500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
It might not make sense why it works. You don’t have to “believe” in it. But it works anyway. This is one of the great mysteries of medicine and probably of life. Oh, you want examples?
Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese medical practice. I’ve tried it. Friends have tried it. Many have had good results. But we don’t know why it works.
I have also been trying qi gong lately, another ancient Chinese practice that involves moving energy around by standing with your arms extended in front of your body or waving them around like a lunatic. This, too, seems to have healing effects. Don’t know why. We’re fighting off flu and colds around here. At the suggestion of my sister, a doctor, we tried something called Apitherapy Honey Elderberry Syrup. It’s basically raw honey, elderberry and some herbs like echinacea. It doesn’t make sense that it would work, but it works incredibly well. This grapey-tasting stuff that tastes agreeably like a liquid lollipop just knocks down a cold.
A friend of mine recently told me a story. He was an engineer for 10 years, and he did Kung Fu. One day he pushed too hard and tore something. He went to an acupuncturist who was Korean. There was a language barrier. My friend figured that the acupuncturist didn’t understand a word about his injury. The guy fixed it anyway.
My friend, being an engineer and used to scientific proofs, had an interesting problem. Acupuncture worked, but could not be explained. So he became a licensed acupuncturist himself, spending three thousand hours to get a masters degree in acupuncture and oriental medicine so he could practice in California.
My friend’s name is Eric Schmidt and he runs an acupuncture clinic here in Santa Monica. 
Being an amateur engineer myself I like to know why things work, so I asked him to explain acupuncture. He gave it a shot, starting by explaining about the fascia, a fibrous tissue that binds blood vessels, nerves, muscles and groups of muscles. ”These fascia work together and they communicate with each other,” Eric told me.
Fascia might be a physical expression of what the Chinese call meridians, often described as energy channels. They connect in ways you might not have considered, and they’re the reason an acupuncturist can treat frontal jaw pain by inserting a needle in the frontal part of your foot.
That’s a 6 on the scale of weird as far as I’m concerned. Shall we go to 8? When an acupuncturist inserts a needle an inch or so into the skin it touches deep nerve centers that connect to a part of the brain involved with activities not wholly under our conscious control, like digestion, respiration, and the sleep cycle. The body reacts powerfully when we stimulate these nerve centers associated with such deep regulatory processes.
“The body is launching a strong response to a trauma that’s never occurred,” Eric explained, and the curious thing is that response can be a healing force. In this way, the acupuncture needle is “tricking” the body into sending energy into a trouble zone. The body can’t tell the difference, or chooses not to perceive the difference, between real trauma and the minor trauma of an acupuncture needle.
If you’ve ever had a dream about falling and woke up breathing hard and in a cold sweat you’ve experienced how something that is “just in the mind” can be so real.
Maybe this is why there may never be a scientific response to the “reason” acupuncture works. Simply by becoming involved in it you are involved in your own healing. You’re not a passive patient, but instead a co-creator of your own wellness. Maybe we shouldn’t ask why it works, but instead, is it effective? For many problems treatable by acupuncture, the answer is a resounding “yes.” That makes the real question: Why don’t more mainstream doctors refer people to acupuncturists?
There’s a lot to be learned from something that we might not understand. But that would go to 10 on the weird scale.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
I was training for a marathon but my left knee wasn’t along for the ride. It filed a complaint with the rest of my body. There was a long line at the somatic complaint window that day, so by mile 11 nobody in authority was listening to the knee.
KNEE: Hey, brain! Can’t you stop this jerk from running?
BRAIN: Relax, babe. Who’s that, the left knee?
KNEE: Paying attention is supposed to be your job.
BRAIN: Babe, coupla miles, this thing’s over. Focus on that.
KNEE: Hey, you focus on me, babe, because when I quit, you are just a piece of meat. You are a piece of meat on a stick, sitting in a chair, watching TiVO.
BRAIN: You’re being rude. I will now ignore you.
KNEE: Oh, yeah? I am going to mess you up!
Actually, the knee didn’t say that. It said something unprintable here. (Sometimes children read this blog.) But it made its move – it decided to stop working. Suddenly, I was limping. The training run was over and I limped right into three months of physical therapy. I got the ice packs, the weight training, the electrical stimulation, the whole deal.
I didn’t like feeling sick and weak, so I turned to acupuncture. Having somebody stick needles in you – and paying them for it – can sound nuts. I felt at home, however, with the idea of moving qi around and showing my knee how it might heal. It worked. I’m running well again.
There are lots of respectable doctors lining up to say that acupuncture is a sham.
