Dr Vilhelm Schjelderup
Norway

Acupuncture is now more and more being accepted as a part of international medicine. The documented physiological effects of acupuncture- especially those involving the neurotransmitter systems- have made acupuncture more acceptable to doctors trained in Western medicine. Accordingly there is a growing consensus that acupuncture is a valid form of medical therapy.

The basic question how to give a more comprehensive scientific explanation of the phenomena of acupuncture, and the practical question what place to give acupuncture in our medicine are, however still unsettled. It is easy to see why these questions are so difficult to answer. Acupuncture comes to us from traditional Chinese medicine and has become established as a medical method within a very different conceptual framework from what we are accustomed to in our medicine. It is therefore reasonable that in order to approach an answer to these questions concerning the integration of acupuncture into our future medicine, we must go into a more fundamental discussion.

Let us take a Grande look on acupuncture and Western medicine:

Acupuncture: Paradigm of TCM
Holistic concepts
Biophysical method

Western medicine: Paradigm of Western science up to 1900
Analytical concepts
Biochemical methods dominate

When we try to introduce acupuncture into Western medicine, we have basically 3 options:

1. Copy acupuncture from TCM.
2. Adapt it to our framework and see what we can make fit in.
3. Expand our framework.

Now this third option is according to my view the most promising. If we look at the table

I put up, there are here some very positive possibilities. In our medicine, there is an unreasonable bias for biochemical methods. A proper equilibrium between analytical and holistic approaches has not yet been found. There has been an important development in science, and especially in physics, since year 1900 which has not yet been absorbed into our medical science.

This is then the approach I am going to follow in my lecture.

As my starting point, I shall take some simpler methods related to acupuncture, those that have been called micro-circulations of acupuncture. As you know, these methods are based on the principle that the various organs and parts of the organism are reflected topographical as points or snall zones within a circumscribed part of the body. These zones are in a physiological relationship with the corresponding organs, and are used accordingly for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Most typical of such methods is ear acupuncture and auriculotherapy. As you remember, Paul Nogier found the key to how the different parts of the body are reflected in the ears, in his image of the human fetus as it lies upside down in the uterus.

Nasal reflexology is less well known. This method is based on a physiological correspondence between zones in the nasal mucosa and different organ systems. One of the discoverers of this methods was the German gynaecologist, William Fliess, otherwise known as a close friend of Sigmund Freud. The intellectual exchange with Fliess meant a lot to the scientific development of Freud. Fliess used nasal reflexology with success in the treatment of many gynaecological disorders. It may also be quite effective in types of sexual neuroses. If William Fliess had become world famous, and not Freud- the father of psychoanalysis- medical and cultural history in our century would have been different. The further development of nasal reflexology through the work of physicians like Asuro, Bonnier and Frose extended its use to include a variety of diseases connected with other organ systems. Quite detailed maps of the topographical localization in the nasal mucosa was provided by the Spainard Asuro. In the Far East, nose acupuncture is practices with needles put in from the outside, but this method may reflect the same basic discovery of such a holographic system in the nose.

In zone therapy which was developed by the American E.N.T surgeon Fitzgerald- probably on the basis of a traditional method practiced by the American Indians, we find similar systems of somatotopic localization in the hands and feet, as well as in the tongue, in the nasal and pharyngeal cavities.

As regards the teeth, the separates are connected to the main meridians and organ-systems in traditional acupuncture. Such a system of oral or dental acupuncture has also been presented by Dr. Gleditsch in Germany.

In iridology, we find the same principle of a holographic mapping of the whole organism into the fibrous pattern of the eye irises. This diagnostic method was discovered by the Hungarian surgeon Von Peczely in the last century and is widely used in natural medicine.

All of these systems- and there are a few more of a similar kind- have been discovered independently through empirical practice. As you see, we find such systems located to all main sense organs and to the hands and feet: that means to all the main contact areas between the organism and the outside world. These methods are now so well established through clinical practice and at least one of them, ear acupuncture, so well proved scientifically that we have somehow to accept them as facts. The question we then have to ask is: What are their physiological functions? What may they tell us about the biological organization of man?

