What do the meridians in the yellow calendar mean?
Meridian theory is one of the cores of the basic theory of traditional Chinese medicine, which originated in ancient times and serves today. For more than two thousand years, it has been playing an important role in maintaining the health of the Chinese nation.
Huangdi Neijing says: "Meridian, life, sick, human medicine, sick." Meridians and collaterals are characterized by "deciding life and death, dealing with all diseases, regulating excess and deficiency, and not blocking". Therefore, acupuncture and moxibustion "wants to open its meridians with micro-needles, regulate its blood gas, manage its disadvantages, follow its path, and spread it to future generations." It can be seen that the meridian theory has a decisive guiding role in the practice of various disciplines of traditional Chinese medicine.
What are meridians and where do they exist in the human body? What are the functions of meridians and how are they realized? These problems are not only important topics for Chinese and foreign scientists to study, but also mysteries that ordinary people really want to know. Up to now, although the meridian research has made considerable achievements and great progress, both experimental research and hypothesis demonstration are still in the stage of forming and accumulating scientific data and theoretical theories. Therefore, scientific conclusions about meridians need long-term and arduous exploration and research.
Two thousand five hundred years ago, the first medical classic Huangdi Neijing was born in China. In this classic, there is an important concept throughout the book, that is, meridians. Meridian is the general name of meridian. The ancients found that there were some routes running through the whole body, which were called meridians. It is also found that there are some branches on these trunks, and there are smaller branches on them. The ancients called these branches collaterals, and "pulse" is the general concept of this structure.
The understanding of meridians in Huangdi Neijing comes from a large number of clinical observations. In recent years, documents recording these clinical observations have gradually been found in unearthed cultural relics such as Mawangdui silk books, Zhangjiashan bamboo slips and Mianyang Murenjing model. These early documents mainly describe the meridian system, involving three ancient medical methods: one is moxibustion, the other is bian (a medical technology to treat diseases with stones), and the other is introduction (an ancient qigong). Meridian is the way to use these three medical technologies.
With the development of smelting technology, people have made metal needles, called microneedles, and used them to treat meridians. Huangdi Neijing is divided into two books, one of which is called Lingshu Jing, also known as Acupuncture Jing, which is a book dedicated to treating meridians with micro-needles. Huangdi Neijing made a systematic summary of meridians. In addition to meridians, new concepts such as collaterals, meridians, tendons, skin and strange meridians have been added, which together constitute the meridian system and become the most important physiological structure of the human body in the eyes of the ancients. Huangdi Neijing also expounds the functions of meridians, that is, activating qi and blood, balancing yin and yang, nourishing bones and muscles, smoothing joints, connecting internal and external organs, and spreading diseases and pathogens. The understanding of the meridian system and its function in Huangdi Neijing mainly comes from long-term clinical observation, and also contains some results of reasoning analysis and analogy description. Because the concept system of Huangdi Neijing has been more than two thousand years ago, it has brought great difficulties for modern people to understand its ideological connotation. Therefore, it is the task of TCM researchers to reveal the connotation of the classic concept of meridian from literature and experiments.
Exploring meridians by sensing along meridians
For more than half a century, scholars at home and abroad have made unremitting explorations on meridian issues. The first question they encountered was whether the meridians mentioned by the ancients really existed. At that time, some people thought that the meridians mentioned by the ancients were blood vessels in modern anatomy and there was no independent meridian system. On the other hand, some people abroad claimed to have discovered the entity of meridians, which was proved to be an illusion by China scholars.
In 1950s, people found a strange phenomenon in acupuncture: some people felt a sense of following the meridians when receiving acupuncture treatment. Later, this phenomenon was officially named as the phenomenon of sensation along the meridian. People who can produce this phenomenon are called "meridian-sensitive people", but such people only account for a small part of the crowd. The discovery of sensory conduction along meridians reversed the viewpoint that meridians are blood vessels, because blood vessels obviously cannot form this phenomenon of sensory movement along meridians. In addition, people also found that the skin resistance along the meridian is low, which laid a certain foundation for verifying the objective existence of the meridian.
In the 1970s, people made a deeper study of telepathy along the meridian and found some strange features of telepathy along the meridian:
Low speed, about a few centimeters per second.
● It can be blocked by mechanical compression, injection of physiological saline and freezing and cooling.
● Reflux and insufficient induction may occur.
● It can bypass the scar tissue and pass through the local anesthesia area, which can tend to focus.
● Vasodilation and mild edema sometimes occur along the sensory transmission route of meridians, and electromyography can be measured.
● Some amputees were found to have phantom meridian telepathy at the amputation site.
These phenomena complicate people's understanding of meridians, because simple nerve transmission or blood flow cannot explain the above characteristics. However, because these characteristics of sensation transmission along meridians mainly depend on patients' subjective feelings and descriptions, their straightness needs to be discounted, so it is very important to study some visible meridian phenomena and objective detection of meridians at the same time. These include skin allergies, pigment bands along the meridians when acupoints are stimulated, tiny sound waves detected along the meridians (acoustic emission along the meridians), hidden sensory transmission along the meridians (sensitive phenomena along the meridians that exist in more than 90% of people) and other physical characteristics along the meridians.
In the mid-1980s, the study of meridians was highly valued by the state, and the first national-level meridian project in China was born, that is, the "Seventh Five-Year Plan" national key project-"objective detection of the route along the Fourteen Meridians". At this time, scientists are not satisfied with explaining the existence of meridians by simple means such as subjective perception, but try to prove the objective existence of meridian routes by more scientific means. The most important discovery in this period is that the trajectory of isotopes moving along the meridian line was photographed by γ camera. Using biophysical means to study meridians has become a major feature of meridian research. The researchers found that the meridian route has physical characteristics such as low resistance, high pitch vibration, good acousto-optic heat conduction and isotope migration. These works are summarized in an important book on the study of meridians-Acupuncture and Biophysics of Meridians, which is a milestone in objectively confirming the existence of meridians.
In the 1990s, China successively implemented two national climbing projects, the Eighth Five-Year Plan and the Ninth Five-Year Plan. The research has gradually deepened from phenomenon to essence, and the topic has been developed around three aspects: the mechanism of sensation transmission along meridians, the correlation between meridians and viscera, and the physical and chemical characteristics of meridians, forming several hypotheses:
● Neurology: It is believed that sensory transmission along the meridian is the result of excitation transmission between neurons.
● Humoral fluid theory: It is believed that qi and blood in meridians of TCM refer to all kinds of body fluids in human body, and meridians are the channels through which body fluids run, and the movement of body fluids stimulates nerves to generate sensory conduction along meridians.
● Energy theory: Meridian is considered as the transmission channel of some physical energy and information.
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