As an Acupuncturist I was fascinated to read that every woman needing pain relief while giving birth at University College London hospital is offered acupuncture.
I was reading an interesting article in the Guardian the other day. It questioned whether acupuncture should be used more widely in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Dr David Carr. An accredited Acupuncturist and clinical lecturer in maternal foetal medicine began a leading maternity acupuncture service at the hospital, which has now provided training to 120 of its midwives. He also trained more midwives, obstetricians and anaesthetists throughout the UK so that they were able to provide acupuncture to women in labour.
When I was in labour in an Adelaide hospital I was certainly not offered acupuncture as part of our national health service. We are lagging behind the U.K in this respect and according to the article they are lagging behind the rest of Europe who are more progressive and intelligent. In the U.K there are 2,500 medical professionals qualified to practice acupuncture, compared with 45,000 in Germany. Here in Australia there are more than 2200 acupuncturist and Chinese medicine practitioners yet to my knowledge there is not a single hospital that offers the service. This got me thinking. How long before the treatments are offered, funded by Medicare and available at Adelaide hospitals?
An example cited in the article brings home the economic value of the service. In the U.K a cluster of clinics had been using acupuncture since 2008 for patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. They questioned the economics of this at first but when you look at the bigger picture. “Acupuncture was offered to 114 patients rather than a knee replacement costing £5,000, and 79% accepted. Two years later a third of them had not required a knee transplant, representing an annual saving of £100,000”(Pugh, 2015).
When working as an Acupuncturist in China I did an internship in a hospital that only offered Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine, yet the patients did not have the endemic diseases and conditions that we see here in the West. The problem does not seem to lie with the population here in Australia who are very receptive to acupuncture treatments.
The article is worth a read if you have the time.
Cheers. Your Acupuncturist
Julie
