234
The Body Electric
some of us wondered if it might work electrically, the same as regenera-
tion seems to. What do you think?"
That was a new idea to me, but right away I thought it was a good
one. Although neurophysiologists had studied pain intensively for dec-
ades, there was still no coherent theory of it, or its blockage by anesthet-
ics and anodynes. Because of Western medicine's biochemical bias, no
pain-killers other than drugs were considered seriously. Maybe a physical
method could give us a clue as to what pain really was.
We talked for several hours, but afterward I heard no more from the
colonel, and I didn't get the chance to follow up his idea until more
than a decade later. In 1971, while touring China as one of the first
Western journalists admitted by the Communists, New York Times col-
umnist James Reston saw several operations in which acupuncture was
the only anesthetic, and he himself had postoperative pain relieved by
needles after an emergency appendectomy. His reports put acupuncture
in the news in a big way. It was almost the medical equivalent of Sput-
nik. Soon the National Institutes of Health solicited proposals for re-
search on the Chinese technique, and I jumped at the chance.
At that time the prevailing view in the West was that if acupuncture
worked at all, it acted through the placebo effect, as a function of belief.
Hence it should be effective only about a third of the time, just like
dummy pills in clinical tests. Many of those applying for the first grants
began with this idea, and with the corollary that it wouldn't matter
where you put the needles. Thus, much of our earliest research merely
disproved this fallacy, which the Chinese—and apparently the U.S.
Army—had done long ago. Recalling my talk with the colonel, I pro-
posed a more elegant hypothesis.
The acupuncture meridians, I suggested, were electrical conductors
that carried an injury message to the brain, which responded by sending
back the appropriate level of direct current to stimulate healing in the
troubled area. I also postulated that the brain's integration of the input
included a message to the conscious mind that we interpreted as pain.
Obviously, if you could block the incoming message, you would prevent
the pain, and I suggested that acupuncture did exactly that.
Any current grows weaker with distance, due to resistance along the
transmission cable. The smaller the amperage and voltage, the faster the
current dies out. Electrical engineers solve this problem by building
booster amplifiers every so often along a power line to get the signal
back up to strength. For currents measured in nanoamperes and micro-
volts, the amplifiers would have to be no more than a few inches apart—
just like the acupuncture points!
I envisioned hundreds of
little DC