Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

During the early 1970s, these observers witnessed truly staggering examples of Chinese acupuncture. Perhaps the most impressive demonstration was the use of acupuncture during major surgery. A certain Dr Isadore Rosenfeld, for instance, visited the hospital at the University of Shanghai and reported on the case of a twenty-eight-year-old female patient who underwent open-heart surgery to repair her mitral valve. Astonishingly, the surgeons used acupuncture to her left earlobe in place of the usual anaesthetics. The surgeon cut through the breastbone with an electric buzzsaw and opened her chest to reveal her heart. Dr Rosenfeld described how she remained awake and alert throughout: ‘She never flinched. There was no mask on her face, no intravenous needle in her arm…I took a color photograph of that memorable scene: the open chest, the smiling patient, and the surgeon’s hands holding her heart. I show it to anyone who scoffs at acupuncture.’

Such extraordinary cases, documented by reputable doctors, had an immediate effect back in America. Physicians were clamouring to attend the three-day crash courses in acupuncture that were running in both America and China, and increasing numbers of acupuncture needles were being imported into America. At the same time, American legislators were deciding what to make of this newfound medical marvel, because there had been no formal assessment of whether or not acupuncture really worked. Similarly there had been no investigation into the safety of acupuncture implements, which was why the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempted to prevent shipments of needles from entering the United States. Eventually the FDA softened its position and accepted the importation of acupuncture needles under the label of experimental devices. The Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, took a similar line, and in August 1972 he signed into law a bill that permitted acupuncture, but only in approved medical schools and only so that scientists might test its safety and efficacy.

In hindsight, we can see that those who argued for caution were probably correct. It now seems highly likely that many of the Chinese demonstrations involving surgery had been faked, inasmuch as the acupuncture was being supplemented by local anaesthetics, sedatives or other means of pain control. Indeed, it is a deception that has occurred as recently as 2006, when the BBC TV series Alternative Medicine generated national interest after showing an operation that was almost identical to the one observed by Dr Rosenfeld three decades earlier. Again, acupuncture was being used on a female patient in her twenties, also undergoing open-heart surgery, and also in Shanghai.

The BBC’s presenter explained that: ‘She’s still conscious, because instead of a general anaesthetic this twenty-first-century surgical team are using a two-thousand-year-old method of controlling pain — acupuncture.’ British journalists and the general public were amazed by the extraordinary images, but a report by the Royal College of Anaesthetists cast the operation in a different light:

It is obvious, from her appearance, that the patient has already received sedative drugs and I am informed that these comprised midazolam, droperidol and fentanyl. The doses used were small, but these types of drugs ‘amplify’ the effect of each other so that the effect becomes greater. Fentanyl is not actually a sedative drug in the strict sense, but it is a pain-killing drug that is considerably more powerful than morphine. The third component of the anaesthetic is seen on the tape as well, and that is the infiltration of quite large volumes of local anaesthetic into the tissues on the front of the chest where the surgical incision is made.

In short, the patient had received sufficiently large doses of conventional drugs to mean that the acupuncture needles were a red herring, probably playing nothing more than a cosmetic or psychological role.

The American physicians who visited China in the early 1970s were not accustomed to deception or political manipulation, so it took a couple of years before their naïve zeal for acupuncture turned to doubt. Eventually, by the mid-1970s, it had become clear to many of them that the use of acupuncture as a surgical anaesthetic in China had to be treated with scepticism. Films of impressive medical procedures made by the Shanghai Film Studio, which had once been shown in American medical schools, were reinterpreted as propaganda. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities continued to make outrageous claims for acupuncture, publishing brochures that contained assertions such as: ‘Deep needling of the yamen point enables deaf-mutes to hear and speak…And when the devil was cast out, the dumb spake: and the multitudes marvelled.’