While acupuncture has been a successful Chinese medical treatment for over 5,000 years, it was not well known to the general U.S. public until the early 1970s, when President Nixon reopened relationships with China. Acupuncture was first met with skepticism, both by the U.S. public at large and the conventional American Medical Association. Slowly, Americans and other western countries began to conduct studies, sometimes in conjunction with the Chinese, about the efficacy of acupuncture. Certain types of acupuncture, particularly for pain management and drug related addictions, were easily translated into western medical theory and could be easily learned and used by western doctors. Thus, the idea of using some acupuncture gained mainstream acceptance. As this acceptance grew, so did the use of acupuncture and Chinese medical theories and methods, at least amongst the numbers of people open to "alternative" medicine. By the 1990s, despite initial scientific skepticism...