Rethinking Traditional Japanese Acupuncture and Moxibustion: Spread the Hokushin-kai Style of Acupuncture to the World

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

umerous recent clinical trials have revealed the effects of acupuncture.However, almost all of these investigations were based on the use of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) or Western medicine.In the United Kingdom, only 3% of the practitioners treat patients with Japanese therapeutic methods. 1 Thus, the real value of traditional Japanese acupuncture and moxibustion remains unknown to the world.In this Guest Editorial, we introduce the Hokushin-kai style-acupuncture as one of the real values of traditional Japanese acupuncture and moxibustion.We also suggest that clinical trials are needed to evaluate this acupuncture method.During the Meiji era (1868-1912 ad), the Japanese government attempted to abolish the practice of acupuncture in favor of Western medicine, despite acupuncture's excellent clinical effects.At that time, acupuncturists resisted the policy and conducted research to support the use of acupuncture versus Western medicine.2 During the Syowa era (1926-1989 ad), Yanagiya and colleagues proposed that Japanese acupuncture should be based on ancient classic texts, such as The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic (the Huangdi Neijing), 3 which describes the principles of acupuncture.Moreover, various methods of Japanese acupuncture based on ancient classic texts, such as meridian therapy (keiraku-tiryo-style), were established.