A story is told in China about a peasant who had worked as a maintenance man in a newly established Western mission hospital. When he retired to his remote home village, he took with him some hypodermic needles and lots of antibiotics. He put up a shack, and whenever someone came to him with a fever, he injected the patient with the wonder drugs. A remarkable percentage of these people got well, despite the fact that this practitioner of Western medicine knew next to nothing about what he was doing. —TED KAPTCHUK, The Web That Has No Weaver
The current era has witnessed a revival of many archaic forms of medicine, including acupuncture, ayurveda, and homeopathy. To the surprise of many, particularly medical doctors, this renaissance of traditional therapies has begun to challenge the preeminence of Western medicine. Similarly, some scientists are privy to an uprising against the dominant frameworks of biology and physics. The parallel rebellions reinforce each another: the first is external in nature while the latter is introspective, deep, and fundamental.
The outward rebellion involves so-called “alternative” or “complementary” medicines. The label “alternative” can evoke connotations of opposition that is outside government, bereft of power, apart from the mainstream, and unorthodox.
However, these medicines were not always considered alternative and were orthodox, traditional, and mainstream in Europe, the Americas, China, and India for thousands of years. The twentieth century saw them displaced by the dominance of biomedicine, marginalized and banished from the realm of mainstream medical practice. The decline of these systems of medicine can be attributed to a number of factors.
The first was their inability to decisively control bacterial and viral diseases. This was particularly true of infectious diseases, including smallpox, bubonic plague, cholera, and typhus. Here, modern Western medicine provided a definitive victory with the invention of various vaccines. Subsequently the invention of sulfonamide, the first antimicrobial sulfa drug and precursor to modern antibiotics, saved innumerable lives. Finally the invention of antibiotics conquered almost all the bacteria-based diseases. Today, while drug-resistant bacteria are on the rise and influenza pandemics still pose a risk, pandemics of bubonic plague, cholera, and smallpox that once invoked dread exist for the most part only in history. This profound contribution established a strong foundation and formidable reputation for modern Western medicine.
Western medicine’s supremacy in surgery also contributed to the demise of the older medical systems. War has frequently afflicted humanity, and its injuries have contributed to surgery’s perpetual importance. This was particularly evident in the two colossal wars of the first half of the twentieth century, where surgery saved innumerable military and civilian lives. During times of peace, surgery also saved many lives from injuries arising from accidents and various life-threatening health conditions.
A third major reason for the rise to supremacy of Western medicine was the great success of modern science. Its discoveries enabled the development of sophisticated techniques and technologies that changed the world and significantly increased the standard of living. Along with the success of its applications, science developed a self-consistent theoretical system that was capable of explaining most phenomena encountered in life. It can be argued that this system represents the most profound edifice of knowledge ever created by humanity.
The immense success of modern science made it the sole criteria by which everything, including medicine, was assessed. If a medicine was consistent with the framework underpinning the theoretical system of modern science, it was considered “scientific” and thus reliable and orthodox. Conversely, medical systems that did not concur with the framework, including homeopathy, acupuncture, and ayurveda, were regarded as “unscientific” and could, at best, be labeled “alternative.” Given the supremacy of the scientific outlook, even the “alternative” label could be considered a generous concession.
Western medicine has not been favored to the same degree since the mid-twentieth century. Surgery, while remaining important, lost the prominent arena that the major wars of the twentieth century afforded it. Similarly, technology’s rapid development has seen injuries in vehicle accidents and factories greatly reduced, further diminishing surgery’s prominence. As people live longer, they look to medicine to improve their quality of life. In this context, surgery offers limited assistance.
Another modern-day phenomenon undermining the dominance of Western medicine is the relative rarity of epidemic diseases. A combination of factors, such as improved hygiene and the effectiveness of earlier vaccination programs, has all but eliminated epidemics from most people’s lives. While contagious diseases such as influenza, malaria, and AIDS still pose a risk to life, most people have not personally experienced a highly contagious, highly lethal epidemic. Modern medicine has not been able to provide decisive cures for many of the diseases that still threaten us and thus has not enjoyed the same opportunities to save the masses that it experienced in earlier times.
In the absence of widespread life-threatening acute diseases, inhabitants of developed countries continue to suffer from chronic diseases and functional disorders. These represent an Achilles heel for modern Western medicine. Consider the following widespread scenario: you visit your doctor suffering from a recurring headache or some other discomfort. The doctor performs a thorough investigation and refers you for an array of medical tests that employ impressively advanced technology. In many cases these tests reveal the cause of your discomfort, but often the results are within accepted parameters. This outcome leads your doctor to conclude that, contrary to what you may believe, there is nothing wrong with you.
