Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981.
November.
From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of
personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm
your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and
human triumphs.
Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest
“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?’
