An invaluable guide for anyone beginning a career in acupuncture, this book offers a unique and supportive insight into the challenges and the pitfalls that the novice acupuncturist is likely to encounter, and provides encouragement and down-to-earth ideas for tackling them. Written in an easy-to-read conversational style with useful case studies throughout, this book will help newly-qualified acupuncturists to reflect on what kind of practitioner they want to be. It addresses styles of working, common mistakes, confidence with patients, becoming a better practitioner, and how to think about success and failure in the treatment room. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the practitioner ends the day refreshed and enlivened by the work and has confidence in the treatments given.

Traditional Chinese medicine is often portrayed as an enduring system of therapeutic knowledge that has become globalized in recent decades. In Other-Worldly, Mei Zhan argues that the discourses and practices called “traditional Chinese medicine” are made through, rather than prior to, translocal encounters and entanglements. Zhan spent a decade following practitioners, teachers, and advocates of Chinese medicine through clinics, hospitals, schools, and grassroots organizations in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on that ethnographic research, she demonstrates that the everyday practice of Chinese medicine is about much more than writing herbal prescriptions and inserting acupuncture needles. “Traditional Chinese medicine” is also made and remade through efforts to create a preventive medicine for the “proletariat world,” reinvent it for cosmopolitan middle-class aspirations, produce clinical “miracles,” translate knowledge and authority, and negotiate marketing strategies and medical ethics. Whether discussing the presentation of Chinese medicine at a health fair sponsored by a Silicon Valley corporation, or how the inclusion of a traditional Chinese medicine clinic authenticates the “California” appeal of an upscale residential neighborhood in Shanghai, Zhan emphasizes that unexpected encounters and interactions are not anomalies in the structure of Chinese medicine. Instead, they are constitutive of its irreducibly complex and open-ended worlds. Zhan proposes an ethnography of “worlding” as an analytic for engaging and illuminating emergent cultural processes such as those she describes. Rather than taking “cultural difference” as the starting point for anthropological inquiries, this analytic reveals how various terms of difference—for example, “traditional,” “Chinese,” and “medicine”—are invented, negotiated, and deployed translocally. Other-Worldly is a theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich account of the worlding of Chinese medicine.

The updated Second Edition of this outstanding reference guide and textbook provides a comprehensive review of both the French (after Nogier) and Chinese schools of acupuncture. The book offers a detailed description of the anatomy and morphology of the ear, acupoints on the ear and their localizations, as well as specific points for ear acupuncture. Dr. Rubach, with many years' experience as a practitioner and teacher, provides valuable information in an easy-to-read, helpful format. You will learn how to use ear acupuncture safely and effectively. Large-format, graphic images are used to clearly show the location of points and the methods of auriculotherapy. The book includes answers to important everyday questions and is a treasury of practical information. Special features of Principles of Ear Acupuncture, Second Edition: A critical review of different methods of stimulation A practical compendium of the therapeutic point combinations Quick reference section on acupoints and localization A question and answer section for instant review Now includes over 30 interesting indications The book includes special sections on the use of acupuncture in pregnancy, obstetrics, gynecology, and dentistry. Filled with tips for daily practice and an excellent reference guide, this book is a must for students and ear acupuncturists.