Daniel Keown - The Spark in the Machine: How the Science of Acupuncture Explains the Mysteries of Western Medicine

How the Science of Acupuncture Explains the Mysteries of Western Medicine

DR DANIEL KEOWN M.B. CH.B., LIC. AC.

LONDON AND PHILADELPHIA

The Three Yin Channels

When embryologists and anatomists draw pictures of these cavities they are sometimes drawn as massive spaces, but in reality there is almost no space at all. Just like in the drawing of the Taijitu , or an unopened supermarket plastic bag, the space between the cavities is almost invisible.

The space is potential space.

These potential spaces are the channels. The organs pair up in the channels:

Heart and Kidney in the ShaoYin (what Western medicine calls retroperitoneal )

Pancreas, Spleen and Lung in the TaiYin (what Western medicine calls the anterior pararenal space )

Liver and Pericardium through the JueYin (peritoneum, diaphragm and pericardium).

These channels or , compartments are like rooms in a house. The walls of the room are made of fascia and the only way in or out is through the windows or doors. The fascia is immensely strong, and just like the walls of your rooms you cant go through them; you have to use the paths in the house.

Your body is like the whole house. Just as in your house, there are connections between all the rooms, including stairs up and down and maybe even hidden doorways (this is the case with Ming Men).

Also just like your house, at one level this arrangement is very simple; there is no need to conceptualise it any deeper. In the same way that you have different roles for the rooms of the house, so does the body, but the house remains its own structure.

These fancy Western names anterior pararenal , peritoneal , retroperitoneal are just like names of a room dining , kitchen , study and so the name is not that important. What is important is that they represent a distinct room in the house, a compartmentpart of an Acupuncture channel.

This book, and Acupuncture, is about how you move through that house, and the role of each room.

In the same way that you will link your dining room to the kitchen to facilitate ease of eating, so the body also links various organs together.

The Western names listed above have to be included because the whole point of this book is about how Western medicine validates Chinese medicineall I can do is apologise for the ridiculous names that my fellow doctors have used to describe these compartments

The organs, and hence the Acupuncture channels, have to connect through the fat layer of muscle between chest and abdomen the diaphragm. They do this through the only three openings in the diaphragm:

aorta (Heart and Kidney ShaoYin)

oesophagus (Spleen, Pancreas and Lung TaiYin)

vena cava (Liver and Pericardium JueYin).

Conveniently, the arrangement of these three openings is in the same order as the Chinese place the channels:

aorta is at the back (ShaoYin)

oesophagus is in the middle (TaiYin)

vena cava is at the front (JueYin).

These pathways represent not just the passage of blood and food, but also energy and information.

The correspondence between East and West on this is impressive, but to really understand the channels we have to understand the organs themselves.

The Chinese organs are much more interesting than the Western ones. For starters, they have personalities and they mediate these personalities, appropriately enough, through hormones

The Three Yang Channels

The three internal pathways that wrap the six Yin organs are thus formed.

The Yang channels are much simpler. This is because the Yang organs are hollow. Hollow organs are also channels and so the Yang organ and channel are the same thing.

Again, these three channels each have a Yin and a Yang end, and an arm and a leg end:

Bladder and Small Intestine form TaiYang

Stomach and Large Intestine form YangMing

Gallbladder and Triple Burner create ShaoYang .

PROLOGUE

Why Cant Humans Regenerate?

When I was three years old I caught my thumb in a folding chair. I cannot remember this episode, filled as it must have been with blood and pain, but my mother does. She packed the amputated tip of the thumb on ice and rushed me to the Emergency Department, where a surgeon sewed it back on again. I still have the scar on my thumb now, running parallel to the base of my nail.

What my mother didnt know, and what most doctors still dont, is that my thumb would almost certainly have grown back perfectly without any treatment. It would have regenerated in the same way as some amphibians can grow back their tails or legs. Bone, nail, nerves, blood vessels, the whole lot. All it needed was a gentle clean, a non-adherent dressing, and a lollipop to soothe my frayed, three-year-old nerves.

It turns out humans can regenerate, but only the very tips of their fingers and only children, who still have strong Qi (well come to this). In the 1970s a Sheffield paediatrician even published a paper on this effect in the Journal of Paediatric Surgery . Her results were unequivocal: amputations above the last joint in children under six left to heal naturally would regrow, the entire finger, without a scar or deformity!

It is somewhat amazing that this fact is so little known in the medical community. Having worked in the Emergency Department for ten years I have only ever met one colleague who was aware of this fact, despite the implications it has for patient care. The reason for this to me is clear: it strikes at the core of what we think we know about medicine. If people can regenerate fingers then how do they do so, and what else can they regenerate? Medical schools would have to open up a new department.

The research into regeneration in humans is so slim that I have only ever seen one book on it, yet it is at the heart of the healing principle. An orthopaedic surgeon in America, R.O. Becker, spent decades looking into the ability of salamanders to regenerate. His interest was in the non-union of bone fractures, literally a crippling problem that can occur for no clear reason. His findings led to medically approved devices for using electricity to cure non-unions, but it was these findings themselves that were most amazing.

Becker chose salamanders to experiment on because of their ability to regrow limbs, but he could have used any number of primitive animals that regenerate. Salamanders never suffer from non-union of broken bones for, even if they have no limb left to reunite, they can just grow a new one. Although salamanders are amphibians, their legs are functionally very similar to ours. They have bones, joints, nerves, blood vessels, and muscles, tendons and ligaments. In fact, they have everything we have in our legs, just smaller and covered in green skin.

A salamander that has had its leg removed will make a stumpy blood clot at the end and then over the course of the next few weeks it will grow a shiny new green leg. Its amphibian magic!

Becker was intrigued by this power. After some research, he started to measure the electrical currents that would occur at the site of injury after amputating his salamanders legs. He had already noticed that there was a tiny electrical gradient from the salamanders head to fingers (if that is what a salamander has). He noticed that this current was so small that it was almost unmeasurable. It was in micro-amperes, but was consistent and was consistently more negative at the head. What he found was that after he amputated the limb there was a reversal in the polarity of the normal electrical current and that this reversal would cause the limb regeneration.