The Missing Chapter
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of pain. Pain in the skin is different from pain in the head or belly or
muscles. If you ever want to embarrass a neurophysiologist, ask for an
explanation of pain.
Early in my work on regeneration it occurred to me that I'd stumbled
upon another method of nerve function. I imagined slowly varying cur-
rents flowing along the neurons, their fluctuations transmitting informa-
tion in analog fashion. Though I kept my main focus on the role of these
currents in healing, I pursued other lines of inquiry on the side. I did so
partly out of simple curiosity, but also because I realized that, no matter
how much merit my DC theory might have for healing, it would have a
better chance of being considered if I could fill in some of its details in a
wider context.
In the study of healing I dealt only with the output side of the sys-
tem, the voltages and currents sent to the injured area to guide cells in
repairing the damage. Cybernetics and common sense alike told me
that, before an organism could repair itself, it must know it had been
injured. In other words, the wound must hurt, and the pain must be
part of an input side of the system. Certainly if the output side was run
by electrical currents, it made no sense to assume that the input side
relied on nerve impulses.
At the same time another problem nagged me. The impulses and the
current seemed to coexist, yet everything we knew about nerve impulses
and electricity said they couldn't travel through the same neuron at the
same time without interfering with each other. We now have solutions
to both problems, thanks to serendipity. The ways in which the answers
came show how one experiment often furthers an unrelated one, and how
politics occasionally benefits science.
The Constellation of the Body
In the early 1960s, after I'd published a few research papers, I had an
unannounced visitor, a colonel from the Army Surgeon General's office.
He said he'd been following my work from the start and had an idea he
wanted to discuss. He liked if I'd ever heard of acupuncture.
I told him it wasn't the sort of thing taught in medical school. Al-
though I'd read about it, I had no direct experience of it and didn't
know whether it did any good.
"I can tell you for sure it does work ," he replied. "It definitely re-
lieves pain. But we don't know how it works. If we knew that, the Army
might adopt it for use by medics in wartime. After reading your work,