According to the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health, traditional Chinese medicine originated more than 3000 years ago. Its most popular modality, acupuncture, is perhaps the oldest and most commonly used medical procedure in the world. A wide variation in the practice of this and other Chinese medical modalities call into question the idea that there are universally agreed on criteria for choosing procedures based on arrived diagnoses. In the current culture that calls for certainty and reductionist thought, it is believed that the nearest thing to what is considered an objective body of theoretical and clinical knowledge is found deep within the Chinese classic tradition.