The Yam #1
January 2023: Special Debut Issue!!! Click the “Play” button on the image below to watch this article as a video!
Happy Year of the Rabbit, Patients and Friends!
Welcome to the debut issue of The Yam, the Silk Road Health Newsletter! I’m calling it The Yam after the Mongolian “pony express” that delivered mail on the ancient Silk Road from Asia to Europe and back again. Yes, for those of you who have so far managed to evade my interminable history lectures during your office visits… I have you now!
When I took over the practice from the illustrious Dr. Greenberg the Elder, I decided to rename the practice Silk Road Health, since I use a blend of techniques from Traditional East Asian and Western medicine, and the Silk Road was the trade route between Europe and Asia along which a lot of the ideas that inform my work first bumped into one another.
Look at that: Two pieces of useless trivia, all for the same low low price! Just a few paragraphs in, and you’re already getting a bargain!
I was inspired to start this project by something my dad said to me shortly before his retirement. Looking back over his 33 years in practice, he wished there had been clearer language available to explain his diagnoses and treatments to patients.
In Dad’s defense, this is not just an acupuncture problem. It’s something all medical providers, East and West, struggle with. For some reason, we medical people always seem to need to do everything in some thousands of years old dead language. For Western physicians, this is Greek or Latin. For us, it’s Classical Chinese.
Now, even conversational Chinese can be notoriously difficult to translate into English. Classical Chinese is to modern Mandarin Chinese as Ye Olde Englishe is to English. Even native speakers often can’t make heads or tails of it. And even when we do get it translated …well here’s an example from an actual chart I wrote up a few days ago:
“I used the Three Descending Levels of Heaven Technique to Subdue the Running Piglet”.
Think you can guess what this treatment was?
If you guessed a line from a remake of Charlotte’s Web as a 1970s kung fu movie, no one would blame you, but the correct answer is “panic attacks with palpitations”.
So as you may have gathered from this example, the language of TEAM, even when translated into English, can be highly metaphorical and quite impenetrable to people not versed in its arcana. Luckily, I have a very specific set of skills for dealing with highly metaphorical and impenetrable language! I have come to save the day! Never fear, good people, for I…. (drum roll please) WAS AN ENGLISH MAJOR!
My hope is that this series, which I’m calling The Science of Magic, will help grant dad’s wish for better language, and empower you with a fuller understanding of this powerful and elegant medicine that has helped us help you for almost forty years.
The Science of Magic
I’m taking the title of this series from a quote by the famous science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, who said,
“Any science that is sufficiently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic.”
-Arthur C. Clarke
The science of acupuncture, despite its age, is so advanced and so poorly understood that it often does seem like magic. My goal, with this series, is to help demystify acupuncture by explaining the science behind it.
1. How Does Acupuncture Work?
This is by far the most frequent question I am asked by my patients, and for good reason. You all have a right to know how letting some weirdo put a needle in your foot is going to help your migraines or whatever you happen to be coming in for. So behold, and be astounded, as I defy the very laws of time and space to condense four years of acupuncture college into one five…well maybe ten….ten max… minute video! Ha! No problem!
Check this out: You have an invisible suit of armor permeating, linking, and protecting every single muscle, tendon, ligament, nerve, blood vessel, and organ in your entire body, even your brain! This armor is woven of collagen fibers with more than twice the tensile strength of steel! It forms an ingenious shock absorption system that protects your body from strain by spreading it out evenly over its surface area, just like the fibers in a bulletproof vest. It also forms a kind of vacuum packing that organizes and gives shape to all the parts of your body. It links your muscles together in long, powerful chains when they need to pull in the same direction as a team, while simultaneously keeping them neatly separated, each in its own little bento box compartment, so they don’t get stuck together and restrict your movements. This invisible armor also conducts electricity, and can even generate its own!
Though it may sound like something out of science fiction, it’s a real thing, and it’s in your body! It’s your fascial system, the connective tissue matrix acupuncturists use to make you better. Fascia runs in pathways called fascial planes that connect long swaths of the body to one another, from top to bottom, and from core to surface. Just like the intricate weaving of threads in an article of clothing, these fascial planes make up the fabric of your body.
Sometime at least 3000 years ago, Chinese doctors were able to observe and map these fascial planes into what we now know as the acupuncture channels. They found that, because the fascial network both covers the entire surface of the body and penetrates to its deepest interior, they were able to affect profound changes at any level they wished. To understand how they were able to do this, we need some noodles.
Cutting edge research into acupuncture has found that the collagen fibers that make up the fascia wind around the needle, like noodles around a fork. So imagine you have a big pile of noodles- spaghetti, ramen, kugel, whatever- take your fork, which is going to stand in for our acupuncture needle here, and grab a noodle on the edge of the pile-
Hey! Don’t eat the acupuncture channels! Cannibals…
-As I was saying, as you twirl your noodle around your fork, you will notice that the motion is transferred right up the length of the noodle even sometimes into the deepest part of the noodle pile. It is likely that given enough time, and if your mother does not yell at you for playing with your food, you could figure out which strands of noodle on the outside of the plate connect to which strands of noodle at the center. And if you really didn’t have anything better to do, you could probably figure out just the right way to move your fork to get very specific kinds of responses from the noodles at the center.
Okay, now you can eat the acupuncture channels. Mmm! Lower Taiyang Channel of Foot! Delicious!
Essentially, the generations of Chinese scientists who developed the theory and techniques of acupuncture- over several thousand years of poking people with needles and writing down what happened- were able to map out exactly which strands of connective tissue noodle on the surface of your body attached to which other strands elsewhere in the body. Not only that, but they figured out exactly which kind of “fork”, or acupuncture needle, and exactly which ways of moving the “fork” would get which specific responses in the body. That’s why when you have that migraine in your right temple, I can needle a point on your left foot, and the headache goes away.
So there you have it! Now when people ask you how acupuncture works- you know, as they do, at social functions, parties, in line at the grocery store, wherever- you can tell them “It’s perfectly scientific. We just follow the ancient spaghetti map!”
Okay, so maybe don’t say exactly that.
To sum up: Acupuncture channels are long chains of fascia, or connective tissue, that permeate every part of your body, connecting top to bottom and surface to interior. Acupuncture is the art and science of precisely manipulating that system to improve its function, using acupuncture needles as levers.
I want to thank all the patients who submitted this excellent question! I hope that I have answered it to your satisfaction, and that it has helped empower you with a deeper understanding of how this medicine can help you live a healthier and more fulfilling life.
Any questions or comments on this article?
Got other questions about this voodoo that I do?
Email them to me at silkroadhealth@gmail.com, and you may find it answered in an upcoming issue!
Want to book an appointment? Go to www.silkroadhealthllc.com and click “schedule”.