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CIA-RDP96-00792R000200100001-4
GOO
HANDS
A FIRSTHAND ENCOUNTER
WITH THE MYSTERY
IGONG
BY ELIZABETH ROWE
The orthopedic doctor picked up my left foot and examined it
closely. The lump on top of the instep looked twice as big
under his scrutiny as it had that morning. Without warning, he
dropped my foot onto the table. It hit with a dull thud.
ILLUSTRATION: MARK ELLIOT
"Calcium deposit. Surgery," he said, with an economy of
words that would have made Western Union proud. "Half an
hour in the office and six weeks on crutches. A hundred dol-
lars."
I swallowed hard. Not at the money or the surgery, but at the
recovery time.
"Six weeks on crutches just for this?" I asked incredulously,
pointing at the chicken's egg on my foot.
The doctor frowned, a thin array of lines appearing on his
tanned forehead. He nodded and closed my folder, signaling
that our therapeutic time together was over.
"You can schedule the surgery with the
nurse on the way out," he said as he gave me a
cool, dry handshake.
Elizabeth Rowe, a former nurse,
is a freelance writer living in
Palmyra, New York.
I left his office and the building weighing my options. Having
recently taken a nursing position on an acute-care psychiatric
unit, I knew that I wouldn't last long hobbling around the unit
on crutches trying to keep up with my very mobile patients. I
needed an alternative, but with all my nursing training my
roots in traditional Western medicine ran deep.
The effective use of other healing methods, however, was
not unknown to me. On a trip to China when I was eighteen, I
was shown pictures of operating theaters in which heart
surgery was conducted under the "anesthesia" of acupuncture.
While the procedure looked barbaric to me at
the time, lopping off this lump on my foot with-
out so much as a question as to why it had
appeared seemed barbaric to me now.
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Several months prior to the development of my calcium
deposit, I had heard about a Chinese woman in Rochester, New
York, who had treated several acquaintances of mine for ail-
ments ranging from a weak back to asthma. I called her and set
up an appointment. Once a week for the next eight weeks, I
underwent a fifteen-minute
therapy consisting of light
touch at different points on
my body, particularly my foot.
The treatment-performed
through my clothes-resem-
bled acupuncture without the
needles. By the last session,
the lump was gone.
Thus was I introduced to
qigong, another controversial
healing phenomenon from
the East making its way slow-
ly to the West, bringing with
it new challenges to the
Western model of disease.
Like acupuncture before it,
qigong has been received
with suspicion by many West-
ern scientists and doctors. It's
not hard to see why.
N ORDER to understand
Lagons, One must first
understand the Chinese
concept of qi, and this is near-
ly impossible for those not
raised speaking Chinese and
living in that culture.
The word qi (pronounced
"chee" and spelled "chi" in
the Wade Giles system of
translation) does not have a
clear English equivalent,
though it is often referred to
as "vital force," "life energy,"
"universal force," or "unseen
life force." Good health
occurs when this energy is
properly flowing through the
body. In The Web That Has No
Weaver: Understanding Chi-
nese Medicine, author Ted J.
Kaptchuk, O.M.D., suggests
that qi can be thought of as
"matter on the verge of
becoming energy, or energy
at the point of materializing.
... [Q]i is perceived function-
ally-by what it does." Such a
definition, however, does little
to satisfy the Western mind.
At one level, qigong is prac-
ticed as a yogalike discipline of breathing exercises and pos-
tures learned by individuals to improve their own balance of qi.
In this way it resembles tai chi, and, like that graceful martial
art, it is widely practiced throughout China and said to have a
revitalizing effect. (It is believed to have originated in 2500 B.C.
as a ritual dance performed to ward off muscle ailments and
skin diseases.) More intriguing, however, are the qigong
practitioners who have mastered their control of qi and report-
(continued on page 104)
Bonnie Kamin photos
QIGONG IN CHINA
TURNING ON
TO THE 'HEALING FORCE.'
"I'm like a radio station putting
out a signal, and patients are like
radios," explains Ki Xin Guo,
M.D., a traditional physician in
the Qigong Research Depart-
ment at Beijing's Xi Yuan
Hospital. In these photographs,
taken last year during a group
treatment session in Beijing, Ki
works with a patient suffering
from ulcers in his esophagus.
(Other patients' ailments ranged
from sleep disorders to brain
tumors.)
