This week’s NYT had an article about a new discovery: a whole network of pathways in the body through which both biological and synthetic particles travel. There was a Radiolab episode about this network released on November 17, 2023.
The Western medical community had difficulty finding these pathways because they are only present in live tissue; in deceased human anatomy, they appear as holes and cracks in the tissue wall.
I remember in 2002, Kikko Matsumoto, an amazing Japanese Acupuncturist, told us about the triple heater and how it is one continuous pathway in the body that connects everything together, every organ, every muscle, every cell, as she wrote about in her books. She was talking about this pathway for at least 30 years, and she is one of many Chinese Medical practitioners.
On the one hand, it is cool that Western medicine actually found it. For a long time, there was literature claiming there was no anatomical proof of meridians, and now there certainly is.
On the other hand, this system has existed for over 4,000 years and has been used to heal millions of people, and now that a handful of doctors have published a few articles on the topic, it is gaining recognition. Does that make sense?
At this moment in time, it is like we are navigating two worlds: the old one that is clinging to old ideas and using violence to keep it in place, and a new world where the concepts we knew as true already for years can actually exist in the world without domination from the old core.
Historically, we, as alternative practitioners, are often called on to maintain a middle ground, grateful that our craft is recognized more in the mainstream. And at the same time, to remain impartial to the pace at which these expertise, receive validation in the greater medical community.
I am not sure whether the discovery of the interstitium will support Chinese Medicine as a valid medical practice or create an entirely new modality that allopathic medicine will use in a different way. There was already a fair amount of cancer research being conducted around the discovery of these pathways, at least before oncology funding was slashed. Time will tell.
