The Maintenance of Professional Authority: Acupuncture and the American Physician

This paper examines the response of the medical profession to a situation in which its cultural authority was potentially challenged: the sudden, large-scale importation of acupuncture into the United States in the early 1970s. I describe how the medical profession coped with a therapeutic modality that could not be explained by the biomedical model. Various tactics were used to limit the practice of acupuncture to physicians, thereby mitigating the threat of the growing popularity of lay practitioners. Once it was securely under the control of the medical profession, the practice of acupuncture was severely restricted, and an effective but enigmatic modality was removed from the medical regimen.