Ki would spend only a minute
or so with each patient, moving
from one to the next, seemingly
in a trance. Before each patient,
he would take a position similar
to a martial arts stance, his arms
extended and hands undulating,
his body swaying as he shifted
his weight from front foot to
back. Then, as if directing ener-
gy through his outstretched
arms, he would point his fingers
in the general vicinity of
acupuncture points on the body
and lunge forward. He would
never physically touch the
patient. Directed toward an
observer, the doctor's hand
actions produced a feeling of dis-
equilibrium and the distinct sen-
sation of some energy force.
These brief sessions of so-called
external qigong were comple-
mented daily by early- morning
qigong exercises performed out-
doors by the patients themselves.
"By practicing daily exercises,"
Ki explains, "they 'turn on' or
become receptive to my healing
force."
--- Sally Swope
*
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67
st
of
re
it
ita
ne
th
of
ng
nt
on-
the
ied
an
on.
not
City
OURNAL

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IN GOOD HANDS
(continued from page 67)
edly are able to use the vital energy at
another, higher level. And this is where
qigong smacks headlong into Western
science.
These qigong masters, using powers
that seem to rival telekinesis, reportedly
are able to send the life force out of their
bodies to heal others.
To the observer, they seem to be
merely performing certain hand move-
ments near their patients or perhaps gen-
tly touching them at key points on the
body. But through this ancient practice
the qigong masters have reportedly
treated ailments ranging from cardiac
diseases to neurological disorders to
cancer. In a 1986 article for The New
York Times, reporter Edward A. Gargan
described a qigong master's treatment of
a paralyzed patient in Beijing:
"Slowly at first, as if plumping an invis-
ible pillow, the doctor's hands explored
the air before him. Gradually they began
a silent minuet, turning, tumbling, twist-
ing. Now, as if shaping a clump of clay,
his hands pounded, then undulated
across an invisible surface. On a table
before him, the legs of a prone patient,
his eyes closed, rose slowly, first one,
then the other, as if in response to the
doctor's motions. For fifteen minutes,
like limbs of a string puppet, the patient's
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arms and legs rose and fell as the doctor
pushed and pulled at the air."
Though it differs dramatically in tech-
nique, qigong is based on the same prin-
ciples of Chinese medicine that inform
the practice of acupuncture. In each case
the body is seen as a grid of channels, or
meridians, in which the vital energy, or
qi, flows. Along the meridians are points
that can be manipulated to regulate the
flowing qi, which in turn influences the
functioning of the patient's major organ
systems.
But whereas the acupuncturest uses
needles at these points to influence the
patient's flow of qi, the qigong masters
say they rely upon only the powers of a
united mind and body. "The qi is like
body electricity," explains Honolulu
qigong practitioner Lily Siou, author of
Ch'i Kung: The Art of Mastering the
Unseen Life Force. "I send energy and
they receive it." Siou, in fact, says she
can fill a room with qi and thereby affect
two or three patients at a time.
Sonia Young, the qigong practitioner I
visited in Rochester for my deformed
foot, explains that she penetrates the
body with qi and then "reads" the return-
ing qi for information on how the
patient's systems are functioning. In her
fifteen- to thirty-minute treatments,
Young uses her hands, particularly the
fleshy portion at the base of the palm, to
"impart the qi energy." During my ses-
sions, I experienced a sensation similar
to that of a small electric vibrator being
applied to my skin; other clients said
they felt similar sensations.
Like other alternative treatments,
qigong is more effective on some disor-
ders than others, Young says. And,
despite the perceived antipathy between
ancient and modern medical practices,
Young is a proponent of Western
medicine and sees the two complement-
ing one another. "I am definitely not
against Western medicine," she says.
"You should take advantage of what it
offers. Many times I say to clients, 'Take
the phone right now and call your doc-
tor.' Often, it is combining qigong with
Western medicine that can give you the
best care."
Others purporting to be qigong mas-
ters are less humble, however, and the
problems for consumers trying to make
sense of the field promise to get worse.
The potential for fraud is particularly
troublesome to those who take qigong
seriously-both researchers and practi-
tioners. "I am quite irritated with a lot of
people in the so-called qigong field and
other fields who indiscriminately say, 'I
can cure that, yes,' " says Young. "It
makes me mad. I don't believe them."