One way to explain these methods is by the theory of nervous reflexology, regarding them as reflections of the somatotopic localization we find at various levels of the nervous system. Such an explanation probably has some relevance. But the theory of nervous reflexology as we know today, is not adequate to explain the reason for these elaborate and medically so effective systems. If this had been so, we may reason that neuro-physiologists and neuro-anatomists would have been eager to accept these methods. As we know, this has not been the case. I have indeed even been told that a Norwegian professor of neuro-anatomy desperately exclaimed that "God would not be so cruel as to let ear acupuncture be true".

The existence of these methods therefore invites us to pose some fresh questions.

I have ventured to call these methods holographic because they imply that the organism as a whole is graphically inscribed in a part of that organism which is the meaning of the Greek term holography. These methods seem to exemplify a general biological principle which has an interesting parallel to the principle of holography in physics. The organism as a whole is seen projected as kind of hologram on a part of the organism. This holographic pattern again reflects back on the organism as a whole as we register when we use these methods in therapy. It is this two- way holographic process or this dynamic holography, as I will call it which forms the basis for our use of these systems both for diagnostics and for therapy.

In physics, the principle of holography is a consequence of the wave structure. In the physics of radiation, a hologram is created as an interference pattern between the radiation from an object and a coherent wave pattern, like a standing wave.

The hologram is thus an interference pattern. It has no apparent similarity to the object but it has that remarkable quality that if we take any part of this holographic pattern, we may reconstruct the image of the whole object either by optical or mathematical means.

Any part of the hologram contains the information of the whole object. Only the sharpness of the reconstructed image will depend on the size of the part.

Holography is an important principle in modern physics. To introduce this term in connection with these medical methods, is to suggest that these systems may have a biophysical explanation. This is not necessarily in contradiction to a neurophysiological explanation. We know so little about the organizing fields in embryological development. A holographic patterning may have been active at that age to determine the development of structural connections in the nervous system and in other organ systems as well. Dr. Nogier's image of the human ear and the embryo may convey a double insight: that of the projection of the organism in the ear and that of the significance of the holographic principle in embryological development.

The holographic process we utilize in these methods serve a double function: to impress the message of the whole on the part and then by a feed-back mechanism to let the whole respond to a change in the part. Such a double function certainly must serve the purpose of biological organization. It may help to explain the holistic properties of living organisms and help us understand how the organism which in the analytical sense is composed of an enormous number of parts may as yet function as a whole and preserve internal coherence.

This problem of the holistic functioning of living organisms is one of the great, unsolved problems in biology. It can apparently not be solved on the basis of the reductionist approach, which is still prevalent in medicine and biology.

This I believe is the most central point in our discussion where we have to go into questions of basic philosophy. It was the French philosopher Rene Descartes who made the reductionist method the only valid approach in science. The reductionist method implies that in order to understand anything in a scientific sense, we have to analyze it into its separate parts and then show how we can put these parts together to get the original thing. Through the genius of Isac Newton and the later development of science, the reductionist method had an enormous success and became a central dogma in all of science. In this century, however, especially through the modern development of atomic physics, the limitations of the reductionist approach has become apparent. As Fritj writes: "Every contemporary physicist will accept the main theme that modern physics has transcended the mechanistic Cartesian view of the world and is leading us to a holistic and intrinsically dynamic conception of the universe".

A contemporary critic of the Cartesian reductionist philosophy was the German philosopher Leibnitz. Leibnitz was also an eminent logician and mathematician who actually invented the differential calculus independently of Newton. But while Descartes developed an analytical philosophy, Leibnitz developed a thoroughly holistic philosophy.

I shall read for you part of an argument from his book on Monadology which is quite pertinent for our understanding in biology and physiology:

"Every living organism is therefore a kind of divine engine or living automate which is infinitely superior to any artificial engine. A man-made engine is not in every part an engine. A tooth in a cogwheel will have parts which will not be of any functional use for the purpose for which the engine was constructed. But the natural engines means that the living organisms will be functional engines into their smallest parts into the infinitely small".

