50 Years of Healing: What Has Changed— and What Hasn’t

When our father began practicing in Southern California in 1976, acupuncture was still a curiosity to most Americans. Some patients came quietly, uncertain whether they should even tell their physicians they were seeing a Chinese medicine practitioner.

How Much Has Changed in Fifty Years?

Today, acupuncture is licensed throughout the country. Major medical centers offer integrative medicine. Terms such as inflammation, microbiome, mind-body medicine, metabolic health and longevity have entered everyday conversation. Patients are increasingly interested not only in treating disease, but in preventing it.

In some ways, American healthcare has been moving toward questions Chinese medicine has asked for thousands of years:

Why does one person become ill while another remains well? What happens before disease appears? How do sleep, food, movement, emotions, and environment influence health? And how do we strengthen the body’s own capacity to remain resilient?



Chinese medicine has never separated these questions from the practice of medicine.

From Alternative to Integrative

My brother, Dr. Daoshing Ni, and I have had the unusual privilege of watching this transformation from inside the profession.

When we began practicing, we often had to explain what acupuncture was. Today, patients frequently arrive because their physician, physical therapist, fertility specialist, or other healthcare professional recommended it.

At the same time, Chinese medicine has also changed. We have access to laboratory testing, advanced imaging, genetics, and an extraordinary understanding of human physiology that did not exist fifty years ago.

The future, in my view, doesn’t require choosing one system over another; it requires knowing when each has something useful to offer.

What Hasn’t Changed

Technology has transformed medicine, but the fundamental needs of the human body have changed very little. We still need nourishing food, movement, adequate sleep, meaningful relationships, and periods of rest and recovery. And we still need physicians and healers willing to listen carefully enough to understand the person behind the diagnosis.



One of the oldest principles in Chinese medicine is that the highest form of medicine is not simply treating disease after it appears. It is cultivating health before disease takes hold.

Fifty years later, I believe that principle is more relevant than ever.