All About Acupuncture
I have a sort of funny relationship with acupuncture: This strange and ancient Oriental art burst upon the American consciousness just about Inc same time that I entered the field of health journalism. Infact, if memory serves, the very first article on health that I wrote was on the subject of acupuncture. I titled it “Acupuncture?” By that, I meant to convey the idea that using the body as a pincushion to achieve healing was almost incomprehensible. But I concluded the article with a challenge to the medical profession to take an honest look at acupuncture to see if there was really something to it. The mere fact that Western doctors can’t “understand” acupuncture, I charged, was no good reason not to give it a fair trial.
To be perfectly honest, I never expected that a fair trial would be given. Much less did I suspect what has actually occurred.
Why acupuncture caught on so fast among American doctors, I can’t say, except to suggest that perhaps there is something about inserting needles into a patient that makes a doctor feel “right at home.” In any case, when I wrote that first article, my research was based almost entirely on some rather hard-to-get books and a few accounts in relatively obscure journals. I was able to locate only two physicians who were practicing acupuncture in the United States, and one of them consented to be interviewed only if we agreed not to mention his name.
That was in late 1971. Contrast that situation with the picture of hundreds attending a conference of the Traditional Acupuncture Foundation in Baltimore ten years later. And that organization is just one of many acupuncture associations across the country. No one has a clear count, but some 2,000 to 3,000 American M.D.’s are now involved with the ancient therapy. In addition, the Acupuncture Examining Committee has given certifications to 1,200 nonphysician acupuncturists since the mid-70s, most of whom practice in California. Florida and Rhode Island rank as two other states with a head start on acupuncture.
“Definitely, acupuncture has become more and more accepted by the American public,” says John Nawratil, editor of the American Journal of Acupuncture. “It’s the medical establishment that’s still resisting. But the AMA [American Medical Association] is fighting a losing battle on this one.”
It may be that the reason acupuncture has taken hold so fast in the United States is that it usually works. And, as often as not, after everything else has failed.
A Canadian M.D. whose back had a habit of “going out” wrote in the Lancet about his last-straw visit to an acupuncturist after a particularly painful bout. As sometimes happens immediately after needle therapy, he found that the pain was worse. Furious, he made it to his car and, once in the driveway at his home, called to his wife to help him out.
“Slow, writhing movement to get out of car as painlessly as possible. But something wrong here. Pain almost gone,” he wrote, “Look children, daddy is now six inches taller than when he left this morning; he can stand straight. Disbelieving doctor, convinced of an artifact, bends forward and back several times as if praying to house. Can move, straighten, walk, hardly any pain. It worked.”
He concluded, “Perhaps millions should be spent researching this therapy, which might lead us to save tens of millions of painkillers, muscle relaxants, days off work, hospital beds” (June 13, 1981).
That’s just one man’s story and one man’s condition. When assessing the value of acupuncture, it is important to remember that most patients who present themselves for acupuncture do so only after a chronic condition has resisted long years of traditional medical care, including every conceivable kind of pain medication and surgery. It is likely that if the cases seen by acupuncturists were not of this desperate variety, the results they obtain would be even more impressive.
No one is quite sure how acupuncture works, but there are at least two theories.
The closeness of traditional acupuncture points on the skin to nerves, and acupuncture’s facility in curing many kinds of pain, have led to the “gate theory” explanation of how the theory works. According to this theory, pain is a slow neural signal traveling from a problem area to the spinal column and on to the brain. The point at which the pain impulse enters the spinal column is a kind of nerve gate. But the sense of touch, which acupuncture stimulates, travels four times as fast as pain impulses. When these faster impulses reach the nerve gate first, They effectively block the entrance of pain signals, preventing the brain from registering them, according to the gate theory.
Another theory is that acupuncture directly causes the body to release certain natural painkillers called endorphins and enkephalins, substances that act like morphine to deaden pain. Exactly how they do Ilia I has not yet been established. Supporting this theory is the finding that when a chemical called maloxone, which blocks the action of these natural painkillers, is injected before acupuncture treatment, pain relief also appears to be blocked.
I .et me add that—despite those studies-a number of doctors and Wen llsts still maintain that acupuncture in fact has no physiological basis and works only through a placebo effect—the power of suggestion. The problem with that reasoning is that doctors have been able to perform operations on animals using only acupuncture techniques for anesthesia. It is doubtful, to say the least, that an animal is going to hold still and not cry out in pain because it has somehow been “psyched” into believing that it won’t feel anything when the scalpel cuts.
Tags: acupuncture, acupuncture techniques, acupuncture therapy, acupuncturist, traditional acupuncture