Part I

My curiosity was aroused.  After all, Traditional Chinese Medicine had been around for over 5,000 years.  I thought anything that had lasted that long through time must have some validity to it.  Penicillin had only been in use for less than one hundred years.

An initial cultural exchange program (1975-76) allowed master acupuncturists from China to come to New York to teach.  That first wave of seminars was a learning struggle.  The instructor's English was very hard to understand.  Also, they could not fully comprehend the questions asked in English, and they had difficulty finding the right words to explain concepts.  Of course, if I had to go to China and had to speak and comprehend Chinese, I would do far worse than they did. 

I kept asking, "But what do you mean by 'energy'?  What is key or ki (Qi)? What is Yin energy?  What is Yang energy?  How does it work?"  The instructors would politely smile and point to acupuncture points on a chart, but it didn't explain to me, or any of the other doctors in the class, how energy really worked.

My partner in practice, an osteopath, had tried some acupuncture techniques on intelligent selected patients who understood that the procedure was experimental.  On some migraine headache patients and difficult lower back and sciatic cases, the results gave varied degrees of relief from "very good" to "a little better."  On other patients, no results were produced.  However, an important consideration to note; no harm resulted in any cases.  I started to integrate acupuncture in some cases as an adjunct to my basic therapies and always told my patients the truth, that I didn't know what to expect, but hundreds of millions of people in China had been helped with acupuncture for thousands of years.

My patients would ask me, "How does it work?"  I would tell them that it balances Yin and Yang energy.  At that point, after much research, I understood that Yang energy was a stimulating/accelerating force and that Yin energy was a calming/inhibiting force. Traditional Chinese Medicine precepts stated that if an organ or system had too much or too little energy, disease occurred.  When a normal balance of energy was restored, health would return.  In western medicine, this balancing effect is also sought by using specific drugs to accelerate/stimulate or inhibit/calm certain organ functions.

Anatomically, I would locate the acupuncture point and painlessly insert the needles.  At times, I twirled them or stimulated them electrically.  Sometimes I got surprisingly great results, such as in stubborn cases of shingles, sometimes no results.  I understood the theory of acupuncture, and clinically, I saw unexplainable successful results from treatment, but my burning question persisted, "What actually was this invisible force called 'energy' and how did it help in the healing process?"  Theoretically, historically and clinically, there was ample intellectual justification for using acupuncture as an integrative tool, but in my gut it still left me perplexed.  How did "energy" work?