Descartes had claimed that living organisms are complicated engines, essentially of the same type as man- made constructions. You see how Leibnitz effectively criticizes this assertion of Cartesian reductionism claiming they are perfect engines, which are functional into the most minute detail. And it strikes me as it might strike you that the further we advance in anatomy and physiology, the more clearly it is indeed demonstrated that living matter is indeed organized and functional into the most minute detail. If Leibnitz is correct in asserting that living organisms are functional into the infinitely small is actually a question of order at the subatomic and sub- particle level, which brings us right into the center of current debate in theoretical physics.

Now, order there certainly is. But the question is how? As you may know, one of the more interesting attempts today to solve this problem in theoretical physics is the theory of the implicate order by the British physicist David Bohm. Bohm's theory is essentially holistic. His starting point is the concept of unbroken wholeness and his aim is to explore the nonmanifest order inherent in physical relations. He calls this order implicates or enfolded and he describes it with the analogy of a hologram. Actually, as ultimate consequence of the wave structures of physical reality every point of the universe may be seen to imply a hologram of the whole cosmos.

In Bohm's view, the world is structured according to the same general principles as in holography, only the hologram is a static concept to express the essentially dynamic nature of reality. He has therefore introduced the concept "holo-movement" which he uses to study the structure of movement, taking into account both the unity and the dynamic nature of the universe.

Bohm's theory is on a very high conceptual level and not so easy to grasp as we of course expect from a theoretical physicist of today. When I mention it, it is not only to show how a concept of dynamic holography is central to present scientific debate. But, those of you who are familiar with the higher level of traditional Chinese acupuncture philosophy may in these concepts of holo-movements and implicate order perceive some very clear similarities and perhaps feel strangely at home.

Physics has come a long way since the 17th century. An important step in this development was the realization of the wave-particle duality, or complimentary of electromagnetic radiation and physical reality in general. As you know, it was Isac Newton who proposed the particle theory of light, while the wave theory of light was first proposed by the Dutch mathematician and physicist Christian Huygens who are a close friend of Leibnitz. Now we know that both of them were actually right. In modern physics, the particle structure and the wave structure are both seen as complimentary aspects of the same basic physical reality. Apparently the same may be said of the analytical philosophy of Descartes and the holistic philosophy of Leibnitz. The purely reductionist approach is insufficient, not only in modern physics, but to explain the dynamic order of living organisms as well.

Descartes compared science to a tree, where philosophy formed the roots, physics the trunk and the other sciences were the branches. In medical science, the tendency has been to disregard philosophy and physics and start with the branches. Sauce-economical factors may have strengthened our bias to concentrate mainly on Bo-chemistry. This has not only created serious obstacles for acupuncture research, but for many other approaches to medicine that require a more biophysical explanation.

This is a reason why I attach such a great significance to these holographic methods that have been discovered in empirical medicine. They not only indicate a holistic structuring of the living organism but they bring us right into the center of a discussion of the validity of biophysical approached to medical problems.

Let us return to the question of what physiological functions these holographic systems may have. A living organism is a highly complex biophysical system, which is in continuous interaction and exchange with the environment. To retain its integrity, such a system must have a high degree of both stability and flexibility. Disease may in fact be defined as a breakdown in this integrity. We have localized such holographic systems in the main contact areas of the organism with the outside world. The holistic structuring in these areas seems to imply that the organism is meeting the external world in a basically holistic manner. And as these holistic patterns are exposed to external influences, they will act in a kybernetic way to serve to increase the self-correcting, self-regulating and self-stabilizing properties of the total system. Let us just look at the zone system in the feet to illustrate this. Walking means a continual massage of these zones, especially if we are walking barefoot which will give a general therapeutic effect on the organ systems of the body. Similar self-therapeutic effects are reasonably attached to other holographic systems as well. The natural existence of these systems help us to understand how a living organism can preserve and strengthen its internal stability and integrity through external activity and a dynamic interaction with the outer world. Health is not a product of passivity and sensual isolation.

