Professor Fei is a chemist who is good at molecular physics, not a doctor, so he took a completely different approach in this research. First of all, we abandoned the traditional formal organization and adopted a new organization called virtual organization. There are no full-time researchers in the project, and all kinds of relevant scientists and equipment in Shanghai are mobilized according to the research needs. It took nearly ten years to finally find some concrete evidence of the existence of meridians.
This study first thinks that there will be no undiscovered linear or tubular tissues in today's advanced anatomy. Therefore, we will focus on the tissue analysis near the meridians. Due to the progress of modern biomolecular science, the tools and methods that can be used are much more advanced than twenty years ago. In addition, the members of this group are not mainly medical experts, but mainly chemists, physicists, mathematicians and other experts in basic science. Starting from the most basic laws of matter, the chances of success are particularly high.
Before this study, a team in Tianjin had found that when acupuncture was inserted into acupoints, a large amount of calcium ions would be generated around the acupoints. The report did not explain the source of calcium. From the common sense, the calcium in the human body is mainly in the bones, and the calcium in the bones cannot be released at the moment of acupuncture. Therefore, it is judged that there should be a calcium bank that can release calcium ions at any time near the acupoints of the human body. If we find this calcium bank, we should be able to find evidence of the existence of substances in some acupoints.
First, the team located three-dimensional acupoints on living people and observed the actual influence points of acupuncture under magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment. At the same time, set aside a separate human leg for synchronous dissection. Acupoints in traditional Chinese medicine are divided into three layers according to their depth: heaven, man and earth. When acupuncture, there will be a feeling of acupuncture on each floor, the patient will feel sour, swollen and numb, and the surgeon will feel sticky. This experiment is aimed at the stomach meridian layer of the leg. After the anatomical location of acupoints, it is found that the stratum of all acupoints of the stomach meridian on the calf stops at the interosseous membrane between the fibula and tibia, which is a kind of connective tissue, and its previous understanding was only the connection between human tissues.
So the team cut off the interosseous membrane and sent it to the physics laboratory for analysis with proton accelerator. It is found that there are seven elements such as calcium (Ca), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn) and chromium (Cr), and the difference between acupoints and non-acupoints is 40-200 times. This is a very exciting achievement, and it is the first time that human beings have discovered the physical evidence of the existence of meridians. Since then, no one can doubt that meridians and acupoints are illusory.
Then the team continued to analyze the structure of this interosseous membrane and found that it was composed of three collagen fibers, and then five fibers were rolled into a bundle. A large number of such bundles form a thin sheet, which is a bit like the arrangement of cables in a computer. The molecular level analysis of this kind of collagen fiber shows that it is a biological liquid crystal substance composed of several different protein molecules.
According to the common sense of physics, substances with crystal structure have some special properties for physical energy such as sound, light, electricity, heat and magnetism. Referring to the past experiments of Shanghai Jiaotong University on people with special functions, we can know that a large part of the "work" issued by qigong masters is to emit far infrared rays with specific wavelengths. Therefore, the team tested the physical properties of connective tissue, starting with the transmittance of far infrared rays. Soon, exciting results were obtained. Experiments show that collagen fiber has a light transmittance of nearly 100% in the radial direction to the far infrared rays of 9-20 microns, but it is almost completely opaque in the transverse direction, that is to say, for this frequency range, collagen fiber has the physical characteristics of optical fiber.
Then we know from foreign medical research literature that all tissues of human body, even as small as individual single cells, are connected by at least two collagen fibers, which is probably the information expressway inside human body. And the protective film outside each organ of the human body is also a dense optical fiber. The meridians of TCM are divided into meridians and collaterals, among which the meridians are the trunk, and the meridians are mainly drawn in the general diagram of meridians of TCM. Collaterals are branches of meridians, almost all over the body, which is consistent with the research results. The research paper 1998 was first published in Chinese mainland Science Bulletin in March, and then was invited to be published in the Symposium on Traditional Medicine of the World Health Organization in 2000, and published in the Symposium on Traditional Chinese Medicine across the Taiwan Strait in 20001. Although these reports have received considerable attention, the impact of this study is certainly far more than that.
The physical evidence of meridians is only a small part of stratigraphic research in the three levels of heaven, man and earth. Besides this evidence, there must be other phenomena in meridians and acupoints. The team led by Dr. Ding, the research team of Fudan University in Shanghai, later found that most of the capillaries in the human body are irregular, but the capillaries near acupoints are regular parallel lines, parallel to the meridians. Through the calculation of fluid mechanics, it is found that as long as there is a certain pressure difference between adjacent acupoints, the interstitial fluid flow field between capillaries outside the pipeline will be formed in the human meridian. It's a bit like an ocean current, without pipes, but with water. This is also very similar to the majestic Wei Qi described in Huangdi Neijing. Capacity gas is blood in blood vessels, and the external flow field found here is probably Wei Qi. This research is still going on. Due to the limitation of current equipment, it is still difficult to observe this phenomenon directly in vivo. But after the blood pressure in the dead body disappears, the meridians stop moving at all, so it is impossible to see this phenomenon. This is the biggest difficulty in meridian research, and it is necessary to understand the subtle changes of life.
These special phenomena near the meridians can show that the meridians of the human body are not a system imagined by ancient China people. With the continuous progress of science and technology, more evidence of the existence of meridians will gradually appear. For example, there must be evidence of the existence of other meridians on the two levels of "heaven" and "man", which remains to be discovered by scientists. The process of biological evolution begins with single-celled organisms. Among the early simple creatures, many have no brains, but connective tissues (the meridian tissues first discovered by the research team). The brain is an organ possessed by very advanced creatures. Judging from this phenomenon, it is not necessarily the brain that dominates the operation of human organs, but it is more likely to be directly regulated by the meridian system.
In modern computer terms, the human body is probably not a system controlled by a single computer, but is composed of multiple computers and a high-speed communication network. The brain is like the CEO's terminal in the company network. This also shows that our ancestors' definition of the five internal organs of the human body includes heart, liver, spleen, lung, kidney-five internal organs, and small intestine, gallbladder, stomach, large intestine, bladder, triple energizer-six fu organs, which may be the reason for missing the "brain" alone.
Modern medicine is based on anatomy. In the past, when anatomy was developed, the meridian system could not be seen because of scientific and technological capabilities. Until the end of the last century, human scientific and technological ability was only able to find some evidence of meridians. If, as we speculated, "Meridian is the information expressway inside the human body", then the initial anatomy is likely to miss the most important part of the human body. This is like observing a tree, but you can't see the trunk, only the leaves; Just like when dissecting a computer, I only saw part of the hardware and thought it was the whole computer. I didn't expect software to exist, and I didn't know there was such a behemoth as the Internet.
The decline of Chinese medicine today is largely due to the teaching of modern Chinese medicine. As soon as they entered the school, they first taught this half-baked anatomy, so that these novice doctors established a human body structure without meridians in their minds, and then began to teach meridians and acupoints. Of course, their hearts are full of doubts. How do they learn Chinese medicine?
With the appearance of meridian physical evidence, it will definitely have a great influence on the whole medical field in the foreseeable future, and the original anatomy must be adjusted accordingly. Of course, the whole modern medicine based on anatomy will also undergo great changes.