How It's All Connected

Twenty years ago, when I was in acupuncture school, one question frequently asked of our instructors was how to explain acupuncture to patients. The suggested answers varied:

Acupuncture addresses the root of the problem, helping resolve the symptoms, which are the branches that stem from the root.

The meridian system is like a garden hose with offshoots, and the needles help release what may be kinked and obstructing flow.

When inserted, acupuncture needles trigger a central nervous system response that affects other areas of the body.

None of these explanations was wrong, though the garden hose analogy always felt a bit clunky at best. The one time I tried using it on a patient in the student clinic, they looked at me like I had three heads. The goal was to explain a medical system that uses terms like Qi, Yin, Yang, and Zang Fu in a way that made sense to the average person, especially someone unfamiliar with anatomy and physiology. But even back then, these explanations never fully resonated with me as the best way to describe how acupuncture works.

I kept thinking about a landmark 2002 study (which I shared in my blog earlier this year) examining the relationship between acupuncture points, meridians, and the body’s connective tissue. I first saw the study sitting on a table in our lecture room after a classmate printed it out and brought it to school. The images showed connective tissue wrapping around acupuncture needles.

I couldn’t get them out of my mind. The more I studied acupuncture and human anatomy, the more I began to see connective tissue as a soft-tissue web that shapes and connects the body. When I explained to patients that acupuncture needles help smooth out this webbing — a bit like smoothing a bed sheet by gently pulling at the edges rather than pressing directly on the wrinkles and creating more — patients seemed to understand.

Then last month, The New York Times published an incredible article about the interstitium, and thankfully it acknowledges how Chinese medicine has been describing this system for thousands of years. While I had long focused on explaining the anatomical effects of acupuncture, this article beautifully connects those ideas to the physiological, or functional, effects as well. It reads more like an experience than a traditional article — you scroll through while images and animations appear alongside the text, illustrating each concept in real time. It’s by far the best piece I’ve seen explaining not only how acupuncture works, but how the human body itself functions. I highly recommend it.