Your hands and Needles are the best set of tools in the history of medicine!
Thanks to C. Chan Gunn, MD and Dr. W. B. Cannon
Your hands and Needles are the best set of tools in the history of medicine!
I've been in medicine for 30 yrs and have studied many Masters of Medicine who contributed to the pain therapy. So if this comment sound arrogant, it is not. It is actually very reasonable, practical, logical and reality based.
Throughout history physicians used their hands to examine and collect the evidence to make assessments. Without the hands on examination the physician is literally working blinded. This is especially important in the history and physical examination of chronic pain patients where real time data can trump any evidence that is older that a few days.
The thin needle is the best single surgical tool in modern medicine for the treatment of pain that originates in muscles and connective tissues.
There have been many Master Healers in the last century who focused on chronic pain who have drawn similar conclusions. Chronic pain lived within muscles and connective tissues. They also realize that pain medications and repair surgery were fraught with haphazard results. The then discovered and concluded that injection therapy was much more predictable and curative without the rick and failures of amputation surgery.
One notable physician was C. Chan Gunn, MD who studied acupuncture was bold enough to rethink the action of the therapy and the needle. He found an older study on muscles that concluded that a muscle that was denervated could be caused to relax when short circuited. Gunn applied the concept to a stainless steel wire or needle. Thus linking the effects of the needles with real concrete data. When a scientist can linking a present concept with historical concepts of the past, this should give more validity to the new concept.
If needling therapies concepts could be incorporated into today’s Conventional Medicine treatment options for chronic pain health care cost would plummet as chronic pain problems would drop!!! Then overall well being rates would raise substantially.
Chronic pain treatments were known to live in muscles and connective tissues and had known possible treatment options. This was obvious and well accepted in the last century by many renowned physicians such as Gunn, Travell & Simons', Rachlin, Baldry, Seems, Helms, Rapson, Starlanyl, Hackett, Cyriax, Craig, Gokavi, Lennard, Burke, DiFabio and Pybus, B.J./D.D. Palmer, Wyburn-Mason and Chaitow.
These physicians knew that long-term or chronic pain was caused by stressed and damaged muscles. Over long periods of time these muscles collected damages and then coalesces into what we called trigger points (TrPs). TrPs can develop in any skeletal muscle, tendon, ligament, skin or bony attachments. TrPs generate pain signals, make muscles work erratically, contract onto nerves and spasm.
These tissues are called myofascial tissues and the pain is called myofascial pain and dysfunctions. These tissues cause undetectable or “invisible” types of pain syndromes. Invisible meaning that the evidence is not reality abiele for confirmation as with a tumor.
These tissues also susceptible to further degradation to cause even more pain plus cause many odd medical malfunctions and conundrums.
The treatment of myofascial pain and dysfunctions is called MF release therapies. The release is actually a type of microscopic re-injury process. You can release myofascial tissues with hands as with massage, with leverage as with yoga or spinal adjustments and finally with with metallic wires or needles.
All these authors used either hands-on, leverage options like kneading, pulling, stretching, unwinding and traction. Some used the metallic thin or hypodermic needles to effectively release or “re-injure” the diseased tissues, ignite healing and thus reverse muscles pain with automatic healing.
Gunn studied Acupuncture but then with logical and reasoning separated the thin needle away from the philosophy of Chinese Acupuncture. The metallic needle surgical tool is the key to the science and biology which can be formulated into a mechanism of action. With a mechanism of action (MoA), a provider can better understand how best to improve clinical outcomes.
Gunn thus linked all the metallic needle tools to the Cannon’s Law of Denervation. The stainless steel surgical tools could safely and effectively “re-injure” plus (de)repolarize tight, stubborn and contracted muscles which release and triggered them to relax and elongate. So these set of tools can be viewed as safe nontoxic metal wire-like probes and surgical tools.
Combining all the actions into a Mechanism of Action Theory, one can envision 6 events happening simultaneously to reverse the damages collected within diseased myofascial tissues:
These surgical tools are in an advantage to only using your hands in the touch and palpation part of the examination. The examiner can effectively “reach into” the deeper layers of muscles and fasciae. The examiner can thus “feel” these tissue to assess how they respond to the touch of the needles.
These tools are more valuable than MRIs because this is real time internal data and not days old. All this is done via a pin hole incision with leaves no scar.
These surgical tools depolarizes the contracted muscles which causes them to relax as per Cannon’s Law of Denervation. The result is that a relaxed muscle releases and does not apply compression forces onto arteries, veins, nerves and improved flow.
These surgical tools preps, breaks up, cut into, stirs and agitate the subcellular environment which will improve the effectiveness of these healing cycles. Again via a pinhole incision which leaves no scarring.
These surgical tools can also be used to examine distant areas that are prone to infection via spreading and the metastatic tendency of diseased myofascial cells.
These surgical tools can stimulate the stiff, tight muscle tissues through the pinhole to stimulate and agitate the healing cascade. The metallic needle tools are like “keys” which will ignite the natural healing cascade of wound repair.
Here is 3- three modern takes on this ancient needle therapy. In my opinion validating the true mechanism of action of needle-based therapy:
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This concept is a shocker to Conventional Medical physician and researchers!!
Any stainless surgical tool can be used in place of an acupuncture needle. Many if not all surgical instruments must be it a surgical scalpel or an arthroscope. If the surgeon cuts and proves with any surgical tool he or she is inadvertently using Gunn-Cannon’s Concept of Healing.
Since the intended use of these tools is totally different, the results will be less than expected and the outcomes will be haphazard with tragic consequences. This is what we have in all aspects of the use of surgery to treat long-term pain.
Gunn’s insights are amazingly profound, safe, low-tech, highly effective and follows all the known laws of biology, physic and nature. http://www.istop.org/drgunn.html
Cannon WB, Rosenblueth A. The Supersensitivity of Denervated Structures: A Law of Denervation.New York: MacMillan; 1949.
