The Missing Chapter
235
generators like dark stars sending their electricity along the meridians,
an interior galaxy that the Chinese had somehow found and explored by
trial and error over two thousand years ago. If the points really were
amplifiers, then a metal needle stuck in one of them, connecting it with
nearby tissue fluids, would short it out and stop the pain message. And
if the integrity of health really was maintained by a balanced circulation
of invisible energy through this constellation, as the Chinese believed,
then various patterns of needle placement might indeed bring the cur-
rents into harmony, although that part of the treatment has yet to be
evaluated by Western medical science.
The biggest problem Western medicine had in accepting acupuncture
was that there were no known anatomical structures corresponding to
the meridians, those live wires supposedly just under the skin. Some
investigators claimed to have located tiny clusters of sensory neurons
where the points were, but others had looked for them in vain. My
proposal offered a convenient way into the problem. If the lines and
points really were conductors and amplifiers, the skin above them would
show specific electrical differences compared to the surrounding skin:
Resistance would be less and electrical conductivity correspondingly
greater, and a DC power source should be detectable right at the point.
Some doctors, especially in China, had already measured lower skin re-
sistance over the points and had begun using slow pulses of current,
about two per second, instead of needles. If we could confirm these
variations in skin resistance and measure current coming from the
points, we'd know acupuncture was real in the Western sense, and we
could go on confidently in search of the physical structures.
I got the grant and used part of the money to hire Maria Reichmanis,
a brilliant young biophysicist who was Charlie Bachman's last Ph.D.
student. Her combination of mathematical gifts and practicality got us
results fast. Together we designed a "pizza cutter" electrode, a wheel
that we could roll along the meridians to give us a reliable continuous
reading, as well as a square grid of thirty-six electrodes to give us a map
of readings around each point.
Along the first meridians Maria measured, the large-intestine and per-
icardial lines on the upper and lower surfaces, respectively, of each arm,
she found the predicted electrical characteristics at half of the points. Most
important, the same points showed up on all the people tested. Since
acupuncture is scuh a delicate blend of tradition, experiment, and theory,
the other points may be spurious; or they may simply be weaker, or a
different kind, than the ones our instruments revealed. Our readings also
indicated that the meridians were conducting current, and its polarity,