Acupuncture has been in use in China for over 2,000 years although it may have developed independently in other parts of the world. There are ancient Egyptian scripts dating 1550 BC which suggest the use of acupuncture and there is also early evidence amongst South African Bantu, Arabs, Inuits and South Indians. There are only legends suggesting how it was discovered that acupuncture might work and one of these suggests that soldiers injured in the battlefield by arrows stuck in certain parts of the body would have relief from a condition elsewhere.

Early acupuncture instruments were made of stone and latterly bamboo, copper, iron, gold, silver and finally stainless steel. An early textbook, dated from 475-221BC and known as the “Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine” was a compilation of medical knowledge at that time and is a reference book for acupuncturists.

Acupuncture was brought to the west by travelling Jesuit priests and also by doctors working for the Dutch East India Company, notably Willem ten Rhijne [1647-1700], Andreas Cleyer and Englebert Kaempfer. However, enthusiasm for acupuncture met considerable opposition at the time; this draws an interesting parallel when in 1628 William Harvey published the conclusions of his experiments which showed contrary to previously held beliefs that blood flowed in a continuous circuit. Harvey’s discovery became gradually accepted.

In the early 1800s there appeared a renewal of interest in acupuncture in Europe. In 1816, Berlioz, the father of the composer, published the first book on acupuncture in France and in 1825 Sarlandiere was the first to apply an electric current to implanted needles. J. M. Churchill published two books on acupuncture in 1821 and 1828 in England and in 1912 a respected physician, Sir William Osler described acupuncture as the most efficient treatment for lumbago in the eighth edition of “The Principles and Practice of Medicine”. Nogier is responsible for the introduction of auricular therapy using points on the ear. Despite such distinguished exponents of acupuncture interest in the subject waned until after President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Traditional Chinese acupuncture incorporates theories of meridians and energy flows and is used juxtaposed to principles of culture and philosophy. It uses points along channels, selected on the basis of pulse diagnosis and traditional guides which currently have little foundation to one trained in scientific medicine.

The principles of modern western acupuncture are based on physiological discoveries commencing with J.H.Kellgren’s work in London in1938 where he observed that injecting saline into a muscle produced pain some distance from that point and at times the maximal pain was not experienced in the muscle itself but in other structures. He went on to demonstrate that spontaneous pain from a muscle invariably originated from trigger points within the muscle and that pressure on such spots could reproduce the patient’s pain which could be temporarily relieved by a local anaesthetic.

This work was further developed in America by Travell and Simons culminating in a classic volume on Myofascial Pain in 1983.

Melzack and Wall, in 1965 proposed the gate-control theory of pain that explained how the sensation of pain might be modulated by various physiochemical mechanisms in the central nervous system.