Naturally, many people finding no remedy in Western medicine will look for something “alternative.” For this reason, older medical systems such as homeopathy, acupuncture, and ayurveda have experienced a revival and a return to the medical market. A 1993 report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that over one-third of the 1,539 adults surveyed had used alternative therapies in the past five years, averaging nineteen visits per person. The article calculated that the nation’s out-of-pocket expenses for alternative medical care amounted to around $10 billion per year. This was only $3 billion less than the out-of-pocket expenses for all hospitalizations in the United States.1
This $10 billion represented a major market opportunity for medical centers, and many that had previously espoused mainstream science’s opposition to alternative medicine began to provide alternative, traditional, and even spiritually based therapies. Recent data from the United States shows that seventy-five medical schools now include courses in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in their curricula. This revival is further demonstrated by community hospitals and academic medical centers opening new services, such as the Division of Complementary Medicine at the University of Maryland, the Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and the Center for Alternative Medicine and Longevity at the Miami Heart Institute. The latter promotes twenty-six varieties of alternative therapies, including applied kinesiology, bio-oxidative therapies, Qigong, and iridology.2
A curious modern development in medicine has seen thousands of well-educated Western doctors heading to China, India, and Japan to study Eastern medicine. While the early stages of this pilgrimage were mostly fueled by inquisitiveness, a desire to achieve better outcomes for their patients as well as gaining a competitive advantage in the Western market have served as more recent motivations.
Widespread awareness of Eastern medicine in the West is relatively recent. While historians have discovered records documenting traditional acupuncture treatment in China dating back five thousand years, references to acupuncture treatments did not appear in Western medical literature until the early 1800s. When first reported by Western explorers, these treatments were depicted as exotic, primitive, and unworthy of serious attention. Consequently, acupuncture disappeared from scientific and medical consideration.
In the 1920s a team of forty German doctors journeyed to China to embark on a serious investigation into Traditional Chinese Medicine. They studied both herbal medicine and acupuncture. In that era, war, starvation, and epidemic diseases still posed the most important problems for medicine, and Western medicine, equipped with its unfolding discoveries of sulfa drugs, vaccines, and antibiotics as well as its effective surgical techniques, offered more powerful solutions than traditional herbal medicine and acupuncture. Traditional therapies were also incompatible with contemporary science and technology, which had enjoyed great success during the industrial revolution and the colonial wars. In this light, Western doctors and scientists afforded little credence to exotic ancient medical therapies. Around this time, Traditional Chinese Medicine’s “unscientific” label led the Chinese government even to consider forbidding it.
Later, after World War II, some pioneering Western doctors recommenced investigation of acupuncture. Employing modern technology, they focused on electronic measurements (explored in more detail in chapter 6). The first discovery occurred in 1947 when a German physician, Richard Croon, found a correlation between resistance on the skin and acupuncture point locations: areas of the skin where electrical resistance was measured to be lower were more likely to be located at acupuncture points. Subsequently, in 1950, Yoshio Nakatani, a Japanese doctor, independently found the same lower-resistance phenomena along the Kidney Meridian. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, a meridian is the path along which the Qi, or life force, flows. The Kidney Meridian is one of the twelve standard meridians; there are also eight extraordinary meridians.
From 1953 onward, another German physician, Reinhold Voll, devoted himself to systematically studying the relationship between acupuncture systems and lower resistance on the skin. Based on the results of his studies, he developed a system of using the resistance measurements for diagnosis, thereby transforming acupuncture from a purely therapeutic technique to a combined therapeutic and diagnostic system.
Despite the introduction of modern techniques to acupuncture, thereby making it more powerful, it still lacked scientific rationale to explain its function. Acupuncture was not accepted by the scientific community, medical insurance, or medical universities, even in Germany, where Croon and Voll worked.
The profit motive is generally a more powerful driver than curiosity. The evolution of the medical market compelled numerous Western medical doctors to study this mysterious acupuncture treatment. Western medical insurance companies and governing bodies were subsequently forced to reconsider their policy toward it.
The prevailing attitude of condescension toward ancient treatments experienced a transformation in the 1970s. In many cases, the apparent inability of Western medicine to provide relief from chronic pain and suffering, along with the increased disposable income that the era afforded, led many to try alternative therapies.
