Dr Jean-Marc Kespi
Honorary President of the French Association of Acupuncture (AFA)
After enthusiastically completing my medical studies, I set up as a general practitioner in 1962. I came across acupuncture the same year and began to learn a second medicine, Chinese this time. From the outset, I was passionate about it: I watched, listened, felt and smelt; this enabled me to remain faithful to the clinical approach I had learned from my masters during my classical studies from 1952 to 1960.
At a time when acupuncture was often described as dusty and poetic archaism’, I had the privilege, after reading Georges Soulié de Morand and Jean Choain, of meeting my acupuncture masters Albert Chamfrault, Nguyen van Nghi et Claude Larre. I was struck by the fact that they always questionned their readings of acupuncture texts ; frequently asking ‘why’, they told us that there was something important to be grasped here, another way of looking at life and medicine. I was able to give credit to this tradition, which gradually enabled me to discover its depth and validity. In this way, acupuncture has taken me on a journey that has enriched me considerably in terms of medicine and life.
Traditional Chinese medicine takes a different approach. It’s not anatomical: it is functional and symbolic. It offers an original reading of the human being and its symptoms. What’s more, on a therapeutic level, by puncturing one or more acupuncture points, it addresses itself to the areas of the body where the suffering has been memorised, helping to free the obstructed areas at that level, and making them circulate again. The scar is still present, but less so or no longer painful. The aim here is to treat a person beyond his symptoms, to accompany him, to replace the symptoms untill their somatic or psychic defences have been overcome, finally to remind the body of a normal way of functioning that it has known but ignored.
Nguyen van Nghi also made me realize quite quickly that I would never be a traditional Chinese doctor: I hadn’t ‘drunk’ the Chinese language, rites and civilisation with my mother’s milk; I wasn’t familiar with Chinese life, its rites, practices and customs. But because I was a foreigner, I could ask questions that only foreigners would ask and, by reflecting on things from the outside, possibly enrich it. There is one condition for this: I need to get close and intimate with Chinese tradition, civilisation, language, arts, medicine and physical practices.
On 13 July 2015, at the suggestion of the Grand Chancellor, I was appointed Chevallier de la Légion d’Honneur as a general practitioner and Honorary President of the French Acupuncture Association. General medicine and acupuncture have been honoured in this way, far beyond my own person.