There is a growing understanding and acknowledgement of the therapeutic effect of acupuncture by western medical circles. For instance, a number of medical schools in universities of France have added acupuncture to their curricula in recent years. The Acupuncture Association of France has become a medical association recognized by the French Government. Some leading members of that association entertain the view that acupuncture can reduce considerably the severity of symptoms of certain diseases and the pain suffered by some patients. They believe, moreover, in the assertion that acupuncture can weaken to a great extent the hold on people of some harmful addictions. As it is the opinion of western medicine that reduction of a patient"s symptoms and alleviation of the patient"s suffering are important steps in the treatment of the patient, acupuncture has come to be widely accepted by the western medical circles.
Being able to do these two things, acupuncture can obviously make great contributions to a patient"s ultimate recovery and the strengthening of his/her power of resistance.
Acupuncture is capable of reducing a person"s feeling of pain. How does acupuncture works? In order to answer this question, a research team of Havard University resorted to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). This method, which is often simply called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), uses a scanning device that can perform diagnostic functions and make quantitative analysis on a sample of tissues. It employs a large magnet to determine the magnetic bearings of a lot of atom nuclei in the patient"s body that is being studied. Radio waves excite the atoms in the body as soon as the magnet is switched on. The atoms instantly move into a high-energy state and emit weak radio signals, which are converted into images of the tissues being researched. Each chemical element in the tissues is represented by a particular radio-wave frequency. The MRI can be used to find, for example, carbon, which will provide information about bone.
The Harvard researchers monitored the twenty subjects of the study, all completely healthy, during the time when they were receiving the acupuncture treatment and for a while after they had received it.
The researchers first inserted the needles in the bodies of the subjects at places where the traditional Chinese medical practitioners specified for pain to be reduced. Within a few seconds, the researchers found that the blood flow in a designated zone of each subject"s cerebrum was decreasing gradually. At that moment, all the subjects said that they felt as if they were holding something heavy in their hands. It was exactly this feeling of holding something heavy that indicated that the effect of acupuncture was showing itself as expected, i.e. in a normal manner. If any subject of the study had said that he/she felt some pain (which might actually have been caused by some error in the acupuncture operation), then the MRI scan in his/her case would have shown an increase in blood flow in the designated zone of his/her cerebrum.
The researchers said that while blood flow decreases the cerebrum will not be in a condition to "work hard". Therefore, acupuncture can make a designated zone of the cerebrum calm down.