Integrating acupuncture and Western medicine: report of the WFAS Third World Conference of Acupuncture November 1993, Kyoto, Japan

The setting of the conference could not be faulted, with a magnificent, though not beautiful, conference hall overlooking a lake and forma1 gardens set in hills and pine forests. Kyoto offers unparalleled delights in the form of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines; the temples and their Zen-inspired formal, yet natural, gardens are breathtaking. A month in Kyoto is recommended to anyone with the time and necessary wealth to spare. The conference was huge: 3454 delegates attended from 39 countries. There were 3 major presentations to the whole conference: Professor Shohachi Tanzawa (Japan) on The role of acupuncture and moxibustion for the elderly, Dr David Bowsher (UK) on Acupuncture’s mechanism of action and Dr Hu Ching-Li (WHO) on How acupuncture and moxibustion should go forward into the 2Zst century. Three major symposia covered the Past af Acupuncture ana’ the prevention of disease particularly concerned with immune response; and Meridian phenomenon/phenomenon of propagated channel sensation' , Most of the conference consisted of parallel sessions, and so it was possible only to attend a proportion of the smaller sessions. To give the flavour of the whole proceedings we have summarized the 399 conference abstracts (Table). The categorization is necessarily rough, with many papers not falling neatly into any one category. For instance, a few of the uncontrolled clinical studies also incorporated physiological measures. The Table clearly shows that descriptive clinical studies, often just rough assessments of clinical outcome, formed over one-third of the conference presentations. Physiological and biochemical work amounted to almost another third, with much of the remainder concerning treatment techniques and discussions of traditional theory. The most striking fact to emerge from the Table is the small number of controlled trials.