If you look around in the media you’ll eventually come across someone explaining that acupuncture is simply a manipulation of nerves that results in the body releasing endorphins. Endorphins are the feel-good chemicals of the brain. The endorphins, the hypothesis goes, then act to mediate the experience of pain in the body. It’s a tidy, straight-forward answer that’s easy for most people to accept. It is also obviously woefully incomplete.
The problem with this hypothesis is that pain is just one thing acupuncture can be used to treat! Endorphins can’t explain how acupuncture can be used to regulate menstrual cycles, enhance fertility, help insomnia, open congested sinuses, treat digestive issues, help people quit smoking and so on. Obviously there has to be more to acupuncture than the release of endorphins.
Caves
The word for “acupuncture point” in Chinese is “xué”. The top point of the character for this word is said to represent a covering while the bottom part represents a hole. The word is also translated as “cave”. So the word “point” is missing some of the connotations of the original Chinese word.
An acupuncture point is a 3-dimensional thing. It is a cave. It provides an access to something deep. What lies beneath the surface is acupuncture channels. Acupuncture channels (sometimes called “meridians”) are a topic in and of themselves, but are beyond the scope of this article.
That said, it is sufficient to understand that acupuncture points provide a deep access to the energy of the body.
Field Effects
Through the last century or so the science of physics has begun to illuminate some of the strange rules by which the universe works. Energy and matter were discovered to be interchangeable. We began to see that matter exists as a wave or a field of infinite size. Originally it was thought that quantum mechanics only applied to the very microscopic world of atomic particles. Recently research published in the scientific journal “Nature” has shown that quantum effects can be observed in things big enough to see with the naked eye.
The foundation of “modern science” is Greek philosophy. The foundation for the science of acupuncture is Chinese Taoist philosophy. More and more these two sciences describe the universe in similar terms. I see this as an indication of progress, as they both attempt to describe the universe as it actually exists.
Acupuncture works on the biological field of the body. Like a pebble dropped into a still pond, needles inserted into acupuncture points send ripples out as they enter and interact with the energetic field of the body.
Each point has one or more specific effects on some aspect of the body. Some act primarily in the area of the body near to the point. Others can have effects on the far side of the body. Still others have a systematic effect on the body. Using the science of Chinese medicine an acupuncturist knows which points to select to achieve a particular effect on the body that will bring it back to a state of health.