The flight from science? The reporting of acupuncture in mainstream British medical journals from 1800 to 1990

Abstract: The reporting of acupuncture over the last two centuries n the British Medical Journal and the Lancet is described and analysed in this paper. The pattern of reporting in these mainstream British medical journals is seen as reflecting the occupational strategy adopted by the medical profession to deal with the competitive challenge from practitioners of acupuncture and other alternative therapies. It is suggested that this strategy favoured the development of a predominant climate of medical rejection of acupuncture as the nineteenth century progressed and doctors sought the social, political and economic rewards associated with the professionalisation of medicine. In recent years, however, the strategy of partially incorporating acupuncture into medical orthodoxy in face of the growing support for alternative medicine is viewed as being more compatible with the collective interests of the profession. Despite the overt commitment of the medical elite to a distinctive ideology of scientism, the scientific basis for its past and present response to acupuncture - as manifestes in the way in which this topic has been reported in the two leading medical journals considered here - is questioned.

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