You are here: About Allina > Newsroom > Allina Medical Clinic Connections

Transcript: Acupuncture and western medicine

This is Allina Medical Clinic Connections, your connection to healthier living.

Allina Medical Clinic Physician Douglas Sill is about to add a new set of tools to his doctor's bag: acupuncture needles.

This family practice doctor at the Forest Lake clinic will use his 2008 Bush Fellowship award to study the eastern medical art, something he first encountered on a volunteer trip to Nepal in 1995. Before then, Sill described himself as an acupuncture skeptic.

Dr. Sill: Nobody was trying to convince me, but I kept seeing the successes that these practitioners were having and it was certainly much more than random.

His eyes opened, Sill says he can see now how traditional western medicine and acupuncture can work together.

Dr. Sill: I began to realize that there's a real complementary relationship between the two different medical philosophies.

Over the next year, Sill will cut back his clinic duties to study acupuncture at UCLA's Helms Institute, the leading program of its kind in the U.S., and become board certified in acupuncture. When he returns to full time practice, Dr. Sill says he'll offer acupuncture treatments to his patients, primarily for pain management.

Dr. Sill: Acupuncture has a good record I think for being successful treating many different kinds of pain. This would include things like sports medicine type injuries, chronic headaches, malignancy related pain. And I think that acupuncture can offer another modality for treatment beside just chronic pain medicine.

Dr. Sill says while acupuncture may not be main stream in the U.S., it's n ot unknown, either.

Dr. Sill: It's certainly a modality that's widely known in the patient community and more and more people are seeking this out.

In fact, he says part of his motivation to pursue the Bush Fellowship to study acupuncture was the number of questions he and his colleagues often receive about acupuncture.

To learn more about this subject, contact your personal physician or log on to AllinaMedicalClinic.com.

This is Tim Burke.