BBC Documentary The Science of Acupuncture _ BBC Documentary _ Traditional Chinese Medicine.mp4

in China a young woman is having open heart surgery but it's unlike anything you'll see in the west she's still conscious because instead of a general anesthetic this 21st century surgical team are using a 2,000 year old method of controlling pain acupuncture millions of us now believe that this simple needle has extraordinary powers today more and more of us are putting our faith into alternative medicine Jen which is the the the main herb from ancient Herbal Remedies quite fragant no it's all Way Beyond what we normally think of is medicine to Miracle Faith healing said

again healed all and acupuncture ow oh moving hers doesn't it but do these therapies really work do they offer something more than conventional medicine and can science help us find out in this series I'll be putting all three to the test I'll find out whether these needles really do have healing powers and in a groundbreaking experiment I'll discover something truly astonishing about [Music] acupuncture [Applause] [Music] all over the UK acupuncture is booming this ancient Chinese treatment is now one of the most popular of all alternative therapies it's even taking hold within the NHS now nearly

a million of us use it every year and it's growing fast there are clinics all over the place now here in Chinatown that's not so surprising but it's happening all over the country now I'm a scientist and with all that I understand about medicine it just makes no sense that sticking a needle into a human body could cure illnesses and yet millions of people are convinced the acupuncture Works where conventional medicines fail 19-year-old Joanna Hughes believes acupuncture has transformed her life for nearly a year she suffered from ma a condition that left her bedridden we

will do something to help you a lot of people are very fighting of needles yeah I'm not too bad yeah conventional medicine had done nothing so finally she tried acupuncture it's nowhere near as painful as sort of an injection or it's not like that it's a lot less painful than that it's kind of like a little electric shock on points which are really strong like my lever point on my feet is really strong you kind of feel electric shocks going like up your legs it's reacting yes you can see after just a few treatments the

effect was remarkable I just felt like kind of me again I felt like I had so much more energy I could start to do some things which was just like so amazing compared to what I had been like um few months ago and it's not just Joanna now more and more people are convinced that acupuncture has worked wonders my life was changed it felt like I had new knees again cuz it was just it was wonderful I had to scream before if I move my shoulder too much as soon as I come out of a

session you can immediately feel that the pain has gone away it did work for me and it was kind of a miracle if you [Music] like but it's all based on a very different view of the body acupuncturists believe that illness is caused by an imbalance in a Life Energy Chi which determines our health the chi the energy flows through the whole body so acupuncture really is manipulation or unblocking or relieving the energy so what does Professor may make of My Life Energy what can you tell me about what's going on in my body by

looking at my tongue from your tongue the de coting and the color I know um what's happening to different organs of your body May me show me your tongue ah yes well your tongue is RA rather red the tip here and I think you're suffering from circulation problems and uh is that right um no I don't think I do no but the tip of the tongue represent the heart yes so I will look at the heart Meridian see if you you have any pain along your heart Meridian or any dysfunction in your heart as a

scientist I found Professor May's explanation of how the Body Works extraordinary what I'm really struggling with is that it's just all so alien it's not just the needles the language the ideas even the diagnosis and it just Bears no relation to science and yet so many people are convinced that it's working for them so I have to find out whether it really [Music] is Shanghai China's booming Metropolis looking around it's hard to believe that this is the home of one of the most ancient traditional medicines in the [Music] world but it's here I hope to

find out exactly what acupuncture is and why so many people in the west are convinced by it I'm pretty skeptical about acupuncture but we'd be crazy to write off ancient wisdoms we ought to question them well but we can't write them off especially when it appears to be able to do something astonishing in the city's most advanced Hospital 21-year-old factory worker Chun gunan has a hole in the heart and her health is deteriorating she's about to have open heart surgery even with the best medical equipment it's a risky operation her chest will be cut open

and her heart stopped but Gan will go through all of this without a general anesthetic instead she's chosen acupuncture [Music] although Sedated by drugs and her chest numbed she'll be conscious throughout the whole procedure the doctors stimulate the needles using an electrical current as the surgeon Begins the success of the operation depends not just on his skill but on the power of acupuncture acupuncture is an effective painkiller it's also less damaging to the body than a general anesthetic it seems incredible but gan's doctors have done more than 300 similar operations what could possibly explain what's