One doc, writing in his Respectful Insolence blog, cites a research study demonstrating that when practitioners faked doing acupuncture it “worked” just as well as the real thing. Doing fake acupuncture meant using specially designed needles that retracted into the needle hub before hitting the skin.
Could acupuncture be nothing more, than “an elaborate and fancy placebo”?
David Gorski, writing in Science-Based Medicine, slammed the methods of one study that suggested acupuncture resulted in changes in the brain but didn’t make pain patients feel better. Harriet Hall, also writing for Science-Based Medicine, pointed out flaws in a study examining acupuncture to treat heartburn. If people felt better, she wrote, it was because they believed in acupuncture, not because the medicine of acupuncture was doing anything.
“It doesn’t matter what you do to the patient; all that matters is what the patient believes you did.”
- Harriet Hall
I get the sense that some of these docs are sorta pissed off. R.W. Donnell, writing in his blog Notes from Dr. RW, refers to researchers’ efforts to understand alternative and integrative medicine as “academic medical woo” and “quackademic medicine.” His terms are catchy, but he references Wikipedia as a source and also quotes a report originally published in 1910. Wikipedia is often wrong; things have changed a tad since 1910.
Nevertheless, all these folks are right to get tough. Why? Anything labeled “therapeutic” had better work and better not harm anybody.
Merck had to withdraw the “therapeutic” painkiller Vioxx following reports that it increased rates of strokes and heart attacks. We want people looking at treatments closely. This benefits everyone.
Acupuncture doesn’t hurt anybody. Many believe that it works. While “believe” might be the operative word there, the evidence to satisfy the skeptics isn’t here yet. Still, their criticism makes the research better.
Have you tried any “alternative” medicine? How’d it work for you?
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
It can be a good thing to learn from the past. (“Must remember to look behind when backing up car.”) It can be a good thing to look around the room and mentally rewind everything you see to its source. (“Where did that bag of Tostitos come from and would I want to see how they were made?”) The past is embedded everywhere.
The novelist William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
But what if the past wasn’t serving you – would you be able to unlearn it? Let’s see.
As part of pre-production for a documentary series we’re working on, I recently went to see a researcher named John D. Riley. At his Zero Point Research lab, I sat in front of a Lifestream Generator, a device pumping out millions of volts of DC electrical energy. 
If you’ve ever seen a Tesla coil, you’ll get an idea of what this is like. He told me that as the energy passed through me I’d experience where I was emotionally blocked. Well, I sure was feeling something around my neck and left shoulder – it jerked up and back, pulled by an unseen force. In that very second, an indelible image burst on the movie screen in my mind. I saw my 40-year-old father pulling my arm as I, at age 10, tried to run away. Was this some of my past somehow embedded in me, now released? Faulkner had it right. The past wasn’t even past. I was carrying some of it around in my shoulder.
Lots of people wanting to heal themselves are looking to reprogram the embedded past. 
Go to a yoga class and see if twisting your torso will release mental crud and create more space. Maybe a hypno-therapist can rewire your mind. Maybe an acupuncturist can get life force flowing in a more balanced pattern. Stored memory is powerful, whether it involves language, images, or even body postures. Manipulating it might be the key to healing on both the macro and micro levels… perhaps right down to the level of individual cells.
That’s the focus of some promising research at Children’s Hospital Boston that suggests we will be able to press reset on a cell’s developmental clock. If disease scarred your heart or damaged your nerves or knocked out your immune system, scientists could reboot. In successful experiments, they’ve already reverted ordinary skin cells to their embryonic state. Called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) these cells can become whatever kind of cell required – blood cells, brain cells, lung cells or heart cells. That means the body would have a chance to start over. The cell’s “memory” of being sick would be erased.
Emotionally positive memories play a role in healing, but even negative memories have their usefulness. If you happen to remember that snakes with a triangular head are poisonous, you might think to back away when you see one. Still, the prospect of rewinding time, being able to reprogram ourselves, or rebooting a sick cell makes me believe that we have a shot of taking charge of our past in order to shape the future.
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This week’s Newsweek cover article is a slap at Oprah Winfrey for crazy talk about complementary and integrative medicine. Oprah does cover some fringe stuff that is wacky and sometimes wrong. But I think she’s right to do it. Here’s why.
The history of medicine is smeared with snake oil. It was once believed that drinking oil – not olive oil, but the black stuff that comes out of the ground – had healthy properties. Even today, some swear that drinking apple cider vinegar helps digestion and whacks infections, but it may actually damage tooth enamel and sear the esophagus.
