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One reason for this lack of under-standing is that despite its wide acceptance in eastern Asia, acupuncture has been generally dismissed in the West as superstitious folklore. Only since World War II has it become the subject of serious scientific inquiry in the Soviet Union, to a lesser extent in France, Germany and Britain. In the U.S., the treatment is available principally in San Francisco's Chinatown. Even in its homeland, acupuncture was being phased out by officials before the Communist takeover in 1949. Then Mao Tse-tung realized that it would be impossible to train China's 500,000 traditional practitioners in Western medicine. So he deliberately encouraged the nation's Western-trained doctors to study the old ways as well as the new. It is this latest generation of physicians that has extended acupuncture's scope.
Gold v. Steel. Before its great leap forward into anaesthesia, acupuncture had changed little. The original text is a book about 2,300 years old. Dr. Ilza Veith, professor of the history of health sciences at the University of California (San Francisco), has translated it as The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine. According to this canon, the body has twelve more or less vertical channels or "meridians," and along these are 365 points at which the insertion of a needle will have a physiological effect. These points do not follow any anatomical system recognized in the West.
The mystical rationale for acupuncture is that the forces of yang and yin flow through the twelve channels and must be precisely balanced. Yang is variously translated as good, positive and "on the sunny side," while yin is bad, negative or "on the shadowy side." If a traditional acupuncturist diagnosed a patient as having too much yin somewhere, he would jab a selected point with a gold yang needle. In today's China, the newly respectable "scientific" acupuncturists rely mainly upon proletarian stainless steel. The modernists have added about 200 points to the list of accepted targets, and they sterilize their needles. But they are unable to explain how the treatment achieves its effects.
Toe to Head. There has been some speculation that acupuncture affects nerve impulses or stimulates the blood supply to nerves. Dr. Li Pang-chi, the scientifically trained physician responsible for Reston's care in Peking, once had doubts about acupuncture. Now he believes that illness can be caused by imbalance between organs—and that "acupuncture can help to restore balance by removing the causes of congestion or antagonism." In acupuncture the insertions are not necessarily close to the pain or its apparent cause. For a headache, it may be the big toe that is punctured. Adherents also claim success in treating, among other things, toothache, influenza, dysentery, nephritis, deafness, blindness, asthma, eczema, diabetes and high blood pressure.