Ouch! That Feels Better.(benefits of acupuncture)

Lei Dao is lying on his stomach with his trousers pulled down. His doctor, Hong Na, twists and turns one needle into his hip, then another into his backside. "It hurts," cries Lei--then gives a clench-jawed laugh at what he's gotten himself into. This discomfort, though, is nothing next to the pain that brought him to Wangjing Hospital in Beijing in the first place. As a writer for a legal publication, he spends long hours working at his desk, which often leaves him with agonizing pain in his right leg. When it comes to most of his ailments, Lei prefers drugs and other conventional treatments, but nothing he's found alleviates muscle pain better than acupuncture. "Western medicine can do nothing about my pain," Lei says, "and acupuncture works."

Numerous scientific studies have confirmed this judgment, and it's now widely accepted in medical circles that acupuncture is an effective treatment for most types of pain. But Lei may be mistaken in one respect: the distinction between Western medicine and acupuncture is getting blurrier all the time. In countries around the world, acupuncture is becoming a bona fide treatment for pain--another tool, along with painkillers and anesthetics, in the doctor's medical kit. Increasingly, acupuncturists are white-coated physicians who receive payment from state-run health systems or even private medical insurance. Even in China, scientists are working to put this ancient art on a firm scientific footing.

Scientists have failed, though, to come up with a good theory as to why acupuncture seems to work. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that acupuncture helps to smooth the flow of the life force, or qi, through the body along 14 major pathways, or "meridians." According to this theory, pain is the result of blocked qi in one or more meridians. Dr. Han Jisheng, director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at Beijing University, would like to believe it, not least because it's a fundamental tenet of his culture. However, he says, "I have no evidence."

Han got involved with acupuncture in 1965 when he witnessed a surgical procedure performed without anesthetics--only acupuncture to relieve the pain. Since then he's tried to explain scientifically how it works. Although the "acupoints" highlighted by the meridian map of the body don't correspond to any part of the anatomy, they seem to be the most effective places to apply needles or electrical currents. He also found that acupuncture triggers the release of endorphins and other pain- blocking chemicals. Han has even gotten different results by applying different frequencies of alternating current to the needles: 100 hertz worked better for muscle spasms as a result of spinal injuries, while 2Hz was more suitable for chronic lower-back pain. But despite his efforts, Han hasn't been able to come up with a good scientific explanation for why this is so.

Scientists in the United States who've applied brain scans to acupuncture patients have been able to observe that the needles stimulate those parts of the brain involved ...