Acupuncture
(This is an excerpt from a University
Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
In A Practical Guide To Vibrational Medicine (2001) by Richard Gerber MD, the author tells us of documentation found by medical historians proving the existence of traditional acupuncture treatments in China dating back 5000 years. It has only been since the 1970s that acupuncture began to gain acceptance in the West. Today many people seek out acupuncture treatments as an alternative, complimentary form of treatment. This is primarily because of the effectiveness of this treatment, gaining popularity through word-of-mouth, not because it is embraced by Western medicine, for this therapy remains a mystery to many American doctors.
Acupuncture, though not necessarily thought of as vibrational medicine, is one of the oldest vibrational therapies still in use and quite popular today. Based on the ancient Chinese medicine model, acupuncture is a process of stimulation of points on the body, called acupuncture points, or acupoints, in order to change the flow of Ch’i, or life force energy to a specific area. These specific points are located along meridian channels, which are energetic channels located along the contours of the body, the points relating to organs, muscles, and other body systems. The points are stimulated with very thin needles, traditionally made from bone or rock, and now most commonly made of stainless steel.
Thousands of years ago, Chinese healers mapped out these meridian lines, and discovered that if there was a disruption in the flow of energy, specific points of blockage would affect specific organs. They learned that by stimulating these points, they could regulate the flow of energy, to bring about a more natural and balanced flow, to ensure optimal function of the organs and body systems. They found that if too little energy was flowing to an organ or other system, this part would become weak, and if too much energy was flowing into an organ or other system, congestion would occur, and cause a block in the flow. Both conditions could cause weakness and disease, and treatment with acupuncture at these indicated points was found to relieve the condition and restore health.
Despite the effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment for pain relief as well as many diseases, western medicine proponents have been quite slow in recognizing and utilizing this simple, painless practice. Much research has been conducted in the U.S. to determine what is actually happening, and why acupuncture works. Some of the theories include: acupuncture is just a placebo effect, people believe it is going to work, and it does; acupuncture acts to stimulate nerves which effect flow of pain signals to the brain; or stimulation of acupuncture points releases endorphins, which in turn gives pain relief. Traditional Chinese Medicine’s view of the body as a dynamic energy system in which the balance of the five elements affects the flow of ch’i through the body, in turn affecting health, was not an acceptable premise to the doctors and scientists still working from the perspective of the body as a purely mechanistic system.
In A Practical Guide to Vibrational Medicine (2001), Dr. Gerber tells about how Russian scientists made an interesting discovery as they were also studying acupuncture. They found that “acupoints had unique electrical characteristics that distinguished them from surrounding skin. They found a ten to twenty-fold drop in electrical skin resistance over acupoints that could easily be measured using conventional electrical recording equipment.” Other amazing research has been done in this area, such as the 1960s Korean study by Dr. Kim Bong Han involving injecting dye into the acupoints of rabbits, showing the dye following the same pathways as the ancient veterinary charts of rabbit meridians. Another study by French Drs. Claude Darras and Pierre De Vernejoul involved injecting a radioactive isotope into the acupoints of human patients, as well as into other established channels such as non-acupoints, blood vessels, and the lymph system. They found “when the non-acupoints, blood vessels, or lymphatic channels were injected, the radioactive tracer tended to diffuse outward from the injection site into a typical small circular pattern. However, when true acupoints were injected, the radioactive technetium followed the exact pathways as the acupuncture meridians described and illustrated in several hundred-year-old acupuncture charts of the human body! Even more amazing was the fact that when acupuncture needles were inserted into distant acupoints along the same tracer labeled meridians and then twirled, a change was produced in the rate of flow of technetium through the meridians. In other words, needle stimulation of acupoints on the meridians changed the flow rate of ‘something’ including the technetium tracer along the meridian channels. This research provided the first believable evidence supporting the ancient Chinese claim that acupuncture needle stimulation affected the flow of Ch’i through the body’s meridians.”
Though acupuncture is definitely a physical practice, treating the body directly, it is also considered to be a method of vibrational healing as it works with the subtle energy systems of the body, and the flow and balance of life-force energy in and around the body. It has been found to be very effective in the areas of pain relief, immune system support, aiding in weight loss and smoking cessation, treating allergies and asthma, digestion difficulties, arthritis, and many other maladies, including some ground-breaking work with cancer and AIDS. There are many very knowledgeable acupuncture practitioners, and many of them have studied even longer than the average doctor of Western medicine. Yet these studies are based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, which has never lost the view of humans as dynamic, holistic entities, and has always attempted to address health from a vibrational perspective.