A crucial question as to a biophysical explanation is these holographic systems really are holograms in physical sense. I remember discussing this question with William Tiller, Professor of Physics at Stanford University some years ago. Professor Tiller, like me, believed that they somehow are a consequence of the principle of holography in physics. His suggestion was that I start speaking of these systems as if they were holograms and then slowly change to saying that they are!

If these systems are really due to the principle of holography as we know from radiation physics, they must be explained on the basis of a biophysical theory which allows for organic wave patterns. Such theories presently have been developed.

Fritz Popp and his co-workers at the University of Marburg in Germany have developed a biophysical theory postulating a biological information system based on a system of standing wave patterns including every organ, tissue and cell in the living organism. The theory originally was developed to explain the regulation of cell division in living tissue. As you know, cells in the body continually die and have to be replaced by new cells. This physiological cell division must be regulated exactly if the structure of organs and their physiological functions shall remain intact. A biological information system adequate to exert this physiological regulation has to meet some very exact physical requirements, which according to the calculations of Popp, cannot be met by previously known biological information systems like the nervous system.

According to Popp, this electromagnetic information system at the cellular level is a general biological information system which serves to regulate not only cell division but a large spectrum of physiological activities. The theory implies the existence of a standing wave field covering every living cell of the entire organism. If the theory is correct, it means that the coherent background according to radiation physics is a pre-requisite for the generation of holograms, which in fact, is a normal component of all living tissues.

Popp does accept the discovery of holographic patterns in acupuncture and explains them in accordance with his theory. In 1979, he wrote: "And last, but not least, if we consider all the relevant biophysical aspects, the holographic principles that have become apparent in acupuncture can only be understood through the presence of coherent electromagnetic fields in the organism whose systems of transportation are known to consist of wave conductors.

The regulation of cell division by electromagnetic radiation was discovered by the Russian biologist Alexander Gurvich as early as in 1923. Gurvich worked with cell cultures and screens of glass and quartz. He concluded that the electromagnetic radiation in question was ultraviolet as it did penetrate the quartz wall but not the glass. He called the phenomenon he had discovered biological induction and believed it acted on the basis of a resonance principle.

This ultraviolet radiation stimulating cell division was too weak to be registered by physical equipment at the time of Gurvich. For this reason, his findings were not scientifically accepted until this ultra-weak biological radiation of ultraviolet was confirmed objectively through the experiments of Soviet biophysicists in the 1960s. Since that time, there has been substantial research in photobiology and related areas of biophysics in the Soviet Union.

One of the most important discoveries is the discovery of Professor Kaznacchev that disease processes, notably those of virus infections can be transferred through ultra-weak electromagnetic radiation in the absence of all possibility of chemical contact between the two cell cultures. Another discovery is the different physiological effects observed by radiation with different frequencies of monochromatic light effects that are not observed under natural conditions because ordinary sources of light contain broad spectra of electromagnetic radiation with different frequencies. This important research is little known in the Western world. But, apparently, it is now also taken up in China. I thus read this summer in the Beijing Review that Chinese scientists use the laser technology which had detected the frequency spectrum of germ-carrying cells and thus, obviously had confirmed the original discovery of Kaznachev and brought it a step further.

The most comprehensive biophysical theory today is the theory of biological plasma or bioplasma that has been formulated by Professor Inyushin in Alma Ata and Professor Sedlak in Lublin. The bioplasma theory is little known and much understood in the Western world. Professor Sedlak gives this summary:

"B-plasma would thus constitute the ultimate substrate of both chemical and electronic processes, as well as a carrier of all information within the system. From the bioelectrical point of view, the transfer of information within the living organism is not confined to the nervous and hormonal system; this information is more general, more selective, more efficient and has a electromagnetic nature. Electromagnetic fields are entities best suited for controlling plasma. The introduction of the concept of bioplasma adds much to what has previously been known from bioelectronics about the nature of the living system and the principles of its internal coordination. The essence of life lies in the behaviours of electric particles and electromagnetic fields".

