Acupuncture isn’t about Mystic Energy

Language is a funny thing. It’s amazing, don’t you think? I think it’s completely mind-blowing how we’ve made these systems of highly-precise sounds and gestures that allow us to convey meaning along a more-or-less straightforward path of shared understanding, sometimes with people we’ve never met or know anything else about. Sure, misunderstandings abound. After all, language is completely arbitrary, prone to nuance and variation, and endlessly changing. But still. 

It’s amazing how hung up we can get on language, too, especially when it suits our purpose to pretend not to understand what the other is trying to say. Language is a perfect vehicle, not just for clear, straightforward and honest communication, but also for lies, hypocrisy, and hurtful behaviour. C’mon, we all know what I’m talking about. Language has been helping humans mix it up since its inception, not just between each other, but also inside each of us. We are arguably the only animal that readily creates abstract, symbol-laden, paradox-ridden constructs of meaning that stagger incongruously across space and time to make things absurdly difficult for everyone else, hundreds of years down the line (this paragraph being the perfect example, stat.)

I’m talking about theories about how the world works. There’s a lot of them about, and unfortunately they don’t always agree on the particulars of important stuff like where we come from, where we’re going, or why we can’t just eat cheese and chocolate and watch our favourite tv show all day. If you read this blog (I’d love to know who reads this, truly) you’ve probably caught me ranting off about how people on the other side of the world, two thousand years ago, came up with the idea that our bodies resemble and behave like landscapes, as opposed to those more recent savants who decided that our bodies are more like inefficient, leaky, mobile plumbing systems with an iPad attached at the top end. 

One of my favourite problems with modern acupuncture practice is how disconnected from reality the people who practise it seem sometimes. The explanations that some of my colleagues come up with for why what they’re doing works range from cute but annoying, to downright absurd and self-defeating, to cricket-eliciting silence when they get struck down. It’s difficult for me (and sometimes a little embarrassing, truth be told) to share the room with those guys and watch as the skeptics countering their arguments are honestly making way more sense than they are. 

It all comes down to language. 

Imagine you’re an ancient Chinese hunter-gatherer, living ten thousand years ago, and for no other reason than there aren’t too many things to be distracted with, you are really in tune with what is happening around you. There are no tall buildings or street lights (no streets either, for that matter); no fridges or TVs or miniaturised telecommunications devices run by computer programs designed to sell you stuff. Your world is the edges of forests (not too deep in there, because there’s animals that will eat you), riverbanks (avoid the tall grasses because alligators might jump at you, with the same murderous intent), plains extending as far as the eye can see and maybe some mountains in the distance. And because someone taught you how, you’ve made it through enough winters to know that there will always be another winter, followed by another spring and another summer and another autumn, and that you’ll spend them going to pretty much the same places to forage for the same food, hunt the same game, and do the same things over and over in an endless cycle, following along what everyone else is doing. 

Now imagine you want a shorthand description for all of this. A few words only, because you don’t really need to talk much. After all, you’ve been hanging around with more-or-less the same people all your life, and there isn’t much to talk about. Imagine you come up with a clever, pithy way to refer to all of the interactions, goings-on, and cycles of activity and stillness going on in this endlessly repetitive life of yours. And just for the sake of argument, let’s say you come up with this:

Between Sky and Soil, there is Movement.  

Cool! That pretty much sums it up. Right?

The only problem is the word you used at the end, ‘movement’, is doing some seriously heavy lifting there. No matter. After all, all your buddies know what you’re talking about. Besides, anyone who looks around them can understand what you mean, right?

Fast forward seven thousand years and your great-great-great-etc-etc-etc descendant is trying to make sense of what you said. He or she doesn’t speak like you anymore. It’s been many hundreds of generations since the last people who even knew what it sounded like when you said it went into the ground to fertilise the next crop of daffodils. But one of the numerous descendants between you and them had the good sense to in some way record what you said. So our down-lineage hero/ine is using all the resources at their disposal to translate what you said into something they can understand. And because those resources include the commentary of everyone in between you and them, explaining and adding and contradicting and subtracting from each other’s interpretations, they come up with this:

Between Heaven and Earth, there is Energy. 

Not bad. A bit convoluted there, with the use of the word “energy”, but to you as the original hunter-gatherer, it still makes a lot of sense, no? It should be perfectly clear what you meant.

Well, not really. You see, that word, “energy”, picked up some other meanings along the way, and a couple of thousand years later, our heroic descendant’s descendants’ contemporaries start a fight, because they don’t agree with the use of the word “energy” in that context. What kind of energy, exactly? Electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, what? They bring out various weird contraptions that can measure “energy”, whatever that means, and come up empty-handed. Or they measure five, or six, or twenty different things and angrily demand to be told which one is it. 

Moreover, some of those people have also gotten hold of other records of other people interpreting what you said in the intervening centuries, and they don’t agree that that’s what you said, at all. Some others claim that what you said was downright nonsense, because how could you possibly know anything so long ago, if you didn’t have any contraptions to measure anything they could see. 

