Originally published January 19 2006
Acupuncture growing in popularity among Australians
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Marc Cohen, president of the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association and a professor at Melbourne's RMIT, speaks out about the increasing popularity of acupuncture among Australians, as 10 percent of the country's citizens report having undergone acupuncture therapy at some point in their life.
Today 10 per cent of Australians use acupuncture, and one in five GPs administers it, says Marc Cohen, president of the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association and a professor at Melbourne's RMIT.
But while it may be one of the better known forms of traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture is by no means the only one that's gaining attention from the Western medical world.
With incidence of chronic diseases on the rise in Australian and other Western countries, there has been increasing interest in traditional medicine as an alternative approach that can be used in conjunction with the modern tradition.
Lisa He, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in Melbourne, says in the decade she has been practising in Australia there's been an increase in the numbers of Westerners using Chinese remedies.
Already some traditional Chinese herbs are having a major impact on world health _ the herb artemisia has been used to treat skin diseases and malaria in China for more than 1000 years, and has been recommended by the World Health Organisation as a treatment for malaria in the developing world.
``Most hospitals don't even record on the medical charts what herbal medications their patients are taking _ a large number of patients are taking alternative medications, but most of the time doctors don't even ask about their use.''
There's a perception that Chinese medicine is safe and has less side effects than Western medicine, but while there may be some truth to that, it's an oversimplification that misses important factors, says Qian George Li, head of the masters program in herbal medicine at the University of Sydney.
Many herbs affect the way the liver and kidney excrete drugs, so if you start a herb when you're already taking something else you might excrete the drug more quickly, possibly rendering it ineffective, Cohen says.
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