Bioelectronics: the western form of acupuncture. But only the eastern form
is denigrated as “woo.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/can-the-nervous-system-be-hacked.html
The vagus nerve and its branches conduct nerve impulses — called action potentials — to every major organ. But communication between nerves and the immune system was considered impossible, according to the scientific consensus in 1998. Textbooks from the era taught, he said, “that the immune system was just cells floating around. Nerves don’t float anywhere. Nerves are fixed in tissues.” It would have been “inconceivable,” he added, to propose that nerves were directly interacting with immune cells. ‘There was nothing in the scientific thinking that said electricity would do anything. It was anathema to logic. Nobody thought it would work.’
Nonetheless, Tracey was certain that an interface existed, and that his rat would prove it. After anesthetizing the animal, Tracey cut an incision in its neck, using a surgical microscope to find his way around his patient’s anatomy. With a hand-held nerve stimulator, he delivered several one-second electrical pulses to the rat’s exposed vagus nerve. He stitched the cut closed and gave the rat a bacterial toxin known to promote the production of tumor necrosis factor, or T.N.F., a protein that triggers inflammation in animals, including humans.
“We let it sleep for an hour, then took blood tests,” he said. The bacterial toxin should have triggered rampant inflammation, but instead the production of tumor necrosis factor was blocked by 75 percent. “For me, it was a life-changing moment,” Tracey said. What he had demonstrated was that the nervous system was like a computer terminal through which you could deliver commands to stop a problem, like acute inflammation, before it starts, or repair a body after it gets sick. “All the information is coming and going as electrical signals,” Tracey said. For months, he’d been arguing with his staff, whose members considered this rat project of his harebrained. “Half of them were in the hallway betting against me,” Tracey said.
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Tracey’s efforts have helped establish what is now the growing field of bioelectronics. He has grand hopes for it. “I think this is the industry that will replace the drug industry,” he told me. Today researchers are creating implants that can communicate directly with the nervous system in order to try to fight everything from cancer to the common cold. “Our idea would be manipulating neural input to delay the progression of cancer,” says Paul Frenette, a stem-cell researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who discovered a link between the nervous system and prostate tumors.
http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/behind-the-cover-story-michael-behar-on-star-trek-acupuncture-and-bioelectronics/
Yes. Tracey presented at a conference about how the mind and body interact a few years ago. The Dalai Lama was there. He asked a question of Tracey about this nerve stimulator. They had a conversation through a translator, and eventually the Dalai Lama shook his head knowingly. He recognized that this placement in the neck, the vagus nerve, where Tracey implants devices, was an important point for an Eastern healing process. This is essentially the Western world discovering acupuncture, which taps into the nervous system to heal things, sometimes using electrical currents. Eastern medicine practitioners might look at this and go, “Yeah, this is what we’ve been trying to tell you for 4,000 years!”
When Tracey and I talked about the similarity of the approaches, he told me, “Be careful how you write this, because half of the world will read this as if you’re trying to teach them how acupuncture works, and they already know how it works.” So Tracey was urging us to be respectful of how we put the Dalai Lama’s comments, and the relationship to acupuncture, in context. It’s not as if the scientists have figured out something that acupuncturists didn’t already know, and practice, in a different way.
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