The Power of Qi. Acupuncture Directly Affects the Emotional Brain

Excerpted from
Curing Depression, Anxiety and Stress Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy
By David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D.

Like two people who are meant to be friends but who do not realize it the first time they meet, during my first encounter with acupuncture, I missed my chance.

I was still a medical student in Paris in the early 1980s, before I went to the United States to continue my training. One of my professors at the time was just back from China. He had read a book by the Frenchman Soulie de Morant - among the first to introduce acupuncture to the West - and had decided to find out about it for himself. To document his findings, he had shot a Super 8 film of an operation in a Beijing hospital.

With 200 fellow students, I watched, agape, as a woman talked quietly with a surgeon who was removing a cyst the size of a melon from her open abdomen. The only anesthesia consisted of a few very fine needles inserted under her skin. Obviously, we had never seen anything like it. Yet, as soon as the film was over and the light was back on, we all quickly forgot what we had just seen. Maybe it was possible in China, but here? ... It was too remote from what we knew and from the vast stores of Western medical knowledge remaining for us to acquire. Too remote and too esoteric. I did not give that film another thought for 15 years, until the day when I went to India, to Dharamsala, the seat of the Government of Tibet in Exile, in the foothills of the Himalaya.

I visited the Institute of Tibetan Medicine and talked with a practitioner about his views on depression and anxiety. "You Westerners," he said, "have a vision of emotional problems that's all topsy-turvy. You're always surprised to see that what you call depression or anxiety or stress has physical symptoms. You talk about fatigue, weight gain or loss, irregular heartbeats, as if they were physical manifestations of an emotional problem. To us, the opposite is true. Sadness, loss of self-esteem, guilt feelings, the absence of pleasure, can be mental manifestations of a physical problem."

True, I had never thought about it this way. And his view of depression was just as plausible as the Western one. He went on: "In truth, both of these views are wrong. To us, emotional symptoms and physical ones are simply two sides of the same thing: an imbalance in the circulation of energy, the Qi."

At that point, he lost me. Grounded by my training in the Cartesian tradition, which marks a strict distinction between the "mental" and the "physical," I was not yet ready to talk about "Qi" (pronounced "chi"). Nor was I ready to imagine an underlying, governing "energy" affecting both the physical and the mental realm-especially one that could not be measured with objective instruments. But my Tibetan colleague went on: "There are three ways to influence Qi: through meditation-which regenerates it; through nutrition and medicinal herbs, and, directly, with acupuncture. We often treat what you call depression with acupuncture. It works very well provided that patients follow the treatment long enough."

But I was not listening to him anymore. He was talking to me about meditation, herbs, and needles. We were no longer on the same wavelength. Besides, as soon as he referred to the length of treatment, I immediately imagined that it must involve the placebo effect, responses patients have to treatments that do not contain any active agent. Placebos generally work well when patients are being taken care of regularly and kindly, and with convincing displays of technical competence. Since this is exactly what an acupuncturist does, it seemed obvious to me that any response to acupuncture must be a placebo effect. Once I had reached this conclusion, I just listened to him politely and then found an excuse to move on with my day. That was the second chance I missed-but this one had left a trace in my memory.

The third encounter took place in Pittsburgh a year or two afterwards. One Saturday afternoon in the street, I met a patient I had seen only once, in the outpatient clinic of the hospital She had been suffering from quite a serious depression, but she had refused to take the antidepressants I offered her. We'd gotten along well, nevertheless, so when I saw her, I asked her how she was now, if she was feeling any better. She looked at me smiling, but a bit unsure as to whether she could be frank with me or not. I must've seemed open, because she finally told me that she had decided to see an acupuncturist. She said she'd had a few sessions over 4 weeks, and now she was fine.

If I had not had that conversation with the Tibetan doctor in Dharamsala, I surely would have attributed her "cure" to the placebo effect. As I already mentioned, in depression, the placebo effect is common-so common, in fact, that it takes about three clinical studies comparing an antidepressant to a placebo for one of them to show that the medication is superior. But the conversation in Dharamsala came back to me immediately and I was a bit annoyed, I must admit, that a treatment different from mine had been more useful. I decided to find out more about this strange practice. What I learned about the extent of its impact on the nature of body and mind still staggers me.