An Analogy for the Mechanism of Acupuncture

In the Spring of 2009 a patient asked me how I thought acupuncture worked in scientific terms. I’ve heard this question many times in ten years of practice and don’t have an answer, but told her I thought it had something to do with the undifferentiated nerve fibers that occur throughout the sub-dermal level of our bodies. These fibers were found in the 1990’s by scientists looking for something else, and are remarkable because they don't have a connection to the central nervous system. Those researchers thought that perhaps the fibers were involved in the pain response, but didn’t really know their purpose. I have always wondered if these undifferentiated nerve fibers might be associated with proprioception, but in any event I have reasoned that whatever else an acupuncture needle does, it penetrates this layer of nerve fibers when it is inserted into the body.

In casting about for a way to describe this that might make sense to my patient, a computer network specialist, I suddenly had an idea and said, “Maybe these undifferentiated nerve fibers work like a wireless computer network. Maybe what has been previously described as a mystical ‘aura’ or ‘subtle energy’ is actually like an internal wireless communication system between these fibers and the central nervous system.”

And I was pretty pleased with my metaphor.

However, my patient took it a step further the next day. She told me that in thinking about what I had said, it occurred to her that many wireless networks she had worked with periodically needed to be hard-wired to the server. After adding new hardware or software, you had to re-sync the wireless and the wired systems by briefly connecting them with a wire and re-booting. Maybe, she suggested, the acupuncture needle fulfills the role of the wire acting to re-sync the wireless system with the server.

Well, I have to give it to her. Exchanging physical, mental and spiritual trauma for the computer system’s hard and software trauma, I think this makes more sense than any other scientific explanation I have heard for describing the mechanism of acupuncture. The more I've tested it the more I have liked the analogy, but I have no idea how to turn it into a hypothesis capable of being tested. Still, it comes closer than other scientific ideas I have heard for describing at least part of the range of mechanisms I have witnessed in ten years of practicing and 20 years of receiving acupuncture.