Acupuncture and Myofascial Release
Long ago I visited a friend in Calgary whose brother was a doctor who was doing research into acupuncture. At the time acupuncture seemed to be about as far from medicine as voodoo but he was convinced that acupuncture really worked. He had no idea why. Since then I've wondered how it works too.
From the perspective of 'western' medicine acupuncture is crazy. It does stuff like stick a thin needle in your wrist to treat nausea. The Chinese idea was that the needle changed the flow of 'chi' along 'meridians' but anatomists doing dissections never saw anything like that so they assumed it didn't exist.
For a long time Barb Eddie was my nurse practitioner and we liked each other. She retired and moved into pain relief using myofascial release. This involved inserting thin needles into bundles of muscular tension that she could feel. I went to her because I'd injured my leg and could hardly walk. Her office was a short walk from my home but I had to rest twice on my way to the appointment. She found a spot and probed it with a needle and I had immediate pain relief. I walked all the way home without needing a rest.
I have an appetite problem. I don't really like to eat. It's actually pretty serious if I'm not careful. Once I ended up in hospital for a week because of it. One day Barb offered to see if she could help with that and I was happy to co-operate. I lay face down on a massage table and she found a spot on my back and probe it. WOW! I was looking down at the floor and suddenly a bright purple fuzzy bar was in my visual field. That night, for the first time in many years I actually woke up feeling hungry.
At the time Barb was running a formal scientific study of myofascial release and her published results showed things like a significant decline in the need for pain medication.
Lately I read an article at NYTimes :`
(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/11/magazine/interstitium-anatomy-acupuncture-medicine.html)
that talks about the recent discovery of a third circulatory system in the body, along side the blood system and the lymph system called the interstitium. This is a circulatory system that moves things through the spaces between cells. I surmise that the interstitium is associated with Barb's myofascial system because it also responds to probes with thin needles.
Recently scientists have been able to trace the flow through the interstitium and find a good correlation between that flow and the Chinese charts of meridians in the body. That is a very satisfying discovery for me. I like the idea of consilience; i.e. scientific knowledge forms a whole where the parts reinforce each other rather than contradict. Biology and physics are very different fields of study but neither conflicts with the other - they reinforce. And now ancient Chinese knowledge is being shown to be consilient with modern medicine.
Some might say - haarumph - Just another example of Europeans claiming ancient ideas as their own just because the Europeans 'discovered' that the old ideas were true. I am like pooh pooh to that - scientific knowledge can benefit all of humanity - and it is being constrained by cultural things like capitalism and imperialism and religion that have imperatives other than the best knowledge.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.