Pinpricks: Needling, numbness, and temporalities of pain.

Acupuncture analgesia appeared relatively straightforward. A patient laid awake as the practitioner needled selected sites on the body to induce numbness for surgery. Numerous reports emerging from China in the 1970s featured men and women resting on operating tables, smiling into the camera, surrounded by doctors who attended to the excised region-the esophagus, brain, gut, heart, or lungs. In the course of a decade, hundreds of news articles proclaimed acupuncture analgesia as embodying the spirit of Communist politics. While "acupuncture analgesia" was a heterogeneous practice that addressed a variety of disorders, it cohered visually in photographs of patients indifferent to their vivisected bodies, and it cohered discursively as a means for eliminating sensitivity to pain. Across these domains of representation, I argue that reports of obliterating pain with a single needle across clinical encounters collapsed the multiple temporalities of pain. Drawing on sources from an imagined community of researchers and physicians in parts of China, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Britain, and the United States, this chapter explores the epistemic and ontological implications of numbness-a distinct sensation defined by the lack of sensation-in the absence of the brain.

The history of acupuncture anesthesia for pneumonectomy in Shanghai during the 1960s.

The success of acupuncture anesthesia (AA) for pneumonectomy in Shanghai in 1960 was a key event for AA gaining practical clinical application. The effort was a close collaboration between the Shanghai First Tuberculosis Hospital and the Shanghai Institute of Acupuncture and Moxibustion. One of the most important factors of AA success was the great financial and political support provided by the Chinese central government and Shanghai local government. In December1965 the State Science and Technology Commission of China issued a formal document acknowledging AA as an important first-level national achievement of the integration of Chinese and Western medicine, and a collaborative effort of the whole scientific community in China. AA was an important influential factor that helped acupuncture spread across the world.

[Research on Acupuncture Anesthesia-analgesia].

In the present paper, the author retrospects the historical developmental stages of acupuncture anesthesia-analgesia from 1) preliminary exploration:the creative application of acupuncture therapy to surgery with lower dosage or without anesthetics began in Shanghai and Xi'an in 1958; 2) clinical popularization:the acupuncture anesthesia-analgesia became popularized from 1965, peaked in 1970s' and declined from 1980s'; 3) mechanism study:from 1970 to 2000, a large quantity of research papers were published to confirm the validity of acupuncture analgesia (AA), and in 1997, NIH Consensus Conference for acupuncture was held, promoting the related research in the world; 4) focused research:from 2007 to now, the acupuncture anesthesia-analgesia was listed as one of the key research program in China; 5) theoretical summary:in view of the uncertainty of the scientific basis of the meridian system of traditional Chinese medicine, the nerve fibers distributed under the acupoint are now considered to be the indispensable components for AA, and the knowledge of modern neuroscience is competent to explain the underlying mechanism of AA; 6) returning to reality:AA has been accepted by the international scientific community, and the "acupuncture-assisted anesthesia", or "compound acupuncture and anesthetics anesthesia" has been used as the first choice for some types of surgical operation. The research on acupuncture anesthesia-analgesia greatly facilitates clinical application of acupuncture therapy in the world, and also promotes the development of acupuncture therapy itself and neuroscience. However, the transformation between theory and practice and their mutual interaction are endless endeavor. Thus, a careful review of the half-century-long practice of acupuncture anesthesia-analgesia is painstakingly necessary in order to clarifying the mechanisms, to raise the efficacy of clinical practice and to correct the possible errors referred to this concept.

Acupuncture research is part of my life.

Acupuncture has been used in China for more than 3,000 years. Although the clinical application of acupuncture is very popular, its mechanisms of action are still unclear. Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, a boost of research on acupuncture emerged in China, and I was one of the researchers involved in this episode. With the help of modern neuroscience, the mechanisms of acupuncture for pain management have been unraveled at least partly. This article describes my decision as a young medical graduate to devote my life to research on acupuncture and pain medicine; it has since been my life's journey-one full of challenges and happiness, pitfalls and achievements.

[Acupuncture anesthesia' 50 years: beyond anesthesia and surgery].

Today, when acupuncture and surgery have been combined for a half century, the author of the present paper holds that the main role of acupuncture in whole process of the surgery does not only mean anesthesia. Getting this point consciously, the author points out that acupuncture will not only have a bigger role in the operating room, but also plays an important and far-reaching impact on the acupuncturology and even the whole life science.