NEWS

Traditional Chinese Medicine Taps "Qi" for Health

Jan Ziegler

More than a thousand people came from the United States to a suburb of Washington, D.C., recently to attend a lecture by a man whose presence for a few hours they believed would heal them, physically, mentally, or emotionally. The content of his speech was not as important as what he was said to be emitting: the life force energy the Chinese call "qi."

Yan Xin is a master of qi gong (pronounced "chi gung") medicine. Qi gong, the predecessor to tai chi, is an exercise combining postures, flowing movement, controlled breathing, and meditative practices.

A qi gong physician such as Yan Xin is said to be able to channel qi to a patient directly and in the Chinese system, the unimpeded and balanced flow of internal "qi" is considered crucial to health — particularly to the prevention of cancer. Qi is the most important ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, and the hardest to characterize. But that should not stop anyone interested in studying this ancient system and harnessing its benefits, practitioners say. Texts recording physician experience during the 15th century in China suggest the remission rate from breast cancer among populations treated with traditional medicine, for example, was 40%, said Yongli Ni, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and one of the conference organizers.

"We have made progress since then," she said, speaking not only about China, but the West. "We can do a better job."

Yan Xin's lecture was the highlight of a weekend-long conference in May at which traditional Chinese medicine practitioners from the United States and China described their methods and results to a small group of western physicians, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and patients. Its sponsors included the Traditional Chinese Medicine Center in Washington, D.C., which Ni, who holds an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins, heads, and Yan-Huang Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital in Beijing.

Like the United States, China, according to the speakers, has adopted surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation for treatment of cancer. But use of this triad by itself "is wrong," Ni said. "Otherwise, why would there be so many recurrences?" Traditional Chinese medicine's idea is that Western treatment blasts the cancer but fails to adjust the underlying qi or energy issues — thus leaving a potentially fertile field for future malignancies.

Chinese practitioners state firmly that if you balance energy with acupuncture, qi gong, herbs, therapeutic massage and healthy lifestyle (low-fat diet included), your risk of contracting cancer in the first place will be lower — and if you have cancer already you may induce remission using these practices. Indeed, said Dean Y. Deng, M.D., head of the Acucenter Pain Clinic in Lake Forest, Ill., some cancer patients have achieved remission using qi gong alone.

Claiming to be a skeptic, however, he said, "How it works, I don't know."

Epidemiology is needed to help answer some of the questions about traditional Chinese medicine and its efficacy, since descriptions of clinical experience in China tend to be based on case reports and physicians' experience rather than comparisons and statistical aggregates, and lack Western-style analysis, he and others said.

Several medical centers, including the University of California at San Francisco, have begun small studies to determine outcomes in cancer patients and others using traditional Chinese medicine. And one of the speakers at the conference, Yan Su, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C., presented a Western-style analysis of 40 patients showing traditional Chinese medicine herbs — also considered energy balancers — could reverse abnormal changes of mucosal tissues in atrophic gastritis and Barretts' esophagus, believed to be precancerous conditions.

Tuning in

Yan Xin's audience was half Asian, half Western, according to Ni, and about one-quarter of the western portion consisted of scientific and medical researchers from major universities.

"We're at the beginning. It's something that's just being taken seriously by Western clinical practitioners and researchers," said Len Wisneski, M.D., a member of the National Institutes of Health's consensus panel on acupuncture, medical director of American Whole Health in Chevy Chase, Md., and clinical professor of medicine at George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, D.C.



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Dr. Len Wisneski

 
Some 1,500 studies in China have documented effects of qi, Wisneski said in a phone interview, although, as conference participants noted, most remain untranslated. Studies published in the United States indicate, for example, that exposure to qi enhances kinase activity and protein crystallization, a process used to precipitate out pure proteins from tissues or compounds in solution.

Gary Schwartz, psychology professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, used a random event generator from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory for readings in a room where 2,500 qi gong practitioners had gathered during a meeting in New York. The device registered deviations that suggested the practitioners had caused an emission of energy or a change in the ambient energy of the room. In the past, the device has registered similar deviations when groups of people meditated or shared the same emotion.

Still, none of these experiments has defined exactly what qi is in scientifically acceptable terms. Indeed, an exact definition may not be possible — yet.

"Qi is like gravity," Schwartz said in a telephone interview. "The way we measure gravity is: We measure its effects and we infer a process that cannot be tasted, touched or felt."

For clinical purposes, definition may not be necessary — efficacy is what's important. Five thousand years of experience indicate something must be going right, conference speakers said.



             
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