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.
Clarification
The May issue of Acupuncture Today featured a review of the book The Channel Divergences: Deeper Pathways of the Web by Miki Shima and Charles Chace. The review pertained to the revised edition of The Channel Divergences, not the original edition published in 2001.
We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.