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NEW AGE JOURNAL
104

I
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S INTRIGUING as qigong appears
to be, research on the subject is
just beginning in the West. In
China, however, it has been under way
for almost fifteen years. According to the
Beijing Review, the country has at least
eight magazines devoted to qigong
research, as well as ten national qigong
scientific research associations and
many similar local groups. Through their
experiments, the Chinese have found
that qigong has applications beyond
medicine, according to the Review: It has
been used by athletes to loosen muscles,
enhance circulation, and improve train-
ing; by students to improve concentra-
tion and memory; and by the military to
improve combat ability.
As for the practice's health effects, a
study by Yan Xuanzou, a professor at the
Beijing College of Traditional Chinese
Medicine, found that people who prac-
ticed internal qigong-visualization and
breathing exercises-for forty minutes
had increased levels of IGA (an
immunoglobulin extracted from saliva)
and lysozyme activity (lysozyme is an
enzyme that destroys the cell walls of
bacteria). These two indicators of
immune system response did not change
in the subjects who simply sat quietly or
those who exercised without any medita-
tive component.
Even the more elusive external qigong
has been studied in China. One experi-
ment by Feng Li Da, of the Beijing
Immunology Research Center, found
that a single qigong treatment-directed
by a master at tissue cultures-could kill
30.7 percent of cervical cancer cells and
25 percent of stomach cancer cells. In a
second study, mice macrophages-cells
that destroy bacteria-were found to
have a significant increase in bacteria-
destroying activity after a ten-minute
treatment by a qigong master.
Such studies, notes Daniel Brown,
chief psychologist at the Cambridge
Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
"use the same methods we do to study
the immune response: tissue cultures,
animals, and humans. And, although
these studies have problems with their
methodology, as many scientific studies
do, these had reasonable controls. They
should be investigated further." Brown,
one of a number of researchers working
to set up qigong research exchange pro-
grams with China, soon may have a
chance to do just that himself. "There
are negotiations going on now, made
more delicate by the events last summer
in Beijing," he notes. "The nature of the
research will be to try and learn how
qigong affects physical and biological
systems, using the best in technology
and science."
One researcher who has been encour-
aging just such a cross-cultural explo-
ration is David Eisenberg, a physician at
Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and
instructor in medicine at Harvard
Medical School. Eisenberg was intro-
duced to qigong in the late '70s while an
exchange student at the Beijing College
of Traditional Chinese Medicine, an
experience he later wrote about in
Encounters With Qi: Exploring Chinese
Medicine [See New Age Journal,
January/February 1987]. Not knowing
whether what he witnessed in China
were cleverly forged tricks or demon-
strations of an astounding bodily force,
Eisenberg urges the meticulous applica-
tion of the scientific laws of inquiry to
the study of qigong. "If qi can be mea-
sured and harnessed using scientific
methods," he noted in a recent speech to
qigong researchers in Beijing, "then
modern medical science will likely bene-
fit from this merger of ancient and mod-
ern human talent."
Satisfying all the scientific skeptics,
however, will prove difficult, particularly
in light of the seemingly paranormal
nature of qigong. And even those
researchers sympathetic to the field
seem to differ as to proper methodology
for exploring it. Take, for example, a
study recently presented at the
American
Association
for the
Advancement of Science and at the
International Bioenergetics Medicine
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Conference by Kenneth Sancier, a physi-
cal chemist and senior researcher at SRI
International in Menlo Park, California,
and vice-president of the Qigong
Institute, a division of the East-West
Academy of Healing Arts, in San
Francisco. Sancier's study-which exam-
ined the effects of qigong on body ener-
gy as measured by a muscle
test-involved eight men and women
and qigong practitioner Effie Chow,
founder of the Academy.
Using a specially designed device
hooked to a computer, the subject's arm
muscle endurance was measured before
and after the practitioner performed a
qigong maneuver designed to either
strengthen or weaken the subject. With
"very few exceptions," Sancier reports,
the subjects demonstrated "statistically
significant" increases in muscle en-
durance after the strengthening maneu-
ver, and decreases in endurance after the
weakening maneuver. Sancier claims the
results provide evidence that the
mind-in this case, that of the qigong
master-can affect the body energy.
Sancier's study was blind-the sub-
jects did not know the nature of the
maneuvers nor the purpose of the test.