going on in the old city of Shanghai I'm hoping to find some answers [Music] I've come to meet one of acupuncture's Masters yo yurin an acupuncturist from one of China's great medical dynasties and someone who can help me understand exactly how acupuncture works I've been feeling a bit run down so he begins by feeling my pulse and looking at my tongue one of his patients Fred we trans lat for him thank you he says the top of the tongues condition is very good it's very red very red yes good and that's good that's good that's

good he he say basically you think too much he's probably right and that's why he says your inner heat is actually put qu quite a lot of inner heat a lot of inner heat because you think you think of uh too many problems and things like that but the most importantly he says to basically uh take control of your personal life and maintain the balance so don't work so long yes sleep more yes relax more yes and think less yes I've known for a long time that's what I should do but that's very good that's

that's me well all of that is true about me but you could say that about just about everyone I know at yoan's Clinic the patients are put through a series of bizarre procedures and Fred was happy for me to watch his treatment can you ask yurin why he's put these glass bowls on you he says basically this kind of glass balls can help the you know the blood circulate a little faster okay so all of these down here down your leg yes are going to help with the blood flow through your legs yes and that's

going to help your buttock exactly okay then it was my turnor you should just relax and and what's he going to do think of a happy place while he's uh okay and that's great that didn't hurt he slides the needles in each specific point is supposed to treat a different part of my body yeah how do you feel okay a couple of them have stung a little bit but say I'm uh that one really help you to sleep ow Fred how far in is he putting them I'm actually very light not not too much right

yeah oh moving HS doesn't it yeah don't don't move well it's quite nice to lie down but I can't say I'm feeling anything [Music] special 20 minutes later and how long do it take to work for it a few times a few times expect any Miracles you have to maintain self balance that's the most important part so you have to sleep more and uh work less so most of it is down to me yes okay I'm feeling everything's feeling really tingly and I'm feeling slightly spaced um and I guess that's probably from having needles stuck

into me and whether that's a good thing or not I have no idea [Music] today ancient China is rapidly disappearing yet remarkably acupuncture has found a place in the modern world I'd like to know just how it's adapted to the demands of modern medicine here in this Hospital doctors are using conventional medicine and acupuncture side by side so patients get to choose which kind of treatment they're going to have doctors here claim they use it for sound medical reasons not just to keep a tradition alive and what was wrong with him okay so for pain

mhm acupuncture yeah for a problem with an organ mhm Western medicine and if that doesn't work uh-huh then acupunct okay yes but sometimes us Western B they have very big side effect so they will say um yeah you can accept some acupun treatment okay use a little to those Western medicine and acupun oh so use a small amount of Western medicine yes and acupuncture treatment to help to increase the effect and that reduces the side effect of in medicine yes okay yeah doctors here claim that acupuncture can treat just just about every illness and people

come from all over the world to seek a cure I went to my doctor in Houston I had a pain in my shoulder it's been like that for about 6 months first he gave me steroids uh didn't really get better so he said you're going to China why didn't you try acupuncture and as soon as I come out of a session you can immediately feel that the pain has gone away I had a virus attack and half of my face was paralyzed and someone recommended Dr Lee to me so I came here after 5 treatment

and I was fine I'm here to stop smoking I have high cholesterol is what I have and if I continue to smoke could have either a heart attack or a stroke so you know both health reasons and you know my own moral reasons to stop that one hurt sorry it's time for the needles to come out if they're working she should feel sick when she smokes oh you want me to try does you want me to try to smoke in here it's okay to light up okay yeah feel a little nauseous yeah I'm going put

this out this is making me sick okay whatever parts of my body that he was working on just made me a little nauseous this just really the smell just made it worse so there is something to Chinese medicine definitely the more I hear the more I'm beginning to realize we can't just dismiss this ancient tradition for people here acupuncture has proved itself again and again over thousands of years I've traveled deep into the country to visit this ancient city hangjo it dates back to the time of the great emperor chin and it's over 2,000 years

old so it's a great place to find out about the origins of [Music] acupuncture yo yuren has invited me to a museum dedicated to acupuncture the earliest needles look more like instruments of torture well in the past there was no metal and so there were no metallic needles they used bone instead we call them banza or stone which was sharpened to a point with a grinding stone so fine that it could be used as a needle to pierce the body [Music] that's so why did people start to stick needles into other people someone would feel

