When I began studying Chinese medicine, curious people would ask what acupuncture was about or how it worked. It took me some time to understand it myself, and I would get flustered trying to explain it in general terms I thought they would comprehend. I would use the common phrase “life force” and then stumble, trying to reign myself back into a realm where those curious folks unfamiliar with energy medicine could understand. I would talk of neural networks, highways of information, fascia—trying to link the Chinese medical approach to a more Western view of how the body works. These explanations and examples still work, but they can also muddy the waters of the true nature and beauty of how the medicine works.
A while ago however, I listened to a podcast featuring Ann Cecil-Sterman, a classical acupuncturist here in New York City, who I believe described it in a deceptively simple, but eloquent way. When explaining what qi is, she began with asking one to imagine a body: at one moment that body is alive and, a moment later, that body is no longer alive. The body that is no longer alive, were we to examine it, has everything that the live body has–blood, fluids, organs, tissues. The one thing that it is missing is its qi, the life force. Acupuncture is the art of organizing that qi to maximize the flow of life.
When we insert needles at a particular point on the body, we are manipulating the qi of the body to move; to encourage parts of our body into certain actions or activities that will benefit its function or to rid it of things that are harming it. We can’t see actually see qi, but we know that it’s there. Most scientists prefer to only believe in what can be proven, reproducible, and “evidence-based.” It’s this view that’s kept many in the Western field skeptical of Chinese medicine. Theoretical scientists in the other hand, know that there exists other forces that we cannot see and have yet to detect. Their belief is based on mountains worth of observations. Their approach to belief is similar to that of Chinese medicine. Over hundreds of years, and countless trials, the Chinese came to observe how bodies react to acupuncture needles or herbal remedies. The result is a canon of practices aimed at optimizing our bodies to live in harmony with their environment.