The story usually told about acupuncture’s arrival in the West is one of its arrival in the 20th century via travellers to the East who eventually popularised the treatment after a journalist featured it in her writings in the 1970s. This is indeed a true story – though only the latest chapter of an older one. Acupuncture had travelled westward over a thousand years before its official arrival in the West.
By the 6th century, acupuncture theory had begun to travel along the Silk Road trade routes to Korea and Japan. These regions did not experience the Silk Road’s merchants travelling with their silk goods but instead experienced the trade of medical knowledge from physicians and scholars travelling alongside these merchants. Japan adopted acupuncture and developed new needles for the practice. Korea combined acupuncture with herbal medicine to create new medical practices. For Acupuncture Evesham, visit https://www.purelandsacu.co.uk/acupuncture-evesham/
These fragments continued to drift westward and were passed from scholar to scholar, translator to traveller physician before any formal introduction to Europe of the practice. It wasn’t until the 17th century that acupuncture began to be documented by Europeans, encountering a practice that had already travelled a thousand years.
It’s a reminder that arriving in the West was never the beginning of acupuncture’s journey to the West. It was merely the moment someone finally wrote it down.