discomfort but they discovered that if you put a needle in some part of the body there'd be a sensation and all of a sudden the pain would disappear here people discovered that this point here could relieve pain or that that point there could treat something else it's these ideas passed down from one generation to the next that have survived intact to the present day [Music] acupuncture is so deeply rooted in the medicine here hardly anyone questions whether it works you know if everybody in a culture believes that something's going to work um then it's much

more likely to work and we we know that about medicine if people believe something's going to work it makes a big difference it's more likely to have an effect gan's operation is entering the most dramatic phase they check she's okay as they prepare to stop her heart to repair the hole it seems amazing to me that acupuncture is even considered for such a lifethreatening operation but after 2 hours of intricate surgery everything appears to have gone well remarkably just 2 days after the operation Gan is sitting up in bed telling her sister the story her

memories are still Vivid I remember the doctor needle into my hand and felt my PS then he put another needle in here and here near my vein then my whole body started to tremble when the scal P started to cut the bone I could hear it all but I didn't feel any pain not the thing the speed of gan's recovery is impressive just just a week after the operation she's ready to check out and there's one other benefit to the acupuncture the bill is a third of the cost of an operation with general anesthetic and

as I come to the end of my trip I'm struck by the sheer numbers of people who I've met who are convinced that acupunctur worked for them the ancient Bel Lea in acupuncture and Chi is as much at home among the Modern Skyscrapers as the old temples this idea of chi is right at the heart of acupuncture the Chinese SE is a universal energy that flows around the world and inside every one of us so it's right at the heart of the culture the shin monks believe that controlling their Chi allows them to perform remarkable

[Applause] Feats and every morning Millions perform Tai Chi a daily ritual they believe keeps the chi life force in balance around the body I think in the west we often see bodies as machines and when one bit goes wrong we think we have to fix that one bit with acupuncture the Chinese see the body as a whole system and so instead of just trying to fix the bit that's gone wrong they try to readjust the balances in a whole body I've been much more impressed by acupuncture than I was expecting to be one of the

tricky things about this trip is that it feels like I've been speaking a foreign language the whole time and I don't mean Chinese English I mean Western Medical View and the ideas of chi and meridians a lot of scientists coming here might say they need more evidence and I need more evidence but I've seen enough to make me believe it's really worth trying to explore it more so as I head home I'm eager to find out what science has to say about [Music] acupuncture [Music] I saw some amazing things in China and heard some very

compelling stories but nothing really amounted to hard evidence there could always be other explanations for what I saw the woman who gave up smoking for example seemed determined to give up [Music] anyway so is there any objective scientific research in into [Music] acupuncture just one website has 9,000 scientific papers and 661 trials but sheer numbers of Trials don't mean much unless they've been properly [Music] conducted I've come to exitor the university here is now a World's leader in Research into alternative medicine Professor edzard Ernst scrutinizes the research for alternative therapies using strict scientific criteria well

one thing is absolutely certain there's no such thing as an alternative science and there will never be such a thing so um either you investigated with the proper tools of science or you don't investigate it causality is nowhere near proven Professor Ernst and his team assess every trial that's published mostly the research is disappointing TRS are too small to be ultimately conclusive because big trial costs big money a small trial costs small money so trials tend to be small um and therefore not fully conclusive the data isn't just poor what evidence there is suggests that

acupuncture isn't actually working for most conditions it's certainly not the Cure Ro it's often said to be some people claim for instance that acupuncture can help with addictions like smoking or with weight loss or even with infertility but when these claims been put to the test acupuncture hasn't been shown to work but intriguingly there was one trial that stood out above the others it was bigger and more scientifically rigorous than the rest and it was testing a condition that affect millions of us here in the [Music] UK Linda T has suffered migraines for 25 years

a couple of times a month they'd strike throwing her family life into chaos my eyesight goes and it goes like Jagged and you get blind spots and then usually within about an hour I start to feel sick and get real pounding headache and it's just like unrelenting it's just horrendous nothing her doctors did seemed to work but then her mother suggested acupuncture which had worked well for her bad back and she couldn't stand up at this time she was like bent double and she said well yes do anything um and she did that and it

