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Acupuncture—A Chinese Puzzle
By JOHN WHITE
“That
a needle stuck into one’s foot should improve the functioning of one’s liver is
obliviously incredible. The only
trouble is that, as a matter of empirical fact, it does happen.”
So wrote
novelist Aldus Huxley many years ago, in his forward to Dr. Felix Mann’s book, Acupuncture:
The ancient Chinese art of healing. Mann described how a skilled acupuncturist can, by inserting
needles into the body at various points and depths, cure, improve or arrest a
wide range of afflictions: migraine, headache, ulcers, arthritis, high blood
pressure, conjunctivitis, hay fever, acne, sciatica, hepatitis, asthma,
hemorrhoids, angina pectoris, lumbago, weak eye sight, tonsillitis, anemia,
insomnia. No surgery of drugs, mind
you—just needles.
Today,
as China’s bamboo curtain lifts, Americans are becoming aware of the Oriental
therapeutic and anesthetic treatment-by-needles. In 1971, in China, Seymour Topping, managing editor of the New
York Times, and his wife, Audrey, witnessed heart surgery performed on a woman
whose only anesthetic was acupuncture.
During the operation the surgeon actually held the patient’s heart in
his hands for all to see. The woman,
who was calmly sipping orange juice through a straw, apparently held the
patient’s heart in his hands for all to see.
The woman, who was calmly sipping orange juice through a straw,
apparently felt no pain and smiled at observers. “We almost fainted,” said Mrs. Topping.
Later,
the prestigious journal of the American Medical Association carried a long
article about acupuncture by Dr. E. grey Diamond of the university of
Missouri. Dr. Diamond had made a trip
to China several months earlier with cardiologist Dr. Paul Dudley White. On their return, both indicated that
acupuncture anesthesia warrants further investigation. In addition, two New York medical men
visiting China, Dr. Samuel Ronsen of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Dr.
Victor Sidel of Montefiore Hospital and Albert Einstein College of Medicine
commented favorably about acupuncture anesthesia to the press.
The headlines
sparked by such serious interest in acupuncture have made some scientist
uncomfortable, even angry. “It’s all in
the mid,” they say. “Needles instead of
sugar pills. Hypnosis. Traditional Chinese stoicism. Trickery.”
To which others respond that acupuncture also is supposed to work well
on animals, which presumably are not receptive to hypnosis ad placebos. And so controversy rages.
What do
we actually know about acupuncture [from Latin acus,”needle” and punctura,
“puncture”] so far? Legend has it that
the system originated in the chance discovery that arrows shot into one part of
the soldiers’ bodies could cure illness in other parts. Acupuncture was known, according to
tradition, as early as 2600B.C., during the reign of Emperor Huang Ti. More than 2000 years lager, the practice was
described in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic Internal Medicine, and since then has
bee an ever-present method of healing in the Orient. Today Japan has 50,000 licensed acupuncturists, and China has
about one million, of whom 150,000 are physicians.
Traditional
acupuncture theory is intimately bound up with Chinese philosophy, Taoism and
the yin-yang concept of dynamically opposing, yet harmonizing, energies in the
universe—energies that are believed to wax and wane rhythmically. Man is a microcosm of the universe, and
therefore also has the same regular change in his body’s vital energy—variously
identified as CH’I, QI or T’CHI. The skilled
acupuncturist, using a little-known method of pulse diagnosis, determines his
patient’s “yin” and “yang” condition and, if there is an imbalance, treats them
for what he coerces will go wrong if not corrected. He aims at prevention rather than cure.
Should
illness actually arise, he treats the person, not the illness. A disorder is thought to be due to a
malfunction or imbalance of the ‘chi’s’ as it circulated throughout the body
along 12 bilateral channels called meridians.
Each meridian is associated with an integral organ such as the heart,
lings or stomach. And on the meridians
are about 900 puncture points, each about 1.10 of an inch in diameter and
carefully located on charts of the human body.
