Acupuncture as Energy Medicine

by Gary Danchak |

If you go to a western doctor, the western process of amassing verifiable data begins before you even meet him or her. A nurse will ask you why you’re here, take your temperature and blood pressure, and review your meds. Then the doctor makes his way in, you have a chat, maybe get poked or prodded here or there, then you might be asked for some blood work—to get some “values.”

If you come to an acupuncturist, you’ll likely get a cup of tea while you’re brought up to speed with some of the basics: yin and yang, qi and blood, tongue and pulse. Then he or she will reach out and feel your pulses at the radial arteries, and you will be plugged into a 3,000-year-old energy assessment instrument.

The data the acupuncturist is amassing is coming in through his or her fingertips and is being assessed between the brain and the gut—the acupuncturist may initially indulge in some analysis as he or she tries to decide what patterns of energetic imbalance are being felt. The acupuncturist may not be interested in quantifying (although some of that goes on and is simply a matter of keeping good notes) as much as he or she is interested in determining the relationships of the energy flowing in the 12 organ systems. This is Chinese medicine.

The acupuncture treatment is pretty straightforward after you get a good read on the pulses. Move excess energy from this organ over to that one to tonify its deficiency. If there’s a bottleneck of energy (pain) encourage proper flow (a matter of needle technique and point selection). Balance the energy and you have a healthy patient.
Chinese medicine is based on 3,000 years of observation of how natural forces interact in the world and the assumption that humans are microcosms of the larger world. Western medicine is considerably younger and based on the scientific method, really good with the details, maybe not so much with the big picture.

Have you ever laughed so hard you started to cry? Ask a western doctor why this happens and you may have this image of a scientist in a white coat dicing up brain matter and whirling it around in a centrifuge to determine how much serotonin was in the brain at the point of change. Ask an eastern doctor and he’d say: it’s because the universe will not tolerate absolutes. The t’ai qi symbol tells us that as you approach absolute yang, energy becomes yin, and vice versa. All energy is in constant flux—yang becoming yin, yin becoming yang. A snapshot that stops time only shows a partial truth: “The Tao that can be told of is not the Tao; the Name that can be named is not the constant name.” As Ted Kaptchuk, OMD concludes, “The Tao comes to stand for something that does not deny reason, but always manages to remain just outside its grasp.” This is like an extra dimension.

As Aristotelian thinkers (we who know for a fact that “A” cannot be “not A”), western thought is logical, linear and scientific. Eastern, not so much.

Taoist sage Lao Tzu (600 B.C.) said:
To be bent is to become straight.
To be empty is to be full.
To be worn out is to be renewed.
To have little is to possess.

Looking for common ground between these disparate points of view, I stumbled down a rabbit hole into a description of string theory on Wikipedia, which noted that “string theory is the first candidate for the theory of everything (TOE), a way to describe the known fundamental forces…and matter…in a mathematically complete system.” Apparently the math all works out and explains Everything if you just add seven more dimensions to the paltry three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time that we know about now. By comparison, it’s not so hard to believe that when an acpuncturist puts a needle in your arm they’re contacting and manipulating a stream of qi.

If you look at matter on an atomic level, you have protons and neutrons and electrons whizzing around them, which means that a big boulder on a hill might look like it’s not moving, but it is moving and it is constantly changing, and we can do tests to prove it.

But what value is there to knowing that? Will it make your shoulder stop hurting?

Our bodies appear solid, yet we know that little sub-atomic particles are constantly tearing through us without our awareness (nevermind permission), some no doubt whacking a few electrons out of their orbits—a bit of DNA in your brain, a chunk of carbon in your heart—but most passing through this relatively amorphous construction, our bodies, seemingly without causing much trouble. But who knows? Pathogens lurk on doorknobs and in sneeze clouds. Secondary pathogens caused by improper diet impede the flow of energy and slow healing.

East and West agree that we are energetic beings in constant flux. What better or more direct way to achieve health and harmony than using tiny needles to lever and redirect energy back to a comfortable pattern of flow? And it even works on shoulders.

(This meditation is inspired by my annual re-reading of the seminal “The Web That Has No Weaver” by Ted Kaptchuk, OMD.)