And all along it’s staring right at them, because what you described was right there for everyone to see. 

Translating Chinese Medicine in the West is very much like that. 

And in my not-so-humble opinion, it misses the point completely.

This is my problem with most modern acupuncturists trying to explain what acupuncture is about. All the talk about “energy” and “chee” and “meridians” veers into the esoteric for a reason: they have no idea what they’re talking about. Chinese Medicine arose in a context where observation of the Natural World was not the job of a specialist with endless time to make up concepts and ideas, each one more precise and convoluted than the one before. It was the only thing to do. 

My main acupuncture teacher was a stickler for modern clinical anatomy and physiology. My favourite admonition of his to his students when they started going off the rails about how Chinese Medicine was “different” was this: ancient Chinese humans weren’t different from modern humans. They didn’t have extra heart valves, eyes in the middle of their foreheads, or bodies of light. The human body has changed nothing in the last 70,000 years. So the ancient Chinese sages who came up with these ideas about the body couldn’t have been talking about anything other than a body that looks exactly like yours or mine. So if you see differences between what they said about the body and what is in your anatomy textbook, the onus is on you to bridge the gap with the Western doctors, because your object of study is not different from theirs. 

What has changed is our viewpoint, and our language. Remember, when all you have is a smartphone, everything looks like Instagram.

Now, I am not saying that the solution is to go out and try to find what each crude and primitive concept in Chinese Medicine corresponds to what advanced and sophisticated idea that modern researchers came up with. Such a reductionist approach has been tried before, and the results range from the laughable to the downright insulting. We’re talking about a different way of conceptualising phenomena here. All of my teachers insisted that the way was for one to change one’s viewpoint, take on and understand the ideas of the other system on their own terms, and then start a conversation aimed at making things make sense. 

And, again in my not-so-humble opinion, it starts with this:

Acupuncture is NOT “energy medicine”.

I’ve talked before here about connective tissue, a.k.a. fascia, and how it behaves. It is a living matrix of tissue elements that acts as a scaffolding for the cells of the body to build the shapes that we recognise as us. It is responsive to changes in pressure, tension, shear, and torque. It follows that inserting a sharp piece of metal between the layers would elicit a response. If that happens to cause a cascade of mechanical, chemical, and electrical reactions (spoiler: it does) throughout a system, which by the way is self-regulating and self-correcting, it also follows that such an intervention would tend to have a regulating, correcting effect on the body where it is applied. If you want a shorthand for that, then maybe the words of our ancient hunter-gatherer chatterbox from earlier make a little more sense. 

Because you see, they weren’t only following along what was going on. They were also spending considerable amounts of time huddled inside tents and huts surviving Winter, when they couldn’t go out. They had time to sit and get bored and look for ways to stay functional in anticipation of the next time they needed to go out. And like the language inventors, some got creative in other ways, inventing and trying out stuff to make sure their pains and aches went away. Maybe poke the place that hurts with a sharp stone, or a stick, or an ember if you feel cold. Stretch it out, or breathe a little deeper. Try to imagine to what degree such experimentations would metastasise into a system over thousands of years at the hands of bands of really bored, really creative, hairless apes huddled in the same tent for months at a time. Especially if some of them were along naming those things and memorising everything, so they could teach it to the younger ones so they could survive in turn.

Look, I get it. Acupuncture is weird. And it’s needles — inserted into you. But if you’ve made it this far into this post, first of all thank you, but I take it you’re at the very least intrigued. So think of it this way: if nothing else, it’s way less of a challenge for your body than even the most cursory and minimalist of surgeries. It won’t leave scars, won’t require you to take antibiotics, and won’t take weeks to heal over after. And there is a very good chance that it might nudge your body in the direction that you want to go. It was used to treat pain originally, after all, and all modern studies done on the subject consistently rank it as more effective for that particular purpose than any other form of therapy, drugs included. 

Maybe, since we’re all hung up on language here, we should call it something else, instead of ‘acupuncture’. The ancient Chinese sages called it 鍼灸 (zhēnjiǔ), which literally means “needle and cauterisation”… hm, maybe let’s not talk about the ‘cauterisation’ part, effective as it is. Those ancient Chinese hunter-gatherers were nothing if not practical and descriptive, after all. ‘Needle-mediated connective tissue regulation’ says what it does on the tin, but doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. 

I’ll keep looking for a term. In the meantime, think of acupuncture as what it is: a highly-developed and sophisticated form of empirically-verified interventions aimed at helping the body regulate itself and heal when it falls out of whack. Maybe it can help you overcome the fear and the doubt about whether it can help you, and you can give it a try sometime. 

I’d be happy to help with that, just call me up.  

Just don’t think of acupuncture as “energy medicine”.  

No, seriously, please don’t. 

It would lead to all sorts of misunderstandings, and we don’t want that, do we?