What are the meridians?

The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine: "the meridians, the reason why people are born, the reason why the disease became, the reason why people are treated, the reason why the disease started." The meridians are "ambulatory between the flesh, deep and invisible, and its floating and common, are all veins", and has a "decision of life and death, at the disease, adjusting the real and virtual, can not not be" the characteristics of the acupuncture, "want to micro-needle through the meridians, adjusting the Blood qi, camping its in and out of the meeting, so that can be passed on to future generations". Thus, the theory of meridians and collaterals has a decisive role in guiding the practice of Chinese medicine.

What are the meridians and where do they exist in the human body? What are the functions of the meridians and through what channels are they realized? These issues are both Chinese and foreign scientists to study the major topics, but also the people are very interested in understanding the mystery. So far, although the research on meridians has achieved considerable results, there has been great progress, but whether it is experimental research, or hypothesis argumentation, on the whole, it is still in the hundreds of scientific data and theoretical theory of the formation of controversy, the accumulation of the stage. Therefore, the scientific conclusions about meridians still need a long, hard exploration and research.

Two and a half thousand years ago, China gave birth to the first medical masterpiece, the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, in which an important concept runs through the whole book, that is, meridians. Meridian is a general term for meridians and veins. The ancients discovered that the human body has some routes that run through the whole body, which are called meridians; they also found that there are some branches on these big trunks, and there are smaller branches on the branches, which the ancients called veins, and the term "vein" is an umbrella concept for this kind of structure.

The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine's understanding of the meridians is derived from a large number of clinical observations, and the literature documenting these clinical observations has been gradually found in recent years in unearthed artifacts such as the Mawangdui Palindrome, the Zhangjiashan Bamboo Slip, and the Mianyang Wooden Man Meridian Model. These early documents mainly describe the meridian system and involve three ancient medical techniques: one is moxibustion, one is acupuncture (i.e., a kind of medical technique that uses stones to cure illnesses), and the other is the art of guiding (a kind of ancient qigong), and the meridians are the pathways through which these three medical techniques are applied.

With the development of smelting technology, metal needles, called microneedles, were made and used to treat the meridians. The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine is divided into two books, one of which is called the Ling Shu Jing, also known as the Needle Jing, which is a work devoted to treating the meridians with microneedles. The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine systematically summarizes the meridians and adds new concepts to the meridians, such as collateral veins, meridians, meridian tendons, skin, and odd meridians, which ****together comprise the meridian system, making it the most important physiological structure of the human body in the minds of the ancients. Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine also explains the functions of the meridians, namely, the operation of qi and blood, balancing yin and yang, moistening the tendons and bones, slippery joints, contacting the internal organs and the surface and up and down, as well as the transmission of diseases and evils, and so on. Huangdi Neijing's understanding of the meridian system and its function mainly comes from long-term clinical observation, but also contains some results of reasoning and analysis and the description of analogies. Since the conceptual system of Huangdi Neijing is more than 2,000 years old, it brings great difficulties for modern people to understand the connotation of its ideas. Therefore, it is the task of Chinese medicine researchers to reveal the connotations of the classical meridian concepts from several aspects, including literature and experiments.

Exploring meridians through meridian sensing

For more than half a century, scholars at home and abroad have relentlessly explored the issue of meridians, and the first problem encountered was whether the meridians mentioned by the ancients really existed. At that time, some people thought that the meridians mentioned by the ancients were the blood vessels in modern anatomy, and there was not a set of independent meridian system. On the other hand, some people abroad claimed to have discovered the entities of meridians, which turned out to be proved to be an illusion by our scholars.

In the 1950s, a strange phenomenon was discovered in acupuncture: when some people received acupuncture treatment, they would have a feeling of moving along the meridian routes. Later, this phenomenon was formally named the meridian sensing phenomenon, and those who could produce this phenomenon were called "meridian-sensitive people", but this kind of people only accounted for a very small part of the population. The discovery of the meridian sensitization phenomenon reversed the belief that meridians were blood vessels, because blood vessels were obviously unable to create the phenomenon of sensory movement through the meridians. In addition, it has been found that the skin along the route of the meridians has a lower electrical resistance, and these phenomena have laid a certain foundation for verifying the objective existence of the meridians.

By the 1970s, the phenomenon of meridian sensory transmission was studied in greater depth, and some strange properties of meridian sensory transmission were discovered:

- The speed is slow, on the order of centimeters per second.

- It can be blocked by mechanical compression and injection of saline and cryo-cooling.

- Reflux and lack of sensory transmission can occur.

- May bypass scar tissue and pass through local anesthesia areas and may tend to the lesion.

- Vasodilatation, mild edema, and electromyographic emission are sometimes seen along the route of transsensory transmission.

- Phantom meridian sensing was found to occur at the site of amputation in some patients with amputation.

These phenomena have complicated the understanding of the meridians, as neither nerve transmission nor blood flow alone can explain these features. However, since these characteristics of meridian sensory transmission rely mainly on the subjective feelings and descriptions of the patient, their directness is somewhat discounted, so it is very important to carry out research on some visible meridian phenomena and objective detection of meridians at the same time. These include skin sensitization and pigmentation bands that occur along the meridians when stimulating acupoints, detection of tiny sound waves along the meridians (meridian acoustic emission), implicit meridian sensing (a meridian sensitization phenomenon that exists in more than 90% of the population), and a number of other physical properties of the meridians.

In the mid-eighties, the study of meridians was highly valued by the state, and the first national meridian project was born, which was the "Seventh Five-Year" national research project - "Objective Detection of Fourteen Meridian Routes". Detection". At this time, scientists were no longer satisfied with subjective perception and other simple means to explain the existence of meridians, but tried to prove the objective existence of meridian routes through more scientific means. The most important discovery during this period was the use of gamma cameras to capture isotopes moving along the meridian routes. The use of biophysical means to study the meridians became a major feature of meridian research, and researchers successively found that the meridian routes had low electrical resistance, high acoustic vibration and better acoustic, optical and thermal conductivity, as well as isotope migration and other physical properties. These efforts were summarized in a major meridian research work, Acupuncture Meridian Biophysics, which was a milestone in objectively confirming the existence of meridians.

Entering the 1990s, China has carried out the "Eighth Five-Year Plan" and "Ninth Five-Year Plan" two national meridian climbing program projects, the research from the phenomenon gradually deepened to the essence of the subject centered on the mechanism of sensory transmission through the meridians, meridians and internal organs related to the physical and chemical properties of the meridian line three.

- Neurological theory: It is believed that the sensory transmission through the meridians is the result of the transmission of excitation between neurons.

- The theory of body fluids: it is believed that the qi and blood in the meridians of traditional Chinese medicine refers to the various body fluids in the human body, and the meridians are the channels through which the body fluids run, and the movement of the body fluids stimulates the nerves to produce the sensory transmission through the meridians.

- Energy theory: It is believed that the meridians are channels for the transmission of certain physical energy and information.