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Acupuncture: A chinese puzzle
Picture your body as a metropolitan subway system. Its 14 lines extend from the tips of your toes to the edges of your eyebrows, shuttling your qi, or vital energy, through 361 stations with hummingly smooth precision. Now picture those stations being invaded by wind, cold, heat, damp or dryness until the schedules fall apart and the trains start to derail. Suddenly, your system is such a mess that you would rather take a cab.
That's how Xing Yue, a young Chinese doctor in Harbin, in northeastern Heilongjiang province, explained traditional concepts of health and illness when she began teaching me acupuncture. The subway stations were acupuncture points and their lines the meridians that correspond to different organs in the body. I would spend the next four months following Xing on her rounds through a nerve rehabilitation clinic by day, watching her successfully treat paralysis in stroke victims. At night, we would pore over the map of the subway, discussing the character of each station and how to tweak it with tiny needles to get the trains back on schedule.
Acupuncture has been practiced in China for more than 2,000 years, but is only now beginning to gain acceptance by Western medical authorities as a legitimate means of treating pain, nausea, asthma and a host of other ailments. The acceptance is wary, however, not least because of the lingering mystery over why it works. In 1997 the U.S. National Institutes of Health issued a report acknowledging that acupuncture alleviated some of the agonizing side effects of chemotherapy—yet the researchers couldn't pinpoint the reason the needles were so effective.
This enigma never bothered the pragmatic Dr. Xing. Her training in Chinese medicine had encompassed thorough instruction in Western theories of disease and diagnosis, which she trusted. But as long as acupuncture worked, she was content to use it. She saw for herself that, after three weeks of twice-daily treatments, her stroke victims regained use of their hands, even though she knew their paralysis had been caused by blood clots in the brain, not windy weather. If I had a cold, she would stick two needles under my nose "to unblock the qi" in my sinuses, and then hand me a bottle of vitamin C, to help my "immune system fight the virus." When a domestic abuse victim came to her after a month of sleepless nights, Xing prescribed acupuncture for the insomnia and then referred her to a social worker for help escaping her violent husband. Toward the end of our course, she dispatched one of my most severe migraines with a couple of well-placed jabs to my right hand. I was grateful, of course, but still frustrated I couldn't use Western science to understand how she had done it. Xing met my grimace with a steady grin. "Acupuncture," she shrugged, "might not be the easiest thing to explain—but then again, neither is the human body."
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