From Sedlak's words, you realize that the bioplasma theory is a broad and ambitious theory amounting to a biophysical explanation of life. It is not a vague, mystical concept but a fairly strict scientific theory supported by a large body of experimental research and extensive knowledge of physics, biophysics and physiology. Of interest to our discussion is the concept of a pervasive bioelectronic network where sub-cellular structures and organic molecules form a complex semi-conductor system. The theory is here in correspondence with the development of transistor technology where organic molecular transistors are perceived as a future stage in micro-computerization. Remembering Leibnitz's concept of living organisms as perfect engines, we can just marvel how we in

our technology are only rediscovering the wisdom of nature.

Within the bioplasma energy and information is not only transferred by electronic processes, but by photons as well, that means by electromagnetic radiation. Just as organic molecules and sub-cellular structures have been found to have semi-conductor properties, they may act as laser emitters. In this way, the theory explains the enormous capabilities of information transfer and regulative functions that are inherent in living matter.

The bioplasma theory comprises the main features of the theory of Popp and likewise, explains the existence of organic holograms. According to Inyushin, the bioplasma generates a fairly stable, highly complex electromagnetic field and the creation of 3-dimensional holograms.

To me the question is not so much whether the bioplasma theory is correct in all of its aspects, or not, but rather that it expresses a trend in which the future science of life obviously will go. If the Russians and Eastern Block countries presently are further advanced in this field than the Western world, this is due to their heavy investment in biophysical research. In our part of the world, medical science is more engaged in biochemistry and molecular biology. But we may safely conclude that biophysics will come out much stronger also in our medicine. As Fritz Popp puts it: " Biophysics has the future ahead of it as an auxiliary science to medicine."

To biophysicists like Popp and Inyushin, the phenomena observed in acupuncture are not something alien and disturbing, but something which naturally fit into their biophysical way of thinking. According to Fritz Popp, all the relevant phenomena of acupuncture as he knows them from competent acupuncturists can be explained on the basis of his theory on organic wave conductors. In this way, he explains the circulation of energy in the meridians and the coupling of meridians to organ systems. The energetic polarity of Yang and Yin corresponds to the two modes of electric and magnetic type, which we know from the physics of wave conductors.

On request from the Soviet Ministry of Health, Inyushin has been doing extensive research on the biophysical aspects of acupuncture. He sees the acupuncture meridians as bioplasmic connections, which through the embryological development have narrowed, into channels. He has discovered a photobiological effect, which is, called the Inyushin effect and which can be used to measure the activity of bioplasma directly. When I visited his institute in Alma Ata in 1976, he was doing research on the laser conductivity of the acupuncture meridians and was perfecting a device to measure bioplasmic activity in acupuncture points through the Inyushin effect. He has also greatly contributed to the development of soft laser therapy and laser acupuncture, which were in extensive use in hospitals in Alma Ata.

My conclusion is that acupuncture is a biophysical mode of therapy, which primarily acts on a biophysical system of the organism. This system belongs to a general system for the transfer of energy and information, which comprises the whole organism and acts on the subcellular level. This biophysical information system has important regulatory functions and strong holistic properties. It is more general than the nervous system and antedates in embryological development. A comprehensive scientific understanding of acupuncture will only be possible through the further development of biophysics, but important steps have already been achieved in basic research. Eventually, acupuncture will become naturally integrated into a more general biophysical trend in future medicine.

REFERENCES

1. Krack, N.: "Nasale Reflex-Therapie mit aetherischen Oelen", Haug Verlag, Heidelberg, 1975.
2. Capra, F. : "The Turning Point", p.89, Wildwood House, London, 1982.
3. Leibnitz, G.W.: "Monadologie", Reclam, Stuttgart, 1979.
4. Bohm, D.: "Wholeness and the Implicate Order", Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980.
5. Popp, F.A.: "So koennte Krebs entstehen", bild der wissenschaft, Jan. 1976.
6. Popp, F.A.: "Deutungsversuche zur Akupunktur", Deutsche Zeitschrift fuer Akupunktur, 5/79.
7. Inyushin, V.M.: "Lazerini svet I zivoj organism" (Laser Beams and Organic Resonnaces), Kazakh State University Press, Alma Ata, 1970.
8. Sedlak, W.: "the electromagnetic Nature of Life", Proc.II. International Congress of Psychotronics, Monte Carlo, 1975.