Even then, with the exception of a handful of doctors and scientists, acupuncture was largely unknown outside China. This changed in 1976 with the death of Mao Ze-dong, the last absolute ruler of China, as China ended twenty-seven years of isolation to begin to open its doors to the West. Through this narrow portal of communication appeared reports of acupuncture’s effectiveness in relieving pain and its use as anesthesia during operations. The first reports about acupuncture appeared in the New York Times on April 28, 1971, and it made front-page news on July 25 of that year.3 In response to this development, doctors in the United States either voiced incredulity or attributed acupuncture’s benefits to the placebo effect.4 Nevertheless, people in the United States and other Western countries became aware of acupuncture, providing it a foothold at the base of Western medicine.
The 1980s saw China open further to the West, and thousands of Western doctors traveled to China to study acupuncture themselves. Ultimately, the situation was comparable to the story introducing this chapter, about the Chinese peasant who used antibiotics from the West to heal without understanding how they worked. Similarly, Western doctors learned how to insert needles into acu-points to benefit their patients without knowing acupuncture’s working principles.
Acupuncture became increasingly popular in Western countries. By the beginning of the 1990s, the German Association of Acupuncture already had more than four thousand members. In addition to those studying acupuncture in China, many practitioners had begun to establish courses and open schools to teach acupuncture in Germany and other Western countries.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War, which had largely severed communication channels between East and West since the end of World War II. This development led to China further engaging with Western countries, and Chinese medical doctors were permitted to leave China to work in the West. Many headed to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia to practice therapies, including acupuncture, herbal medicine, and Qigong.
The twenty-first century has seen clinics offering Chinese medicine achieve an unprecedented level of popularity in the West. In the United States and the United Kingdom, this popularity has begun to make significant inroads into the conventional Western medicine market. This prompted the governments of some Western countries to consider and enact new legislation to regulate the alternative medical market, covering factors such as the qualifications of complementary medical practitioners and the safe application of herbs. Meanwhile, the competitive dynamics of the medical insurance industry have forced companies to adapt their coverage of alternative therapies to satisfy their customers’ demands.
It seems likely that these exotic forms of medicine will continue to enjoy rapid worldwide expansion in the medical market. However, practical success does not mean these alternative or complementary forms of medicine have already achieved scientific status. Their success is regarded as purely empirical and without a reliable scientific basis. Despite the fact that a remarkable percentage of acupuncture patients benefit from the treatment, practitioners are unable to explain how their treatment works from a Western medical point of view. This scenario does not sit well with the conservative scientific community, which maintains a cautious, even suspicious, attitude toward these therapies.
For instance, in the last five decades, many anatomists and histologists have searched, without success, for the mysterious acu-points and acu-channels, which are clearly described in the ancient books on acupuncture. The apparent absence of these structures can be seen to invalidate Chinese medical theory and leads to the suggestion that the benefits of acupuncture may be attributable to a mere placebo effect. In other words, the whole chronicle of acupuncture, spanning thousands of years, might only be an elaborate fairy tale, or worse, a colossal hoax.
The increasing popularity of acupuncture and other traditional medicines has led to new research foundations for complementary medicine, including the Foundation for Integrated Medicine in the United Kingdom, supported by the royal family, to be established to encourage serious scientific research. Various private foundations are also conducting research into complementary medicine.
In shaping the administrative and legal framework for the emerging alternative medicine market, government agencies have sought to clarify the situation through scientific research. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. government’s medical research agency, established the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, to support research. Similarly, government foundations in some Eastern countries, such as China and India, have supported such research for decades.
Universities in the West, even highly conventional institutions such as Harvard Medical School, the University of California, Duke University, the University of Arizona, Imperial College London, the University of Westminster, the University of Greenwich, and Middlesex University, have started to seriously consider complementary medicine. In addition to holding conferences, some have established research teams to investigate the reliability and scientific merit of alternative therapies.
There are two aspects to this research: the first studies the effectiveness, safety, and cost-benefit relationship of various forms of complementary medicine. This research can in some ways be considered a vehicle for skeptics, enabling them to discern whether positive outcomes can be attributed to a placebo effect and whether these alternative systems are genuine therapies or merely the domain of charlatans. This relatively straightforward form of research will provide information concerning the credibility of these therapies, which is highly important for patients and government authorities.
The second aspect is fundamental scientific research into the mechanisms underlying holistic medicine. In some ways, this form of research is for believers, particularly those who want to peer into the mysteries that facilitate alternative therapies. This form of research is not as urgent as the first, but its success would serve two purposes: providing a scientific rationale for complementary medicine, thereby legitimizing its position in society; and enabling major improvements in techniques and effectiveness by employing rational scientific understanding and the power of modern technology.