worked and she was able to stand up walk around and leave and she was kind of fine and she couldn't believe it Linda's doctor wouldn't prescribe acupuncture but she did finally get the chance to try it when she was asked to take part in a medical trial I also use Rand six over here Rand six is a point that we Comming to use for energy medical researcher Andrew Vickers was asked to conduct the most comprehensive trial so far into acupuncture what we wanted to do was a very large study taking pretty much all cers anyone

with chronic headache disorders and we wanted to follow them up for a longer period of time you know a year or so and the idea was that the data from this study would be directly relevant to Medical practice and so the first fullscale acupuncture trial in the UK got underway together with 400 other volunteers Linda was randomly allocated to one of of two groups one the control group had just the normal treatment the other group had normal treatment plus acupuncture Linda was in the acupuncture group The acupuncture did something for her migraines that no conventional

medicine had managed I didn't have any through the trial and then I I I never had another one afterwards so it was kind of almost miraculous what we found at the end of the trial was that patients who were in The acupuncture group had fewer days with headache and the headaches they had were less severe than the patients in the control group the results were intriguing here at last was a large scale randomized trial that showed acupuncture might really work it was a significant step forward but there's something that's still troubling me perhaps it wasn't

the acupuncture itself itself that was making the difference to people like Linda and the other volunteers it could have been some other part of the treatment just being listened to once a week having that kind of attention or being able to lie down and relax properly maybe those things made a difference and there's another big problem and then you stimulate them manually the placebo effect if you know you're having a treatment and believe it might help especially if it's something as elaborate as acupuncture then that in itself can have a big effect and uh another

stimulation is maybe we want to we want to placebos can move mountains in clinical medicine in order to create progress in healthcare we actually want to find out whether treatment is more than a placebo is one way and the other it's a crucial hurdle to overcome there's only one way to be sure that it's the act of needling itself that benefits the patient and that's to compare those who've had acupuncture were those who've been tricked into believing they've also had it now how on Earth can you do that persuade someone they've had a 1-in needle

stuck into them when they haven't will some has been developed that does just [Music] that I've come to see Mike Cummings a medical doctor as well as one of the country's most prominent acupuncturists well in order for me to demonstrate those he's Keen to put acupuncture on a real scientific footing and has been checking out techniques for fake acupuncture so generally this is the experience that you'll have MH tap the needle in ow and then gently gently insert okay I felt the spike which hurt a bit and when it when when you pushed in and

I didn't feel much I just felt the spike ready okay so that's the real thing so that's the real thing so now I have to try and convince you somehow that I've done that type of procedure this looks exactly like the needle I just put in your hand yet this one rather like a stage dagger actually disappears into the shaft of the needle so when you insert it looks for all the world like it's gone in but it's actually blunt and it hasn't penetrated your skin at all okay we'll try it out pop that in

there and then we can tap it in the same way that's convincing and then we twiddle and push it to be honest that is more convincing than the actual real acupuncture that feels more like a needle going in and looks more like a needle going in that's probably because the blunt end on the skin is still feeling quite sharp I would believe I'd had acupuncture you think it's in you um I don't cuz you showed me how it worked but um I I would have done well that was pretty convincing and for me it represents

quite a big step forward because if you're able to have a believable acupuncture it means you can put real acupuncture to the test properly and see whether it's the needling itself that's really having an effect and what's more I know of a team who've managed to do exactly that I've come to the United States because a fullscale trial here has for the first time tested real acupuncture against sham acupuncture [Music] at the University of Maryland researchers were determined to discover whether acupuncture was better than a placebo while leading the team was Dr Brian Burman when

you're looking for a placebo in an acupuncture trial you need to persuade somebody they've had a needle stuck into them when they haven't how do you do that what we did was we took a guide to but there wasn't an acupuncture needles and then we would tap it like that and then we would actually tape over the point we'd have them ready made up and it would look pretty much the same thing if you were looking down just the same you said that you do this on naive patients the people that we did it on

had never had acupuncture before have have you had acupuncture I have so you would be more were able to tell the subtle differences between it so Maryland became home to the first Placebo controlled trial into acupuncture as subjects Dr Burman used patients suffering from a crippling disease called osteoarthritis there's no cure only techniques for easing the suffering Sylvia anchors immigrated to America 40 years ago go and has been in crippling pain for the last 20 you think you can do a lot you know you start to walk and you think I'm going to be fine

