture across these moments of political translation. Zhan makes visible how the cultural translations of traditional Chinese medicine from the East and the West inform how the practices become validated or invalidated. The ideologies of Chinese medicine as “traditional” is situated and constructed within a Western Framework. 

“Cultural translation is the very site of encounter where irreducible differences are fought out, authorities involved and challenged, and ambiguities dissolved or created. A critical study of the cultural translation of traditional Chinese medicine is neither a rationalist nor a relativist project, but it might ask the question of how tradition, science, and the politics of difference are worlded through translation” (Zhan, 142). 

By exploring how the practices land on different situated people, practitioners, students, clinic visitors, and patients, they make visible how the knowledge becomes constructed and how meaning is made through transnational practices. As I navigate how acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine have been used as treatments for chronic pain, these treatments have landed differently across different localities. How acupuncture is validated or made accessible is incredibly nuanced, remains situated within frameworks of colonialism and has continuously shifted over time. Through my exploration, I am situated as a Chinese American researcher conducting research in the West. I aim to examine how socio-cultural formations and zones of cultural encounter inform the practice and perceptions of acupuncture.  

How might experiences of chronic pain serve as a form of embodied knowledge and create capitalist resistance? In turn, what type of project does healing our pain become? I am interested in Pun Ngai’s work in “Scream, Dream, and Transgression in the Workplace”, exploring Dagongmei’s acts of resistance through experiences of chronic pain and disrupting their environments. The Dagongmei’s sudden inability to produce turns into disturbances that force the community to question their work conditions. In this case, the body reveals and interrupts what the empirical could not offer. Acupuncture has been used to treat chronic pain in China for centuries. Current explorations of acupuncture usage for chronic pain treatment in China are researching the effectiveness of bone touching during the practice. “Even though widely used in today's clinical practice, the optimal dose of acupuncture has remained a controversial issue. As the effectiveness and safety of touching periosteum acupuncture therapy for treating chronic pain remains uncertain and current evidence is limited” (Li). In other current Chinese explorations, researchers are examining the role of acupuncture and moxibustion, though their policies must be related to China’s health reforms for this work to be made visible (Lim). Through the translations of knowledge and at various points in time often the West discredits Chinese Medicine for being false or a pseudoscience. Simultaneously, when praised these knowledge are co-opted, appropriated, and mystified. By making visible the current explorations and studies regarding chronic pain and acupuncture in China, I hope to challenge these ideologies.  

While a complex site in China, in the West, acupuncture has been used by revolutionaries of color to treat and manage pain. Acupuncture has been used by the Black Panther Party and Young Lords to distribute care to minoritized subjects experiencing anxiety, PTSD, chronic pain, and struggles with drug addiction (Meng). Acupuncture practices in China are established and treatment costs around two or three dollars, whereas in the US today practitioners charge around $50 to $150 per session. To make the treatment more accessible, the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords created Community acupuncture networks that would charge patients on a sliding scale of $15-$40 per treatment. (Sharman, 238).

The archives of the Small family. Tolbert Small Treating a Patient with Acupuncture for Back Pain in the Upstairs Room of the Harriet Tubman Medical Office in Oakland, CA. 1993. 

The Black Panthers studied acupuncture in China and worked alongside socially informed doctors to inform the community of acupuncture practice. Since then, community acupuncture has been an accessible and liberatory site for many queer and trans individuals seeking trauma-informed care in the US. Community acupuncture has the ability to improve individuals' material conditions and everyday realities of living with chronic pain, while simultaneously remains subject to critique for its inability to shift perspectives and access for Chinese patients. As written by Lisa Baird in Zena Sharman’s “The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Healthcare”, “Healing from trauma is cyclical, nonlinear, and unpredictable” (Sharman, 243). Like the work of Rebecca Karl who explores the positioning of China as backwards according to Euro-America, Baird similarly deconstructs the ideologies of progress in their approach to healing. Karl explores a diachronic and synchronic mapping of the world and time, challenging the notion that locations are situated along narratives of progressiveness and backwardness (Karl, 83). If within this mapping China is positioned as backward conversely to the Western world, Karl and Sharman both function to challenge this by highlighting alternative modalities of viewing the time, the world, and care. For Western minoritized subjects, acupuncture can be a liberatory site of decolonial healing, while simultaneously the knowledge gets politicized and discredited for subjects in China. 

I conclude my exploration with a question, how might these dreams parallel or contrast the ones provoked by chronic pain acupuncture patients? Explored by Pun Ngai, are the dreams Dagongmei have that cause them to wake up at night screaming, creating another form of resistance through disturbance. What knowledge do acupuncture-induced dreams produce? The dreamscape can be a crucial site that allows us to reimagine and restructure our societies in a liberatory way that cannot be replicated through empirical knowledge production (Kelley, 55). The knowledge produced by dreams and imagination is vital and has the ability for us to reimagine our worlds and begin the process of decolonization and healing at a larger scale. If Western revolutionaries have used community acupuncture to reimagine healthcare access in the West, what knowledge might acupuncture be able to offer in return for further projects of radical reimagining and liberation for subjects across the globe? 

Works Cited

Chernyak, Grigory V, and Daniel I Sessler. “Perioperative acupuncture and related techniques.” Anesthesiology vol. 102,5 (2005): 1031-49; quiz 1077-8. doi:10.1097/00000542-200505000-00024

Hao, Jason Jishun, and Michele Mittelman. “Acupuncture: past, present, and future.” Global advances in health and medicine vol. 3,4 (2014): 6-8. doi:10.7453/gahmj.2014.042

Karl, Rebecca E. “Recognizing Colonialism: The Philippines and Revolution.” In Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 83-115. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Kelley, Robin D. G., and Aja Monet. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. 1st ed., Beacon Press, 2022.

Li, Xiaoping et al. “Touching-bone acupuncture in the treatment of chronic pain: A protocol for an overview of systematic reviews and meta-analysis.” Medicine vol. 100,46 (2021): e27195. doi:10.1097/MD.0000000000027195

Lim, Min Yee et al. “Current status of acupuncture and moxibustion in China.” Chinese medicine vol. 10 12. 21 May. 2015, doi:10.1186/s13020-015-0041-1

Meng, Eana. “Use of Acupuncture by 1970s Revolutionaries of Color: The South Bronx "Toolkit Care" Concept.” American journal of public health vol. 111,5 (2021): 896-906. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2020.306080

Pun, Ngai. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Sharman, Zena. The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care. 1st ed., Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016.

Zhan, Mei. Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames. 1st ed., Duke University Press, 2009, pp. xiv–xiv, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822392132.