By inserting fine, stainless-steel [bone, porcelain, gold, and silver
have been used in the past] needles* (An alternative to the needle treatment
is moxibustion, in which small cone of powdered Artemisia vidgaris, commonly
called mugwort, leaves are placed on the appropriate points, ignited and left
to burn until the skin reddens. Massage
of the puncture points is still another treatment possibility) into
appropriate points and varying the depth and speed of insertion, the traditions
acupuncturist claims that he affects the energy flow—either stimulating or
dispersing it. He thus restores
equilibrium to the energy system, and the patient is returned to health. [Since the points of insertion avoid vital
organs, the needles do not damage the body, although they may cause a little
soreness.]
Besides
using acupuncture for treatment, the Chinese now use it as a means of
anesthesia. Classically, needles were
placed in the skin superficially and left for 10 to 30 minutes. In a new anesthetic as well as therapeutic
technique, sparked by Mao Zedong’s exhortations to improve medicine, needles
are sometimes placed deeper, up to tow inches.
In addition, they are constantly manipulated in a rapid half-inch,
up-and-down motion [about 120 times a minute] while being twirled between thumb
and fingers. In a yet more dramatic
innovation, electro acupuncture has developed, primarily by a woman, Chu
Lien. In this procedure, a patient
receives though implanted needles a 0.5-milliampeares current for 20 minutes,
which completely anesthetizes the area to be incised.
The list
of ills which acupuncture can cure is growing.
In 1968, a Chinese army medical team located the acupuncture points that
effect hearing by experiments on themselves.
They say they have successfully treated deafness in 90 percent of cases
resulting from a childhood disease.
They offer as proof 11 children, deaf and mute prior to 1969 but now
completely cured. Also, Chinese doctors
have combined acupuncture with herbal medicine, modern drugs and doctor-patient
discussions to treat Illness. They claim
that such treatment has cured 79 percent of inmates at a medical hospital in Human
Province.
Similar
advances in using acupuncture have been reported in the U.S.S.R., where there
are said to be 1000 specialists in the art.
Stanley Krippner, a psychologist at the new Humanistic Psychology
Institute in San Faransico, visited the Soviet Union and reported that Moscow
physiologist G.S. Vassilchenko has successfully applied acupuncture to treat
bedwetting, sexual impotence and frigidity.
But Russians acupuncturists rarely use needles. Instead, they employ electrical stimulation,
message, and ointments and occasionally laser beams. Moreover, the Russians do not completely rely on the ancient
charts. They have found that Caucasians
have acupuncture points at slightly different places than Orientals, and that
the placement may vary even with different individuals.
I asked
Dr. John W.C.Fox, former assistant professor of anesthesiology at the State
University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, if he could
explain acupuncture. “Western
physicians are not at all satisfied with the classical Chinese theory,” he
said. “They want to explain acupuncture
in terms that are readily understood or will fit in with our neuropsychological
concepts.”
Perhaps
Ronald melzack, a neurophychologist at McGill University in Montreal, and Patrick
Walls, and a neurophysiologist at University College in London have offered the
most promising modern explanation of acupuncture anesthesia. They suggest that there are certain
inhibitory mechanisms in the spinal cord that allow or block the transmission
of impulses which, when they reach the brain, are interpreted as peripheral
stimuli, such as a needle prick, can eliminate pain by altering the
transmission of pain-producing impulses.
A French
physician, Dr. Georges Cantoni, offers an electronic theory of
acupuncture. Dr. Cantoni has found that
people in good health have an electrical potential difference of 30 to 40 mill
volts between the head and the fingertips, the head being the positive pole and
the fingertips the negative pole. If
one’s health is less than void, this difference in potential decreases or can
event get inverted. This electrical
balance of imbalance is, according to Dr. Cantoni, one of the main aspects of
what the Chinese mean by “the circulation of energy.”
Science
will continue to search for an explanation of what is presently an inexplicable
phenomenon. In the Winter, 1971, issue
of the Yale Review, Arthur Galston, a plant physiologist, offered some counsel:
“Since the Chinese seem happy to blend Western medicine with traditional
Chinese practices, should we be less willing to learn from the wisdom of the
East?’