I can walk this long road but then the pain it's I it's hard to explain it's almost like having toothache in your knees it's just really hurts but acupuncturists claim great success for it for Dr Burman it was the ideal condition to test 570 sufferers were recruited and divided into different groups they were randomized to one of three groups they either got true acupuncture sham acupuncture or the education control group which was the standard care from the Arthritis Foundation Sylvia although she didn't know it was assigned to the real acupuncture group they told us that

you know we wouldn't know whether we were having the actual acupuncture or a placebo on my first session I was a little apprehensive because you know you think needles going in they're going to hurt but they didn't throughout the 26- week trial period the team checked the effectiveness of the placebo we think the placebo worked reasonably well most of the people in the groups couldn't tell if they were receiving true acupuncture or sham acupuncture the team were happy that they' convinced enough of the Sham Group by the technique for the trial to be scientifically sound

over the months the results were compiled and then analyzed and a clear picture began to emerge the reaction was pretty incredible there was a lot of interest because it was a wellone study with a large number of participants that had incredible Placebo control an adequate followup and adequate acupuncture so it was applying good science to this ancient technique seen a change the results were to cause a sensation when you compared the two there was about a 33% Improvement of the real acupuncture group over the Sham acupuncture and do you know whether the acupuncture is is

having an effect on the osteoarthritis itself we don't think that the acupuncture is actually having an effect on the osteoarthritis itself what we think the acupuncture does is it reduces the pain and inflammation and that has the effect of then less pain easier to get around and better physical function so would you say that this trial proves the acupuncture works at least for osteoarthritis I think it it does show that acupuncture um works for osteoarthritis of the knees um you know I can't say because of this trial that acupuncture works for other types of osteitis

even um it may well do but we need to do the sort of definitive studies we don't have all the answers in Western medicine so this trial is the first really convincing scientific evidence that acupuncture works for Sylvia it meant a new new lease of life I told everybody to use acupuncture I felt like the spokesperson for them there was such a difference in the pain level in the walking in every aspect of my life was changed it felt like I had new knes again cuz it was just it was wonderful when I heard about

the Burman trial first thing I did was send an email to Brian Burman to congratulate him because up to that point we had the largest trial and now he had the largest trial and I think it's very important to get these big trials done of course the nice thing about his trial is that it also had a placebo control group and he did show important differences between patients who received true acupuncture and those who received a sham technique the bourbon trial shows that acupuncture is effective for one specific indication the trial is welld designed and

therefore I personally trust um its results it it convinced me that acupuncture works for neee osteoarthritis so scientists and patients seem to be speaking with one voice that for osteoarthritis at least acupuncture works and other trials suggest it works for other kinds of pain too so we can safely say based on the evidence acupuncture works for some kinds of [Music] pain I'm quite surprised I found evidence that acupuncture can work something I hadn't expected when I started this investigation but that just raises an even bigger mystery because so far there's no proof that needling has

an immeasurable biological effect on the body so how can it be treating pain to be really convinced that it's working I need to understand how it can be having its [Music] effect a friend of mine Mark Lico might be able to help as a neuroscientist he's been trying to understand just what pain is pain research is a very new area just understanding the areas how they connect together is really just emerging but modern scientific equipment like the MRI scanner has provided insights 15 years ago it was not possible to look inside someone's head it was

treated as a black box this has revolutionized how we understand Neuroscience today now we can actually see how the brain responds to pain there's completely different areas that are associated with pain you'd register that pain and these parts of the brain towards the front would start to light up and there's another area at the sides just here called the insular cortex which would also light up in order to for you to register that feeling of [Music] pain so the brain may be the key to acupuncture that was really important if acupuncture works on pain then

it ought to affect the areas of the brain that are involved in experiencing pain and we're going to devise an experiment to try to measure that now it's hugely ambitious CU of course we've got to be scientific and rigorous and plan it really carefully but if it does work we could find powerful evidence that acupuncture is having a real effect on the body I've called in some of the top people in the field to [Music] help so we're going to devise an experiment together that's trying to work out the effect of needling on the brain

on the data is the most extraord interesting thing I think one of the first key things we have to tackle is what we use as a control I'm s about concern to actually trying work with acupuncture actually is is it the needle going in or is it actually the Turning of the needle and there seems to be a depth issue here as well most acupun would say for this point here on the hand would needle about maybe half a centimeter to to a centimeter this is clearly much more complicated than it initially seems isn't it