But, for some observers, even those pre-
cautions are not enough. "A number of
biases can affect results, and without a
control group you can't say the results
have to do with qigong," contends
Brown, of the Cambridge Hospital. "You
must control for the expectation effect
and the state of mind of the subjects and
the qigong master, and select a random
sample of subjects."
Such experimental rigor is all the
more important given the field's poten-
tial, researchers say. With scientific vali-
dation, the practice could someday have
applications as widespread as those of
acupuncture-which today is used to
treat everything from chronic pain to
crack addiction. Notes Michael
Maliszewski, director of the behavioral
medicine department at the Diamond
Headache Clinic in Chicago: "We're just
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QIGONG
UNITED
Is it the
of the
T
hough qigong therapy may
seem far too esoteric to
appeal to a mainstream
Western public, a number of
observers compare its present posi-
tion to that of acupuncture fifteen
years ago. The latter, once-dismissed
healing art now has more than five
thousand certified practitioners
nationwide, and several insurance
companies now reimburse patients
for treatments. Research that would
help establish a similar credibility for
qigong has been slow in getting
under way in the United States, but
there is growing interest in studying
the phenomenon.
"The current qigong rescarch
comes from a network of about twen-
ty to thirty individuals within institu-
tions nationwide, rather than a net-
work of institutions supporting
qigong research," explains William
C. Gough, founder of the ten-year-old
Foundation for Mind-Being
Research, in Los Altos, California,
which serves as one of the clearing-
houses for qigong research. One
group that has been actively promot-
ing further US interest in gigong is
the Washington-based US-China
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NEW AGE JOURNAL
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scratching the surface."
A
S IT TURNED OUT, Sonia Young's
apparent treatment of my calcium
deposit was far from unusual. Her
other clients had similar success stories:
· In 1975, a woman I'll call Anne, a gradu-
ate student and mother of four, nearly
died in a car accident. Her right ankle,
two cervical vertebrae, pelvis, knees, and
ribs were crushed; her trachea transect-
ed, her vocal cords severed, her spleen
ruptured, her liver and right kidney dam-
aged, and her right leg broken.
According to Anne, the physicians who
at first thought she wouldn't live later
told her she would probably not talk,
walk, read, speak, or write again.
A seven-month hospital stay yielded
significant gains, and Anne returned
home to continue a long road to recov-
ery.
But in 1984 she began to wrestle with
chronic respiratory problems. Because
of the fixed narrow opening of her tra-
chea, the result of its being cut in two,
fluid collected in Anne's lungs, inviting
infection. She found herself more and
more dependent on the antibiotics that
were working less and less effectively.
"In spring 1987, I got very bad again,"
Anne says. "I couldn't even make it to
the bathroom. That was when I called
someone I knew who had had half a lung
removed and was secing a woman for
treatment."
That woman was Young, whom Anne
saw three times a week for several
weeks, then twice a week for about six
months. Her lungs cleared up, and she
stopped taking antibiotics.
. In 1988, writer-artist Katherine
Denison went to see Young for one of
her then infrequent visits to the qigong
therapist.
"She stated a concern for weakness in
my right side," says Denison, remember-
ing the session. "I assumed it was mus-
cular, but Sonia said it was the nerves. I
IN THE
STATES
acupuncture
'90s?
Peoples Friendship Association,
which led its first official qigong
research exchange to China in 1983
and sent a public qigong study tour
to China last March. This year the
association plans to sponsor in China
the first world conference on martial
arts and qigong.
Also spreading the word about
gigong is the newly established
Qigong Institute, a division of the.
sixteen-year-old East-West Academy
of Healing Arts, in San Francisco.
The institute-which has presented
papers on its qigong research before
such prestigious groups as the
American Association for the
Advancement of Science-has sched-
uled trips to China to explore qigong
research and practice, and plans to
sponsor the US visits of several
qigong masters.
-Sally Swope
S
A
For more information, contact the
Foundation for Mind-Being Research,
(415) 941-7462; the US-China Peoples
Friendship Association, (202) 296-4147;
or the Qigong Institute, East-West Academy
of Healing Arts, 450 Sutter St., Suite 916,
San Francisco, CA 94108, (415) 788-
2227 or 323-1221.
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JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 1990
107
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THE MIND
AND THE MASTERS
A DOCTOR'S ASSESSMENT OF QIGONG
BY PHILIP S. LANSKY, M.D.
