Acupuncture

Drugs and the Chinese needle

George Patterson

The Chinese expression used to describe the inhaling of the twisting spiral of smoke rising from the mixture of heroin and barbiturate is ' chasing the dragon ', and it is the most popular means of drug addiction. Puff, the Magic Dragon, lives by the China Sea — in Hong Kong, where there are 250,000 addicts in a population of four million people. There are also respectable banks, reputable firms and criminal syndicates in the business of supplying the rest of the world with three-quarters of its illicit supplies of opiates at astronomical profits. But for the past nine months I have been working with a medical research team in Hong Kong who have discovered what appears to be a revolutionary new cure for drug addiction — not only the opiates, but also barbiturates, tobacco, tranquillisers, sedatives• and alcoholic addiction.

With professional colleagues I have researched and photographed for a book, and filmed for television, a succession of hardened drug addicts — rich and poor, Chinese, American, English and Japanese — who have smoked, snorted, skin-popped or mainlined heroin in hopeless addiction for anything from one to over fifty years, and have seen them cured in periods ranging from four to eighteen days. Also, methadone, magadon, mandrax and other addicts have had their cravings removed and have been able to sleep without medical aids for the first time in years.

Hong Kong's new and unique contribution to the drug scene is a combination of acupuncture and electro-therapy discovered by accident, but even at this early stage of research appearing to be an exciting amalgam of Chinese and Western medical theories.

Acupuncture (from the Latin acus, ' needle ', and pungere, ' to sting ') has been used in China for about five thousand years. But electro-acupuncture has only been practised in China for the past ten years or so and was developed to eliminate the need to twirl the needles by hand in inducing anaesthesia, for long operations. For over ten years it has been used on 500,000 patients in anaesthesia with 90 per cent success, but the Chinese authorities cautiously maintain that it is still in the experimental stages.

Western physicians began taking acupuncture seriously when a group of their most eminent colleagues — including Boston heart specialist, Dr Paul Dudley White, and New York ear surgeon, Dr Samuel Rosen — toured Chinese hospitals and watched fully conscious patients undergo major surgery with nothing more than acupuncture to anaesthetise them.

Towards the end of 1972 a Chinese neurosurgeon from Hong Kong, Dr H. L. Wen, visited China to study the new technique for use in his own operational procedures, and began his experiments on his return to Hong Kong in November. His senior assistant was another Chinese in the Neuro-surgical Unit of the Tung Wah Hospitals, Dr Stanley Cheung, and a British doctor colleague, Dr Margaret Patterson, who was head of the surgery department.

In the course of their private experiments with acupuncture anaesthesia they discovered that, coincidentally, they were curing addiction when patients who had not said they were addicts drew the doctors' attention to the surprising and unanticipated ' cure '. The group then began taking detailed notes, and the case-histories of forty cured patients were published in the April (1973) issue of the Asian Journal of Medicine. Since then over a hundred patients with a variety of addictive complaints have been treated successfully.

• The initial experiments with the acupuncture techniques have been modified after trying many combinations and permutations of ' points ' and ' frequencies ' in the electrotherapy produced by the electrical stimulating machine. This is a small ten inches by five inches battery operated machine capable of producing about ten volts and 125 hertz. The acupuncture points were reduced to two in the ears, and after the needles had been inserted the voltage was increased gradually from one upwards until the patient felt the current flowing through his ears "like pins and needles", but kept below the pain level.

With the hard-core heroin addicts (in Hong Kong this is one on a daily dose of some 900 milligrammes of either 50 per cent or 97 per cent pure heroin) the effects of this treatment became visible after ten or twelve minutes; , the eyes, nose and throat became dry, the aching, shivering and abdominal pains disappeared, the breathing became regular and the patient relaxed. Most patients required only thirty to forty-five minutes at the end of which they were hungry, bright, alert, goodhumoured, and wanted to talk or to read.

While the members of the research group were still reluctant to state their theories on the mechanism of the effects observed clinically, they are of the opinion that the autonomic nervous system is involved in the dramatic effects seen in the patients experiencing immediate amelioration of acute withdrawal symptoms. The British member of the group, Dr Margaret Patterson, has been so impressed with the possibilities of the treat ment that she has returned to Britain to pursue further research here in collaboration with existing treatment centres involved in multi-drug addictions, and especially to consult with electronics experts in the largely unexplored field of 'medical electronics.' In the United States the noted neuro-surgeon Dr Irving Cooper, the creator of the stereotaxic surgical techniques that were so successful in curing Parkinson's disease, has been working with electricity in curing epileptics and spastics. While in Hong Kong. recently he said to Dr Wen and Dr Patterson:, " The electro-acupuncture experiments being conducted here would appear to indicate that many present theories about the physiology of the brain will have to be reconsidered. This is in keeping with the most recent researches of neuro-surgeons who believe evidence is emerging that the electrical stimulation reconditions the reticular formation so that there is progessive improvement the longer the treatment is carried on in conditions formerly believed incurable." In layman's terms, I believe this means that previously dead, or at least inactive, nerve tissue is capable of regeneration under electrical stimulation.

