Commentary: Differential Cerebral Response to Somatosensory Stimulation of an Acupuncture Point vs. Two Non-Acupuncture Points Measured with EEG and fMRI.

Abstract

Acupuncture is a traditional form of Asian medicine; the practice involves needling the invisible lines, called meridians, on the skin’s surface that have acupuncture points within and run longitudinally up and down the human body. However, modern anatomy does not well support the existence of meridians and acupuncture (Litscher, 2014). On the other hand, some researchers have asserted that acupuncture point stimulation caused human somatosensory cortex responses being detected in an fMRI. This phenomenon has been regarded as indirect evidence of the specificity of acupuncture points, although the evidences are debatable (Cho et al., 1998, 2006). In a recent article by Nierhaus et al. (2015) that evaluated acupuncture-induced brain responses using both an EEG and an fMRI, the authors concluded that the needles inserted into a known acupuncture point, named ST36, led to different EEG and fMRI patterns as compared to the needling of two non-acupuncture points. I am expressing my opinions on the choice of the non-acupuncture point labeled Control Point 1 (CP1) in the above article.