Acupuncture and MRIs

WHILE EVEN The National Institutes of Health (NIH) agrees that acupuncture is an effective pain reliever, many Western scientists have dismissed the therapy because they can't pin-point how it works. This "need to know" prompted researchers at the University of California at Irvine to investigate how acupuncture elicits its effects, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They found something that's sure to interest the critics.

The researchers showed that inserting needles into certain points on the feet, which according to acupuncture practitioners improves vision, actually produces activity in the same area of the brain that is stimulated when light flashes into the eye. These preliminary findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appear to make a correlation between acupoint stimulation and the activation of specific areas of the brain.

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