On January 13th, the National Clinical Research Alliance for Acupuncture Anesthesia was officially established in Shanghai, led by Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and its affiliated Yueyang Hospital. They claim that acupuncture anesthesia is a Chinese original integration of Chinese and Western medicine, capable of significantly reducing the use of anesthetics and their side effects, as well as lowering medical costs. They will continue to promote acupuncture anesthesia in China.
Acupuncture anesthesia is a scientific achievement of the integration of Chinese and Western medicine in socialist China. During the Cultural Revolution, it was widely applied in various surgeries. Socialist China even produced a documentary titled “Ode to Silver Needles Under the Shadowless Lamp,” which recorded that postpartum women, after receiving acupuncture anesthesia, completed childbirth smoothly amid cheerful conversations. After the restoration of capitalism, the bourgeoisie heavily slandered socialist scientific achievements, promoting an anti-foreign and pro-Chinese stance, claiming that acupuncture anesthesia was a scam, and fabricated many black materials claiming that acupuncture anesthesia caused deaths to slander and defame.
However, their slander could not conceal that acupuncture anesthesia is a significant scientific achievement. After the restoration, a small number of medical cliques still held this technology and used it to gain fame and status. Today, acupuncture anesthesia has returned to public attention, but it is no longer during the socialist China period. Why does the Chinese revisionist regime rekindle the hype around “acupuncture anesthesia” again?
Here, I have two speculations: First, after the medical insurance system excluded imported drugs from centralized procurement, clinical anesthesia almost exclusively used low-quality domestic drugs, resulting in insufficient anesthesia effects and patients waking up during surgery. The Chinese revisionists use this technology to cover up the poor quality of their centralized procurement anesthetic drugs. Second, they increase surgical charges by adding a “needle anesthesia fee” to fill the hospital’s coffers. Third, led by Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, promoting this technology can satisfy the interests of the Chinese medical clique.
In any case, in capitalist society, advanced medical technology can only serve a small handful of the bourgeoisie, while the real working people are left in a situation where they cannot afford medicine or medical treatment.
