What Chinese medicine actually means, and where my practice fits
People say acupuncture, or they say Chinese medicine. That’s what people search when they want to understand more. Acupuncture names one modality. Chinese medicine names the whole system that modality lives inside.
One term. Many things underneath.
Western medicine works this way too. Surgery, pharmacology, physical therapy, all different approaches inside one larger system. Chinese medicine is the same. Acupuncture is one modality inside it. So are herbs. So is gua sha.
It goes by East Asian Medicine now, a term that holds China, Korea, and Japan as distinct lineages rather than flattening them into one.
Prescribing herbs takes more training.
I hold a license as an acupuncturist in both Pennsylvania and Maine, covering acupuncture, dry needling, cupping, gua sha, and moxibustion. My practice is in Freeport, Maine, where I draw on that full scope for the patients who come through the door. Prescribing and compounding custom herbal formulas is a higher tier of licensure in both states, requiring more study, more clinical hours, and a separate board exam beyond what acupuncture alone requires. In Pennsylvania, it’s built into my L.OM. credential. In Maine, it’s an added tier to my scope of practice, tied to the acupuncture license.
I’ve practiced since 2001, drawing on both classical TCM and classical acupuncture styles. A comprehensive tool belt, not one narrow method. People’s complexity demands it. Two patients can walk in with the same complaint and need entirely different treatment. Getting to the right plan means spending real time understanding what’s actually going on, not applying a fixed protocol because the diagnosis fits a general definition. The tools I reach for depend on what that person, in front of me, on that day, actually needs.
What’s actually under the umbrella.
Acupuncture is the foundation. Thin needles placed at specific points, shifting how the body regulates itself. Chinese herbal medicine works alongside it, formulas built from plant, mineral, and botanical substances, adjusted as a pattern shifts. Moxibustion uses heat, usually from mugwort, to warm what has gone cold and move what has stagnated. Cupping and gua sha work at the level of circulation and connective tissue, releasing restriction close to the surface. All five sit inside the same tradition, refined over thousands of years, still practiced according to the same underlying logic: pattern differentiation.
Saam is one of them too.
Saam acupuncture isn’t a separate modality. It’s a style within acupuncture itself, the way different schools of thought shape how any technique gets practiced. It falls under that same broad umbrella most people call Chinese medicine. It isn’t Chinese in origin. It’s a Korean tradition that emerged in the mid-1600s, one distinct lineage within the wider family of East Asian medicine.
I don’t reach for Saam acupuncture as a separate treatment path, reserved for one category of complaint. I use it as another way of discerning what’s actually going on. Another layer in understanding the whole person in front of me. The conversation and diagnostic work of a visit, the tongue, the pulse, the palpation, tells me a great deal. Saam acupuncture’s channel framework often reveals something more, a finer read on constitution and function that sharpens the picture. Sometimes it confirms what that picture already suggested. Sometimes it surfaces something that changes the plan.
Dry needling isn’t a standalone tool.
Not in how I practice it, anyway.
Dry needling works differently, and at a different level. Its modern clinical roots trace to Western myofascial research, the work of Travell and Simons mapping trigger points and referred pain. More Western medical practitioners are adopting it into their own practices, which speaks to how effective it is. Not wrong. But stripping a tool away from the larger context it comes from tends to limit the tool’s full scope and potential. A trigger point doesn’t exist on its own. It belongs to a person whose sleep, stress, digestion, and constitution are all shaping how that tissue behaves and whether it stays resolved. Where Saam acupuncture helps me read that larger picture, dry needling addresses the structure sitting inside it. Think of the body as a container. When that container is bound up, tight muscle, restricted fascia, a trigger point that refers pain elsewhere, dry needling reaches it directly and lets it release. Used inside that fuller context, the release tends to mean more. And last longer.
These layers work together. Not in sequence. Not as separate silos. Different ways of understanding the same person at the same time. The visit itself gives me the broad diagnostic picture. Saam acupuncture sharpens it. Dry needling addresses what the structure itself needs to release before any of that understanding can fully translate into change. One framework without the others is often incomplete. I’m not choosing between them session to session. I’m holding all of them at once, each one revealing something the others can’t see on their own.
This is individualized care, and it’s why there’s no fixed protocol handed to you on the first visit. The label someone uses, whether they call it Chinese medicine, acupuncture, or something else entirely, matters less than what their body actually needs. My job is figuring out which framework, or which combination, gets us there.
One label, many approaches. Let’s find your best fit.
Sharon Sherman, MSOM, Dipl. AHM (NCBAHM), L.OM., L.Ac., practiced acupuncture and East Asian Medicine in Philadelphia for over two decades before founding True to Life Wellness in Freeport, Maine in 2025.