I mean there are so many different parts we could look at the position that you Put the Needle the depth that you put the needle the movement of the needle whether you move it or not so what you're suggesting is we just focus on the act of needling and taking it's really interesting for me being in a room with a group of people of different perspectives so scientists some of whom are really skeptical about acupuncture and acupuncturists who are interested in science but really believe in acupuncture and I think to do a proper experiment in

this field you have to have those different perspectives you need the skepticism but you also need people who really understand the whole of the field so let's just constrain ourselves to one particular point in acupuncture say in the back of the hand M how would that would that help us well I think that would CU at least you're looking at the effect of of of that point on the brain and one of the interesting comparisons then is to see if you just go say superficially just under the surface of the skin and see what happens

to the brain and then needle to the depth of maybe about a centimeter which is probably on average what most acupun would do and we could we could map that in the brain we could look at that difference well we've made a good start and we've agreed on what test we're going to use we'll stick the needle in on a well-known acupuncture point just here and for the real acupuncture we'll stick the needle in quite deep and do a brain scan of the volunteer as a control we're going to just stick the needle in a

short distance and twist it and then do the brain scan and so by comparing those two we ought to be able to see the difference between the real acupuncture and the control this is a genuine piece of new research we plan to look deep into the brain during acupuncture to find out one way or another where the acupuncture is having a measurable effect on the [Music] body but that's fantastic 16 now all we''ve got to do is set the experiment up Mark talks to the team about volunteers questionnaires scientific protocols as well as tracking down

the most powerful scanner available the setup was just incredible the constant phone calls I mean within a few minutes of someone putting the phone down there'd be someone else on the phone saying are you sure are this protocol is right you sure you shouldn't do the control like this you shouldn't change that everyone was so panicky about the control so worried that they weren't going to get the control cuz once you've started the study you're completely [Music] committed the whole team are now really fired up and the stakes are getting pretty high for everyone the

scientists are quite convinced they're not going to see anything unusual happening in the brain during acupuncture whereas the acupuncturists are a bit worried that if they don't see anything interesting well it kind of undermines the the whole profession finally it's the big day Hugh will lead the study and carry out the acupuncture aiz will scrutinize the data and analyze the results Mark and I will be on hand to check what's going on and we've pulled off a coup we've persuaded the University of York to let us use their state-of-the-art scanning equipment now we've come here

to York to do these experiments why here well this they've got here the new generation of MRI scann is What's called the three Tesla version which is a relatively High field strength only a few years ago they were what's called one and a half Tesla so it's doubled in field strength so it's a hefty big MRI big magnet in there the MRI takes Stills like photographs of the brain but we're also going to use a more advanced form of scanning it's like using perhaps having a a video footage where you get a continuous stream of

data so you can actually follow someone's thoughts in real time far closer than you can do even with the big scanners here so using these two techniques together we ought to be able to see deeper into the brain what's going on at a particular time when acupuncture is going on I think so no firstly no one's combined these two techniques on the same patients that's that's a complete first here this particular design of study is a complete first trying to rule out certain features and using this field strength with this magnetic field has not been

done before so there's lots of firstep going on in this study if you don't find it here you're not going to find it anywhere the massive magnet is powerful enough to pick up a car so each of the volunteers has to check for anything metal on their bodies the only thing I was worried about metallic toil polish far enough way going from collar bones up so that's F enough away don't worry we're just about to go into the room but first of all we need to make sure takes the volunteers through the Escape drill once

inside the MRI they'll be locked behind a 6in steel door Des designed to seal the scanner from the Earth's magnetic field me mechanical way of getting out so if there's a power cut for example and but the thing is actually I'm in the room with you so but this is part of our regular safety routine the team are trying to detect the tiniest changes in the brain when the needles are inserted just very slowly it's wonderful is right CZ even the smallest error at this stage could invalidate the entire experiment we've tried as hard as

