The international authoritative journal “Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine” recently published a paper that provided strong evidence for the existence of meridians in traditional Chinese medicine, which has attracted attention.
According to China’s “Science and Technology Daily” report on April 2, this paper is based on researchers from the Life Science Research Institute of ENN Group for the first time clearly observing the continuous fluorescent lines that migrate along the acupoints of the meridian of the human body. This work is to confirm the meridian of traditional Chinese medicine. Existence provides strong evidence. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences and Harvard University Medical School participated in the collaboration and verification.
For a long time, an important basis for the Western medical community to deny the science of traditional Chinese medicine is that it “cannot prove the existence of meridians” on the anatomical level.
“In recent decades, many teams in China and abroad have done a lot of exploration through various methods, but they have not been able to observe stable meridian trajectories with sufficient length on the human body,” said Dr. Tang Qing, team leader of ENN, this time, the team’s experiment obtained a clear fluorescence image of the meridian over 20cm in the arm part of the pericardium meridian. This is the first time that researchers have used a new method of tracing to obtain the meridian trajectory in the human body since the radioisotope method was used for tracing in the 1980s.
Tang Qing said that the meridian imaging is more stable this time, and the trajectory of multiple acupoints along a meridian is clearer and repetitive.
Tang Qing said that the team initially used the contrast agent sodium fluorescein, and in the following hours, they used laser to excite and take pictures of the sodium fluorescein to obtain the migration trajectory of the fluorescein agent in the body. The results show that the trajectory generally develops along the adjacent acupoints of the pericardial meridian, from Neiguan, Jianshi, to Quchi, which completely overlaps the acupoints of the pericardial meridian, forming a stable meridian line. By contrasting ultrasound imaging and infrared imaging, the possibility of fluorescent lines flowing along blood vessels is ruled out. In order to rule out the possibility that the trajectory of the fluorescent line is a lymphatic vessel, the researchers designed an experiment in which sodium fluorescein and indocyanine green, a contrast agent mainly used for lymphography, were injected at the same time. The results showed that the two trajectories did not completely overlap, so it can be ruled out that the previously observed fluorescence lines of sodium fluorescein are lymphatic vessels.
Tang Qing said frankly that this time they have made some progress in the visualization of the meridian, laying the foundation for the follow-up work, but there is still a lot of work to be done to fully grasp the secrets of the meridian.
It is understood that as of the publication of the paper, in addition to the pericardial meridian, the research team has used the same method to observe three fluorescent lines running along the other meridians. “In the next step, we will verify the biophysical characteristics of the meridian of the fluorescent line, including low flow resistance and low resistance, and carry out functional studies.” Tang Qing believes that these studies have important scientific value for the interpretation and development of the basic theories of traditional Chinese medicine.
Source: DWNews