Fundamental research into the mechanisms of complementary medicine is intertwined with an important move away from the approach of reductionism and the limitations of the particle pattern toward a holistic style of thinking. Such a move would have profound influences not limited to medicine but extending to science, technology, and the future of humanity.
It is possible to draw parallels between the current revival of older therapies and the fifteenth century’s Renaissance, which had the outward appearance of a movement directed toward the past, specifically the culture of ancient Greece. In reality it was a progressive movement that marked the beginning of a new epoch that brought about the Reformation, the industrial revolution, modern democracy, modern science, and a new mode of thinking that differed completely from that of the Middle Ages.
Similarly, the current revival of ancient forms of medicine appears to represent a movement or doctrine of returning to the ancients. In reality, it is also part of a progressive movement indicative of the beginning of a new epoch. We are fortunate to live in this period and witness the many transformations that are occurring in medicine, science, technology, society, and our way of thinking.
As stated earlier, this revival of older therapies represents the external level of a major revolution that is discernible to all. Another revolution is currently unfolding at an internal, deep, and fundamental level. Along with the study of the underlying mechanisms of complementary medicine, this revolution will reveal more about the nature of this new epoch. These two revolutions echo and reinforce each other, and both will influence the ultimate form of the new era.
In the last half century, fundamental scientific research has exposed many weaknesses in Western medicine, biology, physiology, psychology, society, and our way of thinking. Let us consider these weaknesses in light of the two evident limitations in the current mode of thinking in medical research.
As discussed in chapter 2, Stapp pointed out that psychology has moved toward the concepts of nineteenth-century physics while physics has moved in the opposite direction. Nineteenth-century physics employed concepts grounded in materialism, chemicals, and ball-like particles. Physics had moved beyond these incorrect concepts by the early twentieth century, but these obsolete notions, with their inherent materialist limitations, still dominate biology, physiology, and even psychology. The modes of thought overshadowing these disciplines are akin to the outmoded thinking of the Middle Ages. It is impossible to discern the mechanisms behind these ancient forms of medicine, which are related to subtle energy vibrations, information, wave patterns, and harmonies, without changing the way contemporary biology, physiology, and psychology think.
The basic ideas and methods in contemporary medicine, biology, physiology, and psychology are based on the approaches of reductionism, biochemistry, and conquest. Reductionism involves disassembling a system into smaller and smaller separate components in order to study the details of the system, thereby determining which component is responsible when problems occur.
The approach of reductionism was tremendously successful in medical research and the development of biology and psychology in earlier periods. In studies of infectious diseases, scientists would separate bacteria from patients’ excretions, passing them through multiple procedures to separate the individual species. At a certain stage it would be determined which species was responsible for the disease, and scientists would then invent some means, such as antibiotics, to kill it.
The approach of reductionism still has some success in the study of genes and genetic diseases today. However, by reducing problems in systems to a single element to be eliminated, little consideration is given to the dynamic interplay of the multitude of elements. Within the approach of reductionism and conquest, there is no trace of the concepts of balance, cooperation, coordination, and harmony, which are fundamental to holistic medicine. It is therefore not possible to study holistic medicine without moving away from the reductionist approach.
Fortunately, a movement away from reductionism toward holism in physics was initiated in the 1970s by modern physicists such as Hermann Haken, Fritjof Capra, Ilya Prigogine, and Ke-hsueh Li. Haken developed the idea that “the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts” under the name synergetics. Capra pointed out that everything in the universe is interconnected in a huge network of strong or weak interactions. Prigogine found the dynamic dissipative structure, and Li proved that the uncertainty principle is not only valid in the microworld but also in the macroworld.5
Unfortunately, only a few biologists, physiologists, and psychologists are aware of these major changes in the concepts of physics. For these disciplines to comprehend the essence of holistic thinking, it is necessary, even urgent, to introduce them to these radical concepts. This will provide a framework that allows ancient Eastern therapies to be interpreted from the viewpoint of modern science.
In the following chapters, this important revolution in science will be introduced, alongside an introduction to the history of fundamental scientific research into complementary medicine, focusing particularly on acupuncture and related medicines. Long before the present boom in the complementary medical market, pioneering scientists had already done a lot of exploration. Revolutions in science, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, have already cleared the way to understand the essence of balance, cooperation, coordination, and harmony, which are fundamental to holistic medicine.
It is worth noting that the outcome of the revolutions in science will not be limited to the establishment of a new united medical system that incorporates Western medicine and complementary medicine under one theoretical system. It will also promote a profound revolution in physics, biology, physiology, psychology, economics, and finally, in modern society’s way of thinking.