Aryana Libris

Author : Mann Felix
Title : Scientific aspects of acupuncture
Year : 1977

Link download : Mann_Felix_-_Scientific_aspects_of_acupuncture.zip

General considerations. When I first studied acupuncture in 1958, I did so in the traditional Chinese manner. A scientific approach to acupuncture hardly existed at that time. Thus I trod the pathway of Yin and Yang, the five elements, and the other accoutrements of this effective, yet fairy-tale world. I even spent ten years learning to read medical Chinese, so as to be able to read with my Chinese teacher the ancient and modern books in their original language; and what is more to be able to soak myself in the mentality and thought of this traditional medical art. After some years, I felt I had to a certain extent mastered the subject: I knew what the ancients said, and also what was preached in this century in the East and the West. It was only then that I seriously examined the validity of all I had learnt, only to discover that most of it was phantasy, In this book I will show that acupuncture points do not exist, meridians do not exist, and that most of the laws of acupuncture are laws about non-existent entities. Yet acupuncture works; indeed I practise it nearly 100 per cent of my time. I hope in the ensuing pages to explain, at least partially, how acupuncture works from a neurophysiological point of view, and hence how a Western doctor may practise acupuncture and, as a corollary, why the ancients had good results by acupuncture for the wrong reasons. I will show that an acupuncture point is like McBurney’s point which can vary in size and position to a considerable extent. When the appendicitis is cured, McBurney’s point disappears. The reflex pain one has in lumbago or sciatica similar to the pain in the neck, shoulder and arm in cervical disease would in traditional Chinese terms be explained as the pain in an acupuncture point (if only a small area is painful) or as the pain along a meridian (in sciatica or brachial neuralgia). Clearly it is more appropriate for a scientific doctor to say there is a reflex tenderness in the renal angle in renal disease, than for him to say there is an acupuncture point there. Likewise one should describe the tenderness of the arm in angina pectoris as a reflex rather than as a meridian. In this book, I not infrequently mention acupuncture points and meridians, even though they have no physical reality. I do this so that those doctors who already know acupuncture may more easily integrate tradition with the scientific. ...