While Dr Cooper was speaking of epileptics and spastics, other doctors have been working in other fields. For example, Doctor Becker, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical Centre has been experimenting to determine whether electrical stimulation could trigger bone and other tissue growth in animals. Earlier research had established that the chances of regeneration in a species depend upon the proportion of nerve tissue in the area of regeneration. Dr Becker has already succeeded in stimulating regeneration in laboratory animals and has begun trying to apply his technique to humans.

Physical regeneration is one thing; psychological regeneration is another matter altogether. But even in this difficult field exciting developments are being investigated.

One of Britain's most respected neurophysiologists, Dr W. Grey Walter, has performed a remarkable series of experiments work-testing psycho-kinetic effects on enzyme activity on paramecia, on plant growth, and on the healing lesions of mice.

In his 1969 Eddington Memorial Lecture he reported that, " harnessed to an electric machine, by an effort of will-, one can influence external events without movement or overt action through the impalpable surges of one's own brain." This effort "requires a peculiar state of concentration, a paradoxical compound of detachment and excitement." Dr W. Grey Walter's experimental procedure can be described in a simplified way as follows: The electrodes attached to the scalp over the subject's frontal cortex transmit his electrical brain activities through an amplifier to the machine. In front of the subject there is a button; if he presses it down an "interesting scene" will appear on a TV screen. Approximately one second before he presses the button an electrical surge of about 20 micro-volts occurs in a large area of the subject's cortex. This is known as the 'readiness wave '. But the circuits of the apparatus can be so adjusted that the amplified ' readiness wave' is in itself sufficient to trigger a switch and make the TV scene appear a fraction of a second before the subject has actually pressed the button.

This gives some scientific support to the recent interest in the United States of the function of bio-feedback machines in producing 'alpha waves.' For the layman, our brains produce electrical activity, of 'waves' of varying frequency, and these waves are labelled alpha, beta, thera, etc, each associated with a different brain function. Alpha is something that occurs when you feel nothing; the alpha state is typically described as relaxed, pleasant and detached from reality. It is a brain wave with a frequency between

about eight and thirteen cycles per second. Generally, stimulants such as amphetamines, tobacco and caffeine speed up the predominant brain waves; while alcohol, morphine, marijuana and decreased blood sugar tend to slow them down.

In another put related series of experiments Professor Patrick Wall of the British Medical -Research Council, in describing the latest (1973) findings of the Council's cerebral functions group at University College, London,

said that by using micro-electrodes to analyse the behaviour of individual nerve cells they had uncovered a maze of different pathways through which pain is recorded and con trolled. First, there are the fibres that carry the 'pain received' message to the nerve cells. Then there are also the fibres that can negate that message, so that the cells cancel out that pain and do not transmit it to the brain. The cells are also strongly influenced, however, by impulses from the brain which say whether or not it wants to receive that pain message.

According to Dr Wall there may also be pathways from the brain that are used to excite the brain cells; for example, morphine may act by stimulating one of the descending pathways from the brain.

In the field of drug addiction the nearest -explanation for dependence in the most general terms would appear to be a mul

tiplication, induced by the drug of depen dence, of some kind of receptor or enzyme, carrier, neurone or storage site that handles, or reacts to, an active endogenous substance mediating or modulating neural responses. This has been demonstrated by the 'Skinner Box' experiments, of self-stimulation in rats, where by pressing levers rats can self-inject a rewarding drug or stimulate electrically a certain point in its own brain. To obtain the latter behaviour, a stimulating electrode was permanently implanted in the medial fore brain bundle ot the brain. The electrode was wired so that this bundle of neurones was shocked when the rat pressed the lever in the wall of the Skinner Box. In this situation, the rat usually stimulated its brain several thousand times an hour.

All of these developments are clues which Dr Patterson wishes to investigate in the light of the startling results obtained from the early electro-acupuncture treatment of drug addicts of all kinds. Chinese doctors probably have a mass of material in this field of which so little is known, but they already have a piece of equipment to pass over acupuncture points on the skin related to the disease diagnosed and the acupuncture point triggers off an electrical response when over the affected area; outside of this area there is no electrical response.

This would appear to confirm the discoveries made in Russia over thirty years ago by two scientists, Semyon and Valentina _ Kirlian, who invented a device consisting of two metal plates, through which a high frequency alternating current was passed. When a living object was placed between these plates, in contact with a piece of film, the result was a photograph of the "life field" of the object. When a stalk of a newly planted flower was placed between the plates a kind of light was detectable streaming from the stem in the form of "sparks." Another scientist, Victor Adamenko, invented a similar device to that invented by the Chinese which caused a light to flash on and off as it passed' over acupuncture points in the body; in* unhealthy people, he noted, this light was dimmer than in healthy ones.

Even if only some of the treatment is valid' there is enough preliminary evidence to jus-; tify further research in this field of unique potential.