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Fingertips. None of the doctors or healers were able to offer any scientifically satisfactory explanations for the cures they had witnessed. But research is presently under way to find them. Thelma Moss of U.C.L.A.'s Neuropsychiatric Institute is using Kirlian photography, a supersensitive technique developed by Russian scientists to record the electrical field, or "aura," that surrounds humans, animals and even plants. In a study of the influences of healers on patients with terminal kidney disease, she found that the practitioner's aura decreased immediately 'after treatment, while that of the patient was intensified. E. Douglas Dean of the Newark College of Engineering displayed photographs showing that a healer's fingertips produced less electrical radiation when she was at rest than while she was healing.
Most of the doctors at the conference agreed that such therapy, which relies heavily on the patient's faith, provides the unscrupulous with unlimited opportunities for abuse. People must exercise the utmost caution to avoid being victimized by quacks. Few at the conference, however, felt that unorthodox healers could be effectively regulated without also limiting research into what the experts all agree is a fertile area for study. Said one doctor after listening to reports of various psychic healing techniques: "Clearly it does work in some circumstances. If we could harness it, it would be beneficial to many patients."
Four Gates. Probably the best example of how methods inexplicable in purely scientific terms can win acceptance is acupuncture. Until recently, the ancient Chinese art of curing illness and relieving pain by inserting pins into the patient was dismissed as folk medicine. Now Western medical men are seriously studying it and trying to discover scientific explanations for its effects. One new theory has been provided by the Chinese themselves. Working with microelectrodes, physiologists at Shanghai's Academy of Sciences have shown that there are at least four "gates" that control and channel pain impulses—in the spinal cord, the thalamus, the brain stem and the cerebral cortex. Inserted along strategic pathways, their studies show, acupuncture needles can suppress pain messages by somehow closing one or more of the gates.
Whatever the explanation, doctors at several U.S. hospitals, some of them aided by Chinese-trained practitioners, are using acupuncture experimentally to induce anesthesia during surgery or to relieve the pain of arthritis and other ailments. Some French air force physicians have found a novel way to apply acupuncture. Noting that the points on the body that register the greatest electrical activity coincide with those outlined in traditional acupuncture texts, they have written a computer program to correlate the two patterns and quickly identify the acupuncture points appropriate for treatment of certain symptoms. Dr. Jean Borsarello, who helped develop the program and has treated more than 3,500 patients with needles over the past 15 years, still cannot completely explain—in physiological terms, at least—how acupuncture works. He feels that the fact that it does work is reason enough to use it.