Rising from the dead and witnessing his own funeral is certainly an appalling experience. In ancient China, Gong Guo was mourned by thousands of people after his death, and the fact that he came back to life was an even more remarkable event. One morning about 2,500 years ago, Guo Gong suddenly collapsed and appeared to be dead. When news of Gong's death spread, a traveler named Bian Magpie went to the palace and asked to see Gong's body. The magpie found that Guo Gong still had a faint breath, and there was still warmth between his legs. These phenomena, which had not been discovered by the imperial doctors, made the magpie aware of Guo Gong's symptoms and condition. It turned out that Guo Gong was not dead, he was just unconscious. Bian Magpie signaled to his disciple Zi Yang, who took out a set of emergency needles, and Bian Magpie instructed Zi Yang to insert the needles one by one into different parts of Guo Gong's body. Soon after, Guo Gong began to wriggle, then opened his eyes and sat up. The funeral ceremony was canceled, and within a month, Guo Gong recovered completely.
When the people heard that the king was still alive, many of them decided that Guo Gong had not been saved from death, but had been brought back from the dead, and that Bian Magpie must be a magician. But in his own defense, Bian Magpie had never done any magic. Guo Gong was not dead, but only in a coma, and was revived using an extremely ancient and reliable method of treating illnesses with needles and pricks.
According to one legend, the efficacy of acupuncture was first discovered when a hunter took an arrow to the bridge of his nose and was suddenly cured of a long-standing headache. If this is true, the origins of this healing art seem to date back to the Stone Age, as sharp stone tools used to poke at the skin have been found in many different places. While acupuncture is always associated with China, the Eskimos, ancient Egyptians, and the indigenous Bantu people of Africa, had a similar method of healing by scratching certain parts of the body when treating certain diseases. A cannibalistic tribe in Brazil is also said to have used blowpipes to pierce arrows into parts of the body equivalent to acupuncture points.
The earliest written account of acupuncture is from an ancient medical masterpiece: the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine. The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine is a treasure trove of ancient Chinese medicine. Is the Spring and Autumn and Warring States and the Western Han period, many ancient medical practitioners of the valuable experience of the summation of the medical repertoire accumulated over the ages. In the book, there is a detailed introduction to human anatomy, physiology, pathology, origin of disease, diagnosis and treatment principles. The "Suwen" section of the Neijing describes the medical principles of yin and yang, the five elements, the hidden signs, meridians and collaterals, the causes and mechanisms of disease, the rules of treatment, acupuncture, regimen and luck. The "Su Wen" explains acupuncture therapy in great detail, introducing nine different types of needles, ranging in length from about 3 to 24 centimeters, and naming a total of 365 acupuncture points on the surface of the human body***, all of which are listed according to which ailments and diseases they are suited to treat. As for the different ingredients used to make the needles, the book notes that gold needles, although expensive, are particularly effective in treating certain diseases because they stimulate the body's functions, while silver needles have a significant sedative effect.
While the medical treatments contained in the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine - Suwen seem to have been creatively practiced by the Yellow Emperor, there were many other Chinese emperors who took a keen interest in physiology, especially the nervous system (a clear understanding of the human nervous system is essential for effective use of acupuncture in medicine and surgery). In the first century A.D., Wang Mang, with the assistance of doctors and imperial butchers, allegedly cut open the body of a hostile and scrutinized the body's nervous system with a bamboo skewer. 1,000 years later, Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty hired an artist to paint the organs of a criminal who had been branched out, and before Emperor Huizong, Emperor Renzong of the Song Dynasty had an artisan build a bronze figure showing the entire nervous system of the human body.
The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine - Suwen also put forward the name of the five viscera as the center of the House of Qi Heng and the House of Transformation, discussing the different characteristics of the physiological function of the viscera, explaining the qi and blood can reflect the whole body visceral changes.
Despite the fact that acupuncture therapy is extremely popular in China, and in fact quite effective, Westerners on acupuncture therapy, but only in recent times gradually understand. Europeans do not know much about acupuncture, in 1712, the East India Company, a Dutch doctor named Wilhelm den Reimer, published a book on acupuncture, only to make it more recognized. In the 20th century, some doctors in the United States and Europe began to take a keen interest in acupuncture, although some Chinese doctors disregarded it in favor of what they felt was a more sophisticated form of Western medicine.
No one really knows how acupuncture works. All we can say is that needles inserted into one particular part of the body can often relieve pain in another, seemingly unrelated part. How does this happen? No one seems to have ever adequately explained it.
Needle therapy is based on the nerve connections between the organs of the body and the surface of the skin. When an organ causes pain due to illness, a needle is inserted under the skin at an acupuncture point that is connected to the sick organ, thus producing pain relief. Although some acupuncture points are directly connected to certain organs, the acupuncture points and organs may be very far apart in the body. For example, needles are sometimes inserted in the toes to treat headaches, and in the shoulders to treat excess bile.
The ancient Chinese divided the nervous system into 12 meridians, pathways that connect acupuncture points to major organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and bladder. For example, the heart meridian runs along the inside of the arm up to the little finger. Interestingly enough, this pathway is almost exactly the same route that heart disease takes to cause painful sensations. 12 meridians, each with its own name and function, such as the lung meridian's "Yunmen" point, which, after acupuncture, can treat shortness of breath, asthma, rheumatism, tonsillitis and acne, and the spleen meridian's "Tianqi" point, which is connected to the spleen meridian's "Tianyi" point, which is connected to the liver, kidney and bladder. Tianqi point" of the spleen meridian, which is associated with diseases such as bronchitis, cough and peptic ulcer.
In recent years, Chinese acupuncture, which is still based on ancient meridian theory, has attracted world attention because of the well-documented efficacy of needling to anesthetize. When performing medical procedures, making full use of the anesthetic effect of acupuncture can replace drug anesthesia. This method not only avoids the side effects of anesthetics, easy and safe, conducive to the patient's post-surgical recovery, and acupuncture anesthesia can be widely used in the head, neck, thorax, abdomen and limbs and other parts of the size of the surgery, so more and more by the medical profession.
Westerners who are skeptical of the efficacy of acupuncture attribute most of the successes of needle anesthesia to some kind of subtle hypnosis, but there are many reasons why this conjecture is inappropriate, such as the fact that the Mongols have been using needles to treat animals for centuries. One thing that is true, however, is that the success of acupuncture anesthesia depends on the mental state of the patient, and acupuncture anesthesia is not effective for everyone. Therefore, the patient should be carefully screened before deciding whether to use needle anesthesia or still use modern anesthesia methods for surgery.