W
hen I was a medical student in the early '80s,
my standard curriculum was supplemented by
training in clinical acupuncture, hypnosis, and
independent research in the multidisciplinary field that was
coming to be known as psychoneuroimmunology. Essentially,
psychoneuroimmunology extends what has been learned
from biofeedback and self-regulation-that the mind can
influence heart rate, skin temperature, and brain waves-by:
asserting that the mind can also affect our immune system.
Behavioral medicine, a related field, was emerging as a way
to fight stress.
So, before I had even heard of qigong, I was already famil-
iar with what was known in Western medicine about the
ability of the mind to affect the body. A person under hyp-
notic suggestion, for instance, has been known to suffer a
second-degree burn from a pencil eraser that he or she has
been led to believe is a lighted cigarette. Through biofeed-
back, the temperature in one hand can be lowered more
than ten degrees, while the temperature of the other hand
stays constant. Blood pressure, an exceptionally labile entity,
is subject to profound fluctuations during the course of a
day as a person's mood and circumstances vary. Western
physiologists have observed yogis who are able to slow their
pulse rates and breathing to almost zero; in some experi-
ments-well-documented in Western literature-yogis
buried in airtight boxes for as many as seven days have sur-
vived in a self-induced trance. None of these phenomena is
surprising to a Western physician with even a basic knowl-
edge of modern psychosomatics.
To a large extent, qigong falls into the same category as
other behavioral medicines. Many of these phenomena can
be attributed to what Harvard professor Herbert Benson,
M.D., popularized as the "relaxation response." But in
qigong there is the added element of the body's energy being
projected. When the "life force," qi (or chi), is so emitted, it
has been reported to shrink tumors, shatter gall- or kidney
stones, and facilitate the healing of wounds, When a qigong
master projects his or her qi into key acupuncture points on a
surgical patient, anesthetic effects comparable to those of
acupuncture needling may be achieved.
Most physicians would interpret such phenomena as
purely hypnotic. In other words, they would assert, no ener-
gy actually comes out of one person's body to heal the physi-
cal body of another; any healing effects are due, rather, to
the power of belief and faith. The irony in this view is that
Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), the forefather of mod-
ern medical hypnosis, explained his observations not in
terms of belief but in terms of "animal magnetism." It is
Mesmer's language, not the terminology of modern psychia-
try, that comes closest to the Chinese view of qi as a vital
energy circulating in the human body.
There is no event observed in medical qigong that could
not be explained in purely hypnotic terms, including the
shrinking of tumors thanks to psychoneuroimmunology
and the well-known imagery work with cancer patients pio-
neered by O. Carl Simonton, M.D., (Getting Well Again)
and others. Nevertheless, if we consider only what is univer-
sally accepted in Western physiology, there are plenty of
obvious sources of magnetic energy in the human body. For
instance, we know that the flow of electrons generates a
magnetic field. The flow of electrical impulses in the nerve
trunks, then, can be seen as analogous to electricity flowing
through a wire. This could cause the kind of electromag-
netism found in an electromagnet formed by the flow of
current through steel wires, and the same could be said of
the flow of electrons generated by blood moving through
the arteries. We can be pretty sure that magnetism is gener-
ated by our physiology- but beyond that, scientific expla-
nations of qigong remain unsatisfactory.
In October 1988 I had the opportunity to attend the First
International Conference for the Academic Exchange of
Medical Qigong, in Beijing. Many scientific papers were
presented on different types of qigong research. Much of it
was clinical or anecdotal, and thus explainable with hypno-
sis arguments. Some of it, though, was not; it generated data
that might require an expansion of scientific thinking. One
such study involved placing rats into a tank of water with
their rear legs bound, then removing them at the point of
exhaustion. [ By citing this experiment, we are not condoning
what could be construed as laboratory cruelty ... "The Editors.]
One group of rats received an external qigong treatment
from a qigong master upon being removed from the tank.
The rats were then killed. Double-blind electron microscop-
ic examination of the muscle fibers in the rats' legs demon-
strated less muscle damage in the group that received the
qigong than in the rats that did not receive the treatment.
Even if this putative projection of energy is unexplained
by Western science, qigong remains at the very least an
extraordinarily sophisticated system of self-regulation.
Western physicians-and Western patients- should not
overlook its potential.
Philip S. Lansky is a general practitioner based in Iowa City
who specializes in classical homeopathy and Chinese medicine.
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