#acupuncture #interstitium

"Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways

Acupuncture is used to treat conditions as varied as chronic pain, migraines, seasonal allergies and nausea caused by chemotherapy, but some of its actions have never been completely explained. The discovery of the interstitium may help us understand in modern biomedical terms how acupuncture works.

The principles of the practice invoke two circulating elements: chi and blood.

Traditional Chinese medicine describes chi as flowing along one of 12 main tracks, called meridians.

Acupuncturists insert small needles into specific points on the body to enhance the flow of chi.

In a 2002 study, Helene Langevin and Jason Yandow mapped the locations of acupuncture points in the arms to the fascia between and around muscles.
These acupuncture points have since been found to lie within the same areas of connective tissue where fluid flows through the interstitium.

A 2019 paper by researchers in China, led by Dr. Hongyi Li, explains how they injected chemical tracers into acupuncture points in the hands and feet of cadavers and used chest compressions to push fluid through the bodies.

Fluorescent photography enabled them to see the tracers traveling toward the heart within interstitial spaces of the arms and legs. Li and colleagues clearly recognized, just as Wells and Theise did, that they had glimpsed evidence of an interstitial circulation system.

If acupuncture points seem to reside within the interstitium, could the meridians run through the interstitium as well?

In 2021, a group of researchers conducted a similar experiment in China on living subjects, injecting dye into acupuncture points in the forearms of 15 volunteers.
In almost all of them, the dye slowly migrated upward along a route corresponding to the pericardium meridian, which passes through the wrist and along the inner arm.

(Pericardium is the same meridian stimulated by anti-nausea wrist acupressure devices popular on cruise ships.)"

https://web.archive.org/web/20260512012750/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/11/magazine/interstitium-anatomy-acupuncture-medicine.html