Marić-Oehler, W.( President of the German Medical Acupuncture Association)
Abstract: Different cultures have created different ways of thinking, perception as well as possibilities to explain body and mind. The long tradition of classic Chinese medicine is based on an inseparable unit of body and mind, constantly changed and transformed by different factors.
Modern western medicine is based on natural science and focussed on the body as an anatomic structure. Its medical system is missing a systematic order of specific correlations between body and mind. Hundred years ago psychoanalysis was developed concentrated on the psychic level of the human being.
Just fifty years ago ‘psychosomatics’ has been slowly established. It still plays an unimportant role in western medicine which is centred on the somatic level. Western acupuncture doctors, western psychotherapists and specialists on psychosomatics are working in two different medical fields. Exchange and cooperation is very rare.
New findings in neuroscience are more and more able to explain the effect of emotions and traumatic events, the effect of psychotherapy as well as the effect of acupuncture on the brain and nervous system.
Exchanging concepts and practical therapeutic experience could be the bridge for encouraging a better understanding and bringing eastern medicine and western psychotherapy more close together.
This could be the first step in developing an integrative psychosomatics.