PINNING DOWN ACUPUNCTURE; PHYSICIST FINDS CONNECTION TO BRAIN.

Byline: Debra Gordon Orange County Register

What started with a walk up a Korean mountain in the wrong shoes may end up demystifying an ancient Oriental medicine - and providing new insights into how our brains work.

Professor and physicist Zang-Hee Cho of the University of California, Irvine slipped on that walk five years ago, injuring his back so severely that by the time he got off the plane in Los Angeles he could barely move.

Acupuncture melted the pain and spurred Cho to use modern technology - a functional MRI machine - to explore old medicine.

The results, published last spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world's premier scientific journals, showed a direct correlation between acupuncture and the brain, the first time any such effect has ever been demonstrated.

Cho's experiment may have demonstrated something else: a scientific explanation for two key Eastern medical concepts: the circulation of Qi (pronounced chee), a subtle, vivifying energy that relieves disease and pain, and Yin and Yang, the ever-present, complementary forces of nature.

``There's an unstated understanding among some biomedical workers that if we don't see the mechanism, if it doesn't meet our current post-Cartesian proof, then it can't be real,'' said Steve Given, dean of clinical education at YoSan University in Los Angeles, which trains acupuncturists.

``What Dr. Cho is saying is, `Yeah, it is real.' ''

When his family first suggested acupuncture for his back pain, Cho was skeptical.

A diminutive man of 62 who wears slippers in his small UCI office, Cho is a paean of Western medicine.

He is a member of the highly respected National Academy of Science, the inventor of an early version of the Positron Emission Tomograph, or PET scan, and a pioneer of the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner, both of which have revolutionized our ability to see into the body and brain.

To him, acupuncture was voodoo medicine.

But much to his surprise, the $40, 15-minute procedure worked. Three years later, while on sabbatical in Korea, a bastion of Oriental medicine, he felt his curiosity about acupuncture growing, slipping into his thoughts like needles slipped through the skin.

At the time, he was conducting MRI studies showing how visual stimulation is revealed in the brain. He flashed lights into people's eyes, took MRIs, then analyzed the brightly colored scans, which showed increases in blood flow in parts of the brain.

He decided to do the same thing using acupuncture instead of bright lights.

He recruited 12 volunteers for the experiment, which studied the relationship between an ``acupoint'' and the visual cortex in the brain.

He secured the volunteers' heads in a special coil to prevent movement. First he flashed a light in their eyes to get the standard response in the visual cortex of the brain.

Then an acupuncturist ``needled'' a site in their little toe, called BL67, used to treat eye diseases. Then Cho compared the two MRIs.

They were nearly identical.

Stimulation of the vision-related acupoint showed the same reaction in the brain as stimulation of the eye.

Cho noticed something else.

When he did a series of MRIs, alternately flashing and shutting off the light, and graphed the results, two distinct patterns emerged.

Four participants showed an increasing flow of blood to the cortex; eight showed a decreasing flow.

He repeated the experiments several times. Same results. It was as if the two groups were opposites of each other.

And indeed, they were.

This was the mysterious yin and yang so elemental to Oriental medicine, yet still a mystery to Western medicine, Cho decided.

The two types tend to correlate to the Western type A and B personalities, he said. Yang, or Type A, tends to have a hasty or positive attitude, a high heart rate and warm body. Yin, or type B, tends to have a lower heart rate, cold extremities and cautious and often negative attitudes.

What Cho thought happened was that stimulating the acupoints provoked an opposite effect: increasing blood flow in the yin brains, decreasing it in yangs.

But still Cho didn't understand how it all worked. What was the connection between the tip of the little toe and the visual cortex?

Easy, said the UCI neuroscientist he asked: The nerves in the foot connect to the central nervous system, which connects to a part of the brain that includes the visual cortex.

As the acupuncture signal passes to the brain via nerves, it possibly stimulates the hypothalamus, the ``executive center'' of the brain, responsible for the production and release of hundreds of neurochemicals, Cho said.

These neurochemicals, together with the autonomic nervous system, Cho said, may have some effect on vision-related disorders. Perhaps, he suggested, they are Qi.

With 1,500 acupoints on the body, Cho says, he has a long way to go with his research. But he's hooked now. He's applying to the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine for a $12 million grant to continue his research.

Not only could it lead to more understanding of how acupuncture works - and thus greater acceptance of it by the Western medical establishment, he said, but it may enable scientists to use MRI to explore areas of the brain they weren't previously able to reach.

With acupuncture, for instance, they could stimulate digestive acupoints and watch the effect in the brain; it would be more difficult to do that in any other way.

Acupuncture advocate Steve Given sees the research in a another way. Traditional Oriental medicine tries to figure out how things work by observing them, he says.

Western medicine tries to figure out how things work by taking them apart.

``Dr. Cho, bless his heart, is dancing in the middle. He has a technique that allows us to look at the brain in a more Chinese way.''

CAPTION(S):

Drawing, 2 Photos

DRAWING: (Cover--Color) PINPOINTING THE CURE

Modern medicine begins to understand the ancient healing art of acupuncture

Illustration by Traci Wooden/Daily News

PHOTO (1) An acupuncturist inserts fine needles to stimulate points on or beneath the skin.

(2) With the help of modern medical technology, professor Zang-Hee Cho of UC Irvine was able to provide the first scientific proof of how acupuncture affects the brain.

Mindy Schauer/Orange County Register