The marvel of Chinese medicine is that thousands of years ago, it was already aware of the existence of the human body’s meridian system. According to Chinese medicine, the meridian system is an intricate body map that supplies and transmits vital energy to every part of the body.
A computer-enhanced image produced in the Necker Hospital of a subject injected with a radioactive tracer on the body’s acupuncture points and taken with a gamma camera showed what eerily looked like a circuit board. This was, in fact, the body’s meridian system.
The meridian system works like the circulatory system although it is not part of the body’s anatomical composition. Not being able to locate the meridian system in the human anatomy does not mean that it is not there, it just means that its reality is still beyond the comprehensive understanding of conventional western medicine.
Similar to the circulatory system where blood is channeled through it, the meridian system is the body’s conduit to the life force called chi or qi.
The Necker study observed that the slower the energy flowed through the meridians, the subject experienced more ailments and the more optimal the chi flowed, the subject continuously experienced good health.
With the circuit board computer analogy, one can glean that the meridian system is the motherboard of the body and chi is the information flowing around the computer. When information the computer processes travels slower than expected, one would suspect the computer of having a virus.
The expression, “my computer is running slow today” because of a suspected virus in the computer may be similar in ways to one saying “I feel weak today” or “I don’t feel well today” because there are blockages of the chi in the meridian system.
What does the computer user do when he/she suspects a computer virus in his PC? He/She buys and installs an antivirus program to rid of the bug(s) in his/her PC and make it run efficiently again.
In a similar way, the person who has a disease or ailment, goes to see a Chinese acupuncturist who introduces hair-like needles into the skin to adjust the flow of chi and make it flowing optimally again.
The Spokane acupuncture needles open up the meridian pathways, act as conductors to chi outside the body (similar to how metallic towers attract lightning) and restore neural and physiological balance to the body. Chi should be balanced according to the neuro-physiological capacity of the body.
Too much chi can also be detrimental to the health of a person as the lack of it. Again, we can use the circuit board computer analogy and see that if the PC processes too much information all at once, the computer freezes and needs to be rebooted.
If the person stores too much chi, the brain is often affected and the disease can manifest itself through psychosis, headaches or memory loss among others.