possible to be absolutely rigorous so we're doing everything we know to make sure that we're really looking only at the effect of the acupuncture needle number here for it we' randomized everything as much as we can we've made sure the patients don't know what they're getting we've even tried to to not let the practitioner know the acupuncturist know what he's going to be doing until the last moment 10 seconds till we rest 3 2 1 start finally the experiment [Music] begins a scan is first taken of the brain at r the Baseline so you can

hear that so that's taking images now now it's having a little bit of a baseline period while they work s to get effectively the mind or the thoughts while they're at rest then the team scan the brain when the needles are inserted Hugh then twists the needle this usually generates an achy tingling sensation called thei when the needle is is stimulated you quite often elicit this duy sensation and acupun often look for that they look for a diry sensation as as part of the healing healing activity of the of the acupuncture three 2 one start

let let me going going now part of the excitement for me of this experiment is that it's really bringing together Eastern approaches to acupuncture and a really rigorous Western Scientific way of thinking and it could completely change the way that we see [Music] acupuncture buried away in his lab at York University Aziz begins to analyze the [Music] data it'll be weeks before the analysis will be complete and we'll find out what if anything our experiment has [Music] revealed [Music] at last results day now the results are looking really interesting but Hugh maybe you could just

summarize the main findings for us really clearly first of all with superficial needling you know we get a picture in the brain of a c this area lighting up in other words becoming activated increased blood flow and if you look at this this brain here this is the the front of the brain here and this is the back and we've have a C out there just so you can see inside better what's happening that's no surprise this is just the brain's normal response to the needle being lightly inserted what we found with deep needling if

we had dir the dir sensation of needle that's the aching sensation what we picked up was deactivation areas of the brain here further back um where we we've colored that blue [Music] acupuncture was having a real effect on the brain and it was doing something completely unexpected it was a result that surprised us all that reinforces the idea that something quite special is happening something unique to acupuncture something physiological well as a neuroscientist I I'm particularly interested interested in activations of the brain but the surprising thing about this study is that we have deactivations a

decrease in neuronal activity and that's something I think that neuroscientists have got to take into account well for me the most extraordinary thing is out of this whole study is that we've got what you might call objective evidence we've got biological correlates of acupuncture some's happening in the brain when you put a needle in different things happen with superficial and deep and they're clearly associated with acupuncture and it's something you can actually measure and quantify superficial but the team was even more excited to discover where it was happening associated with the needling The Superficial needling

also activated these deeper structures around here the area of the brain affected by the Deep needling was an area often called the lyic system and this part here was also activated and what we know about these deeper structures is they're associated with our experience of pain or yes how we experience pain how we modulate pain and it's known as the pain Matrix that sounds really exciting you're saying that the bit of the brain that helps us decide whether something's painful the kind of threshold that we have for pain we think perhaps is being affected by

acupuncture and so maybe that helps to explain why acupuncture can help with chronic pain that's one hypothesis certainly it's a guess and I would say it's quite a good guess yeah wow well that's quite remarkable so the discovery that parts of the pain Matrix become less active by Deep needling with dii is astonishing why why on Earth would just that dii sensation you know be associated with deactivations that we don't know but when you tie it in with the fact that acupuncturist use dii does then these deactivations start to give us the the key to

how acupuncture works that's what puts a smile on my face it's just incredible I think the way the acupuncture is say what really matters in acupuncture is dii and then here we are you neuroscientist is saying oh we find that this amazing thing going on in the brain that we don't really understand that well the deactivation the being less active than normal that only seems to happen during dii and maybe that's coincidence or maybe that's the key to something really [Music] interesting I'm I'm sure scientists will continue to examine acupuncture after all huge gaps still

remain in our understanding of this ancient medicine but for me the results of our experiment do add weight to many of the stories I've heard in my [Music] travels it's been quite a journey for me I I started off pretty skeptical about acupuncture it just didn't make sense from a scientific point of view then I found evidence that it really does work for some kinds of pain and then the experiment was just hugely exciting to take a step towards understanding what's going on in the brain so it's been an astonishing time and I believe that

acupuncture still has a lot to teach us about the way our own brains and bodies work and Kathy Sykes turns her attention to Healing same time next Tuesday on BBC [Music] 2 [Music]