Newsweek slaps Oprah for going out on a slippery snake oil limb, promoting people like Suzanne Somers and her aggressive program of hormone replacement therapy. Somers, 62, takes 60 vitamins and supplements and also gives herself a shot of estrogen directly into her vagina. Newsweek portrays her as laughable, but I agree with Oprah – Somers might be a pioneer. Self-experimenters have often advanced science. 
At the age of 22, Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself by staring at the sun in a mirror because he wanted to study the after-images it left on his retinas. 
Australian physician Barry James Marshall swallowed some foul-smelling bacterial crud to show that Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers. Sir Issac ended up with marks on his eyelids; but Marshall ended up with a 2005 Nobel Prize for linking the bacterial crud, H. pylori, to ulcers. I’m not saying Suzanne Somers is going to surprise us with a treatise on gravity, but she has courage.
“Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.” — Barry James Marshall
The line between courage and dumbness, however, can be slim. Jenny McCarthy, another frequent Oprah guest, believes that her son Evan contracted autism because he received a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination. So far researchers haven’t found a link between vaccinations and autism. We do know, as Newsweek points out, that the vaccinations have saved the lives of thousands of children who otherwise might have died.
Facts like that don’t seem to change McCarthy’s belief. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”
Speaking of belief, look at “The Secret.” Oprah led the charge for it, and it has some good stuff, reminding us that we are all fields of energy in a larger field of energy. But it also stated that all diseases can be cured by the power of thought alone. That’s going too far. Even super-Secret supporter Oprah had to caution a guest on her show who had breast cancer and who was thinking of forgoing surgery against the advice of her doctors. Said Oprah, “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science, and try to, through your own mind now because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself.”
Yet Oprah knows people can heal themselves with Qi Gong, meditation, yoga, acupuncture. She’s not afraid to promote this “new” medicine, a medicine that is actually old, embracing the best of East and West.
Newsweek is going backward, contributing to the backlash against new medicine. Oprah is going forward by supporting medical pioneers. While looking into the sun, drinking crud or shooting up in the vagina may not seem so brilliant, breakthroughs come from acts of courage or folly and sometimes both.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Healing is hard to quantify. Does it mean, “My back has stopped hurting by a factor of 45 percent?” Does it mean, “I don’t wake up at night because of those nightmares of being chased by thousands of cats. I only wake up now because I dream of 50 cats?” Does it simply mean, “I feel better?”
Not all healing involves ripping off the band aid and seeing the healing with your own eyes. It can be invisible.
Some have experienced the invisible kind of healing using a technique called Reiki. Reiki involves moving the hands over the patient or lightly touching them. Afterward people have reported feeling balanced energetically or feeling more centered. But how does it work?
“Medicine doesn’t understand how Reiki works.” said Pamela Miles, founding director of the Institute for the Advancement of Complementary Therapies, when I recently interviewed her about Reiki. I’m working on a project about integrative and complementary therapies. As a science-oriented guy I’ve been curious about these therapies because often science can’t explain how they work but they seem to help people a lot. I’ve seen yoga reduce my stress levels. My mother stopped smoking after acupuncture treatments. There’s a mystery here and I want to know more about it.
“When I place hands on someone it’s like feeling an orchestra in my palms – I feel many different notes and qualities of vibration and it keeps changing,” says Miles.
What is science supposed to do with that? What is she transmitting through her hands? Life force energy? Mind energy? It might involve electromagnetic forces. Using a magnetometer to measure electromagnetism, some researchers claim to have seen the energy of Reiki moving from practitioner to patient. (Others say they have no idea what they’re measuring.) But even more interesting is the belief system involved for Reiki to work: you don’t need one. It works anyway, regardless of your belief system or even lack of one.
Scientists, being the take-measure types they are, have taken a shot at trying to understand the success of Reiki. One study suggested that Reiki can speed the healing of skin wounds. Another at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center in New York City looked at how Reiki and meditation might reduce anxiety, fatigue and pain in cancer patients. During the study, the intensity of those symptoms dropped by half. Results like that have encouraged mainstream health care providers to offer Reiki treatments as part of a hospital program. New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, Boston’s Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Institute and Yale-New Haven Hospital are all in.
Nobody knows why, but Reiki seems to help the body engage in self healing. “With Reiki,” Miles says, “patients get a chance to participate actively in their health care and regain a sense of control.” They become partners in their own care, and that, most doctors would say, is a key reason why this form of invisible healing seems to be so effective. I wonder how science will develop the tools to measure something like that. For me, it’s a mystery worth investigating.
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
